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Joshua Gardner

Publications and source records attributed to Joshua Gardner.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2025

UTSA-NLP at ArchEHR-QA 2025: Improving EHR Question Answering via Self-Consistency Prompting

We describe our system for the ArchEHR-QA Shared Task on answering clinical questions using electronic health records (EHRs). Our approach uses large language models in two steps: first, to find sentences in the EHR relevant to a clinician's question, and second, to generate a short, citation-supported response based on those sentences. We use few-shot prompting, self-consistency, and thresholding to improve the sentence classification step to decide which sentences are essential. We compare several models and find that a smaller 8B model performs better than a larger 70B model for identifying relevant information. Our results show that accurate sentence selection is critical for generating high-quality responses and that self-consistency with thresholding helps make these decisions more reliable.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Optimal Stopping with Multi-Dimensional Comparative Loss Aversion

Despite having the same basic prophet inequality setup and model of loss aversion, conclusions in our multi-dimensional model differs considerably from the one-dimensional model of Kleinberg et al. For example, Kleinberg et al. gives a tight closed-form on the competitive ratio that an online decision-maker can achieve as a function of $λ$, for any $λ\geq 0$. In our multi-dimensional model, there is a sharp phase transition: if $k$ denotes the number of dimensions, then when $λ\cdot (k-1) \geq 1$, no non-trivial competitive ratio is possible. On the other hand, when $λ\cdot (k-1) < 1$, we give a tight bound on the achievable competitive ratio (similar to Kleinberg et al.). As another example, Kleinberg et al. uncovers an exponential improvement in their competitive ratio for the random-order vs. worst-case prophet inequality problem. In our model with $k\geq 2$ dimensions, the gap is at most a constant-factor. We uncover several additional key differences in the multi- and single-dimensional models.

cs.GT↗