Hongtao Zhang

Jinwei Zhao, Marco Gori, Alessandro Betti et al.

Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have been widely used in a large number of application domains. Therefore, understanding the dynamics of GD and improving its convergence speed is still of great importance. This paper carefully analyzes the dynamics of GD based on the terminal attractor at different stages of its gradient flow. On the basis of the terminal sliding mode theory and the terminal attractor theory, four adaptive learning rates are designed. Their performances are investigated in light of a detailed theoretical investigation, and the running times of the learning procedures are evaluated and compared. The total times of their learning processes are also studied in detail. To evaluate their effectiveness, various simulation results are investigated on a function approximation problem and an image classification problem.

Yuhan Li, Hongtao Zhang, Keaven Anderson et al.

In the pharmaceutical industry, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen consistent growth over the past decade. This rise is attributed to major advancements in statistical machine learning methodologies, computational capabilities and the increased availability of large datasets. AI techniques are applied throughout different stages of drug development, ranging from drug discovery to post-marketing benefit-risk assessment. Kolluri et al. provided a review of several case studies that span these stages, featuring key applications such as protein structure prediction, success probability estimation, subgroup identification, and AI-assisted clinical trial monitoring. From a regulatory standpoint, there was a notable uptick in submissions incorporating AI components in 2021. The most prevalent therapeutic areas leveraging AI were oncology (27%), psychiatry (15%), gastroenterology (12%), and neurology (11%). The paradigm of personalized or precision medicine has gained significant traction in recent research, partly due to advancements in AI techniques \cite{hamburg2010path}. This shift has had a transformative impact on the pharmaceutical industry. Departing from the traditional "one-size-fits-all" model, personalized medicine incorporates various individual factors, such as environmental conditions, lifestyle choices, and health histories, to formulate customized treatment plans. By utilizing sophisticated machine learning algorithms, clinicians and researchers are better equipped to make informed decisions in areas such as disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment selection, thereby optimizing health outcomes for each individual.

Jiacui Huang, Hongtao Zhang, Mingbo Zhao et al.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a challenging task that requires a robot to navigate in photo-realistic environments with human natural language promptings. Recent studies aim to handle this task by constructing the semantic spatial map representation of the environment, and then leveraging the strong ability of reasoning in large language models for generalizing code for guiding the robot navigation. However, these methods face limitations in instance-level and attribute-level navigation tasks as they cannot distinguish different instances of the same object. To address this challenge, we propose a new method, namely, Instance-aware Visual Language Map (IVLMap), to empower the robot with instance-level and attribute-level semantic mapping, where it is autonomously constructed by fusing the RGBD video data collected from the robot agent with special-designed natural language map indexing in the bird's-in-eye view. Such indexing is instance-level and attribute-level. In particular, when integrated with a large language model, IVLMap demonstrates the capability to i) transform natural language into navigation targets with instance and attribute information, enabling precise localization, and ii) accomplish zero-shot end-to-end navigation tasks based on natural language commands. Extensive navigation experiments are conducted. Simulation results illustrate that our method can achieve an average improvement of 14.4\% in navigation accuracy. Code and demo are released at https://ivlmap.github.io/.