Chengqi Zang

h-index5
3papers

3 Papers

GTJun 5
Evidence Markets

Safwan Hossain, Gabriel Andrade, Chengqi Zang et al.

Modern prediction markets face two limitations that restrict their applicability in a range of settings:~(i)~they reveal what the crowd believes but not the evidence or reasoning behind those beliefs, and~(ii)~they require an event with an external ground truth that resolves at a known future date. We address these twin challenges by introducing evidence markets, a generalization of prediction markets that incentivizes the submission of evidence alongside beliefs and can be endogenously resolved using the crowd-sourced evidence if external resolution is not possible. At its core, the market uses a logarithmic market scoring rule whose liquidity parameter changes dynamically with the accumulated evidence quality. We prove that platform loss is bounded, evidence is rewarded proportional to the current market uncertainty, and can be equivalently implemented through an automated market maker. In the case where the marker resolves endogenously based on submitted evidence, we characterize how withholding evidence shifts a trader's belief about resolution and use it to prove truthful belief and evidence reporting is a always an $\varepsilon$-dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) strategy. To address operational considerations, we propose evidence verification via an LLM-as-a-Judge framework with staking and give an asynchronous execution algorithm that is not bottle-necked by verification. Throughout the work, we use LLM evaluations -- determining which model is best for a given task -- as a salient and representative running example for our proposed market.

AIJul 4, 2025
Multi-Agent Reasoning for Cardiovascular Imaging Phenotype Analysis

Weitong Zhang, Mengyun Qiao, Chengqi Zang et al.

Identifying associations between imaging phenotypes, disease risk factors, and clinical outcomes is essential for understanding disease mechanisms. However, traditional approaches rely on human-driven hypothesis testing and selection of association factors, often overlooking complex, non-linear dependencies among imaging phenotypes and other multi-modal data. To address this, we introduce Multi-agent Exploratory Synergy for the Heart (MESHAgents): a framework that leverages large language models as agents to dynamically elicit, surface, and decide confounders and phenotypes in association studies. Specifically, we orchestrate a multi-disciplinary team of AI agents, which spontaneously generate and converge on insights through iterative, self-organizing reasoning. The framework dynamically synthesizes statistical correlations with multi-expert consensus, providing an automated pipeline for phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS). We demonstrate the system's capabilities through a population-based study of imaging phenotypes of the heart and aorta. MESHAgents autonomously uncovered correlations between imaging phenotypes and a wide range of non-imaging factors, identifying additional confounder variables beyond standard demographic factors. Validation on diagnosis tasks reveals that MESHAgents-discovered phenotypes achieve performance comparable to expert-selected phenotypes, with mean AUC differences as small as $-0.004_{\pm0.010}$ on disease classification tasks. Notably, the recall score improves for 6 out of 9 disease types. Our framework provides clinically relevant imaging phenotypes with transparent reasoning, offering a scalable alternative to expert-driven methods.

AIJun 19, 2024
Stability and Generalizability in SDE Diffusion Models with Measure-Preserving Dynamics

Weitong Zhang, Chengqi Zang, Liu Li et al.

Inverse problems describe the process of estimating the causal factors from a set of measurements or data. Mapping of often incomplete or degraded data to parameters is ill-posed, thus data-driven iterative solutions are required, for example when reconstructing clean images from poor signals. Diffusion models have shown promise as potent generative tools for solving inverse problems due to their superior reconstruction quality and their compatibility with iterative solvers. However, most existing approaches are limited to linear inverse problems represented as Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs). This simplification falls short of addressing the challenging nature of real-world problems, leading to amplified cumulative errors and biases. We provide an explanation for this gap through the lens of measure-preserving dynamics of Random Dynamical Systems (RDS) with which we analyse Temporal Distribution Discrepancy and thus introduce a theoretical framework based on RDS for SDE diffusion models. We uncover several strategies that inherently enhance the stability and generalizability of diffusion models for inverse problems and introduce a novel score-based diffusion framework, the \textbf{D}ynamics-aware S\textbf{D}E \textbf{D}iffusion \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{M}odel (D$^3$GM). The \textit{Measure-preserving property} can return the degraded measurement to the original state despite complex degradation with the RDS concept of \textit{stability}. Our extensive experimental results corroborate the effectiveness of D$^3$GM across multiple benchmarks including a prominent application for inverse problems, magnetic resonance imaging. Code and data will be publicly available.