Wei Zhang

Zhuo Wang, Rongzhen Li, Bowen Dong et al.

Recent investigations show that large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, not only have remarkable capabilities in common Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but also exhibit human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. However, whether GPT-4 can be directly used in practical applications and replace traditional artificial intelligence (AI) tools in specialized domains requires further experimental validation. In this paper, we explore the potential of LLMs such as GPT-4 to outperform traditional AI tools in dementia diagnosis. Comprehensive comparisons between GPT-4 and traditional AI tools are conducted to examine their diagnostic accuracy in a clinical setting. Experimental results on two real clinical datasets show that, although LLMs like GPT-4 demonstrate potential for future advancements in dementia diagnosis, they currently do not surpass the performance of traditional AI tools. The interpretability and faithfulness of GPT-4 are also evaluated by comparison with real doctors. We discuss the limitations of GPT-4 in its current state and propose future research directions to enhance GPT-4 in dementia diagnosis.

Honghao Liao, Zhiheng Li, Ziyu Meng et al.

The expanding applications of legged robots require their mastery of versatile motion skills. Correspondingly, researchers must address the challenge of integrating multiple diverse motion skills into controllers. While existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches have achieved notable success in multi-skill integration for legged robots, these methods often require intricate reward engineering or are restricted to integrating a predefined set of motion skills constrained by specific task objectives, resulting in limited flexibility. In this work, we introduce a flexible multi-skill integration framework named Controllable Skills Integration (CSI). CSI enables the integration of a diverse set of motion skills with varying styles into a single policy without the need for complex reward tuning. Furthermore, in a hierarchical control manner, the trained low-level policy can be coupled with a high-level Natural Language Inference (NLI) module to enable preliminary language-directed skill control. Our experiments demonstrate that CSI can flexibly integrate a diverse array of motion skills more comprehensively and facilitate the transitions between different skills. Additionally, CSI exhibits good scalability as the number of motion skills to be integrated increases significantly.

Haoran Wang, Tong Shen, Wei Zhang et al.

Despite great progress in supervised semantic segmentation,a large performance drop is usually observed when deploying the model in the wild. Domain adaptation methods tackle the issue by aligning the source domain and the target domain. However, most existing methods attempt to perform the alignment from a holistic view, ignoring the underlying class-level data structure in the target domain. To fully exploit the supervision in the source domain, we propose a fine-grained adversarial learning strategy for class-level feature alignment while preserving the internal structure of semantics across domains. We adopt a fine-grained domain discriminator that not only plays as a domain distinguisher, but also differentiates domains at class level. The traditional binary domain labels are also generalized to domain encodings as the supervision signal to guide the fine-grained feature alignment. An analysis with Class Center Distance (CCD) validates that our fine-grained adversarial strategy achieves better class-level alignment compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Our method is easy to implement and its effectiveness is evaluated on three classical domain adaptation tasks, i.e., GTA5 to Cityscapes, SYNTHIA to Cityscapes and Cityscapes to Cross-City. Large performance gains show that our method outperforms other global feature alignment based and class-wise alignment based counterparts. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JDAI-CV/FADA.

Sara Sameer, Wei Zhang, Dhivya Dharshini Kannan et al.

Batteries are critical components in modern energy systems such as electric vehicles and power grid energy storage. Effective battery health management is essential for battery system safety, cost-efficiency, and sustainability. In this paper, we propose Pace, a physics-aware attentive temporal convolutional network for battery health estimation. Pace integrates raw sensor measurements with battery physics features derived from the equivalent circuit model. We develop three battery-specific modules, including dilated temporal blocks for efficient temporal encoding, chunked attention blocks for context modeling, and a dual-head output block for fusing short- and long-term battery degradation patterns. Together, the modules enable Pace to predict battery health accurately and efficiently in various battery usage conditions. In a large public dataset, Pace performs much better than existing models, achieving an average performance improvement of 6.5 and 2.0x compared to two best-performing baseline models. We further demonstrate its practical viability with a real-time edge deployment on a Raspberry Pi. These results establish Pace as a practical and high-performance solution for battery health analytics.

Sara Sameer, Wei Zhang, Xin Lou et al.

The surging demand for batteries requires advanced battery management systems, where battery capacity modelling is a key functionality. In this paper, we aim to achieve accurate battery capacity prediction by learning from historical measurements of battery dynamics. We propose GiNet, a gated recurrent units enhanced Informer network, for predicting battery's capacity. The novelty and competitiveness of GiNet lies in its capability of capturing sequential and contextual information from raw battery data and reflecting the battery's complex behaviors with both temporal dynamics and long-term dependencies. We conducted an experimental study based on a publicly available dataset to showcase GiNet's strength of gaining a holistic understanding of battery behavior and predicting battery capacity accurately. GiNet achieves 0.11 mean absolute error for predicting the battery capacity in a sequence of future time slots without knowing the historical battery capacity. It also outperforms the latest algorithms significantly with 27% error reduction on average compared to Informer. The promising results highlight the importance of customized and optimized integration of algorithm and battery knowledge and shed light on other industry applications as well.

Anthony Bilic, Guangyu Sun, Ming Li et al.

Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification relies on Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) with spatial patch features, yet existing methods struggle to capture global dependencies due to the immense size of WSIs and the local nature of patch embeddings. This limitation hinders the modeling of coarse structures essential for robust diagnostic prediction. We propose Fourier Transform Multiple Instance Learning (FFT-MIL), a framework that augments MIL with a frequency-domain branch to provide compact global context. Low-frequency crops are extracted from WSIs via the Fast Fourier Transform and processed through a modular FFT-Block composed of convolutional layers and Min-Max normalization to mitigate the high variance of frequency data. The learned global frequency feature is fused with spatial patch features through lightweight integration strategies, enabling compatibility with diverse MIL architectures. FFT-MIL was evaluated across six state-of-the-art MIL methods on three public datasets (BRACS, LUAD, and IMP). Integration of the FFT-Block improved macro F1 scores by an average of 3.51% and AUC by 1.51%, demonstrating consistent gains across architectures and datasets. These results establish frequency-domain learning as an effective and efficient mechanism for capturing global dependencies in WSI classification, complementing spatial features and advancing the scalability and accuracy of MIL-based computational pathology.

Junhao Chen, Yifan Zhou, Hanqi Jiang et al.

Quantum compute is scaling fast, from cloud QPUs to high throughput GPU simulators, making it timely to prototype quantum NLP beyond toy tasks. However, devices remain qubit limited and depth limited, training can be unstable, and classical attention is compute and memory heavy. This motivates compact, phase aware quantum token mixers that stabilize amplitudes and scale to long sequences. We present CLAQS, a compact, fully quantum token mixer for text classification that jointly learns complex-valued mixing and nonlinear transformations within a unified quantum circuit. To enable stable end-to-end optimization, we apply l1 normalization to regulate amplitude scaling and introduce a two-stage parameterized quantum architecture that decouples shared token embeddings from a window-level quantum feed-forward module. Operating under a sliding-window regime with document-level aggregation, CLAQS requires only eight data qubits and shallow circuits, yet achieves 91.64% accuracy on SST-2 and 87.08% on IMDB, outperforming both classical Transformer baselines and strong hybrid quantum-classical counterparts.

Zhenglai Li, Jun Wang, Chang Tang et al.

Multi-view clustering (MvC) aims to integrate information from different views to enhance the capability of the model in capturing the underlying data structures. The widely used joint training paradigm in MvC is potentially not fully leverage the multi-view information, since the imbalanced and under-optimized view-specific features caused by the uniform learning objective for all views. For instance, particular views with more discriminative information could dominate the learning process in the joint training paradigm, leading to other views being under-optimized. To alleviate this issue, we first analyze the imbalanced phenomenon in the joint-training paradigm of multi-view clustering from the perspective of gradient descent for each view-specific feature extractor. Then, we propose a novel balanced multi-view clustering (BMvC) method, which introduces a view-specific contrastive regularization (VCR) to modulate the optimization of each view. Concretely, VCR preserves the sample similarities captured from the joint features and view-specific ones into the clustering distributions corresponding to view-specific features to enhance the learning process of view-specific feature extractors. Additionally, a theoretical analysis is provided to illustrate that VCR adaptively modulates the magnitudes of gradients for updating the parameters of view-specific feature extractors to achieve a balanced multi-view learning procedure. In such a manner, BMvC achieves a better trade-off between the exploitation of view-specific patterns and the exploration of view-invariance patterns to fully learn the multi-view information for the clustering task. Finally, a set of experiments are conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art approaches on eight benchmark MvC datasets.

Xiaodong Cui, Wei Zhang, Ulrich Finkler et al.

The past decade has witnessed great progress in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) due to advances in deep learning. The improvements in performance can be attributed to both improved models and large-scale training data. Key to training such models is the employment of efficient distributed learning techniques. In this article, we provide an overview of distributed training techniques for deep neural network acoustic models for ASR. Starting with the fundamentals of data parallel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and ASR acoustic modeling, we will investigate various distributed training strategies and their realizations in high performance computing (HPC) environments with an emphasis on striking the balance between communication and computation. Experiments are carried out on a popular public benchmark to study the convergence, speedup and recognition performance of the investigated strategies.

Wei Zhang, Xiaodong Cui, Ulrich Finkler et al.

Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems rely on distributed deep learning to for quick training completion. To enable efficient distributed training, it is imperative that the training algorithms can converge with a large mini-batch size. In this work, we discovered that Asynchronous Decentralized Parallel Stochastic Gradient Descent (ADPSGD) can work with much larger batch size than commonly used Synchronous SGD (SSGD) algorithm. On commonly used public SWB-300 and SWB-2000 ASR datasets, ADPSGD can converge with a batch size 3X as large as the one used in SSGD, thus enable training at a much larger scale. Further, we proposed a Hierarchical-ADPSGD (H-ADPSGD) system in which learners on the same computing node construct a super learner via a fast allreduce implementation, and super learners deploy ADPSGD algorithm among themselves. On a 64 Nvidia V100 GPU cluster connected via a 100Gb/s Ethernet network, our system is able to train SWB-2000 to reach a 7.6% WER on the Hub5-2000 Switchboard (SWB) test-set and a 13.2% WER on the Call-home (CH) test-set in 5.2 hours. To the best of our knowledge, this is the fastest ASR training system that attains this level of model accuracy for SWB-2000 task to be ever reported in the literature.

Wei Zhang, Jae-Woong Chang, Lilong Lin et al.

High-throughput mRNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is widely used for transcript quantification of gene isoforms. Since RNA-Seq data alone is often not sufficient to accurately identify the read origins from the isoforms for quantification, we propose to explore protein domain-domain interactions as prior knowledge for integrative analysis with RNA-seq data. We introduce a Network-based method for RNA-Seq-based Transcript Quantification (Net-RSTQ) to integrate protein domain-domain interaction network with short read alignments for transcript abundance estimation. Based on our observation that the abundances of the neighboring isoforms by domain-domain interactions in the network are positively correlated, Net-RSTQ models the expression of the neighboring transcripts as Dirichlet priors on the likelihood of the observed read alignments against the transcripts in one gene. The transcript abundances of all the genes are then jointly estimated with alternating optimization of multiple EM problems. In simulation Net-RSTQ effectively improved isoform transcript quantifications when isoform co-expressions correlate with their interactions. qRT-PCR results on 25 multi-isoform genes in a stem cell line, an ovarian cancer cell line, and a breast cancer cell line also showed that Net-RSTQ estimated more consistent isoform proportions with RNA-Seq data. In the experiments on the RNA-Seq data in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), the transcript abundances estimated by Net-RSTQ are more informative for patient sample classification of ovarian cancer, breast cancer and lung cancer. All experimental results collectively support that Net-RSTQ is a promising approach for isoform quantification.