Fazlolah Mohaghegh

Masoud Monajatipoor, Jiaxin Yang, Joel Stremmel et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable versatility in various NLP tasks but encounter distinct challenges in biomedical due to the complexities of language and data scarcity. This paper investigates LLMs application in the biomedical domain by exploring strategies to enhance their performance for the NER task. Our study reveals the importance of meticulously designed prompts in the biomedical. Strategic selection of in-context examples yields a marked improvement, offering ~15-20\% increase in F1 score across all benchmark datasets for biomedical few-shot NER. Additionally, our results indicate that integrating external biomedical knowledge via prompting strategies can enhance the proficiency of general-purpose LLMs to meet the specialized needs of biomedical NER. Leveraging a medical knowledge base, our proposed method, DiRAG, inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), can boost the zero-shot F1 score of LLMs for biomedical NER. Code is released at \url{https://github.com/masoud-monajati/LLM_Bio_NER}

Aashish Anantha Ramakrishnan, Ardavan Saeedi, Hamid Reza Hassanzadeh et al.

With the widespread adoption of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLM), there exists a high demand for task-specific test sets to benchmark their performance in domains such as healthcare and biomedicine. However, the cost of labeling test samples while developing new benchmarks poses a significant challenge, especially when expert annotators are required. Existing frameworks for active sample selection offer limited support for generative Question Answering tasks, where option dynamics can affect model decision boundaries. In this paper, we present Generative Active Testing (GAT), an uncertainty-aware acquisition framework leveraging LLMs as surrogates for informing the sample selection process. Using a novel Statement Adaptation Module, we modify generative tasks into a pseudo-classification format, enabling the capture of sample-level uncertainties across unlabeled candidates. Our zero-shot acquisition functions reduce estimation error by ~40% compared to traditional sampling baselines, offering a scalable solution for cost-effective model benchmarking.

Fazlolah Mohaghegh, Jayathi Murthy

Accurate thermal analysis of composites and porous media requires detailed characterization of local thermal properties in small scale. For some important applications such as lithium-ion batteries, changes in the properties during the operation makes the analysis even more challenging, necessitating a rapid characterization. We propose a new method to characterize the thermal properties of particulate composites based on actual micro-images. Our computer-vision-based approach constructs 3D images from stacks of 2D SEM images and then extracts several representative elemental volumes (REVs) from the reconstructed images at random places, which leads to having a range of geometrical features for different REVs. A deep learning algorithm is designed based on convolutional neural nets to take the shape of the geometry and result in the effective conductivity of the REV. The training of the network is performed in two methods: First, based on implementing a coarser grid that uses the average values of conductivities from the fine grid and the resulted effective conductivity from the DNS solution of the fine grid. The other method uses conductivity values on cross sections from each REV in different directions. The results of training based on averaging show that using a coarser grid in the network does not have a meaningful effect on the network error; however, it decreases the training time up to three orders of magnitude. We showed that one general network can make accurate predictions using different types of electrode images, representing the difference in the geometry and constituents. Moreover, training based on averaging is more accurate than training based on cross sections. The study of the robustness of implementing a machine learning technique in predicting the thermal percolation shows the prediction error is almost half of the error from predictions based on the volume fraction.