Xuequn Shang

Yupei Zhang, Yuxin Li, Yifei Wang et al.

Learning-outcome prediction (LOP) is a long-standing and critical problem in educational routes. Many studies have contributed to developing effective models while often suffering from data shortage and low generalization to various institutions due to the privacy-protection issue. To this end, this study proposes a distributed grade prediction model, dubbed FecMap, by exploiting the federated learning (FL) framework that preserves the private data of local clients and communicates with others through a global generalized model. FecMap considers local subspace learning (LSL), which explicitly learns the local features against the global features, and multi-layer privacy protection (MPP), which hierarchically protects the private features, including model-shareable features and not-allowably shared features, to achieve client-specific classifiers of high performance on LOP per institution. FecMap is then achieved in an iteration manner with all datasets distributed on clients by training a local neural network composed of a global part, a local part, and a classification head in clients and averaging the global parts from clients on the server. To evaluate the FecMap model, we collected three higher-educational datasets of student academic records from engineering majors. Experiment results manifest that FecMap benefits from the proposed LSL and MPP and achieves steady performance on the task of LOP, compared with the state-of-the-art models. This study makes a fresh attempt at the use of federated learning in the learning-analytical task, potentially paving the way to facilitating personalized education with privacy protection.

Zhiguang Wu, Fengbin Zhu, Xuequn Shang et al.

Text-to-SQL task aims to automatically yield SQL queries according to user text questions. To address this problem, we propose a Cooperative SQL Generation framework based on Multi-functional Agents (CSMA) through information interaction among large language model (LLM) based agents who own part of the database schema seperately. Inspired by the collaboration in human teamwork, CSMA consists of three stages: 1) Question-related schema collection, 2) Question-corresponding SQL query generation, and 3) SQL query correctness check. In the first stage, agents analyze their respective schema and communicate with each other to collect the schema information relevant to the question. In the second stage, agents try to generate the corresponding SQL query for the question using the collected information. In the third stage, agents check if the SQL query is created correctly according to their known information. This interaction-based method makes the question-relevant part of database schema from each agent to be used for SQL generation and check. Experiments on the Spider and Bird benckmark demonstrate that CSMA achieves a high performance level comparable to the state-of-the-arts, meanwhile holding the private data in these individual agents.

Yu-An Huang, Xiyue Cao, Zhu-Hong You et al.

The rise of single-cell sequencing technologies has revolutionized the exploration of drug resistance, revealing the crucial role of cellular heterogeneity in advancing precision medicine. By building computational models from existing single-cell drug response data, we can rapidly annotate cellular responses to drugs in subsequent trials. To this end, we developed scGSDR, a model that integrates two computational pipelines grounded in the knowledge of cellular states and gene signaling pathways, both essential for understanding biological gene semantics. scGSDR enhances predictive performance by incorporating gene semantics and employs an interpretability module to identify key pathways contributing to drug resistance phenotypes. Our extensive validation, which included 16 experiments covering 11 drugs, demonstrates scGSDR's superior predictive accuracy, when trained with either bulk-seq or scRNA-seq data, achieving high AUROC, AUPR, and F1 Scores. The model's application has extended from single-drug predictions to scenarios involving drug combinations. Leveraging pathways of known drug target genes, we found that scGSDR's cell-pathway attention scores are biologically interpretable, which helped us identify other potential drug-related genes. Literature review of top-ranking genes in our predictions such as BCL2, CCND1, the AKT family, and PIK3CA for PLX4720; and ICAM1, VCAM1, NFKB1, NFKBIA, and RAC1 for Paclitaxel confirmed their relevance. In conclusion, scGSDR, by incorporating gene semantics, enhances predictive modeling of cellular responses to diverse drugs, proving invaluable for scenarios involving both single drug and combination therapies and effectively identifying key resistance-related pathways, thus advancing precision medicine and targeted therapy development.

Yupei Zhang, Ruojia Feng, Yifei Wang et al.

This paper introduces FDSC, a private-protected subspace clustering (SC) approach with federated learning (FC) schema. In each client, there is a deep subspace clustering network accounting for grouping the isolated data, composed of a encode network, a self-expressive layer, and a decode network. FDSC is achieved by uploading the encode network to communicate with other clients in the server. Besides, FDSC is also enhanced by preserving the local neighborhood relationship in each client. With the effects of federated learning and locality preservation, the learned data features from the encoder are boosted so as to enhance the self-expressiveness learning and result in better clustering performance. Experiments test FDSC on public datasets and compare with other clustering methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of FDSC.