arXiv subjects

Xiaofeng Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaofeng Zhu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Trustful LLMs: Customizing and Grounding Text Generation with Knowledge Bases and Dual Decoders

Although people are impressed by the content generation skills of large language models, the use of LLMs, such as ChatGPT, is limited by the domain grounding of the content. The correctness and groundedness of the generated content need to be based on a verified context, such as results from Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). One important issue when adapting LLMs to a customized domain is that the generated responses are often incomplete, or the additions are not verified and may even be hallucinated. Prior studies on hallucination detection have focused on evaluation metrics, which are not easily adaptable to dynamic domains and can be vulnerable to attacks like jail-breaking. In this work, we propose 1) a post-processing algorithm that leverages knowledge triplets in RAG context to correct hallucinations and 2) a dual-decoder model that fuses RAG context to guide the generation process.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Revisiting Self-Supervised Heterogeneous Graph Learning from Spectral Clustering Perspective

Self-supervised heterogeneous graph learning (SHGL) has shown promising potential in diverse scenarios. However, while existing SHGL methods share a similar essential with clustering approaches, they encounter two significant limitations: (i) noise in graph structures is often introduced during the message-passing process to weaken node representations, and (ii) cluster-level information may be inadequately captured and leveraged, diminishing the performance in downstream tasks. In this paper, we address these limitations by theoretically revisiting SHGL from the spectral clustering perspective and introducing a novel framework enhanced by rank and dual consistency constraints. Specifically, our framework incorporates a rank-constrained spectral clustering method that refines the affinity matrix to exclude noise effectively. Additionally, we integrate node-level and cluster-level consistency constraints that concurrently capture invariant and clustering information to facilitate learning in downstream tasks. We theoretically demonstrate that the learned representations are divided into distinct partitions based on the number of classes and exhibit enhanced generalization ability across tasks. Experimental results affirm the superiority of our method, showcasing remarkable improvements in several downstream tasks compared to existing methods.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Enhancing Signed Graph Neural Networks through Curriculum-Based Training

Signed graphs are powerful models for representing complex relations with both positive and negative connections. Recently, Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) have emerged as potent tools for analyzing such graphs. To our knowledge, no prior research has been conducted on devising a training plan specifically for SGNNs. The prevailing training approach feeds samples (edges) to models in a random order, resulting in equal contributions from each sample during the training process, but fails to account for varying learning difficulties based on the graph's structure. We contend that SGNNs can benefit from a curriculum that progresses from easy to difficult, similar to human learning. The main challenge is evaluating the difficulty of edges in a signed graph. We address this by theoretically analyzing the difficulty of SGNNs in learning adequate representations for edges in unbalanced cycles and propose a lightweight difficulty measurer. This forms the basis for our innovative Curriculum representation learning framework for Signed Graphs, referred to as CSG. The process involves using the measurer to assign difficulty scores to training samples, adjusting their order using a scheduler and training the SGNN model accordingly. We empirically our approach on six real-world signed graph datasets. Our method demonstrates remarkable results, enhancing the accuracy of popular SGNN models by up to 23.7% and showing a reduction of 8.4% in standard deviation, enhancing model stability.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

ConU: Conformal Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Correctness Coverage Guarantees

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in natural language generation (NLG) tasks remains an open challenge, exacerbated by the closed-source nature of the latest large language models (LLMs). This study investigates applying conformal prediction (CP), which can transform any heuristic uncertainty notion into rigorous prediction sets, to black-box LLMs in open-ended NLG tasks. We introduce a novel uncertainty measure based on self-consistency theory, and then develop a conformal uncertainty criterion by integrating the uncertainty condition aligned with correctness into the CP algorithm. Empirical evaluations indicate that our uncertainty measure outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we achieve strict control over the correctness coverage rate utilizing 7 popular LLMs on 4 free-form NLG datasets, spanning general-purpose and medical scenarios. Additionally, the calibrated prediction sets with small size further highlights the efficiency of our method in providing trustworthy guarantees for practical open-ended NLG applications.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Explicit and Implicit Semantic Ranking Framework

The core challenge in numerous real-world applications is to match an inquiry to the best document from a mutable and finite set of candidates. Existing industry solutions, especially latency-constrained services, often rely on similarity algorithms that sacrifice quality for speed. In this paper we introduce a generic semantic learning-to-rank framework, Self-training Semantic Cross-attention Ranking (sRank). This transformer-based framework uses linear pairwise loss with mutable training batch sizes and achieves quality gains and high efficiency, and has been applied effectively to show gains on two industry tasks at Microsoft over real-world large-scale data sets: Smart Reply (SR) and Ambient Clinical Intelligence (ACI). In Smart Reply, sRank assists live customers with technical support by selecting the best reply from predefined solutions based on consumer and support agent messages. It achieves 11.7% gain in offline top-one accuracy on the SR task over the previous system, and has enabled 38.7% time reduction in composing messages in telemetry recorded since its general release in January 2021. In the ACI task, sRank selects relevant historical physician templates that serve as guidance for a text summarization model to generate higher quality medical notes. It achieves 35.5% top-one accuracy gain, along with 46% relative ROUGE-L gain in generated medical notes.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

HG-Adapter: Improving Pre-Trained Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks with Dual Adapters

The "pre-train, prompt-tuning'' paradigm has demonstrated impressive performance for tuning pre-trained heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) by mitigating the gap between pre-trained models and downstream tasks. However, most prompt-tuning-based works may face at least two limitations: (i) the model may be insufficient to fit the graph structures well as they are generally ignored in the prompt-tuning stage, increasing the training error to decrease the generalization ability; and (ii) the model may suffer from the limited labeled data during the prompt-tuning stage, leading to a large generalization gap between the training error and the test error to further affect the model generalization. To alleviate the above limitations, we first derive the generalization error bound for existing prompt-tuning-based methods, and then propose a unified framework that combines two new adapters with potential labeled data extension to improve the generalization of pre-trained HGNN models. Specifically, we design dual structure-aware adapters to adaptively fit task-related homogeneous and heterogeneous structural information. We further design a label-propagated contrastive loss and two self-supervised losses to optimize dual adapters and incorporate unlabeled nodes as potential labeled data. Theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed method achieves a lower generalization error bound than existing methods, thus obtaining superior generalization ability. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method on different downstream tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Caterpillar: A Pure-MLP Architecture with Shifted-Pillars-Concatenation

Modeling in Computer Vision has evolved to MLPs. Vision MLPs naturally lack local modeling capability, to which the simplest treatment is combined with convolutional layers. Convolution, famous for its sliding window scheme, also suffers from this scheme of redundancy and lower parallel computation. In this paper, we seek to dispense with the windowing scheme and introduce a more elaborate and parallelizable method to exploit locality. To this end, we propose a new MLP module, namely Shifted-Pillars-Concatenation (SPC), that consists of two steps of processes: (1) Pillars-Shift, which generates four neighboring maps by shifting the input image along four directions, and (2) Pillars-Concatenation, which applies linear transformations and concatenation on the maps to aggregate local features. SPC module offers superior local modeling power and performance gains, making it a promising alternative to the convolutional layer. Then, we build a pure-MLP architecture called Caterpillar by replacing the convolutional layer with the SPC module in a hybrid model of sMLPNet. Extensive experiments show Caterpillar's excellent performance on both small-scale and ImageNet-1k classification benchmarks, with remarkable scalability and transfer capability possessed as well. The code is available at https://github.com/sunjin19126/Caterpillar.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

The Power of Combining Data and Knowledge: GPT-4o is an Effective Interpreter of Machine Learning Models in Predicting Lymph Node Metastasis of Lung Cancer

Lymph node metastasis (LNM) is a crucial factor in determining the initial treatment for patients with lung cancer, yet accurate preoperative diagnosis of LNM remains challenging. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable text generation capabilities. Leveraging the extensive medical knowledge learned from vast corpora, LLMs can estimate probabilities for clinical problems, though their performance has historically been inferior to data-driven machine learning models. In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble method that combines the medical knowledge acquired by LLMs with the latent patterns identified by machine learning models to enhance LNM prediction performance. Initially, we developed machine learning models using patient data. We then designed a prompt template to integrate the patient data with the predicted probability from the machine learning model. Subsequently, we instructed GPT-4o, the most advanced LLM developed by OpenAI, to estimate the likelihood of LNM based on patient data and then adjust the estimate using the machine learning output. Finally, we collected three outputs from the GPT-4o using the same prompt and ensembled these results as the final prediction. Using the proposed method, our models achieved an AUC value of 0.778 and an AP value of 0.426 for LNM prediction, significantly improving predictive performance compared to baseline machine learning models. The experimental results indicate that GPT-4o can effectively leverage its medical knowledge and the probabilities predicted by machine learning models to achieve more accurate LNM predictions. These findings demonstrate that LLMs can perform well in clinical risk prediction tasks, offering a new paradigm for integrating medical knowledge and patient data in clinical predictions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Predicting Lung Cancer Patient Prognosis with Large Language Models

Prognosis prediction is crucial for determining optimal treatment plans for lung cancer patients. Traditionally, such predictions relied on models developed from retrospective patient data. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have gained attention for their ability to process and generate text based on extensive learned knowledge. In this study, we evaluate the potential of GPT-4o mini and GPT-3.5 in predicting the prognosis of lung cancer patients. We collected two prognosis datasets, i.e., survival and post-operative complication datasets, and designed multiple tasks to assess the models' performance comprehensively. Logistic regression models were also developed as baselines for comparison. The experimental results demonstrate that LLMs can achieve competitive, and in some tasks superior, performance in lung cancer prognosis prediction compared to data-driven logistic regression models despite not using additional patient data. These findings suggest that LLMs can be effective tools for prognosis prediction in lung cancer, particularly when patient data is limited or unavailable.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MMGPL: Multimodal Medical Data Analysis with Graph Prompt Learning

Prompt learning has demonstrated impressive efficacy in the fine-tuning of multimodal large models to a wide range of downstream tasks. Nonetheless, applying existing prompt learning methods for the diagnosis of neurological disorder still suffers from two issues: (i) existing methods typically treat all patches equally, despite the fact that only a small number of patches in neuroimaging are relevant to the disease, and (ii) they ignore the structural information inherent in the brain connection network which is crucial for understanding and diagnosing neurological disorders. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel prompt learning model by learning graph prompts during the fine-tuning process of multimodal large models for diagnosing neurological disorders. Specifically, we first leverage GPT-4 to obtain relevant disease concepts and compute semantic similarity between these concepts and all patches. Secondly, we reduce the weight of irrelevant patches according to the semantic similarity between each patch and disease-related concepts. Moreover, we construct a graph among tokens based on these concepts and employ a graph convolutional network layer to extract the structural information of the graph, which is used to prompt the pre-trained multimodal large models for diagnosing neurological disorders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance for neurological disorder diagnosis compared with state-of-the-art methods and validated by clinicians.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

The current status of large language models in summarizing radiology report impressions

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT show excellent capabilities in various natural language processing tasks, especially for text generation. The effectiveness of LLMs in summarizing radiology report impressions remains unclear. In this study, we explore the capability of eight LLMs on the radiology report impression summarization. Three types of radiology reports, i.e., CT, PET-CT, and Ultrasound reports, are collected from Peking University Cancer Hospital and Institute. We use the report findings to construct the zero-shot, one-shot, and three-shot prompts with complete example reports to generate the impressions. Besides the automatic quantitative evaluation metrics, we define five human evaluation metrics, i.e., completeness, correctness, conciseness, verisimilitude, and replaceability, to evaluate the semantics of the generated impressions. Two thoracic surgeons (ZSY and LB) and one radiologist (LQ) compare the generated impressions with the reference impressions and score each impression under the five human evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that there is a gap between the generated impressions and reference impressions. Although the LLMs achieve comparable performance in completeness and correctness, the conciseness and verisimilitude scores are not very high. Using few-shot prompts can improve the LLMs' performance in conciseness and verisimilitude, but the clinicians still think the LLMs can not replace the radiologists in summarizing the radiology impressions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Noisy Node Classification by Bi-level Optimization based Multi-teacher Distillation

Previous graph neural networks (GNNs) usually assume that the graph data is with clean labels for representation learning, but it is not true in real applications. In this paper, we propose a new multi-teacher distillation method based on bi-level optimization (namely BO-NNC), to conduct noisy node classification on the graph data. Specifically, we first employ multiple self-supervised learning methods to train diverse teacher models, and then aggregate their predictions through a teacher weight matrix. Furthermore, we design a new bi-level optimization strategy to dynamically adjust the teacher weight matrix based on the training progress of the student model. Finally, we design a label improvement module to improve the label quality. Extensive experimental results on real datasets show that our method achieves the best results compared to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

ACT-Diffusion: Efficient Adversarial Consistency Training for One-step Diffusion Models

Though diffusion models excel in image generation, their step-by-step denoising leads to slow generation speeds. Consistency training addresses this issue with single-step sampling but often produces lower-quality generations and requires high training costs. In this paper, we show that optimizing consistency training loss minimizes the Wasserstein distance between target and generated distributions. As timestep increases, the upper bound accumulates previous consistency training losses. Therefore, larger batch sizes are needed to reduce both current and accumulated losses. We propose Adversarial Consistency Training (ACT), which directly minimizes the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence between distributions at each timestep using a discriminator. Theoretically, ACT enhances generation quality, and convergence. By incorporating a discriminator into the consistency training framework, our method achieves improved FID scores on CIFAR10 and ImageNet 64$\times$64 and LSUN Cat 256$\times$256 datasets, retains zero-shot image inpainting capabilities, and uses less than $1/6$ of the original batch size and fewer than $1/2$ of the model parameters and training steps compared to the baseline method, this leads to a substantial reduction in resource consumption. Our code is available:https://github.com/kong13661/ACT

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Investigating and Mitigating the Side Effects of Noisy Views for Self-Supervised Clustering Algorithms in Practical Multi-View Scenarios

Multi-view clustering (MVC) aims at exploring category structures among multi-view data in self-supervised manners. Multiple views provide more information than single views and thus existing MVC methods can achieve satisfactory performance. However, their performance might seriously degenerate when the views are noisy in practical multi-view scenarios. In this paper, we formally investigate the drawback of noisy views and then propose a theoretically grounded deep MVC method (namely MVCAN) to address this issue. Specifically, we propose a novel MVC objective that enables un-shared parameters and inconsistent clustering predictions across multiple views to reduce the side effects of noisy views. Furthermore, a two-level multi-view iterative optimization is designed to generate robust learning targets for refining individual views' representation learning. Theoretical analysis reveals that MVCAN works by achieving the multi-view consistency, complementarity, and noise robustness. Finally, experiments on extensive public datasets demonstrate that MVCAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods and is robust against the existence of noisy views.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Signed Graph Representation Learning: A Survey

With the prevalence of social media, the connectedness between people has been greatly enhanced. Real-world relations between users on social media are often not limited to expressing positive ties such as friendship, trust, and agreement, but they also reflect negative ties such as enmity, mistrust, and disagreement, which can be well modelled by signed graphs. Signed Graph Representation Learning (SGRL) is an effective approach to analyze the complex patterns in real-world signed graphs with the co-existence of positive and negative links. In recent years, SGRL has witnesses fruitful results. SGRL tries to allocate low-dimensional representations to nodes and edges which could preserve the graph structure, attribute and some collective properties, e.g., balance theory and status theory. To the best of knowledge, there is no survey paper about SGRL up to now. In this paper, we present a broad review of SGRL methods and discuss some future research directions.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Unbiased estimation and asymptotically valid inference in multivariable Mendelian randomization with many weak instrumental variables

Mendelian randomization (MR) is an instrumental variable (IV) approach to infer causal relationships between exposures and outcomes with genome-wide association studies (GWAS) summary data. However, the multivariable inverse-variance weighting (IVW) approach, which serves as the foundation for most MR approaches, cannot yield unbiased causal effect estimates in the presence of many weak IVs. To address this problem, we proposed the MR using Bias-corrected Estimating Equation (MRBEE) that can infer unbiased causal relationships with many weak IVs and account for horizontal pleiotropy simultaneously. While the practical significance of MRBEE was demonstrated in our parallel work (Lorincz-Comi (2023)), this paper established the statistical theories of multivariable IVW and MRBEE with many weak IVs. First, we showed that the bias of the multivariable IVW estimate is caused by the error-in-variable bias, whose scale and direction are inflated and influenced by weak instrument bias and sample overlaps of exposures and outcome GWAS cohorts, respectively. Second, we investigated the asymptotic properties of multivariable IVW and MRBEE, showing that MRBEE outperforms multivariable IVW regarding unbiasedness of causal effect estimation and asymptotic validity of causal inference. Finally, we applied MRBEE to examine myopia and revealed that education and outdoor activity are causal to myopia whereas indoor activity is not.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2024

FRAMU: Attention-based Machine Unlearning using Federated Reinforcement Learning

Machine Unlearning is an emerging field that addresses data privacy issues by enabling the removal of private or irrelevant data from the Machine Learning process. Challenges related to privacy and model efficiency arise from the use of outdated, private, and irrelevant data. These issues compromise both the accuracy and the computational efficiency of models in both Machine Learning and Unlearning. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, Attention-based Machine Unlearning using Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRAMU). This framework incorporates adaptive learning mechanisms, privacy preservation techniques, and optimization strategies, making it a well-rounded solution for handling various data sources, either single-modality or multi-modality, while maintaining accuracy and privacy. FRAMU's strength lies in its adaptability to fluctuating data landscapes, its ability to unlearn outdated, private, or irrelevant data, and its support for continual model evolution without compromising privacy. Our experiments, conducted on both single-modality and multi-modality datasets, revealed that FRAMU significantly outperformed baseline models. Additional assessments of convergence behavior and optimization strategies further validate the framework's utility in federated learning applications. Overall, FRAMU advances Machine Unlearning by offering a robust, privacy-preserving solution that optimizes model performance while also addressing key challenges in dynamic data environments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Exploring the Landscape of Machine Unlearning: A Comprehensive Survey and Taxonomy

Machine unlearning (MU) is gaining increasing attention due to the need to remove or modify predictions made by machine learning (ML) models. While training models have become more efficient and accurate, the importance of unlearning previously learned information has become increasingly significant in fields such as privacy, security, and fairness. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of MU, covering current state-of-the-art techniques and approaches, including data deletion, perturbation, and model updates. In addition, commonly used metrics and datasets are also presented. The paper also highlights the challenges that need to be addressed, including attack sophistication, standardization, transferability, interpretability, training data, and resource constraints. The contributions of this paper include discussions about the potential benefits of MU and its future directions. Additionally, the paper emphasizes the need for researchers and practitioners to continue exploring and refining unlearning techniques to ensure that ML models can adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining user trust. The importance of unlearning is further highlighted in making Artificial Intelligence (AI) more trustworthy and transparent, especially with the increasing importance of AI in various domains that involve large amounts of personal user data.

cs.LG↗