9.6AIJul 25, 2024
Babel: A Scalable Pre-trained Model for Multi-Modal Sensing via Expandable Modality AlignmentShenghong Dai, Shiqi Jiang, Yifan Yang et al.
This paper presents Babel, the expandable modality alignment model, specially designed for multi-modal sensing. While there has been considerable work on multi-modality alignment, they all struggle to effectively incorporate multiple sensing modalities due to the data scarcity constraints. How to utilize multi-modal data with partial pairings in sensing remains an unresolved challenge. Babel tackles this challenge by introducing the concept of expandable modality alignment. The key idea involves transforming the N-modality alignment into a series of binary-modality alignments. Novel techniques are also proposed to further mitigate data scarcity issue and balance the contribution of the newly incorporated modality with the previously established modality alignment during the expandable alignment process. We provide the comprehensive implementation. In the pre-training phase, Babel currently aligns 6 sensing modalities, namely Wi-Fi, mmWave, IMU, LiDAR, video, and depth. For the deployment phase, as a foundation model, any single or combination of aligned modalities could be selected from Babel and applied to downstream tasks. Evaluation demonstrates Babel's outstanding performance on eight human activity recognition datasets, compared to a broad range of baselines e.g., the SOTA single-modal sensing networks, multi-modal sensing framework, and multi-modal large language models. Babel not only improves the performance of individual modality sensing (12% averaged accuracy improvement), but also effectively fuses multiple available modalities (up to 22% accuracy increase). Case studies also highlight emerging application scenarios empowered by Babel, including cross-modality retrieval (i.e., sensing imaging), and bridging LLM for sensing comprehension.
Demystifying Large Language Models for Medicine: A PrimerQiao Jin, Nicholas Wan, Robert Leaman et al.
Large language models (LLMs) represent a transformative class of AI tools capable of revolutionizing various aspects of healthcare by generating human-like responses across diverse contexts and adapting to novel tasks following human instructions. Their potential application spans a broad range of medical tasks, such as clinical documentation, matching patients to clinical trials, and answering medical questions. In this primer paper, we propose an actionable guideline to help healthcare professionals more efficiently utilize LLMs in their work, along with a set of best practices. This approach consists of several main phases, including formulating the task, choosing LLMs, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and deployment. We start with the discussion of critical considerations in identifying healthcare tasks that align with the core capabilities of LLMs and selecting models based on the selected task and data, performance requirements, and model interface. We then review the strategies, such as prompt engineering and fine-tuning, to adapt standard LLMs to specialized medical tasks. Deployment considerations, including regulatory compliance, ethical guidelines, and continuous monitoring for fairness and bias, are also discussed. By providing a structured step-by-step methodology, this tutorial aims to equip healthcare professionals with the tools necessary to effectively integrate LLMs into clinical practice, ensuring that these powerful technologies are applied in a safe, reliable, and impactful manner.
1.2CHEM-PHMar 21, 2025
Multi-timescale time encoding for CNN prediction of Fenna-Matthews-Olson energy-transfer dynamicsShun-Cai Zhao, Yi-Meng Huang, Yi-Fan Yang et al.
Machine learning simulations of open quantum dynamics often rely on recursive predictors that accumulate error. We develop a non-recursive convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that maps system parameters and a redundant time encoding directly to excitation-energy-transfer populations in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex. The encoding-modified logistic plus $\tanh$ functions-normalizes time and resolves fast, transitional, and quasi-steady regimes, while physics-informed labels enforce population conservation and inter-site consistency. Trained only on $0\sim 7 ps$ reference trajectories generated with a Lindblad model in QuTiP, the network accurately predicts $0\sim100 ps$ dynamics across a range of reorganization energies, bath rates, and temperatures. Beyond $20 ps$, the absolute relative error remains below 0.05, demonstrating stable long-time extrapolation. By avoiding step-by-step recursion, the method suppresses error accumulation and generalizes across timescales. These results show that redundant time encoding enables data-efficient inference of long-time quantum dissipative dynamics in realistic pigment-protein complexes, and may aid the data-driven design of light-harvesting materials.
Detecting Adversarial Data by Probing Multiple Perturbations Using Expected Perturbation ScoreShuhai Zhang, Feng Liu, Jiahao Yang et al.
Adversarial detection aims to determine whether a given sample is an adversarial one based on the discrepancy between natural and adversarial distributions. Unfortunately, estimating or comparing two data distributions is extremely difficult, especially in high-dimension spaces. Recently, the gradient of log probability density (a.k.a., score) w.r.t. the sample is used as an alternative statistic to compute. However, we find that the score is sensitive in identifying adversarial samples due to insufficient information with one sample only. In this paper, we propose a new statistic called expected perturbation score (EPS), which is essentially the expected score of a sample after various perturbations. Specifically, to obtain adequate information regarding one sample, we perturb it by adding various noises to capture its multi-view observations. We theoretically prove that EPS is a proper statistic to compute the discrepancy between two samples under mild conditions. In practice, we can use a pre-trained diffusion model to estimate EPS for each sample. Last, we propose an EPS-based adversarial detection (EPS-AD) method, in which we develop EPS-based maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a metric to measure the discrepancy between the test sample and natural samples. We also prove that the EPS-based MMD between natural and adversarial samples is larger than that among natural samples. Extensive experiments show the superior adversarial detection performance of our EPS-AD.