Chao Pang

Yu Wang, Chao Pang, Yuzhe Wang et al.

Leveraging artificial intelligence for automatic retrosynthesis speeds up organic pathway planning in digital laboratories. However, existing deep learning approaches are unexplainable, like "black box" with few insights, notably limiting their applications in real retrosynthesis scenarios. Here, we propose MechRetro, a chemical-mechanism-driven graph learning framework for interpretable retrosynthetic prediction and pathway planning, which learns several retrosynthetic actions to simulate a reverse reaction via elaborate self-adaptive joint learning. By integrating chemical knowledge as prior information, we design a novel Graph Transformer architecture to adaptively learn discriminative and chemically meaningful molecule representations, highlighting the strong capacity in molecule feature representation learning. We demonstrate that MechRetro outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for retrosynthetic prediction with a large margin on large-scale benchmark datasets. Extending MechRetro to the multi-step retrosynthesis analysis, we identify efficient synthetic routes via an interpretable reasoning mechanism, leading to a better understanding in the realm of knowledgeable synthetic chemists. We also showcase that MechRetro discovers a novel pathway for protokylol, along with energy scores for uncertainty assessment, broadening the applicability for practical scenarios. Overall, we expect MechRetro to provide meaningful insights for high-throughput automated organic synthesis in drug discovery.

Chao Pang, Jiang Wu, Jian Ding et al.

The tilted viewing nature of the off-nadir aerial images brings severe challenges to the building change detection (BCD) problem: the mismatch of the nearby buildings and the semantic ambiguity of the building facades. To tackle these challenges, we present a multi-task guided change detection network model, named as MTGCD-Net. The proposed model approaches the specific BCD problem by designing three auxiliary tasks, including: (1) a pixel-wise classification task to predict the roofs and facades of buildings; (2) an auxiliary task for learning the roof-to-footprint offsets of each building to account for the misalignment between building roof instances; and (3) an auxiliary task for learning the identical roof matching flow between bi-temporal aerial images to tackle the building roof mismatch problem. These auxiliary tasks provide indispensable and complementary building parsing and matching information. The predictions of the auxiliary tasks are finally fused to the main building change detection branch with a multi-modal distillation module. To train and test models for the BCD problem with off-nadir aerial images, we create a new benchmark dataset, named BANDON. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance over the previous state-of-the-art competitors.

Xiaoran Fan, Chao Pang, Tian Yuan et al. · apple-ml

Speech representation learning has improved both speech understanding and speech synthesis tasks for single language. However, its ability in cross-lingual scenarios has not been explored. In this paper, we extend the pretraining method for cross-lingual multi-speaker speech synthesis tasks, including cross-lingual multi-speaker voice cloning and cross-lingual multi-speaker speech editing. We propose a speech-text joint pretraining framework, where we randomly mask the spectrogram and the phonemes given a speech example and its transcription. By learning to reconstruct the masked parts of the input in different languages, our model shows great improvements over speaker-embedding-based multi-speaker TTS methods. Moreover, our framework is end-to-end for both the training and the inference without any finetuning effort. In cross-lingual multi-speaker voice cloning and cross-lingual multi-speaker speech editing tasks, our experiments show that our model outperforms speaker-embedding-based multi-speaker TTS methods.

Pengfei Zhu, Chao Pang, Yekun Chai et al.

In recent years, the burgeoning interest in diffusion models has led to significant advances in image and speech generation. Nevertheless, the direct synthesis of music waveforms from unrestricted textual prompts remains a relatively underexplored domain. In response to this lacuna, this paper introduces a pioneering contribution in the form of a text-to-waveform music generation model, underpinned by the utilization of diffusion models. Our methodology hinges on the innovative incorporation of free-form textual prompts as conditional factors to guide the waveform generation process within the diffusion model framework. Addressing the challenge of limited text-music parallel data, we undertake the creation of a dataset by harnessing web resources, a task facilitated by weak supervision techniques. Furthermore, a rigorous empirical inquiry is undertaken to contrast the efficacy of two distinct prompt formats for text conditioning, namely, music tags and unconstrained textual descriptions. The outcomes of this comparative analysis affirm the superior performance of our proposed model in terms of enhancing text-music relevance. Finally, our work culminates in a demonstrative exhibition of the excellent capabilities of our model in text-to-music generation. We further demonstrate that our generated music in the waveform domain outperforms previous works by a large margin in terms of diversity, quality, and text-music relevance.

Yekun Chai, Shuohuan Wang, Chao Pang et al.

Software engineers working with the same programming language (PL) may speak different natural languages (NLs) and vice versa, erecting huge barriers to communication and working efficiency. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of generative pre-training in computer programs, yet they are always English-centric. In this work, we step towards bridging the gap between multilingual NLs and multilingual PLs for large language models (LLMs). We release ERNIE-Code, a unified pre-trained language model for 116 NLs and 6 PLs. We employ two methods for universal cross-lingual pre-training: span-corruption language modeling that learns patterns from monolingual NL or PL; and pivot-based translation language modeling that relies on parallel data of many NLs and PLs. Extensive results show that ERNIE-Code outperforms previous multilingual LLMs for PL or NL across a wide range of end tasks of code intelligence, including multilingual code-to-text, text-to-code, code-to-code, and text-to-text generation. We further show its advantage of zero-shot prompting on multilingual code summarization and text-to-text translation. We release our code and pre-trained checkpoints.

Haifeng Wang, Hua Wu, Tian Wu et al.

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

Chao Pang, Yu Wang, Yi Jiang et al.

In this work, we propose MEDICO, a Multi-viEw Deep generative model for molecule generation, structural optimization, and the SARS-CoV-2 Inhibitor disCOvery. To the best of our knowledge, MEDICO is the first-of-this-kind graph generative model that can generate molecular graphs similar to the structure of targeted molecules, with a multi-view representation learning framework to sufficiently and adaptively learn comprehensive structural semantics from targeted molecular topology and geometry. We show that our MEDICO significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in generating valid, unique, and novel molecules under benchmarking comparisons. In particular, we showcase the multi-view deep learning model enables us to generate not only the molecules structurally similar to the targeted molecules but also the molecules with desired chemical properties, demonstrating the strong capability of our model in exploring the chemical space deeply. Moreover, case study results on targeted molecule generation for the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) show that by integrating molecule docking into our model as chemical priori, we successfully generate new small molecules with desired drug-like properties for the Mpro, potentially accelerating the de novo design of Covid-19 drugs. Further, we apply MEDICO to the structural optimization of three well-known Mpro inhibitors (N3, 11a, and GC376) and achieve ~88% improvement in their binding affinity to Mpro, demonstrating the application value of our model for the development of therapeutics for SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Chao Pang, Xingxing Weng, Jiang Wu et al.

This paper develops a Versatile and Honest vision language Model (VHM) for remote sensing image analysis. VHM is built on a large-scale remote sensing image-text dataset with rich-content captions (VersaD), and an honest instruction dataset comprising both factual and deceptive questions (HnstD). Unlike prevailing remote sensing image-text datasets, in which image captions focus on a few prominent objects and their relationships, VersaD captions provide detailed information about image properties, object attributes, and the overall scene. This comprehensive captioning enables VHM to thoroughly understand remote sensing images and perform diverse remote sensing tasks. Moreover, different from existing remote sensing instruction datasets that only include factual questions, HnstD contains additional deceptive questions stemming from the non-existence of objects. This feature prevents VHM from producing affirmative answers to nonsense queries, thereby ensuring its honesty. In our experiments, VHM significantly outperforms various vision language models on common tasks of scene classification, visual question answering, and visual grounding. Additionally, VHM achieves competent performance on several unexplored tasks, such as building vectorizing, multi-label classification and honest question answering. We will release the code, data and model weights at https://github.com/opendatalab/VHM .

Chenxu Yang, Ruipeng Jia, Naibin Gu et al.

DPO is an effective preference optimization algorithm. However, the DPO-tuned models tend to overfit on the dispreferred samples, manifested as overly long generations lacking diversity. While recent regularization approaches have endeavored to alleviate this issue by modifying the objective function, they achieved that at the cost of alignment performance degradation. In this paper, we innovatively incorporate regularization from the perspective of weight updating to curb alignment overfitting. Through the pilot experiment, we discovered that there exists a positive correlation between overfitting and the hyperspherical energy fluctuation. Hence, we introduce orthogonal finetuning for DPO via a weight-Rotated Preference Optimization (RoPO) method, which merely conducts rotational and magnitude-stretching updates on the weight parameters to maintain the hyperspherical energy invariant, thereby preserving the knowledge encoded in the angle between neurons. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model aligns perfectly with human preferences while retaining the original expressive capacity using only 0.0086% of the trainable parameters, suggesting an effective regularization against overfitting. Specifically, RoPO outperforms DPO by up to 10 points on MT-Bench and by up to 2.8 points on AlpacaEval 2, while enhancing the generation diversity by an average of 6 points.

Kaiyu Li, Zepeng Xin, Li Pang et al.

Remote sensing has become critical for understanding environmental dynamics, urban planning, and disaster management. However, traditional remote sensing workflows often rely on explicit segmentation or detection methods, which struggle to handle complex, implicit queries that require reasoning over spatial context, domain knowledge, and implicit user intent. Motivated by this, we introduce a new task, \ie, geospatial pixel reasoning, which allows implicit querying and reasoning and generates the mask of the target region. To advance this task, we construct and release the first large-scale benchmark dataset called EarthReason, which comprises 5,434 manually annotated image masks with over 30,000 implicit question-answer pairs. Moreover, we propose SegEarth-R1, a simple yet effective language-guided segmentation baseline that integrates a hierarchical visual encoder, a large language model (LLM) for instruction parsing, and a tailored mask generator for spatial correlation. The design of SegEarth-R1 incorporates domain-specific adaptations, including aggressive visual token compression to handle ultra-high-resolution remote sensing images, a description projection module to fuse language and multi-scale features, and a streamlined mask prediction pipeline that directly queries description embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SegEarth-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on both reasoning and referring segmentation tasks, significantly outperforming traditional and LLM-based segmentation methods. Our data and code will be released at https://github.com/earth-insights/SegEarth-R1.

Kai Li, Xingxing Weng, Yupeng Deng et al.

Extracting polygonal roofs and footprints from remote sensing images is critical for large-scale urban analysis. Most existing methods rely on segmentation-based models that assume clear semantic boundaries of roofs, but these approaches struggle in off- nadir images, where the roof and footprint are significantly displaced, and facade pixels are fused with the roof boundary. With the increasing availability of open vector map annotations, e.g., OpenStreetMap, utilizing historical labels for off-nadir image annotation has become viable because remote sensing images are georeferenced once captured. However, these historical labels commonly suffer from significant positional discrepancies with new images and only have one annotation (roof or footprint), which fails to describe the correct structures of a building. To address these discrepancies, we first introduce a concept of an alignment token, which encodes the correction vector to guide the label correction. Based on this concept, we then propose Drag OpenStreetMap Labels (DragOSM), a novel model designed to align dislocated historical labels with roofs and footprints. Specifically, DragOSM formulates the label alignment as an interactive denoising process, modeling the positional discrepancy as a Gaussian distribution. During training, it learns to correct these errors by simulating misalignment with random Gaussian perturbations; during inference, it iteratively refines the positions of input labels. To validate our method, we further present a new dataset, Repairing Buildings in OSM (ReBO), comprising 179,265 buildings with both OpenStreetMap and manually corrected annotations across 5,473 images from 41 cities. Experimental results on ReBO demonstrate the effectiveness of DragOSM. Code, dataset, and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/likaiucas/DragOSM.git.

Jiheum Park, Chao Pang, Tristan Y. Lee et al.

Current cancer screening guidelines cover only a few cancer types and rely on narrowly defined criteria such as age or a single risk factor like smoking history, to identify high-risk individuals. Predictive models using electronic health records (EHRs), which capture large-scale longitudinal patient-level health information, may provide a more effective tool for identifying high-risk groups by detecting subtle prediagnostic signals of cancer. Recent advances in large language and foundation models have further expanded this potential, yet evidence remains limited on how useful HER-based models are compared with traditional risk factors currently used in screening guidelines. We systematically evaluated the clinical utility of EHR-based predictive models against traditional risk factors, including gene mutations and family history of cancer, for identifying high-risk individuals across eight major cancers (breast, lung, colorectal, prostate, ovarian, liver, pancreatic, and stomach), using data from the All of Us Research Program, which integrates EHR, genomic, and survey data from over 865,000 participants. Even with a baseline modeling approach, EHR-based models achieved a 3- to 6-fold higher enrichment of true cancer cases among individuals identified as high risk compared with traditional risk factors alone, whether used as a standalone or complementary tool. The EHR foundation model, a state-of-the-art approach trained on comprehensive patient trajectories, further improved predictive performance across 26 cancer types, demonstrating the clinical potential of EHR-based predictive modeling to support more precise and scalable early detection strategies.

Chao Pang, Xinzhuo Jiang, Nishanth Parameshwar Pavinkurve et al.

Synthetic Electronic Health Records (EHR) have emerged as a pivotal tool in advancing healthcare applications and machine learning models, particularly for researchers without direct access to healthcare data. Although existing methods, like rule-based approaches and generative adversarial networks (GANs), generate synthetic data that resembles real-world EHR data, these methods often use a tabular format, disregarding temporal dependencies in patient histories and limiting data replication. Recently, there has been a growing interest in leveraging Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) for EHR data. This enables applications like disease progression analysis, population estimation, counterfactual reasoning, and synthetic data generation. In this work, we focus on synthetic data generation and demonstrate the capability of training a GPT model using a particular patient representation derived from CEHR-BERT, enabling us to generate patient sequences that can be seamlessly converted to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) data format.

Xingxing Weng, Chao Pang, Gui-Song Xia

Vision-language modeling (VLM) aims to bridge the information gap between images and natural language. Under the new paradigm of first pre-training on massive image-text pairs and then fine-tuning on task-specific data, VLM in the remote sensing domain has made significant progress. The resulting models benefit from the absorption of extensive general knowledge and demonstrate strong performance across a variety of remote sensing data analysis tasks. Moreover, they are capable of interacting with users in a conversational manner. In this paper, we aim to provide the remote sensing community with a timely and comprehensive review of the developments in VLM using the two-stage paradigm. Specifically, we first cover a taxonomy of VLM in remote sensing: contrastive learning, visual instruction tuning, and text-conditioned image generation. For each category, we detail the commonly used network architecture and pre-training objectives. Second, we conduct a thorough review of existing works, examining foundation models and task-specific adaptation methods in contrastive-based VLM, architectural upgrades, training strategies and model capabilities in instruction-based VLM, as well as generative foundation models with their representative downstream applications. Third, we summarize datasets used for VLM pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation, with an analysis of their construction methodologies (including image sources and caption generation) and key properties, such as scale and task adaptability. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions: cross-modal representation alignment, vague requirement comprehension, explanation-driven model reliability, continually scalable model capabilities, and large-scale datasets featuring richer modalities and greater challenges.

Kaiyu Li, Xiangyong Cao, Yupeng Deng et al.

Monitoring Earth's evolving land covers requires methods capable of detecting changes across a wide range of categories and contexts. Existing change detection methods are hindered by their dependency on predefined classes, reducing their effectiveness in open-world applications. To address this issue, we introduce open-vocabulary change detection (OVCD), a novel task that bridges vision and language to detect changes across any category. Considering the lack of high-quality data and annotation, we propose two training-free frameworks, M-C-I and I-M-C, which leverage and integrate off-the-shelf foundation models for the OVCD task. The insight behind the M-C-I framework is to discover all potential changes and then classify these changes, while the insight of I-M-C framework is to identify all targets of interest and then determine whether their states have changed. Based on these two frameworks, we instantiate to obtain several methods, e.g., SAM-DINOv2-SegEarth-OV, Grounding-DINO-SAM2-DINO, etc. Extensive evaluations on 5 benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior generalization and robustness of our OVCD methods over existing supervised and unsupervised methods. To support continued exploration, we release DynamicEarth, a dedicated codebase designed to advance research and application of OVCD. https://likyoo.github.io/DynamicEarth

Xingxing Weng, Ruifeng Ni, Chao Pang et al.

Current remote sensing vision-language models (RS VLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in image interpretation but rely on static training data, limiting their ability to accommodate continuously emerging sensing modalities and downstream tasks. This exposes a fundamental challenge: enabling RS VLMs to continually adapt without catastrophic forgetting. Despite its practical importance, the continual learning capability of RS VLMs remains underexplored, and no dedicated benchmark currently exists. In this work, we present CLeaRS, a comprehensive benchmark for continual vision-language learning in remote sensing. CLeaRS comprises 10 curated subsets with over 207k image-text pairs, spanning diverse interpretation tasks, sensing modalities, and application scenarios. We further define three evaluation protocols: long-horizon, modality-incremental, and task-incremental settings, to systematically assess continual adaptation. Extensive benchmarking of diverse vision-language models reveals catastrophic forgetting across all settings. Moreover, representative continual learning methods, when adapted to RS VLMs, exhibit limited effectiveness in handling task, instruction, and modality transitions. Our findings underscore the need for developing continual learning methods tailored to RS VLMs.

Chao Pang, Jiheum Park, Xinzhuo Jiang et al.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) provide a rich, longitudinal view of patient health and hold significant potential for advancing clinical decision support, risk prediction, and data-driven healthcare research. However, most artificial intelligence (AI) models for EHRs are designed for narrow, single-purpose tasks, limiting their generalizability and utility in real-world settings. Here, we present CEHR-XGPT, a general-purpose foundation model for EHR data that unifies three essential capabilities - feature representation, zero-shot prediction, and synthetic data generation - within a single architecture. To support temporal reasoning over clinical sequences, CEHR-XGPT incorporates a novel time-token-based learning framework that explicitly encodes patients' dynamic timelines into the model structure. CEHR-XGPT demonstrates strong performance across all three tasks and generalizes effectively to external datasets through vocabulary expansion and fine-tuning. Its versatility enables rapid model development, cohort discovery, and patient outcome forecasting without the need for task-specific retraining.

Chao Pang, Vincent Jeanselme, Young Sang Choi et al.

Foundation models hold significant promise in healthcare, given their capacity to extract meaningful representations independent of downstream tasks. This property has enabled state-of-the-art performance across several clinical applications trained on structured electronic health record (EHR) data, even in settings with limited labeled data, a prevalent challenge in healthcare. However, there is little consensus on these models' potential for clinical utility due to the lack of desiderata of comprehensive and meaningful tasks and sufficiently diverse evaluations to characterize the benefit over conventional supervised learning. To address this gap, we propose a suite of clinically meaningful tasks spanning patient outcomes, early prediction of acute and chronic conditions, including desiderata for robust evaluations. We evaluate state-of-the-art foundation models on EHR data consisting of 5 million patients from Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUMC), a large urban academic medical center in New York City, across 14 clinically relevant tasks. We measure overall accuracy, calibration, and subpopulation performance to surface tradeoffs based on the choice of pre-training, tokenization, and data representation strategies. Our study aims to advance the empirical evaluation of structured EHR foundation models and guide the development of future healthcare foundation models.

Luis H. John, Chungsoo Kim, Jan A. Kors et al.

Background: Conventional prediction methods such as logistic regression and gradient boosting have been widely utilized for disease onset prediction for their reliability and interpretability. Deep learning methods promise enhanced prediction performance by extracting complex patterns from clinical data, but face challenges like data sparsity and high dimensionality. Methods: This study compares conventional and deep learning approaches to predict lung cancer, dementia, and bipolar disorder using observational data from eleven databases from North America, Europe, and Asia. Models were developed using logistic regression, gradient boosting, ResNet, and Transformer, and validated both internally and externally across the data sources. Discrimination performance was assessed using AUROC, and calibration was evaluated using Eavg. Findings: Across 11 datasets, conventional methods generally outperformed deep learning methods in terms of discrimination performance, particularly during external validation, highlighting their better transportability. Learning curves suggest that deep learning models require substantially larger datasets to reach the same performance levels as conventional methods. Calibration performance was also better for conventional methods, with ResNet showing the poorest calibration. Interpretation: Despite the potential of deep learning models to capture complex patterns in structured observational healthcare data, conventional models remain highly competitive for disease onset prediction, especially in scenarios involving smaller datasets and if lengthy training times need to be avoided. The study underscores the need for future research focused on optimizing deep learning models to handle the sparsity, high dimensionality, and heterogeneity inherent in healthcare datasets, and find new strategies to exploit the full capabilities of deep learning methods.

Chao Pang, Xingxing Weng, Jiang Wu et al.

Advanced change detection techniques primarily target image pairs of equal and high quality. However, variations in imaging conditions and platforms frequently lead to image pairs with distinct qualities: one image being high-quality, while the other being low-quality. These disparities in image quality present significant challenges for understanding image pairs semantically and extracting change features, ultimately resulting in a notable decline in performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce an innovative training strategy grounded in knowledge distillation. The core idea revolves around leveraging task knowledge acquired from high-quality image pairs to guide the model's learning process when dealing with image pairs that exhibit differences in quality. Additionally, we develop a hierarchical correlation distillation approach (involving self-correlation, cross-correlation, and global correlation). This approach compels the student model to replicate the correlations inherent in the teacher model, rather than focusing solely on individual features. This ensures effective knowledge transfer while maintaining the student model's training flexibility.

Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Yang Xiang et al.

Pre-trained language models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. GPT-3 has shown that scaling up pre-trained language models can further exploit their enormous potential. A unified framework named ERNIE 3.0 was recently proposed for pre-training large-scale knowledge enhanced models and trained a model with 10 billion parameters. ERNIE 3.0 outperformed the state-of-the-art models on various NLP tasks. In order to explore the performance of scaling up ERNIE 3.0, we train a hundred-billion-parameter model called ERNIE 3.0 Titan with up to 260 billion parameters on the PaddlePaddle platform. Furthermore, we design a self-supervised adversarial loss and a controllable language modeling loss to make ERNIE 3.0 Titan generate credible and controllable texts. To reduce the computation overhead and carbon emission, we propose an online distillation framework for ERNIE 3.0 Titan, where the teacher model will teach students and train itself simultaneously. ERNIE 3.0 Titan is the largest Chinese dense pre-trained model so far. Empirical results show that the ERNIE 3.0 Titan outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 68 NLP datasets.

Chao Pang, Xinzhuo Jiang, Krishna S Kalluri et al.

Embedding algorithms are increasingly used to represent clinical concepts in healthcare for improving machine learning tasks such as clinical phenotyping and disease prediction. Recent studies have adapted state-of-the-art bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) architecture to structured electronic health records (EHR) data for the generation of contextualized concept embeddings, yet do not fully incorporate temporal data across multiple clinical domains. Therefore we developed a new BERT adaptation, CEHR-BERT, to incorporate temporal information using a hybrid approach by augmenting the input to BERT using artificial time tokens, incorporating time, age, and concept embeddings, and introducing a new second learning objective for visit type. CEHR-BERT was trained on a subset of Columbia University Irving Medical Center-York Presbyterian Hospital's clinical data, which includes 2.4M patients, spanning over three decades, and tested using 4-fold cross-validation on the following prediction tasks: hospitalization, death, new heart failure (HF) diagnosis, and HF readmission. Our experiments show that CEHR-BERT outperformed existing state-of-the-art clinical BERT adaptations and baseline models across all 4 prediction tasks in both ROC-AUC and PR-AUC. CEHR-BERT also demonstrated strong transfer learning capability, as our model trained on only 5% of data outperformed comparison models trained on the entire data set. Ablation studies to better understand the contribution of each time component showed incremental gains with every element, suggesting that CEHR-BERT's incorporation of artificial time tokens, time and age embeddings with concept embeddings, and the addition of the second learning objective represents a promising approach for future BERT-based clinical embeddings.

Yu Sun, Shuohuan Wang, Shikun Feng et al.

Pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Recent works such as T5 and GPT-3 have shown that scaling up pre-trained language models can improve their generalization abilities. Particularly, the GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters shows its strong task-agnostic zero-shot/few-shot learning capabilities. Despite their success, these large-scale models are trained on plain texts without introducing knowledge such as linguistic knowledge and world knowledge. In addition, most large-scale models are trained in an auto-regressive way. As a result, this kind of traditional fine-tuning approach demonstrates relatively weak performance when solving downstream language understanding tasks. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a unified framework named ERNIE 3.0 for pre-training large-scale knowledge enhanced models. It fuses auto-regressive network and auto-encoding network, so that the trained model can be easily tailored for both natural language understanding and generation tasks with zero-shot learning, few-shot learning or fine-tuning. We trained the model with 10 billion parameters on a 4TB corpus consisting of plain texts and a large-scale knowledge graph. Empirical results show that the model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 54 Chinese NLP tasks, and its English version achieves the first place on the SuperGLUE benchmark (July 3, 2021), surpassing the human performance by +0.8% (90.6% vs. 89.8%).

Xuan Ouyang, Shuohuan Wang, Chao Pang et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained cross-lingual models achieve impressive performance in downstream cross-lingual tasks. This improvement benefits from learning a large amount of monolingual and parallel corpora. Although it is generally acknowledged that parallel corpora are critical for improving the model performance, existing methods are often constrained by the size of parallel corpora, especially for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-M, a new training method that encourages the model to align the representation of multiple languages with monolingual corpora, to overcome the constraint that the parallel corpus size places on the model performance. Our key insight is to integrate back-translation into the pre-training process. We generate pseudo-parallel sentence pairs on a monolingual corpus to enable the learning of semantic alignments between different languages, thereby enhancing the semantic modeling of cross-lingual models. Experimental results show that ERNIE-M outperforms existing cross-lingual models and delivers new state-of-the-art results in various cross-lingual downstream tasks.

Yi Liu, Chao Pang, Zongqian Zhan et al.

In recent years, building change detection methods have made great progress by introducing deep learning, but they still suffer from the problem of the extracted features not being discriminative enough, resulting in incomplete regions and irregular boundaries. To tackle this problem, we propose a dual task constrained deep Siamese convolutional network (DTCDSCN) model, which contains three sub-networks: a change detection network and two semantic segmentation networks. DTCDSCN can accomplish both change detection and semantic segmentation at the same time, which can help to learn more discriminative object-level features and obtain a complete change detection map. Furthermore, we introduce a dual attention module (DAM) to exploit the interdependencies between channels and spatial positions, which improves the feature representation. We also improve the focal loss function to suppress the sample imbalance problem. The experimental results obtained with the WHU building dataset show that the proposed method is effective for building change detection and achieves a state-of-the-art performance in terms of four metrics: precision, recall, F1-score, and intersection over union.