Sumi Helal

Buhua Liu, Shitong Shao, Bao Li et al.

Diffusion models have emerged as the leading paradigm in generative modeling, excelling in various applications. Despite their success, these models often misalign with human intentions and generate results with undesired properties or even harmful content. Inspired by the success and popularity of alignment in tuning large language models, recent studies have investigated aligning diffusion models with human expectations and preferences. This work mainly reviews alignment of diffusion models, covering advancements in fundamentals of alignment, alignment techniques of diffusion models, preference benchmarks, and evaluation for diffusion models. Moreover, we discuss key perspectives on current challenges and promising future directions on solving the remaining challenges in alignment of diffusion models. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first comprehensive review paper for researchers and engineers to comprehend, practice, and research alignment of diffusion models.

Xuhang Wu, Zhuoxuan Liang, Wei Li et al.

With the rapid advancement of IoT and edge computing, sensor networks have become indispensable, driving the need for large-scale sensor deployment. However, the high deployment cost hinders their scalability. To tackle the issues, Spatial Interpolation (SI) introduces virtual sensors to infer readings from observed sensors, leveraging graph structure. However, current graph-based SI methods rely on pre-trained models, lack adaptation to larger and unseen graphs at test-time, and overlook test data utilization. To address these issues, we propose PlugSI, a plug-and-play framework that refines test-time graph through two key innovations. First, we design an Unknown Topology Adapter (UTA) that adapts to the new graph structure of each small-batch at test-time, enhancing the generalization of SI pre-trained models. Second, we introduce a Temporal Balance Adapter (TBA) that maintains a stable historical consensus to guide UTA adaptation and prevent drifting caused by noise in the current batch. Empirically, extensive experiments demonstrate PlugSI can be seamlessly integrated into existing graph-based SI methods and provide significant improvement (e.g., a 10.81% reduction in MAE).

Haoyi Xiong, Jiang Bian, Yuchen Li et al.

Combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with search engine services marks a significant shift in the field of services computing, opening up new possibilities to enhance how we search for and retrieve information, understand content, and interact with internet services. This paper conducts an in-depth examination of how integrating LLMs with search engines can mutually benefit both technologies. We focus on two main areas: using search engines to improve LLMs (Search4LLM) and enhancing search engine functions using LLMs (LLM4Search). For Search4LLM, we investigate how search engines can provide diverse high-quality datasets for pre-training of LLMs, how they can use the most relevant documents to help LLMs learn to answer queries more accurately, how training LLMs with Learning-To-Rank (LTR) tasks can enhance their ability to respond with greater precision, and how incorporating recent search results can make LLM-generated content more accurate and current. In terms of LLM4Search, we examine how LLMs can be used to summarize content for better indexing by search engines, improve query outcomes through optimization, enhance the ranking of search results by analyzing document relevance, and help in annotating data for learning-to-rank tasks in various learning contexts. However, this promising integration comes with its challenges, which include addressing potential biases and ethical issues in training models, managing the computational and other costs of incorporating LLMs into search services, and continuously updating LLM training with the ever-changing web content. We discuss these challenges and chart out required research directions to address them. We also discuss broader implications for service computing, such as scalability, privacy concerns, and the need to adapt search engine architectures for these advanced models.

Bingyang Chen, Tao Chen, Xingjie Zeng et al.

Millions of patients suffer from rare diseases around the world. However, the samples of rare diseases are much smaller than those of common diseases. In addition, due to the sensitivity of medical data, hospitals are usually reluctant to share patient information for data fusion citing privacy concerns. These challenges make it difficult for traditional AI models to extract rare disease features for the purpose of disease prediction. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by proposing a novel approach for rare disease prediction based on federated meta-learning. To improve the prediction accuracy of rare diseases, we design an attention-based meta-learning (ATML) approach which dynamically adjusts the attention to different tasks according to the measured training effect of base learners. Additionally, a dynamic-weight based fusion strategy is proposed to further improve the accuracy of federated learning, which dynamically selects clients based on the accuracy of each local model. Experiments show that with as few as five shots, our approach out-performs the original federated meta-learning algorithm in accuracy and speed. Compared with each hospital's local model, the proposed model's average prediction accuracy increased by 13.28%.

Han Wu, Wenjie Ruan, Jiangtao Wang et al.

The black-box nature of machine learning models hinders the deployment of some high-accuracy models in medical diagnosis. It is risky to put one's life in the hands of models that medical researchers do not fully understand. However, through model interpretation, black-box models can promptly reveal significant biomarkers that medical practitioners may have overlooked due to the surge of infected patients in the COVID-19 pandemic. This research leverages a database of 92 patients with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 laboratory tests between 18th Jan. 2020 and 5th Mar. 2020, in Zhuhai, China, to identify biomarkers indicative of severity prediction. Through the interpretation of four machine learning models, decision tree, random forests, gradient boosted trees, and neural networks using permutation feature importance, Partial Dependence Plot (PDP), Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE), Accumulated Local Effects (ALE), Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME), and Shapley Additive Explanation (SHAP), we identify an increase in N-Terminal pro-Brain Natriuretic Peptide (NTproBNP), C-Reaction Protein (CRP), and lactic dehydrogenase (LDH), a decrease in lymphocyte (LYM) is associated with severe infection and an increased risk of death, which is consistent with recent medical research on COVID-19 and other research using dedicated models. We further validate our methods on a large open dataset with 5644 confirmed patients from the Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, at São Paulo, Brazil from Kaggle, and unveil leukocytes, eosinophils, and platelets as three indicative biomarkers for COVID-19.