Byron Wallace

Somin Wadhwa, Vivek Khetan, Silvio Amir et al.

We present Reddit Health Online Talk (RedHOT), a corpus of 22,000 richly annotated social media posts from Reddit spanning 24 health conditions. Annotations include demarcations of spans corresponding to medical claims, personal experiences, and questions. We collect additional granular annotations on identified claims. Specifically, we mark snippets that describe patient Populations, Interventions, and Outcomes (PIO elements) within these. Using this corpus, we introduce the task of retrieving trustworthy evidence relevant to a given claim made on social media. We propose a new method to automatically derive (noisy) supervision for this task which we use to train a dense retrieval model; this outperforms baseline models. Manual evaluation of retrieval results performed by medical doctors indicate that while our system performance is promising, there is considerable room for improvement. Collected annotations (and scripts to assemble the dataset), are available at https://github.com/sominw/redhot.

Katherine C. Kellogg, Bingyang Ye, Yifan Hu et al.

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in healthcare has been accompanied by scrutiny of their oversight. Existing monitoring approaches, inherited from traditional machine learning (ML), are task-based and founded on assumed performance degradation arising from dataset drift. In contrast, with LLMs, inevitable model degradation due to changes in populations compared to the training dataset cannot be assumed, because LLMs were not trained for any specific task in any given population. We therefore propose a new organizing principle guiding generalist LLM monitoring that is scalable and grounded in how these models are developed and used in practice: capability-based monitoring. Capability-based monitoring is motivated by the fact that LLMs are generalist systems whose overlapping internal capabilities are reused across numerous downstream tasks. Instead of evaluating each downstream task independently, this approach organizes monitoring around shared model capabilities, such as summarization, reasoning, translation, or safety guardrails, in order to enable cross-task detection of systemic weaknesses, long-tail errors, and emergent behaviors that task-based monitoring may miss. We describe considerations for developers, organizational leaders, and professional societies for implementing a capability-based monitoring approach. Ultimately, capability-based monitoring will provide a scalable foundation for safe, adaptive, and collaborative monitoring of LLMs and future generalist artificial intelligence models in healthcare.

Hadas Orgad, Fazl Barez, Tal Haklay et al.

Interpretability aims to explain the behavior of deep neural networks. Despite rapid growth, there is mounting concern that much of this work has not translated into practical impact, raising questions about its relevance and utility. This position paper argues that the central missing ingredient is not new methods, but evaluation criteria: interpretability should be evaluated by actionability--the extent to which insights enable concrete decisions and interventions beyond interpretability research itself. We define actionable interpretability along two dimensions--concreteness and validation--and analyze the barriers currently preventing real-world impact. To address these barriers, we identify five domains where interpretability offers unique leverage and present a framework for actionable interpretability with evaluation criteria aligned with practical outcomes. Our goal is not to downplay exploratory research, but to establish actionability as a core objective of interpretability research.

Sheridan Feucht, Eric Todd, Byron Wallace et al.

Prior work on in-context copying has shown the existence of induction heads, which attend to and promote individual tokens during copying. In this work we discover a new type of induction head: concept-level induction heads, which copy entire lexical units instead of individual tokens. Concept induction heads learn to attend to the ends of multi-token words throughout training, working in parallel with token-level induction heads to copy meaningful text. We show that these heads are responsible for semantic tasks like word-level translation, whereas token induction heads are vital for tasks that can only be done verbatim (like copying nonsense tokens). These two "routes" operate independently: we show that ablation of token induction heads causes models to paraphrase where they would otherwise copy verbatim. By patching concept induction head outputs, we find that they contain language-independent word representations that mediate natural language translation, suggesting that LLMs represent abstract word meanings independent of language or form.

Sheridan Feucht, Byron Wallace, David Bau

In order to predict the next token, LLMs must represent semantic and surface-level information about the current word. Previous work identified two types of attention heads that disentangle this information: (i) Concept induction heads, which copy word meanings, and (ii) Token induction heads, which copy literal token representations (Feucht et al., 2025). We show that these heads can be used to identify subspaces of model activations that exhibit coherent semantic structure in Llama-2-7b. Specifically, when we transform hidden states using the attention weights of concept heads, we are able to more accurately perform parallelogram arithmetic (Mikolov et al., 2013) on the resulting hidden states, e.g., showing that "Athens" - "Greece" + "China" = "Beijing". This transformation allows for much higher nearest-neighbor accuracy (80%) than direct use of raw hidden states (47%). Analogously, we show that token heads allow for transformations that reveal surface-level word information in hidden states, allowing for operations like "coding" - "code" + "dance" = "dancing".

Emily Alsentzer, Marie-Laure Charpignon, Bill Chen et al.

The 6th Annual Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL 2025), hosted by the Association for Health Learning and Inference (AHLI), was held in person on June 25-27, 2025, at the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, USA. As part of this year's program, we hosted Research Roundtables to catalyze collaborative, small-group dialogue around critical, timely topics at the intersection of machine learning and healthcare. Each roundtable was moderated by a team of senior and junior chairs who fostered open exchange, intellectual curiosity, and inclusive engagement. The sessions emphasized rigorous discussion of key challenges, exploration of emerging opportunities, and collective ideation toward actionable directions in the field. In total, eight roundtables were held by 19 roundtable chairs on topics of "Explainability, Interpretability, and Transparency," "Uncertainty, Bias, and Fairness," "Causality," "Domain Adaptation," "Foundation Models," "Learning from Small Medical Data," "Multimodal Methods," and "Scalable, Translational Healthcare Solutions."

Sheridan Feucht, David Atkinson, Byron Wallace et al.

LLMs process text as sequences of tokens that roughly correspond to words, where less common words are represented by multiple tokens. However, individual tokens are often semantically unrelated to the meanings of the words/concepts they comprise. For example, Llama-2-7b's tokenizer splits the word "northeastern" into the tokens ['_n', 'ort', 'he', 'astern'], none of which correspond to semantically meaningful units like "north" or "east." Similarly, the overall meanings of named entities like "Neil Young" and multi-word expressions like "break a leg" cannot be directly inferred from their constituent tokens. Mechanistically, how do LLMs convert such arbitrary groups of tokens into useful higher-level representations? In this work, we find that last token representations of named entities and multi-token words exhibit a pronounced "erasure" effect, where information about previous and current tokens is rapidly forgotten in early layers. Using this observation, we propose a method to "read out" the implicit vocabulary of an autoregressive LLM by examining differences in token representations across layers, and present results of this method for Llama-2-7b and Llama-3-8B. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to probe the implicit vocabulary of an LLM.

Gregory Kell, Angus Roberts, Serge Umansky et al.

Objective: Question answering (QA) systems have the potential to improve the quality of clinical care by providing health professionals with the latest and most relevant evidence. However, QA systems have not been widely adopted. This systematic review aims to characterize current medical QA systems, assess their suitability for healthcare, and identify areas of improvement. Materials and methods: We searched PubMed, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ACL Anthology and forward and backward citations on 7th February 2023. We included peer-reviewed journal and conference papers describing the design and evaluation of biomedical QA systems. Two reviewers screened titles, abstracts, and full-text articles. We conducted a narrative synthesis and risk of bias assessment for each study. We assessed the utility of biomedical QA systems. Results: We included 79 studies and identified themes, including question realism, answer reliability, answer utility, clinical specialism, systems, usability, and evaluation methods. Clinicians' questions used to train and evaluate QA systems were restricted to certain sources, types and complexity levels. No system communicated confidence levels in the answers or sources. Many studies suffered from high risks of bias and applicability concerns. Only 8 studies completely satisfied any criterion for clinical utility, and only 7 reported user evaluations. Most systems were built with limited input from clinicians. Discussion: While machine learning methods have led to increased accuracy, most studies imperfectly reflected real-world healthcare information needs. Key research priorities include developing more realistic healthcare QA datasets and considering the reliability of answer sources, rather than merely focusing on accuracy.

Denis Jered McInerney, Luyang Kong, Kristjan Arumae et al.

Multi-task learning is useful in NLP because it is often practically desirable to have a single model that works across a range of tasks. In the medical domain, sequential training on tasks may sometimes be the only way to train models, either because access to the original (potentially sensitive) data is no longer available, or simply owing to the computational costs inherent to joint retraining. A major issue inherent to sequential learning, however, is catastrophic forgetting, i.e., a substantial drop in accuracy on prior tasks when a model is updated for a new task. Elastic Weight Consolidation is a recently proposed method to address this issue, but scaling this approach to the modern large models used in practice requires making strong independence assumptions about model parameters, limiting its effectiveness. In this work, we apply Kronecker Factorization--a recent approach that relaxes independence assumptions--to prevent catastrophic forgetting in convolutional and Transformer-based neural networks at scale. We show the effectiveness of this technique on the important and illustrative task of medical entity linking across three datasets, demonstrating the capability of the technique to be used to make efficient updates to existing methods as new medical data becomes available. On average, the proposed method reduces catastrophic forgetting by 51% when using a BERT-based model, compared to a 27% reduction using standard Elastic Weight Consolidation, while maintaining spatial complexity proportional to the number of model parameters.

Roma Patel, Yinfei Yang, Iain Marshall et al.

Medical professionals search the published literature by specifying the type of patients, the medical intervention(s) and the outcome measure(s) of interest. In this paper we demonstrate how features encoding syntactic patterns improve the performance of state-of-the-art sequence tagging models (both linear and neural) for information extraction of these medically relevant categories. We present an analysis of the type of patterns exploited, and the semantic space induced for these, i.e., the distributed representations learned for identified multi-token patterns. We show that these learned representations differ substantially from those of the constituent unigrams, suggesting that the patterns capture contextual information that is otherwise lost.

Ye Zhang, Stephen Roller, Byron Wallace

We introduce a novel, simple convolution neural network (CNN) architecture - multi-group norm constraint CNN (MGNC-CNN) that capitalizes on multiple sets of word embeddings for sentence classification. MGNC-CNN extracts features from input embedding sets independently and then joins these at the penultimate layer in the network to form a final feature vector. We then adopt a group regularization strategy that differentially penalizes weights associated with the subcomponents generated from the respective embedding sets. This model is much simpler than comparable alternative architectures and requires substantially less training time. Furthermore, it is flexible in that it does not require input word embeddings to be of the same dimensionality. We show that MGNC-CNN consistently outperforms baseline models.

Ye Zhang, Byron Wallace

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently achieved remarkably strong performance on the practically important task of sentence classification (kim 2014, kalchbrenner 2014, johnson 2014). However, these models require practitioners to specify an exact model architecture and set accompanying hyperparameters, including the filter region size, regularization parameters, and so on. It is currently unknown how sensitive model performance is to changes in these configurations for the task of sentence classification. We thus conduct a sensitivity analysis of one-layer CNNs to explore the effect of architecture components on model performance; our aim is to distinguish between important and comparatively inconsequential design decisions for sentence classification. We focus on one-layer CNNs (to the exclusion of more complex models) due to their comparative simplicity and strong empirical performance, which makes it a modern standard baseline method akin to Support Vector Machine (SVMs) and logistic regression. We derive practical advice from our extensive empirical results for those interested in getting the most out of CNNs for sentence classification in real world settings.

Finale Doshi-Velez, Byron Wallace, Ryan Adams

Originally designed to model text, topic modeling has become a powerful tool for uncovering latent structure in domains including medicine, finance, and vision. The goals for the model vary depending on the application: in some cases, the discovered topics may be used for prediction or some other downstream task. In other cases, the content of the topic itself may be of intrinsic scientific interest. Unfortunately, even using modern sparse techniques, the discovered topics are often difficult to interpret due to the high dimensionality of the underlying space. To improve topic interpretability, we introduce Graph-Sparse LDA, a hierarchical topic model that leverages knowledge of relationships between words (e.g., as encoded by an ontology). In our model, topics are summarized by a few latent concept-words from the underlying graph that explain the observed words. Graph-Sparse LDA recovers sparse, interpretable summaries on two real-world biomedical datasets while matching state-of-the-art prediction performance.