Yi Guan

Rujia Shen, Boran Wang, Chao Zhao et al.

Causal discovery from time-series data aims to capture both intra-slice (contemporaneous) and inter-slice (time-lagged) causality between variables within the temporal chain, which is crucial for various scientific disciplines. Compared to causal discovery from non-time-series data, causal discovery from time-series data necessitates more serialized samples with a larger amount of observed time steps. To address the challenges, we propose a novel gradient-based causal discovery approach STIC, which focuses on \textbf{S}hort-\textbf{T}erm \textbf{I}nvariance using \textbf{C}onvolutional neural networks to uncover the causal relationships from time-series data. Specifically, STIC leverages both the short-term time and mechanism invariance of causality within each window observation, which possesses the property of independence, to enhance sample efficiency. Furthermore, we construct two causal convolution kernels, which correspond to the short-term time and mechanism invariance respectively, to estimate the window causal graph. To demonstrate the necessity of convolutional neural networks for causal discovery from time-series data, we theoretically derive the equivalence between convolution and the underlying generative principle of time-series data under the assumption that the additive noise model is identifiable. Experimental evaluations conducted on both synthetic and FMRI benchmark datasets demonstrate that our STIC outperforms baselines significantly and achieves the state-of-the-art performance, particularly when the datasets contain a limited number of observed time steps. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/HITshenrj/STIC}.

Liangliang Liu, Yi Guan, BoRan Wang et al.

Imagining potential outcomes of actions before execution helps agents make more informed decisions, a prospective thinking ability fundamental to human cognition. However, mainstream model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods lack the ability to proactively envision future scenarios, plan, and guide strategies. These methods typically rely on trial and error to adjust policy functions, aiming to maximize cumulative rewards or long-term value, even if such high-reward decisions place the environment in extremely dangerous states. To address this, we propose the Prospective (ProSpec) RL method, which makes higher-value, lower-risk optimal decisions by imagining future n-stream trajectories. Specifically, ProSpec employs a dynamic model to predict future states (termed "imagined states") based on the current state and a series of sampled actions. Furthermore, we integrate the concept of Model Predictive Control and introduce a cycle consistency constraint that allows the agent to evaluate and select the optimal actions from these trajectories. Moreover, ProSpec employs cycle consistency to mitigate two fundamental issues in RL: augmenting state reversibility to avoid irreversible events (low risk) and augmenting actions to generate numerous virtual trajectories, thereby improving data efficiency. We validated the effectiveness of our method on the DMControl benchmarks, where our approach achieved significant performance improvements. Code will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

Rujia Shen, Yang Yang, Yaoxion Lin et al.

Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a crucial role in various applications, including medical monitoring and crop growth. Despite the advancements in deep learning methods for TSF, their capacity to predict long-term series remains constrained. This limitation arises from the failure to account for both intra- and inter-variable variations meanwhile. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce the Fi$^2$VBlock, which leverages a \textbf{F}requency domain perspective to capture \textbf{i}ntra- and \textbf{i}nter-variable \textbf{V}ariations. After transforming into the frequency domain via the Frequency Transform Module, the Frequency Cross Attention between the real and imaginary parts is designed to obtain enhanced frequency representations and capture intra-variable variations. Furthermore, Inception blocks are employed to integrate information, thus capturing correlations across different variables. Our backbone network, Fi$^2$VTS, employs a residual architecture by concatenating multiple Fi$^2$VBlocks, thereby preventing degradation issues. Theoretically, we demonstrate that Fi$^2$VTS achieves a substantial reduction in both time and memory complexity, decreasing from $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(L)$ per Fi$^2$VBlock computation. Empirical evaluations reveal that Fi$^2$VTS outperforms other baselines on two benchmark datasets. The implementation code is accessible at \url{https://github.com/HITshenrj/Fi2VTS}.

Haotian Wang, Xiyuan Du, Weijiang Yu et al.

Multi-agent debate system (MAD) imitating the process of human discussion in pursuit of truth, aims to align the correct cognition of different agents for the optimal solution. It is challenging to make various agents perform right and highly consistent cognition due to their limited and different knowledge backgrounds (i.e., cognitive islands), which hinders the search for the optimal solution. To address the challenge, we propose a novel \underline{M}ulti-\underline{A}gent \underline{D}ebate with \underline{K}nowledge-\underline{E}nhanced framework (\textbf{MADKE}) to promote the system to find the solution. First, we involve a shared retrieval knowledge pool in the debate process to solve the problem of limited and different knowledge backgrounds. Then, we propose an adaptive knowledge selection method to guarantee the accuracy and personalization of knowledge. This method allows agents to choose whether to use external knowledge in each conversation round according to their own needs. Our experimental results on six datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results compared to existing single-agent and multi-agent methods. Further analysis reveals that the introduction of retrieval knowledge can help the agent to break cognitive islands in the debate process and effectively improve the consistency and correctness of the model. Moreover, MADKE using Qwen1.5-72B-Chat surpasses GPT-4 by +1.26\% on average in six datasets, which validates that our method can help open-source LLMs achieve or even surpass the performance of GPT-4. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/FutureForMe/MADKE}.

Weile Chen, Huiqiang Jiang, Qianhui Wu et al.

Neural methods have been shown to achieve high performance in Named Entity Recognition (NER), but rely on costly high-quality labeled data for training, which is not always available across languages. While previous works have shown that unlabeled data in a target language can be used to improve cross-lingual model performance, we propose a novel adversarial approach (AdvPicker) to better leverage such data and further improve results. We design an adversarial learning framework in which an encoder learns entity domain knowledge from labeled source-language data and better shared features are captured via adversarial training - where a discriminator selects less language-dependent target-language data via similarity to the source language. Experimental results on standard benchmark datasets well demonstrate that the proposed method benefits strongly from this data selection process and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods; without requiring any additional external resources (e.g., gazetteers or via machine translation). The code is available at https://aka.ms/AdvPicker

Jingchi Jiang, Rujia Shen, Boran Wang et al.

Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1D) is characterized by insulin deficiency and blood glucose (BG) control issues. The state-of-the-art solution for continuous BG control is reinforcement learning (RL), where an agent can dynamically adjust exogenous insulin doses in time to maintain BG levels within the target range. However, due to the lack of action guidance, the agent often needs to learn from randomized trials to understand misleading correlations between exogenous insulin doses and BG levels, which can lead to instability and unsafety. To address these challenges, we propose an introspective RL based on Counterfactual Invertible Neural Networks (CINN). We use the pre-trained CINN as a frozen introspective block of the RL agent, which integrates forward prediction and counterfactual inference to guide the policy updates, promoting more stable and safer BG control. Constructed based on interpretable causal order, CINN employs bidirectional encoders with affine coupling layers to ensure invertibility while using orthogonal weight normalization to enhance the trainability, thereby ensuring the bidirectional differentiability of network parameters. We experimentally validate the accuracy and generalization ability of the pre-trained CINN in BG prediction and counterfactual inference for action. Furthermore, our experimental results highlight the effectiveness of pre-trained CINN in guiding RL policy updates for more accurate and safer BG control.

Jingchi Jiang, Huanzheng Wang, Jing Xie et al.

The representation of knowledge based on first-order logic captures the richness of natural language and supports multiple probabilistic inference models. Although symbolic representation enables quantitative reasoning with statistical probability, it is difficult to utilize with machine learning models as they perform numerical operations. In contrast, knowledge embedding (i.e., high-dimensional and continuous vectors) is a feasible approach to complex reasoning that can not only retain the semantic information of knowledge but also establish the quantifiable relationship among them. In this paper, we propose recursive neural knowledge network (RNKN), which combines medical knowledge based on first-order logic with recursive neural network for multi-disease diagnosis. After RNKN is efficiently trained from manually annotated Chinese Electronic Medical Records (CEMRs), diagnosis-oriented knowledge embeddings and weight matrixes are learned. Experimental results verify that the diagnostic accuracy of RNKN is superior to that of some classical machine learning models and Markov logic network (MLN). The results also demonstrate that the more explicit the evidence extracted from CEMRs is, the better is the performance achieved. RNKN gradually exhibits the interpretation of knowledge embeddings as the number of training epochs increases.

Bin He, Yi Guan, Rui Dai

Convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) models have become the mainstream methods for relation classification. We propose a unified architecture, which exploits the advantages of CNN and RNN simultaneously, to identify medical relations in clinical records, with only word embedding features. Our model learns phrase-level features through a CNN layer, and these feature representations are directly fed into a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (GRU) layer to capture long-term feature dependencies. We evaluate our model on two clinical datasets, and experiments demonstrate that our model performs significantly better than previous single-model methods on both datasets.

Bin He, Yi Guan, Rui Dai

Deep learning research on relation classification has achieved solid performance in the general domain. This study proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture with a multi-pooling operation for medical relation classification on clinical records and explores a loss function with a category-level constraint matrix. Experiments using the 2010 i2b2/VA relation corpus demonstrate these models, which do not depend on any external features, outperform previous single-model methods and our best model is competitive with the existing ensemble-based method.

Chao Zhao, Min Zhao, Yi Guan

Hypernym identification of open-domain entities is crucial for taxonomy construction as well as many higher-level applications. Current methods suffer from either low precision or low recall. To decrease the difficulty of this problem, we adopt a classification-based method. We pre-define a concept taxonomy and classify an entity to one of its leaf concept, based on the name and description information of the entity. A convolutional neural network classifier and a K-means clustering module are adopted for classification. We applied this system to 2.1 million Baidu Baike entities, and 1.1 million of them were successfully identified with a precision of 99.36%.

Chao Zhao, Min Zhao, Yi Guan

The interests of individual internet users fall into a hierarchical structure which is useful in regards to building personalized searches and recommendations. Most studies on this subject construct the interest hierarchy of a single person from the document perspective. In this study, we constructed the user interest hierarchy via user profiles. We organized 433,397 user interests, referred to here as "attentions", into a user attention network (UAN) from 200 million user profiles; we then applied the Louvain algorithm to detect hierarchical clusters in these attentions. Finally, a 26-level hierarchy with 34,676 clusters was obtained. We found that these attention clusters were aggregated according to certain topics as opposed to the hyponymy-relation based conceptual ontologies. The topics can be entities or concepts, and the relations were not restrained by hyponymy. The concept relativity encapsulated in the user's interest can be captured by labeling the attention clusters with corresponding concepts.

Chao Zhao, Jingchi Jiang, Yi Guan

Objective: Electronic medical records (EMRs) contain an amount of medical knowledge which can be used for clinical decision support (CDS). Our objective is a general system that can extract and represent these knowledge contained in EMRs to support three CDS tasks: test recommendation, initial diagnosis, and treatment plan recommendation, with the given condition of one patient. Methods: We extracted four kinds of medical entities from records and constructed an EMR-based medical knowledge network (EMKN), in which nodes are entities and edges reflect their co-occurrence in a single record. Three bipartite subgraphs (bi-graphs) were extracted from the EMKN to support each task. One part of the bi-graph was the given condition (e.g., symptoms), and the other was the condition to be inferred (e.g., diseases). Each bi-graph was regarded as a Markov random field to support the inference. Three lazy energy functions and one parameter-based energy function were proposed, as well as two knowledge representation learning-based energy functions, which can provide a distributed representation of medical entities. Three measures were utilized for performance evaluation. Results: On the initial diagnosis task, 80.11% of the test records identified at least one correct disease from top 10 candidates. Test and treatment recommendation results were 87.88% and 92.55%, respectively. These results altogether indicate that the proposed system outperformed the baseline methods. The distributed representation of medical entities does reflect similarity relationships in regards to knowledge level. Conclusion: Combining EMKN and MRF is an effective approach for general medical knowledge representation and inference. Different tasks, however, require designing their energy functions individually.

Zhipeng Jiang, Chao Zhao, Bin He et al.

The CEGS N-GRID 2016 Shared Task 1 in Clinical Natural Language Processing focuses on the de-identification of psychiatric evaluation records. This paper describes two participating systems of our team, based on conditional random fields (CRFs) and long short-term memory networks (LSTMs). A pre-processing module was introduced for sentence detection and tokenization before de-identification. For CRFs, manually extracted rich features were utilized to train the model. For LSTMs, a character-level bi-directional LSTM network was applied to represent tokens and classify tags for each token, following which a decoding layer was stacked to decode the most probable protected health information (PHI) terms. The LSTM-based system attained an i2b2 strict micro-F_1 measure of 89.86%, which was higher than that of the CRF-based system.

Jingchi Jiang, Chao Zhao, Yi Guan et al.

Based on a weighted knowledge graph to represent first-order knowledge and combining it with a probabilistic model, we propose a methodology for the creation of a medical knowledge network (MKN) in medical diagnosis. When a set of symptoms is activated for a specific patient, we can generate a ground medical knowledge network composed of symptom nodes and potential disease nodes. By Incorporating a Boltzmann machine into the potential function of a Markov network, we investigated the joint probability distribution of the MKN. In order to deal with numerical symptoms, a multivariate inference model is presented that uses conditional probability. In addition, the weights for the knowledge graph were efficiently learned from manually annotated Chinese Electronic Medical Records (CEMRs). In our experiments, we found numerically that the optimum choice of the quality of disease node and the expression of symptom variable can improve the effectiveness of medical diagnosis. Our experimental results comparing a Markov logic network and the logistic regression algorithm on an actual CEMR database indicate that our method holds promise and that MKN can facilitate studies of intelligent diagnosis.

Bin He, Bin Dong, Yi Guan et al.

Objective: To build a comprehensive corpus covering syntactic and semantic annotations of Chinese clinical texts with corresponding annotation guidelines and methods as well as to develop tools trained on the annotated corpus, which supplies baselines for research on Chinese texts in the clinical domain. Materials and methods: An iterative annotation method was proposed to train annotators and to develop annotation guidelines. Then, by using annotation quality assurance measures, a comprehensive corpus was built, containing annotations of part-of-speech (POS) tags, syntactic tags, entities, assertions, and relations. Inter-annotator agreement (IAA) was calculated to evaluate the annotation quality and a Chinese clinical text processing and information extraction system (CCTPIES) was developed based on our annotated corpus. Results: The syntactic corpus consists of 138 Chinese clinical documents with 47,424 tokens and 2553 full parsing trees, while the semantic corpus includes 992 documents that annotated 39,511 entities with their assertions and 7695 relations. IAA evaluation shows that this comprehensive corpus is of good quality, and the system modules are effective. Discussion: The annotated corpus makes a considerable contribution to natural language processing (NLP) research into Chinese texts in the clinical domain. However, this corpus has a number of limitations. Some additional types of clinical text should be introduced to improve corpus coverage and active learning methods should be utilized to promote annotation efficiency. Conclusions: In this study, several annotation guidelines and an annotation method for Chinese clinical texts were proposed, and a comprehensive corpus with its NLP modules were constructed, providing a foundation for further study of applying NLP techniques to Chinese texts in the clinical domain.