Zihao Zhao

Honglin Xiong, Sheng Wang, Yitao Zhu et al.

The recent progress of large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT and GPT-4, in comprehending and responding to human instructions has been remarkable. Nevertheless, these models typically perform better in English and have not been explicitly trained for the medical domain, resulting in suboptimal precision in diagnoses, drug recommendations, and other medical advice. Additionally, training and deploying a dialogue model is still believed to be impossible for hospitals, hindering the promotion of LLMs. To tackle these challenges, we have collected databases of medical dialogues in Chinese with ChatGPT's help and adopted several techniques to train an easy-deploy LLM. Remarkably, we were able to fine-tune the ChatGLM-6B on a single A100 80G in 13 hours, which means having a healthcare-purpose LLM can be very affordable. DoctorGLM is currently an early-stage engineering attempt and contain various mistakes. We are sharing it with the broader community to invite feedback and suggestions to improve its healthcare-focused capabilities: https://github.com/xionghonglin/DoctorGLM.

Zhengliang Liu, Tianyang Zhong, Yiwei Li et al.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has marked a pivotal shift in the field of natural language processing (NLP). LLMs have revolutionized a multitude of domains, and they have made a significant impact in the medical field. Large language models are now more abundant than ever, and many of these models exhibit bilingual capabilities, proficient in both English and Chinese. However, a comprehensive evaluation of these models remains to be conducted. This lack of assessment is especially apparent within the context of radiology NLP. This study seeks to bridge this gap by critically evaluating thirty two LLMs in interpreting radiology reports, a crucial component of radiology NLP. Specifically, the ability to derive impressions from radiologic findings is assessed. The outcomes of this evaluation provide key insights into the performance, strengths, and weaknesses of these LLMs, informing their practical applications within the medical domain.

Sheng Wang, Zihao Zhao, Xi Ouyang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated their potential in clinical applications, providing valuable medical knowledge and advice. For example, a large dialog LLM like ChatGPT has successfully passed part of the US medical licensing exam. However, LLMs currently have difficulty processing images, making it challenging to interpret information from medical images, which are rich in information that supports clinical decisions. On the other hand, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) networks for medical images have seen significant success in the medical field by using advanced deep-learning algorithms to support clinical decision-making. This paper presents a method for integrating LLMs into medical-image CAD networks. The proposed framework uses LLMs to enhance the output of multiple CAD networks, such as diagnosis networks, lesion segmentation networks, and report generation networks, by summarizing and reorganizing the information presented in natural language text format. The goal is to merge the strengths of LLMs' medical domain knowledge and logical reasoning with the vision understanding capability of existing medical-image CAD models to create a more user-friendly and understandable system for patients compared to conventional CAD systems. In the future, LLM's medical knowledge can be also used to improve the performance of vision-based medical-image CAD models.

Yuzhu Mao, Zihao Zhao, Meilin Yang et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables edge devices to collaboratively learn a model in a distributed fashion. Many existing researches have focused on improving communication efficiency of high-dimensional models and addressing bias caused by local updates. However, most of FL algorithms are either based on reliable communications or assume fixed and known unreliability characteristics. In practice, networks could suffer from dynamic channel conditions and non-deterministic disruptions, with time-varying and unknown characteristics. To this end, in this paper we propose a sparsity enabled FL framework with both communication efficiency and bias reduction, termed as SAFARI. It makes novel use of a similarity among client models to rectify and compensate for bias that is resulted from unreliable communications. More precisely, sparse learning is implemented on local clients to mitigate communication overhead, while to cope with unreliable communications, a similarity-based compensation method is proposed to provide surrogates for missing model updates. We analyze SAFARI under bounded dissimilarity and with respect to sparse models. It is demonstrated that SAFARI under unreliable communications is guaranteed to converge at the same rate as the standard FedAvg with perfect communications. Implementations and evaluations on CIFAR-10 dataset validate the effectiveness of SAFARI by showing that it can achieve the same convergence speed and accuracy as FedAvg with perfect communications, with up to 80% of the model weights being pruned and a high percentage of client updates missing in each round.

Zihao Zhao, Yuzhu Mao, Zhenpeng Shi et al.

The widespread adoption of Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-preserving distributed learning methodology, has been impeded by the challenge of high communication overheads, typically arising from the transmission of large-scale models. Existing adaptive quantization methods, designed to mitigate these overheads, operate under the impractical assumption of uniform device participation in every training round. Additionally, these methods are limited in their adaptability due to the necessity of manual quantization level selection and often overlook biases inherent in local devices' data, thereby affecting the robustness of the global model. In response, this paper introduces AQUILA (adaptive quantization in device selection strategy), a novel adaptive framework devised to effectively handle these issues, enhancing the efficiency and robustness of FL. AQUILA integrates a sophisticated device selection method that prioritizes the quality and usefulness of device updates. Utilizing the exact global model stored by devices, it enables a more precise device selection criterion, reduces model deviation, and limits the need for hyperparameter adjustments. Furthermore, AQUILA presents an innovative quantization criterion, optimized to improve communication efficiency while assuring model convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that AQUILA significantly decreases communication costs compared to existing methods, while maintaining comparable model performance across diverse non-homogeneous FL settings, such as Non-IID data and heterogeneous model architectures.

Zihao Zhao, Yang Liu, Wenbo Ding et al.

Existing research has either adapted the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) Bayesian framework for federated learning (FL) or used information-theoretic PAC-Bayesian bounds while introducing their theorems, but few considering the non-IID challenges in FL. Our work presents the first non-vacuous federated PAC-Bayesian bound tailored for non-IID local data. This bound assumes unique prior knowledge for each client and variable aggregation weights. We also introduce an objective function and an innovative Gibbs-based algorithm for the optimization of the derived bound. The results are validated on real-world datasets.

Yuzhu Mao, Siqi Ping, Zihao Zhao et al.

Large pre-trained models, such as large language models (LLMs), present significant resource challenges for fine-tuning due to their extensive parameter sizes, especially for applications in mobile systems. To address this, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has been developed to reduce resource consumption while maintaining satisfactory fine-tuning results. Despite its effectiveness, the original LoRA method faces challenges of suboptimal performance and overfitting. This paper investigates the intrinsic dimension of the matrix updates approximated by the LoRA method and reveals the performance benefits of increasing this intrinsic dimension. By employing regularization and a gradient masking method that encourages higher intrinsic dimension, the proposed method, termed Regularized and Masked LoRA (RM-LoRA), achieves superior generalization performance with the same or lower trainable parameter budget compared to the original LoRA and its latest variants across various open-source vision and language datasets.

Yitao Zhu, Zhenrong Shen, Zihao Zhao et al.

The common practice in developing computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) models based on transformer architectures usually involves fine-tuning from ImageNet pre-trained weights. However, with recent advances in large-scale pre-training and the practice of scaling laws, Vision Transformers (ViT) have become much larger and less accessible to medical imaging communities. Additionally, in real-world scenarios, the deployments of multiple CAD models can be troublesome due to problems such as limited storage space and time-consuming model switching. To address these challenges, we propose a new method MeLo (Medical image Low-rank adaptation), which enables the development of a single CAD model for multiple clinical tasks in a lightweight manner. It adopts low-rank adaptation instead of resource-demanding fine-tuning. By fixing the weight of ViT models and only adding small low-rank plug-ins, we achieve competitive results on various diagnosis tasks across different imaging modalities using only a few trainable parameters. Specifically, our proposed method achieves comparable performance to fully fine-tuned ViT models on four distinct medical imaging datasets using about 0.17% trainable parameters. Moreover, MeLo adds only about 0.5MB of storage space and allows for extremely fast model switching in deployment and inference. Our source code and pre-trained weights are available on our website (https://absterzhu.github.io/melo.github.io/).

Zihao Zhao, Mengen Luo, Wenbo Ding

Distributed machine learning has been widely used in recent years to tackle the large and complex dataset problem. Therewith, the security of distributed learning has also drawn increasing attentions from both academia and industry. In this context, federated learning (FL) was developed as a "secure" distributed learning by maintaining private training data locally and only public model gradients are communicated between. However, to date, a variety of gradient leakage attacks have been proposed for this procedure and prove that it is insecure. For instance, a common drawback of these attacks is shared: they require too much auxiliary information such as model weights, optimizers, and some hyperparameters (e.g., learning rate), which are difficult to obtain in real situations. Moreover, many existing algorithms avoid transmitting model gradients in FL and turn to sending model weights, such as FedAvg, but few people consider its security breach. In this paper, we present two novel frameworks to demonstrate that transmitting model weights is also likely to leak private local data of clients, i.e., (DLM and DLM+), under the FL scenario. In addition, a number of experiments are performed to illustrate the effect and generality of our attack frameworks. At the end of this paper, we also introduce two defenses to the proposed attacks and evaluate their protection effects. Comprehensively, the proposed attack and defense schemes can be applied to the general distributed learning scenario as well, just with some appropriate customization.

Zihao Zhao, Yanhong Wang, Qiaosha Zou et al.

Action recognition is an exciting research avenue for artificial intelligence since it may be a game changer in the emerging industrial fields such as robotic visions and automobiles. However, current deep learning faces major challenges for such applications because of the huge computational cost and the inefficient learning. Hence, we develop a novel brain-inspired Spiking Neural Network (SNN) based system titled Spiking Gating Flow (SGF) for online action learning. The developed system consists of multiple SGF units which assembled in a hierarchical manner. A single SGF unit involves three layers: a feature extraction layer, an event-driven layer and a histogram-based training layer. To demonstrate the developed system capabilities, we employ a standard Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) gesture classification as a benchmark. The results indicate that we can achieve 87.5% accuracy which is comparable with Deep Learning (DL), but at smaller training/inference data number ratio 1.5:1. And only a single training epoch is required during the learning process. Meanwhile, to the best of our knowledge, this is the highest accuracy among the non-backpropagation algorithm based SNNs. At last, we conclude the few-shot learning paradigm of the developed network: 1) a hierarchical structure-based network design involves human prior knowledge; 2) SNNs for content based global dynamic feature detection.

Yitao Zhu, Yuan Yin, Zhenrong Shen et al.

The growing complexity and scale of visual model pre-training have made developing and deploying multi-task computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems increasingly challenging and resource-intensive. Furthermore, the medical imaging community lacks an open-source CAD platform to enable the rapid creation of efficient and extendable diagnostic models. To address these issues, we propose UniCAD, a unified architecture that leverages the robust capabilities of pre-trained vision foundation models to seamlessly handle both 2D and 3D medical images while requiring only minimal task-specific parameters. UniCAD introduces two key innovations: (1) Efficiency: A low-rank adaptation strategy is employed to adapt a pre-trained visual model to the medical image domain, achieving performance on par with fully fine-tuned counterparts while introducing only 0.17% trainable parameters. (2) Plug-and-Play: A modular architecture that combines a frozen foundation model with multiple plug-and-play experts, enabling diverse tasks and seamless functionality expansion. Building on this unified CAD architecture, we establish an open-source platform where researchers can share and access lightweight CAD experts, fostering a more equitable and efficient research ecosystem. Comprehensive experiments across 12 diverse medical datasets demonstrate that UniCAD consistently outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and deployment efficiency. The source code and project page are available at https://mii-laboratory.github.io/UniCAD/.

Xiangtian Li, Han Cao, Zhaoyang Zhang et al.

The works of Gatys et al. demonstrated the capability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in creating artistic style images. This process of transferring content images in different styles is called Neural Style Transfer (NST). In this paper, we re-implement image-based NST, fast NST, and arbitrary NST. We also explore to utilize ResNet with activation smoothing in NST. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that smoothing transformation can greatly improve the quality of stylization results.

Zihao Zhao, Sheng Wang, Qian Wang et al.

Obtaining large-scale radiology reports can be difficult for medical images due to various reasons, limiting the effectiveness of contrastive pre-training in the medical image domain and underscoring the need for alternative methods. In this paper, we propose eye-tracking as an alternative to text reports, as it allows for the passive collection of gaze signals without disturbing radiologist's routine diagnosis process. By tracking the gaze of radiologists as they read and diagnose medical images, we can understand their visual attention and clinical reasoning. When a radiologist has similar gazes for two medical images, it may indicate semantic similarity for diagnosis, and these images should be treated as positive pairs when pre-training a computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) network through contrastive learning. Accordingly, we introduce the Medical contrastive Gaze Image Pre-training (McGIP) as a plug-and-play module for contrastive learning frameworks. McGIP uses radiologist's gaze to guide contrastive pre-training. We evaluate our method using two representative types of medical images and two common types of gaze data. The experimental results demonstrate the practicality of McGIP, indicating its high potential for various clinical scenarios and applications.

Yiyang Zhou, Linjie Li, Shi Qiu et al. · microsoft-research

Existing video benchmarks often resemble image-based benchmarks, with question types like "What actions does the person perform throughout the video?" or "What color is the woman's dress in the video?" For these, models can often answer by scanning just a few key frames, without deep temporal reasoning. This limits our ability to assess whether large vision-language models (LVLMs) can truly think with videos rather than perform superficial frame-level analysis. To address this, we introduce GLIMPSE, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate whether LVLMs can genuinely think with videos. Unlike prior benchmarks, GLIMPSE emphasizes comprehensive video understanding beyond static image cues. It consists of 3,269 videos and over 4,342 highly visual-centric questions across 11 categories, including Trajectory Analysis, Temporal Reasoning, and Forensics Detection. All questions are carefully crafted by human annotators and require watching the entire video and reasoning over full video context-this is what we mean by thinking with video. These questions cannot be answered by scanning selected frames or relying on text alone. In human evaluations, GLIMPSE achieves 94.82% accuracy, but current LVLMs face significant challenges. Even the best-performing model, GPT-o3, reaches only 66.43%, highlighting that LVLMs still struggle to move beyond surface-level reasoning to truly think with videos.

Shaobo Liu, Zihao Zhao, Weijie He et al.

Privacy-preserving network anomaly detection has become an essential area of research due to growing concerns over the protection of sensitive data. Traditional anomaly detection models often prioritize accuracy while neglecting the critical aspect of privacy. In this work, we propose a hybrid ensemble model that incorporates privacy-preserving techniques to address both detection accuracy and data protection. Our model combines the strengths of several machine learning algorithms, including K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), XGBoost, and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), to create a robust system capable of identifying network anomalies while ensuring privacy. The proposed approach integrates advanced preprocessing techniques that enhance data quality and address the challenges of small sample sizes and imbalanced datasets. By embedding privacy measures into the model design, our solution offers a significant advancement over existing methods, ensuring both enhanced detection performance and strong privacy safeguards.

Fei Sun, Minghai Qin, Tianyun Zhang et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been proven to be effective in solving many real-life problems, but its high computation cost prohibits those models from being deployed to edge devices. Pruning, as a method to introduce zeros to model weights, has shown to be an effective method to provide good trade-offs between model accuracy and computation efficiency, and is a widely-used method to generate compressed models. However, the granularity of pruning makes important trade-offs. At the same sparsity level, a coarse-grained structured sparse pattern is more efficient on conventional hardware but results in worse accuracy, while a fine-grained unstructured sparse pattern can achieve better accuracy but is inefficient on existing hardware. On the other hand, some modern processors are equipped with fast on-chip scratchpad memories and gather/scatter engines that perform indirect load and store operations on such memories. In this work, we propose a set of novel sparse patterns, named gather-scatter (GS) patterns, to utilize the scratchpad memories and gather/scatter engines to speed up neural network inferences. Correspondingly, we present a compact sparse format. The proposed set of sparse patterns, along with a novel pruning methodology, address the load imbalance issue and result in models with quality close to unstructured sparse models and computation efficiency close to structured sparse models. Our experiments show that GS patterns consistently make better trade-offs between accuracy and computation efficiency compared to conventional structured sparse patterns. GS patterns can reduce the runtime of the DNN components by two to three times at the same accuracy levels. This is confirmed on three different deep learning tasks and popular models, namely, GNMT for machine translation, ResNet50 for image recognition, and Japser for acoustic speech recognition.