Brian Wong

Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao et al. · salesforce

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on a variety of natural language understanding tasks. However, existing benchmarks are inadequate in measuring the complex logical reasoning capabilities of a model. We present FOLIO, a human-annotated, logically complex and diverse dataset for reasoning in natural language (NL), equipped with first-order logic (FOL) annotations. FOLIO consists of 1,430 examples (unique conclusions), each paired with one of 487 sets of premises used to deductively reason for the validity of each conclusion. The logical correctness of the premises and conclusions is ensured by their FOL annotations, which are automatically verified by an FOL inference engine. In addition to the main NL reasoning task, NL-FOL pairs in FOLIO constitute a new NL-FOL translation dataset. Our experiments on FOLIO systematically evaluate the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. For both NL reasoning and NL-FOL translation, we benchmark multiple state-of-the-art language models. Our results show that a subset of FOLIO presents a challenge for one of the most capable {Large Language Model (LLM)} publicly available, GPT-4.

Kaito Tanaka, Benjamin Tan, Brian Wong

The analysis of students' emotions and behaviors is crucial for enhancing learning outcomes and personalizing educational experiences. Traditional methods often rely on intrusive visual and physiological data collection, posing privacy concerns and scalability issues. This paper proposes a novel method leveraging large language models (LLMs) and prompt engineering to analyze textual data from students. Our approach utilizes tailored prompts to guide LLMs in detecting emotional and engagement states, providing a non-intrusive and scalable solution. We conducted experiments using Qwen, ChatGPT, Claude2, and GPT-4, comparing our method against baseline models and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. Results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the baselines in both accuracy and contextual understanding. This study highlights the potential of LLMs combined with prompt engineering to offer practical and effective tools for educational emotion and behavior analysis.

Yongkang Li, Brian Wong, King Wai Chiu et al.

Chemical imaging enables label-free visualization of cells, tissues and living systems while providing direct biochemical information that is difficult to obtain with conventional fluorescence microscopy. Despite its promise in applications ranging from intraoperative diagnosis to drug-response analysis, its broader use remains limited by slow data acquisition, particularly for three-dimensional imaging. Here we present MicroDiffuse3D, a pretrained foundation model for 3D microscopy image restoration that recovers high-quality volumetric structure from degraded low-resolution measurements acquired at substantially higher throughput. We evaluated MicroDiffuse3D across three challenging restoration settings, including 3D super-resolution under 16-fold volumetric sparsity, joint degradation in resolution and noise, and 3D denoising in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, where the model delivered clear gains over strong baselines. Under the sparse 3D super-resolution setting, MicroDiffuse3D produced clearer continuity across depth with fewer artifacts and improved segmentation quality by 10.58% and line-profile concordance by 15.59%. Together, our results establish pretrained 3D restoration as a broadly applicable strategy for overcoming the throughput and SNR limitations in volumetric chemical imaging, enabling high-resolution analysis at scales and speeds that were previously difficult to achieve.

Brian Wong, Kaito Tanaka

Automated labeling of chest X-ray reports is essential for enabling downstream tasks such as training image-based diagnostic models, population health studies, and clinical decision support. However, the high variability, complexity, and prevalence of negation and uncertainty in these free-text reports pose significant challenges for traditional Natural Language Processing methods. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text understanding, their direct application for large-scale, efficient labeling is limited by computational cost and speed. This paper introduces DeBERTa-RAD, a novel two-stage framework that combines the power of state-of-the-art LLM pseudo-labeling with efficient DeBERTa-based knowledge distillation for accurate and fast chest X-ray report labeling. We leverage an advanced LLM to generate high-quality pseudo-labels, including certainty statuses, for a large corpus of reports. Subsequently, a DeBERTa-Base model is trained on this pseudo-labeled data using a tailored knowledge distillation strategy. Evaluated on the expert-annotated MIMIC-500 benchmark, DeBERTa-RAD achieves a state-of-the-art Macro F1 score of 0.9120, significantly outperforming established rule-based systems, fine-tuned transformer models, and direct LLM inference, while maintaining a practical inference speed suitable for high-throughput applications. Our analysis shows particular strength in handling uncertain findings. This work demonstrates a promising path to overcome data annotation bottlenecks and achieve high-performance medical text processing through the strategic combination of LLM capabilities and efficient student models trained via distillation.

Anthony Palladino, Dana Gajewski, Abigail Aronica et al.

We present a novel Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system using open-vocabulary object detection and classification models. A primary advantage of this approach is that target classes can be defined just before runtime by a non-technical end user, using either a few natural language text descriptions of the target, or a few image exemplars, or both. Nuances in the desired targets can be expressed in natural language, which is useful for unique targets with little or no training data. We also implemented a novel combination of several techniques to improve performance, such as leveraging the additional information in the sequence of overlapping frames to perform tubelet identification (i.e., sequential bounding box matching), bounding box re-scoring, and tubelet linking. Additionally, we developed a technique to visualize the aggregate output of many overlapping frames as a mosaic of the area scanned during the aerial surveillance or reconnaissance, and a kernel density estimate (or heatmap) of the detected targets. We initially applied this ATR system to the use case of detecting and clearing unexploded ordinance on airfield runways and we are currently extending our research to other real-world applications.

Aya Nakayama, Brian Wong, Yuji Nishimura et al.

The "style trap" poses a significant challenge for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), hindering robust semantic understanding across diverse visual styles, especially in in-context learning (ICL). Existing methods often fail to effectively decouple style from content, hindering generalization. To address this, we propose the Semantic-Preserving Cross-Style Visual Reasoner (SP-CSVR), a novel framework for stable semantic understanding and adaptive cross-style visual reasoning. SP-CSVR integrates a Cross-Style Feature Encoder (CSFE) for style-content disentanglement, a Semantic-Aligned In-Context Decoder (SAICD) for efficient few-shot style adaptation, and an Adaptive Semantic Consistency Module (ASCM) employing multi-task contrastive learning to enforce cross-style semantic invariance. Extensive experiments on a challenging multi-style dataset demonstrate SP-CSVR's state-of-the-art performance across visual captioning, visual question answering, and in-context style adaptation. Comprehensive evaluations, including ablation studies and generalization analysis, confirm SP-CSVR's efficacy in enhancing robustness, generalization, and efficiency across diverse visual styles.

Kaito Tanaka, Benjamin Tan, Brian Wong

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as key enablers for multimodal tasks, but their reliance on separate visual encoders introduces challenges in efficiency, scalability, and modality alignment. To address these limitations, we propose MUDAIF (Multimodal Unified Decoder with Adaptive Input Fusion), a decoder-only vision-language model that seamlessly integrates visual and textual inputs through a novel Vision-Token Adapter (VTA) and adaptive co-attention mechanism. By eliminating the need for a visual encoder, MUDAIF achieves enhanced efficiency, flexibility, and cross-modal understanding. Trained on a large-scale dataset of 45M image-text pairs, MUDAIF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks, including VQA, image captioning, and multimodal reasoning tasks. Extensive analyses and human evaluations demonstrate MUDAIF's robustness, generalization capabilities, and practical usability, establishing it as a new standard in encoder-free vision-language models.