We consider the task of generating structured representations of text using large language models (LLMs). We focus on tables and mind maps as representative modalities. Tables are more organized way of representing data, while mind maps provide a visually dynamic and flexible approach, particularly suitable for sparse content. Despite the effectiveness of LLMs on different tasks, we show that current models struggle with generating structured outputs. In response, we present effective prompting strategies for both of these tasks. We introduce a taxonomy of problems around factuality, global and local structure, common to both modalities and propose a set of critiques to tackle these issues resulting in an absolute improvement in accuracy of +37pp (79%) for mind maps and +15pp (78%) for tables. To evaluate semantic coverage of generated structured representations we propose Auto-QA, and we verify the adequacy of Auto-QA using SQuAD dataset. We further evaluate the usefulness of structured representations via a text comprehension user study. The results show a significant reduction in comprehension time compared to text when using table (42.9%) and mind map (31.9%), without loss in accuracy.
In this paper, we introduce SeizNet, a closed-loop system for predicting epileptic seizures through the use of Deep Learning (DL) method and implantable sensor networks. While pharmacological treatment is effective for some epilepsy patients (with ~65M people affected worldwide), one out of three suffer from drug-resistant epilepsy. To alleviate the impact of seizure, predictive systems have been developed that can notify such patients of an impending seizure, allowing them to take precautionary measures. SeizNet leverages DL techniques and combines data from multiple recordings, specifically intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors, that can significantly improve the specificity of seizure prediction while preserving very high levels of sensitivity. SeizNet DL algorithms are designed for efficient real-time execution at the edge, minimizing data privacy concerns, data transmission overhead, and power inefficiencies associated with cloud-based solutions. Our results indicate that SeizNet outperforms traditional single-modality and non-personalized prediction systems in all metrics, achieving up to 99% accuracy in predicting seizure, offering a promising new avenue in refractory epilepsy treatment.
Multi-objective optimization is a widely studied problem in diverse fields, such as engineering and finance, that seeks to identify a set of non-dominated solutions that provide optimal trade-offs among competing objectives. However, the computation of the entire Pareto front can become prohibitively expensive, both in terms of computational resources and time, particularly when dealing with a large number of objectives. In practical applications, decision-makers (DMs) will select a single solution of the Pareto front that aligns with their preferences to be implemented; thus, traditional multi-objective algorithms invest a lot of budget sampling solutions that are not interesting for the DM. In this paper, we propose two novel algorithms that employ Gaussian Processes and advanced discretization methods to efficiently locate the most preferred region of the Pareto front in expensive-to-evaluate problems. Our approach involves interacting with the decision-maker to guide the optimization process towards their preferred trade-offs. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms are effective in finding non-dominated solutions that align with the decision-maker's preferences while maintaining computational efficiency.
In this paper, we introduce the maximum casual entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) problem for discrete-time mean-field games (MFGs) under an infinite-horizon discounted-reward optimality criterion. The state space of a typical agent is finite. Our approach begins with a comprehensive review of the maximum entropy IRL problem concerning deterministic and stochastic Markov decision processes (MDPs) in both finite and infinite-horizon scenarios. Subsequently, we formulate the maximum casual entropy IRL problem for MFGs - a non-convex optimization problem with respect to policies. Leveraging the linear programming formulation of MDPs, we restructure this IRL problem into a convex optimization problem and establish a gradient descent algorithm to compute the optimal solution with a rate of convergence. Finally, we present a new algorithm by formulating the MFG problem as a generalized Nash equilibrium problem (GNEP), which is capable of computing the mean-field equilibrium (MFE) for the forward RL problem. This method is employed to produce data for a numerical example. We note that this novel algorithm is also applicable to general MFE computations.
In this paper, we introduce Kun, a novel approach for creating high-quality instruction-tuning datasets for large language models (LLMs) without relying on manual annotations. Adapting a self-training algorithm based on instruction back-translation and answer polishment, Kun leverages unlabelled data from diverse sources such as Wudao, Wanjuan, and SkyPile to generate a substantial dataset of over a million Chinese instructional data points. This approach significantly deviates from traditional methods by using a self-curation process to refine and select the most effective instruction-output pairs. Our experiments with the 6B-parameter Yi model across various benchmarks demonstrate Kun's robustness and scalability. Our method's core contributions lie in its algorithmic advancement, which enhances data retention and clarity, and its innovative data generation approach that substantially reduces the reliance on costly and time-consuming manual annotations. This methodology presents a scalable and efficient solution for improving the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs, with significant implications for their application across diverse fields. The code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/Zheng0428/COIG-Kun
This article investigates the possibility to use the class entropy of the output of a connectionist phoneme recogniser to predict time boundaries between phonetic classes. The rationale is that the value of the entropy should increase in proximity of a transition between two segments that are well modelled (known) by the recognition network since it is a measure of uncertainty. The advantage of this measure is its simplicity as the posterior probabilities of each class are available in connectionist phoneme recognition. The entropy and a number of measures based on differentiation of the entropy are used in isolation and in combination. The decision methods for predicting the boundaries range from simple thresholds to neural network based procedure. The different methods are compared with respect to their precision, measured in terms of the ratio between the number C of predicted boundaries within 10 or 20 msec of the reference and the total number of predicted boundaries, and recall, measured as the ratio between C and the total number of reference boundaries.
Recently, the FourCastNet Neural Earth System Model (NESM) has shown impressive results on predicting various atmospheric variables, trained on the ERA5 reanalysis dataset. While FourCastNet enjoys quasi-linear time and memory complexity in sequence length compared to quadratic complexity in vanilla transformers, training FourCastNet on ERA5 from scratch still requires large amount of compute resources, which is expensive or even inaccessible to most researchers. In this work, we will show improved methods that can train FourCastNet using only 1% of the compute required by the baseline, while maintaining model performance or par or even better than the baseline.
Summary: NHANES, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, is a program of studies led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States (U.S.). NHANES data is frequently used by biostatisticians and clinical scientists to study health trends across the U.S., but every analysis requires extensive data management and cleaning before use and this repetitive data engineering collectively costs valuable research time and decreases the reproducibility of analyses. Here, we introduce NHANES-GCP, a Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF) Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and Data Build Tool (dbt) resources built on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that automates the data engineering and management aspects of working with NHANES data. With current GCP pricing, NHANES-GCP costs less than $2 to run and less than $15/yr of ongoing costs for hosting the NHANES data, all while providing researchers with clean data tables that can readily be integrated for large-scale analyses. We provide examples of leveraging BigQuery ML to carry out the process of selecting data, integrating data, training machine learning and statistical models, and generating results all from a single SQL-like query. NHANES-GCP is designed to enhance the reproducibility of analyses and create a well-engineered NHANES data resource for statistics, machine learning, and fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). Availability and implementation" NHANES-GCP is available at https://github.com/In-Vivo-Group/NHANES-GCP
Medical knowledge extraction methods based on edge computing deploy deep learning models on edge devices to achieve localized entity and relation extraction. This approach avoids transferring substantial sensitive data to cloud data centers, effectively safeguarding the privacy of healthcare services. However, existing relation extraction methods mainly employ a sequential pipeline approach, which classifies relations between determined entities after entity recognition. This mode faces challenges such as error propagation between tasks, insufficient consideration of dependencies between the two subtasks, and the neglect of interrelations between different relations within a sentence. To address these challenges, a joint extraction model with parameter sharing in edge computing is proposed, named CoEx-Bert. This model leverages shared parameterization between two models to jointly extract entities and relations. Specifically, CoEx-Bert employs two models, each separately sharing hidden layer parameters, and combines these two loss functions for joint backpropagation to optimize the model parameters. Additionally, it effectively resolves the issue of entity overlapping when extracting knowledge from unstructured Uyghur medical texts by considering contextual relations. Finally, this model is deployed on edge devices for real-time extraction and inference of Uyghur medical knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate that CoEx-Bert outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving accuracy, recall, and F1 scores of 90.65\%, 92.45\%, and 91.54\%, respectively, in the Uyghur traditional medical literature dataset. These improvements represent a 6.45\% increase in accuracy, a 9.45\% increase in recall, and a 7.95\% increase in F1 score compared to the baseline.
Optimizing service schedules is pivotal to the reliable, efficient, and inclusive on-demand mobility. This pressing challenge is further exacerbated by the increasing needs of an aging population, the over-subscription of existing services, and the lack of effective solution methods. This study addresses the intricacies of service scheduling, by jointly optimizing rider trip planning and crew scheduling for a complex dynamic mobility service. The resulting optimization problems are extremely challenging computationally for state-of-the-art methods. To address this fundamental gap, this paper introduces the Joint Rider Trip Planning and Crew Shift Scheduling Problem (JRTPCSSP) and a novel solution method, called AGGNNI-CG (Attention and Gated GNN- Informed Column Generation), that hybridizes column generation and machine learning to obtain near-optimal solutions to the JRTPCSSP with the real-time constraints of the application. The key idea of the machine-learning component is to dramatically reduce the number of paths to explore in the pricing component, accelerating the most time-consuming component of the column generation. The machine learning component is a graph neural network with an attention mechanism and a gated architecture, that is particularly suited to cater for the different input sizes coming from daily operations. AGGNNI-CG has been applied to a challenging, real-world dataset from the Paratransit system of Chatham County in Georgia. It produces dramatic improvements compared to the baseline column generation approach, which typically cannot produce feasible solutions in reasonable time on both medium-sized and large-scale complex instances. AGGNNI-CG also produces significant improvements in service compared to the existing system.