Xiaochen Wang

Chengwen Wang, Qingxiu Dong, Xiaochen Wang et al. · pku

Datasets serve as crucial training resources and model performance trackers. However, existing datasets have exposed a plethora of problems, inducing biased models and unreliable evaluation results. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic dataset evaluation framework for automatic dataset quality evaluation. We seek the statistical properties of the datasets and address three fundamental dimensions: reliability, difficulty, and validity, following a classical testing theory. Taking the Named Entity Recognition (NER) datasets as a case study, we introduce $9$ statistical metrics for a statistical dataset evaluation framework. Experimental results and human evaluation validate that our evaluation framework effectively assesses various aspects of the dataset quality. Furthermore, we study how the dataset scores on our statistical metrics affect the model performance, and appeal for dataset quality evaluation or targeted dataset improvement before training or testing models.

Xiaochen Wang, Junqing He, Zhe yang et al. · pku

Large Language Models (LLMs) with chain-of-thought (COT) prompting have demonstrated impressive abilities on simple nature language inference tasks. However, they tend to perform poorly on Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) tasks due to several challenges, including hallucination, error propagation and limited context length. We propose a prompting method, Finite State Machine (FSM) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLM for complex tasks in addition to improved effectiveness and trustworthiness. Different from COT methods, FSM addresses MHQA by iteratively decomposing a question into multi-turn sub-questions, and self-correcting in time, improving the accuracy of answers in each step. Specifically, FSM addresses one sub-question at a time and decides on the next step based on its current result and state, in an automaton-like format. Experiments on benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method. Although our method performs on par with the baseline on relatively simpler datasets, it excels on challenging datasets like Musique. Moreover, this approach mitigates the hallucination phenomenon, wherein the correct final answer can be recovered despite errors in intermediate reasoning. Furthermore, our method improves LLMs' ability to follow specified output format requirements, significantly reducing the difficulty of answer interpretation and the need for reformatting.

Yuan Zhong, Suhan Cui, Jiaqi Wang et al.

Health risk prediction is one of the fundamental tasks under predictive modeling in the medical domain, which aims to forecast the potential health risks that patients may face in the future using their historical Electronic Health Records (EHR). Researchers have developed several risk prediction models to handle the unique challenges of EHR data, such as its sequential nature, high dimensionality, and inherent noise. These models have yielded impressive results. Nonetheless, a key issue undermining their effectiveness is data insufficiency. A variety of data generation and augmentation methods have been introduced to mitigate this issue by expanding the size of the training data set through the learning of underlying data distributions. However, the performance of these methods is often limited due to their task-unrelated design. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel, end-to-end diffusion-based risk prediction model, named MedDiffusion. It enhances risk prediction performance by creating synthetic patient data during training to enlarge sample space. Furthermore, MedDiffusion discerns hidden relationships between patient visits using a step-wise attention mechanism, enabling the model to automatically retain the most vital information for generating high-quality data. Experimental evaluation on four real-world medical datasets demonstrates that MedDiffusion outperforms 14 cutting-edge baselines in terms of PR-AUC, F1, and Cohen's Kappa. We also conduct ablation studies and benchmark our model against GAN-based alternatives to further validate the rationality and adaptability of our model design. Additionally, we analyze generated data to offer fresh insights into the model's interpretability.

Bo Yan, Cheng Yang, Chuan Shi et al.

Abnormal event detection, which refers to mining unusual interactions among involved entities, plays an important role in many real applications. Previous works mostly over-simplify this task as detecting abnormal pair-wise interactions. However, real-world events may contain multi-typed attributed entities and complex interactions among them, which forms an Attributed Heterogeneous Information Network (AHIN). With the boom of social networks, abnormal event detection in AHIN has become an important, but seldom explored task. In this paper, we firstly study the unsupervised abnormal event detection problem in AHIN. The events are considered as star-schema instances of AHIN and are further modeled by hypergraphs. A novel hypergraph contrastive learning method, named AEHCL, is proposed to fully capture abnormal event patterns. AEHCL designs the intra-event and inter-event contrastive modules to exploit self-supervised AHIN information. The intra-event contrastive module captures the pair-wise and multivariate interaction anomalies within an event, and the inter-event module captures the contextual anomalies among events. These two modules collaboratively boost the performance of each other and improve the detection results. During the testing phase, a contrastive learning-based abnormal event score function is further proposed to measure the abnormality degree of events. Extensive experiments on three datasets in different scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of AEHCL, and the results improve state-of-the-art baselines up to 12.0% in Average Precision (AP) and 4.6% in Area Under Curve (AUC) respectively.

Xiaochen Wang, Junyu Luo, Jiaqi Wang et al.

Pretraining has proven to be a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP), exhibiting remarkable success in various NLP downstream tasks. However, in the medical domain, existing pretrained models on electronic health records (EHR) fail to capture the hierarchical nature of EHR data, limiting their generalization capability across diverse downstream tasks using a single pretrained model. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces a novel, general, and unified pretraining framework called MEDHMP, specifically designed for hierarchically multimodal EHR data. The effectiveness of the proposed MEDHMP is demonstrated through experimental results on eight downstream tasks spanning three levels. Comparisons against eighteen baselines further highlight the efficacy of our approach.

Junyu Luo, Xiaochen Wang, Jiaqi Wang et al.

Automatic International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding plays a crucial role in the extraction of relevant information from clinical notes for proper recording and billing. One of the most important directions for boosting the performance of automatic ICD coding is modeling ICD code relations. However, current methods insufficiently model the intricate relationships among ICD codes and often overlook the importance of context in clinical notes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, a contextualized and flexible framework, to enhance the learning of ICD code representations. Our approach, unlike existing methods, employs a dependent learning paradigm that considers the context of clinical notes in modeling all possible code relations. We evaluate our approach on six public ICD coding datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Jiaqi Wang, Junyu Luo, Muchao Ye et al.

The development of electronic health records (EHR) systems has enabled the collection of a vast amount of digitized patient data. However, utilizing EHR data for predictive modeling presents several challenges due to its unique characteristics. With the advancements in machine learning techniques, deep learning has demonstrated its superiority in various applications, including healthcare. This survey systematically reviews recent advances in deep learning-based predictive models using EHR data. Specifically, we begin by introducing the background of EHR data and providing a mathematical definition of the predictive modeling task. We then categorize and summarize predictive deep models from multiple perspectives. Furthermore, we present benchmarks and toolkits relevant to predictive modeling in healthcare. Finally, we conclude this survey by discussing open challenges and suggesting promising directions for future research.

Xiaochen Wang, Junqing He, Liang Chen et al. · pku

Large Language Models with chain-of-thought prompting, such as OpenAI-o1, have shown impressive capabilities in natural language inference tasks. However, Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) remains challenging for many existing models due to issues like hallucination, error propagation, and limited context length. To address these challenges and enhance LLMs' performance on MHQA, we propose the Self-Guiding prompting Finite State Machine (SG-FSM), designed to strengthen multi-hop reasoning abilities. Unlike traditional chain-of-thought methods, SG-FSM tackles MHQA by iteratively breaking down complex questions into sub-questions, correcting itself to improve accuracy. It processes one sub-question at a time, dynamically deciding the next step based on the current context and results, functioning much like an automaton. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming strong baselines on challenging datasets such as Musique. SG-FSM reduces hallucination, enabling recovery of the correct final answer despite intermediate errors. It also improves adherence to specified output formats, simplifying evaluation significantly.

Sai Wang, Senthilnathan Subramanian, Mudit Sahni et al.

Large-language-model (LLM) agents exhibit complex, context-sensitive behaviour that quickly renders static benchmarks and ad-hoc manual testing obsolete. We present Neo, a configurable, multi-agent framework that automates realistic, multi-turn evaluation of LLM-based systems. Neo couples a Question Generation Agent and an Evaluation Agent through a shared context-hub, allowing domain prompts, scenario controls and dynamic feedback to be composed modularly. Test inputs are sampled from a probabilistic state model spanning dialogue flow, user intent and emotional tone, enabling diverse, human-like conversations that adapt after every turn. Applied to a production-grade Seller Financial Assistant chatbot, Neo (i) uncovered edge-case failures across five attack categories with a 3.3% break rate close to the 5.8% achieved by expert human red-teamers, and (ii) delivered 10-12X higher throughput, generating 180 coherent test questions in around 45 mins versus 16h of human effort. Beyond security probing, Neo's stochastic policies balanced topic coverage and conversational depth, yielding broader behavioural exploration than manually crafted scripts. Neo therefore lays a foundation for scalable, self-evolving LLM QA: its agent interfaces, state controller and feedback loops are model-agnostic and extensible to richer factual-grounding and policy-compliance checks. We release the framework to facilitate reproducible, high-fidelity testing of emerging agentic systems.

Yuan Zhong, Xiaochen Wang, Jiaqi Wang et al.

Synthesizing electronic health records (EHR) data has become a preferred strategy to address data scarcity, improve data quality, and model fairness in healthcare. However, existing approaches for EHR data generation predominantly rely on state-of-the-art generative techniques like generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, and language models. These methods typically replicate input visits, resulting in inadequate modeling of temporal dependencies between visits and overlooking the generation of time information, a crucial element in EHR data. Moreover, their ability to learn visit representations is limited due to simple linear mapping functions, thus compromising generation quality. To address these limitations, we propose a novel EHR data generation model called EHRPD. It is a diffusion-based model designed to predict the next visit based on the current one while also incorporating time interval estimation. To enhance generation quality and diversity, we introduce a novel time-aware visit embedding module and a pioneering predictive denoising diffusion probabilistic model (PDDPM). Additionally, we devise a predictive U-Net (PU-Net) to optimize P-DDPM.We conduct experiments on two public datasets and evaluate EHRPD from fidelity, privacy, and utility perspectives. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and utility of the proposed EHRPD in addressing the aforementioned limitations and advancing EHR data generation.

Arash Pakbin, Xiaochen Wang, Bobak J. Mortazavi et al.

Modern applications of survival analysis increasingly involve time-dependent covariates. The Python package BoXHED2.0 is a tree-boosted hazard estimator that is fully nonparametric, and is applicable to survival settings far more general than right-censoring, including recurring events and competing risks. BoXHED2.0 is also scalable to the point of being on the same order of speed as parametric boosted survival models, in part because its core is written in C++ and it also supports the use of GPUs and multicore CPUs. BoXHED2.0 is available from PyPI and also from www.github.com/BoXHED.