SegICL: A Universal In-context Learning Framework for Enhanced Segmentation in Medical Imaging

Medical image segmentation models adapting to new tasks in a training-free manner through in-context learning is an exciting advancement. Universal segmentation models aim to generalize across the diverse modality of medical images, yet their effectiveness often diminishes when applied to out-of-distribution (OOD) data modalities and tasks, requiring intricate fine-tuning of model for optimal performance. For addressing this challenge, we introduce SegICL, a novel approach leveraging In-Context Learning (ICL) for image segmentation. Unlike existing methods, SegICL has the capability to employ text-guided segmentation and conduct in-context learning with a small set of image-mask pairs, eliminating the need for training the model from scratch or fine-tuning for OOD tasks (including OOD modality and dataset). Extensive experimental validation of SegICL demonstrates a positive correlation between the number of prompt samples and segmentation performance on OOD modalities and tasks. This indicates that SegICL effectively address new segmentation tasks based on contextual information. Additionally, SegICL also exhibits comparable segmentation performance to mainstream models on OOD and in-distribution tasks. Our code will be released soon.

ASAP: Interpretable Analysis and Summarization of AI-generated Image Patterns at Scale

Generative image models have emerged as a promising technology to produce realistic images. Despite potential benefits, concerns grow about its misuse, particularly in generating deceptive images that could raise significant ethical, legal, and societal issues. Consequently, there is growing demand to empower users to effectively discern and comprehend patterns of AI-generated images. To this end, we developed ASAP, an interactive visualization system that automatically extracts distinct patterns of AI-generated images and allows users to interactively explore them via various views. To uncover fake patterns, ASAP introduces a novel image encoder, adapted from CLIP, which transforms images into compact "distilled" representations, enriched with information for differentiating authentic and fake images. These representations generate gradients that propagate back to the attention maps of CLIP's transformer block. This process quantifies the relative importance of each pixel to image authenticity or fakeness, exposing key deceptive patterns. ASAP enables the at scale interactive analysis of these patterns through multiple, coordinated visualizations. This includes a representation overview with innovative cell glyphs to aid in the exploration and qualitative evaluation of fake patterns across a vast array of images, as well as a pattern view that displays authenticity-indicating patterns in images and quantifies their impact. ASAP supports the analysis of cutting-edge generative models with the latest architectures, including GAN-based models like proGAN and diffusion models like the latent diffusion model. We demonstrate ASAP's usefulness through two usage scenarios using multiple fake image detection benchmark datasets, revealing its ability to identify and understand hidden patterns in AI-generated images, especially in detecting fake human faces produced by diffusion-based techniques.

Mining Weighted Sequential Patterns in Incremental Uncertain Databases

Due to the rapid development of science and technology, the importance of imprecise, noisy, and uncertain data is increasing at an exponential rate. Thus, mining patterns in uncertain databases have drawn the attention of researchers. Moreover, frequent sequences of items from these databases need to be discovered for meaningful knowledge with great impact. In many real cases, weights of items and patterns are introduced to find interesting sequences as a measure of importance. Hence, a constraint of weight needs to be handled while mining sequential patterns. Besides, due to the dynamic nature of databases, mining important information has become more challenging. Instead of mining patterns from scratch after each increment, incremental mining algorithms utilize previously mined information to update the result immediately. Several algorithms exist to mine frequent patterns and weighted sequences from incremental databases. However, these algorithms are confined to mine the precise ones. Therefore, we have developed an algorithm to mine frequent sequences in an uncertain database in this work. Furthermore, we have proposed two new techniques for mining when the database is incremental. Extensive experiments have been conducted for performance evaluation. The analysis showed the efficiency of our proposed framework.

Knowledge Boundary and Persona Dynamic Shape A Better Social Media Agent

Constructing personalized and anthropomorphic agents holds significant importance in the simulation of social networks. However, there are still two key problems in existing works: the agent possesses world knowledge that does not belong to its personas, and it cannot eliminate the interference of diverse persona information on current actions, which reduces the personalization and anthropomorphism of the agent. To solve the above problems, we construct the social media agent based on personalized knowledge and dynamic persona information. For personalized knowledge, we add external knowledge sources and match them with the persona information of agents, thereby giving the agent personalized world knowledge. For dynamic persona information, we use current action information to internally retrieve the persona information of the agent, thereby reducing the interference of diverse persona information on the current action. To make the agent suitable for social media, we design five basic modules for it: persona, planning, action, memory and reflection. To provide an interaction and verification environment for the agent, we build a social media simulation sandbox. In the experimental verification, automatic and human evaluations demonstrated the effectiveness of the agent we constructed.

TACO -- Twitter Arguments from COnversations

Twitter has emerged as a global hub for engaging in online conversations and as a research corpus for various disciplines that have recognized the significance of its user-generated content. Argument mining is an important analytical task for processing and understanding online discourse. Specifically, it aims to identify the structural elements of arguments, denoted as information and inference. These elements, however, are not static and may require context within the conversation they are in, yet there is a lack of data and annotation frameworks addressing this dynamic aspect on Twitter. We contribute TACO, the first dataset of Twitter Arguments utilizing 1,814 tweets covering 200 entire conversations spanning six heterogeneous topics annotated with an agreement of 0.718 Krippendorff's alpha among six experts. Second, we provide our annotation framework, incorporating definitions from the Cambridge Dictionary, to define and identify argument components on Twitter. Our transformer-based classifier achieves an 85.06\% macro F1 baseline score in detecting arguments. Moreover, our data reveals that Twitter users tend to engage in discussions involving informed inferences and information. TACO serves multiple purposes, such as training tweet classifiers to manage tweets based on inference and information elements, while also providing valuable insights into the conversational reply patterns of tweets.

A Unified Framework for Adaptive Representation Enhancement and Inversed Learning in Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR), aiming to extract and transfer knowledge across domains, has attracted wide attention for its efficacy in addressing data sparsity and cold-start problems. Despite significant advances in representation disentanglement to capture diverse user preferences, existing methods usually neglect representation enhancement and lack rigorous decoupling constraints, thereby limiting the transfer of relevant information. To this end, we propose a Unified Framework for Adaptive Representation Enhancement and Inversed Learning in Cross-Domain Recommendation (AREIL). Specifically, we first divide user embeddings into domain-shared and domain-specific components to disentangle mixed user preferences. Then, we incorporate intra-domain and inter-domain information to adaptively enhance the ability of user representations. In particular, we propose a graph convolution module to capture high-order information, and a self-attention module to reveal inter-domain correlations and accomplish adaptive fusion. Next, we adopt domain classifiers and gradient reversal layers to achieve inversed representation learning in a unified framework. Finally, we employ a cross-entropy loss for measuring recommendation performance and jointly optimize the entire framework via multi-task learning. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets validate the substantial improvement in the recommendation performance of AREIL. Moreover, ablation studies and representation visualizations further illustrate the effectiveness of adaptive enhancement and inversed learning in CDR.

MVEB: Self-Supervised Learning with Multi-View Entropy Bottleneck

Self-supervised learning aims to learn representation that can be effectively generalized to downstream tasks. Many self-supervised approaches regard two views of an image as both the input and the self-supervised signals, assuming that either view contains the same task-relevant information and the shared information is (approximately) sufficient for predicting downstream tasks. Recent studies show that discarding superfluous information not shared between the views can improve generalization. Hence, the ideal representation is sufficient for downstream tasks and contains minimal superfluous information, termed minimal sufficient representation. One can learn this representation by maximizing the mutual information between the representation and the supervised view while eliminating superfluous information. Nevertheless, the computation of mutual information is notoriously intractable. In this work, we propose an objective termed multi-view entropy bottleneck (MVEB) to learn minimal sufficient representation effectively. MVEB simplifies the minimal sufficient learning to maximizing both the agreement between the embeddings of two views and the differential entropy of the embedding distribution. Our experiments confirm that MVEB significantly improves performance. For example, it achieves top-1 accuracy of 76.9\% on ImageNet with a vanilla ResNet-50 backbone on linear evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the new state-of-the-art result with ResNet-50.

Corpus Considerations for Annotator Modeling and Scaling

Recent trends in natural language processing research and annotation tasks affirm a paradigm shift from the traditional reliance on a single ground truth to a focus on individual perspectives, particularly in subjective tasks. In scenarios where annotation tasks are meant to encompass diversity, models that solely rely on the majority class labels may inadvertently disregard valuable minority perspectives. This oversight could result in the omission of crucial information and, in a broader context, risk disrupting the balance within larger ecosystems. As the landscape of annotator modeling unfolds with diverse representation techniques, it becomes imperative to investigate their effectiveness with the fine-grained features of the datasets in view. This study systematically explores various annotator modeling techniques and compares their performance across seven corpora. From our findings, we show that the commonly used user token model consistently outperforms more complex models. We introduce a composite embedding approach and show distinct differences in which model performs best as a function of the agreement with a given dataset. Our findings shed light on the relationship between corpus statistics and annotator modeling performance, which informs future work on corpus construction and perspectivist NLP.

Comparative Study of Domain Driven Terms Extraction Using Large Language Models

Keywords play a crucial role in bridging the gap between human understanding and machine processing of textual data. They are essential to data enrichment because they form the basis for detailed annotations that provide a more insightful and in-depth view of the underlying data. Keyword/domain driven term extraction is a pivotal task in natural language processing, facilitating information retrieval, document summarization, and content categorization. This review focuses on keyword extraction methods, emphasizing the use of three major Large Language Models(LLMs): Llama2-7B, GPT-3.5, and Falcon-7B. We employed a custom Python package to interface with these LLMs, simplifying keyword extraction. Our study, utilizing the Inspec and PubMed datasets, evaluates the performance of these models. The Jaccard similarity index was used for assessment, yielding scores of 0.64 (Inspec) and 0.21 (PubMed) for GPT-3.5, 0.40 and 0.17 for Llama2-7B, and 0.23 and 0.12 for Falcon-7B. This paper underlines the role of prompt engineering in LLMs for better keyword extraction and discusses the impact of hallucination in LLMs on result evaluation. It also sheds light on the challenges in using LLMs for keyword extraction, including model complexity, resource demands, and optimization techniques.

SPMamba: State-space model is all you need in speech separation

In speech separation, both CNN- and Transformer-based models have demonstrated robust separation capabilities, garnering significant attention within the research community. However, CNN-based methods have limited modelling capability for long-sequence audio, leading to suboptimal separation performance. Conversely, Transformer-based methods are limited in practical applications due to their high computational complexity. Notably, within computer vision, Mamba-based methods have been celebrated for their formidable performance and reduced computational requirements. In this paper, we propose a network architecture for speech separation using a state-space model, namely SPMamba. We adopt the TF-GridNet model as the foundational framework and substitute its Transformer component with a bidirectional Mamba module, aiming to capture a broader range of contextual information. Our experimental results reveal an important role in the performance aspects of Mamba-based models. SPMamba demonstrates superior performance with a significant advantage over existing separation models in a dataset built on Librispeech. Notably, SPMamba achieves a substantial improvement in separation quality, with a 2.42 dB enhancement in SI-SNRi compared to the TF-GridNet. The source code for SPMamba is publicly accessible at https://github.com/JusperLee/SPMamba .