Electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation requires specialized expertise, often involving synthesizing insights from ECG signals with complex clinical queries posed in natural language. The scarcity of labeled ECG data coupled with the diverse nature of clinical inquiries presents a significant challenge for developing robust and adaptable ECG diagnostic systems. This work introduces a novel multimodal meta-learning method for few-shot ECG question answering, addressing the challenge of limited labeled data while leveraging the rich knowledge encoded within large language models (LLMs). Our LLM-agnostic approach integrates a pre-trained ECG encoder with a frozen LLM (e.g., LLaMA and Gemma) via a trainable fusion module, enabling the language model to reason about ECG data and generate clinically meaningful answers. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior generalization to unseen diagnostic tasks compared to supervised baselines, achieving notable performance even with limited ECG leads. For instance, in a 5-way 5-shot setting, our method using LLaMA-3.1-8B achieves an accuracy of 84.6%, 77.3%, and 69.6% on single verify, choose and query question types, respectively. These results highlight the potential of our method to enhance clinical ECG interpretation by combining signal processing with the nuanced language understanding capabilities of LLMs, particularly in data-constrained scenarios.
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；HeartVoice Medical Technology（心声医疗科技）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属邵逸夫医院）；Peking University（北京大学）；Institute of Medical Technology, Health Science Center of Peking University（北京大学医学部医学技术研究院）
Ventricular arrhythmias (VA) are the main causes of sudden cardiac death. Developing machine learning methods for detecting VA based on electrocardiograms (ECGs) can help save people's lives. However, developing such machine learning models for ECGs is challenging because of the following: 1) group-level diversity from different subjects and 2) individual-level diversity from different moments of a single subject. In this study, we aim to solve these problems in the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. For the pre-training stage, we propose a novel model agnostic meta-learning (MAML) with curr…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Data61, CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61部门）
We regularly consider answering counterfactual questions in practice, such as "Would people with diabetes take a turn for the better had they choose another medication?". Observational studies are growing in significance in answering such questions due to their widespread accumulation and comparatively easier acquisition than Randomized Control Trials (RCTs). Recently, some works have introduced representation learning and domain adaptation into counterfactual inference. However, most current works focus on the setting of binary treatments. None of them considers that different treatments' sam…
Characterizing the patterns of errors that a system makes helps researchers focus future development on increasing its accuracy and robustness. We propose a novel form of "meta learning" that automatically learns interpretable rules that characterize the types of errors that a system makes, and demonstrate these rules' ability to help understand and improve two NLP systems. Our approach works by collecting error cases on validation data, extracting meta-features describing these samples, and finally learning rules that characterize errors using these features. We apply our approach to VilBERT,…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）；KIRC, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能研究院知识图谱与推理中心（KIRC））；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京国家信息科学与技术研究中心）
Multi-hop knowledge graph (KG) reasoning is an effective and explainable method for predicting the target entity via reasoning paths in query answering (QA) task. Most previous methods assume that every relation in KGs has enough training triples, regardless of those few-shot relations which cannot provide sufficient triples for training robust reasoning models. In fact, the performance of existing multi-hop reasoning methods drops significantly on few-shot relations. In this paper, we propose a meta-based multi-hop reasoning method (Meta-KGR), which adopts meta-learning to learn effective met…
Performing inference on data obtained through observational studies is becoming extremely relevant due to the widespread availability of data in fields such as healthcare, education, retail, etc. Furthermore, this data is accrued from multiple homogeneous subgroups of a heterogeneous population, and hence, generalizing the inference mechanism over such data is essential. We propose the MetaCI framework with the goal of answering counterfactual questions in the context of causal inference (CI), where the factual observations are obtained from several homogeneous subgroups. While the CI network …
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）
In [1, 2], we have explored the theoretical aspects of feature extraction optimization processes for solving largescale problems and overcoming machine learning limitations. Majority of optimization algorithms that have been introduced in [1, 2] guarantee the optimal performance of supervised learning, given offline and discrete data, to deal with curse of dimensionality (CoD) problem. These algorithms, however, are not tailored for solving emerging learning problems. One of the important issues caused by online data is lack of sufficient samples per class. Further, traditional machine learnin…
Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI)（黑森人工智能中心）；Koç University（科奇大学）
The recent explosion of question answering (QA) datasets and models has increased the interest in the generalization of models across multiple domains and formats by either training on multiple datasets or by combining multiple models. Despite the promising results of multi-dataset models, some domains or QA formats may require specific architectures, and thus the adaptability of these models might be limited. In addition, current approaches for combining models disregard cues such as question-answer compatibility. In this work, we propose to combine expert agents with a novel, flexible, and t…
FMI, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（索非亚大学“圣克利门特·奥赫里德斯基”数学与信息学院）；ALT Research Group, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所ALT研究组（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））；IICT, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences（保加利亚科学院信息与通信技术研究所）
We present the system we built for participating in SemEval-2016 Task 3 on Community Question Answering. We achieved the best results on subtask C, and strong results on subtasks A and B, by combining a rich set of various types of features: semantic, lexical, metadata, and user-related. The most important group turned out to be the metadata for the question and for the comment, semantic vectors trained on QatarLiving data and similarities between the question and the comment for subtasks A and C, and between the original and the related question for Subtask B.
Heart disease is one of the significant challenges in today's world and one of the leading causes of many deaths worldwide. Recent advancement of machine learning (ML) application demonstrates that using electrocardiogram (ECG) and patient data, detecting heart disease during the early stage is feasible. However, both ECG and patient data are often imbalanced, which ultimately raises a challenge for the traditional ML to perform unbiasedly. Over the years, several data level and algorithm level solutions have been exposed by many researchers and practitioners. To provide a broader view of the …
Amazon Pvt. Ltd（亚马逊私人有限公司）；Tower Research Capital India Pvt. Ltd.（塔研究资本印度私人有限公司）；MathWorks India Pvt Ltd（迈斯沃克印度私人有限公司）；IIIT-Delhi（德里英迪拉·甘地信息技术学院）
Automatic estimation of relative difficulty of a pair of questions is an important and challenging problem in community question answering (CQA) services. There are limited studies which addressed this problem. Past studies mostly leveraged expertise of users answering the questions and barely considered other properties of CQA services such as metadata of users and posts, temporal information and textual content. In this paper, we propose DiffQue, a novel system that maps this problem to a network-aided edge directionality prediction problem. DiffQue starts by constructing a novel network str…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Knowledge bases (KBs) are often incomplete and constantly changing in practice. Yet, in many question answering applications coupled with knowledge bases, the sparse nature of KBs is often overlooked. To this end, we propose a case-based reasoning approach, CBR-iKB, for knowledge base question answering (KBQA) with incomplete-KB as our main focus. Our method ensembles decisions from multiple reasoning chains with a novel nonparametric reasoning algorithm. By design, CBR-iKB can seamlessly adapt to changes in KBs without any task-specific training or fine-tuning. Our method achieves 100% accura…
State-of-the-art approaches to reasoning and question answering over knowledge graphs (KGs) usually scale with the number of edges and can only be applied effectively on small instance-dependent subgraphs. In this paper, we address this issue by showing that multi-hop and more complex logical reasoning can be accomplished separately without losing expressive power. Motivated by this insight, we propose an approach to multi-hop reasoning that scales linearly with the number of relation types in the graph, which is usually significantly smaller than the number of edges or nodes. This produces a …
International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore（班加罗尔国际信息技术学院）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学理工学院）；Accenture Technology Labs（埃森哲技术实验室）
Knowledge Graphs (KG) act as a great tool for holding distilled information from large natural language text corpora. The problem of natural language querying over knowledge graphs is essential for the human consumption of this information. This problem is typically addressed by converting the natural language query to a structured query and then firing the structured query on the KG. Direct answering models over knowledge graphs in literature are very few. The query conversion models and direct models both require specific training data pertaining to the domain of the knowledge graph. In this…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Canadian VIGOUR Centre（加拿大VIGOUR中心）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所）
Electrocardiogram (ECG) abnormalities are linked to cardiovascular diseases, but may also occur in other non-cardiovascular conditions such as mental, neurological, metabolic and infectious conditions. However, most of the recent success of deep learning (DL) based diagnostic predictions in selected patient cohorts have been limited to a small set of cardiac diseases. In this study, we use a population-based dataset of >250,000 patients with >1000 medical conditions and >2 million ECGs to identify a wide range of diseases that could be accurately diagnosed from the patient's first in-hospital …
A case study of Generative AI in MSX Sales Copilot: Improving seller productivity with a real-time question-answering system for content recommendation
From PDF to RAG-Ready: Evaluating Document Conversion Frameworks for Domain-Specific Question Answering
Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto（葡萄牙波尔图大学工程学院）；Department of Business Administration, University of Maia（马亚大学商业管理系）；LIACC—Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory, University of Porto（葡萄牙波尔图大学人工智能与计算机科学实验室）；Department of Communication Sciences and Information Technologies, University of Maia（马亚大学通讯科学与信息科技系）；School of Health, Polytechnic of Porto（波尔图理工学院健康学院）；School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic Institute of Maia（马亚理工学院技术与管理学院）
FinSage: A Multi-aspect RAG System for Financial Filings Question Answering
1SimpleWay.AI 2McGill University 3University of Toronto 4University of California, Los Angeles 5The Chinese University of Hong Kong 6Duke University 7Universit\'e de Montr\'eal 8Mila - Quebec AI Institute 9Noah's Ark Lab 10CG Matrix Technology Limited；1SimpleWay.AI 2McGill University 3University of Toronto 4University of California, Los Angeles；5The Chinese University of Hong Kong 6Duke University 7Universit\'e de Montr\'eal 8Mila - Quebec AI Institute；9Noah's Ark Lab 10CG Matrix Technology Limited
Contrastive Language--Image Pre-training (CLIP) has shown remarkable success in learning with cross-modal supervision from extensive amounts of image--text pairs collected online. Thus far, the effectiveness of CLIP has been investigated primarily in general-domain multimodal problems. This work evaluates the effectiveness of CLIP for the task of Medical Visual Question Answering (MedVQA). To this end, we present PubMedCLIP, a fine-tuned version of CLIP for the medical domain based on PubMed articles. Our experiments are conducted on two MedVQA benchmark datasets and investigate two MedVQA met…
Context, the embedding of previous collected trajectories, is a powerful construct for Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) algorithms. By conditioning on an effective context, Meta-RL policies can easily generalize to new tasks within a few adaptation steps. We argue that improving the quality of context involves answering two questions: 1. How to train a compact and sufficient encoder that can embed the task-specific information contained in prior trajectories? 2. How to collect informative trajectories of which the corresponding context reflects the specification of tasks? To this end, we …
Word Representations form the core component for almost all advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as text mining, question-answering, and text summarization, etc. Over the last two decades, immense research is conducted to come up with one single model to solve all major NLP tasks. The major problem currently is that there are a plethora of choices for different NLP tasks. Thus for NLP practitioners, the task of choosing the right model to be used itself becomes a challenge. Thus combining multiple pre-trained word embeddings and forming meta embeddings has become a viab…
Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, CS, Peking University, China（高可信软件技术重点实验室，中国科学院，北京大学）；Theory Lab, Central Research Institute, 2012 Labs, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd, Shenzhen, China（理论实验室，中央研究院，2012实验室，华为技术有限公司，深圳）
