Zukang Yang

Arvind Murari Vepa, Zukang Yang, Andrew Choi et al.

Deep learning has seen remarkable advancements in machine learning, yet it often demands extensive annotated data. Tasks like 3D semantic segmentation impose a substantial annotation burden, especially in domains like medicine, where expert annotations drive up the cost. Active learning (AL) holds great potential to alleviate this annotation burden in 3D medical segmentation. The majority of existing AL methods, however, are not tailored to the medical domain. While weakly-supervised methods have been explored to reduce annotation burden, the fusion of AL with weak supervision remains unexplored, despite its potential to significantly reduce annotation costs. Additionally, there is little focus on slice-based AL for 3D segmentation, which can also significantly reduce costs in comparison to conventional volume-based AL. This paper introduces a novel metric learning method for Coreset to perform slice-based active learning in 3D medical segmentation. By merging contrastive learning with inherent data groupings in medical imaging, we learn a metric that emphasizes the relevant differences in samples for training 3D medical segmentation models. We perform comprehensive evaluations using both weak and full annotations across four datasets (medical and non-medical). Our findings demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing active learning techniques on both weak and full annotations and obtains superior performance with low-annotation budgets which is crucial in medical imaging. Source code for this project is available in the supplementary materials and on GitHub: https://github.com/arvindmvepa/al-seg.

Zukang Yang, Zixuan Zhu, Xuan Zhu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in open-domain question answering. However, they continue to face challenges such as hallucinations and knowledge cutoffs. These issues can be mitigated through in-context learning by providing LLMs with relevant context before generating answers. Recent literature proposes Knowledge Graph Prompting (KGP) which integrates knowledge graphs with an LLM-based traversal agent to substantially enhance document retrieval quality. However, KGP requires costly fine-tuning with large datasets and remains prone to hallucination. In this paper, we propose CuriousLLM, an enhancement that integrates a curiosity-driven reasoning mechanism into an LLM agent. This mechanism enables the agent to generate relevant follow-up questions, thereby guiding the information retrieval process more efficiently. Central to our approach is the development of the new Follow-upQA dataset, which includes questions and supporting evidence as input, with follow-up questions serving as ground truths. These follow-up questions either inquire about what is still missing to fully answer the user's query or use special tokens to signify that the retrieved evidence is sufficient. Our experiments show that CuriousLLM significantly boosts LLM performance in multi-document question answering (MD-QA), circumventing the substantial computational costs and latency from the original KGP framework.