Qiming Cui

Qiming Cui, Duygu Tosun, Pratik Mukherjee et al.

Supervised deep learning techniques can be used to generate synthetic 7T MRIs from 3T MRI inputs. This image enhancement process leverages the advantages of ultra-high-field MRI to improve the signal-to-noise and contrast-to-noise ratios of 3T acquisitions. In this paper, we introduce multiple novel 7T synthesization algorithms based on custom-designed variants of the V-Net convolutional neural network. We demonstrate that the V-Net based model has superior performance in enhancing both single-site and multi-site MRI datasets compared to the existing benchmark model. When trained on 3T-7T MRI pairs from 8 subjects with mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), our model achieves state-of-the-art 7T synthesization performance. Compared to previous works, synthetic 7T images generated from our pipeline also display superior enhancement of pathological tissue. Additionally, we implement and test a data augmentation scheme for training models that are robust to variations in the input distribution. This allows synthetic 7T models to accommodate intra-scanner and inter-scanner variability in multisite datasets. On a harmonized dataset consisting of 18 3T-7T MRI pairs from two institutions, including both healthy subjects and those with mild TBI, our model maintains its performance and can generalize to 3T MRI inputs with lower resolution. Our findings demonstrate the promise of V-Net based models for MRI enhancement and offer a preliminary probe into improving the generalizability of synthetic 7T models with data augmentation.

R. Patrick Xian, Alex J. Lee, Satvik Lolla et al. · deepmind, openai

The increasing depth of parametric domain knowledge in large language models (LLMs) is fueling their rapid deployment in real-world applications. Understanding model vulnerabilities in high-stakes and knowledge-intensive tasks is essential for quantifying the trustworthiness of model predictions and regulating their use. The recent discovery of named entities as adversarial examples (i.e. adversarial entities) in natural language processing tasks raises questions about their potential impact on the knowledge robustness of pre-trained and finetuned LLMs in high-stakes and specialized domains. We examined the use of type-consistent entity substitution as a template for collecting adversarial entities for billion-parameter LLMs with biomedical knowledge. To this end, we developed an embedding-space attack based on powerscaled distance-weighted sampling to assess the robustness of their biomedical knowledge with a low query budget and controllable coverage. Our method has favorable query efficiency and scaling over alternative approaches based on random sampling and blackbox gradient-guided search, which we demonstrated for adversarial distractor generation in biomedical question answering. Subsequent failure mode analysis uncovered two regimes of adversarial entities on the attack surface with distinct characteristics and we showed that entity substitution attacks can manipulate token-wise Shapley value explanations, which become deceptive in this setting. Our approach complements standard evaluations for high-capacity models and the results highlight the brittleness of domain knowledge in LLMs.