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Publications
Hazards from Increasingly Accessible Fine-Tuning of Downloadable Foundation Models
Public release of the weights of pretrained foundation models, otherwise known as downloadable access \citep{solaiman_gradient_2023}, enable… (see more)s fine-tuning without the prohibitive expense of pretraining. Our work argues that increasingly accessible fine-tuning of downloadable models may increase hazards. First, we highlight research to improve the accessibility of fine-tuning. We split our discussion into research that A) reduces the computational cost of fine-tuning and B) improves the ability to share that cost across more actors. Second, we argue that increasingly accessible fine-tuning methods may increase hazard through facilitating malicious use and making oversight of models with potentially dangerous capabilities more difficult. Third, we discuss potential mitigatory measures, as well as benefits of more accessible fine-tuning. Given substantial remaining uncertainty about hazards, we conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for the development of mitigations.
The extraction of a small number of relevant insights from vast amounts of data is a crucial component of data-driven decision-making. Howev… (see more)er, accomplishing this task requires considerable technical skills, domain expertise, and human labor. This study explores the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the discovery of insights in data, leveraging recent advances in reasoning and code generation techniques. We propose a new evaluation methodology based on a"capture the flag"principle, measuring the ability of such models to recognize meaningful and pertinent information (flags) in a dataset. We further propose two proof-of-concept agents, with different inner workings, and compare their ability to capture such flags in a real-world sales dataset. While the work reported here is preliminary, our results are sufficiently interesting to mandate future exploration by the community.
The extraction of a small number of relevant insights from vast amounts of data is a crucial component of data-driven decision-making. Howev… (see more)er, accomplishing this task requires considerable technical skills, domain expertise, and human labor. This study explores the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the discovery of insights in data, leveraging recent advances in reasoning and code generation techniques. We propose a new evaluation methodology based on a"capture the flag"principle, measuring the ability of such models to recognize meaningful and pertinent information (flags) in a dataset. We further propose two proof-of-concept agents, with different inner workings, and compare their ability to capture such flags in a real-world sales dataset. While the work reported here is preliminary, our results are sufficiently interesting to mandate future exploration by the community.
Abstract Objectives Distributed computations facilitate multi-institutional data analysis while avoiding the costs and complexity of data po… (see more)oling. Existing approaches lack crucial features, such as built-in medical standards and terminologies, no-code data visualizations, explicit disclosure control mechanisms, and support for basic statistical computations, in addition to gradient-based optimization capabilities. Materials and methods We describe the development of the Collaborative Data Analysis (CODA) platform, and the design choices undertaken to address the key needs identified during our survey of stakeholders. We use a public dataset (MIMIC-IV) to demonstrate end-to-end multi-modal FL using CODA. We assessed the technical feasibility of deploying the CODA platform at 9 hospitals in Canada, describe implementation challenges, and evaluate its scalability on large patient populations. Results The CODA platform was designed, developed, and deployed between January 2020 and January 2023. Software code, documentation, and technical documents were released under an open-source license. Multi-modal federated averaging is illustrated using the MIMIC-IV and MIMIC-CXR datasets. To date, 8 out of the 9 participating sites have successfully deployed the platform, with a total enrolment of >1M patients. Mapping data from legacy systems to FHIR was the biggest barrier to implementation. Discussion and conclusion The CODA platform was developed and successfully deployed in a public healthcare setting in Canada, with heterogeneous information technology systems and capabilities. Ongoing efforts will use the platform to develop and prospectively validate models for risk assessment, proactive monitoring, and resource usage. Further work will also make tools available to facilitate migration from legacy formats to FHIR and DICOM.
Abstract Objectives Distributed computations facilitate multi-institutional data analysis while avoiding the costs and complexity of data po… (see more)oling. Existing approaches lack crucial features, such as built-in medical standards and terminologies, no-code data visualizations, explicit disclosure control mechanisms, and support for basic statistical computations, in addition to gradient-based optimization capabilities. Materials and methods We describe the development of the Collaborative Data Analysis (CODA) platform, and the design choices undertaken to address the key needs identified during our survey of stakeholders. We use a public dataset (MIMIC-IV) to demonstrate end-to-end multi-modal FL using CODA. We assessed the technical feasibility of deploying the CODA platform at 9 hospitals in Canada, describe implementation challenges, and evaluate its scalability on large patient populations. Results The CODA platform was designed, developed, and deployed between January 2020 and January 2023. Software code, documentation, and technical documents were released under an open-source license. Multi-modal federated averaging is illustrated using the MIMIC-IV and MIMIC-CXR datasets. To date, 8 out of the 9 participating sites have successfully deployed the platform, with a total enrolment of >1M patients. Mapping data from legacy systems to FHIR was the biggest barrier to implementation. Discussion and conclusion The CODA platform was developed and successfully deployed in a public healthcare setting in Canada, with heterogeneous information technology systems and capabilities. Ongoing efforts will use the platform to develop and prospectively validate models for risk assessment, proactive monitoring, and resource usage. Further work will also make tools available to facilitate migration from legacy formats to FHIR and DICOM.
Deep spectroscopic surveys with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed that some of the brightest infrared so… (see more)urces in the sky correspond to concentrations of submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) at high redshift. Among these, the SPT2349-56 protocluster system is amongst the most extreme examples given its high source density and integrated star formation rate. We conducted a deep Lyman-alpha line emission survey around SPT2349-56 using the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in order to characterize this uniquely dense environment. Taking advantage of the deep three-dimensional nature of this survey, we performed a sensitive search for Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) toward the core and northern extension of the protocluster, which correspond to the brightest infrared regions in this field. Using a smoothed narrowband image extracted from the MUSE datacube around the protocluster redshift, we searched for possible extended structures. We identify only three LAEs at
Survival models can help medical practitioners to evaluate the prognostic importance of clinical variables to patient outcomes such as morta… (see more)lity or hospital readmission and subsequently design personalized treatment regimes. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold the promise for large-scale survival analysis based on systematically recorded clinical features for each patient. However, existing survival models either do not scale to high dimensional and multi-modal EHR data or are difficult to interpret. In this study, we present a supervised topic model called MixEHR-SurG to simultaneously integrate heterogeneous EHR data and model survival hazard. Our contributions are three-folds: (1) integrating EHR topic inference with Cox proportional hazards likelihood; (2) integrating patient-specific topic hyperparameters using the PheCode concepts such that each topic can be identified with exactly one PheCode-associated phenotype; (3) multi-modal survival topic inference. This leads to a highly interpretable survival topic model that can infer PheCode-specific phenotype topics associated with patient mortality. We evaluated MixEHR-SurG using a simulated dataset and two real-world EHR datasets: the Quebec Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) data consisting of 8211 subjects with 75,187 outpatient claim records of 1767 unique ICD codes; the MIMIC-III consisting of 1458 subjects with multi-modal EHR records. Compared to the baselines, MixEHR-SurG achieved a superior dynamic AUROC for mortality prediction, with a mean AUROC score of 0.89 in the simulation dataset and a mean AUROC of 0.645 on the CHD dataset. Qualitatively, MixEHR-SurG associates severe cardiac conditions with high mortality risk among the CHD patients after the first heart failure hospitalization and critical brain injuries with increased mortality among the MIMIC-III patients after their ICU discharge. Together, the integration of the Cox proportional hazards model and EHR topic inference in MixEHR-SurG not only leads to competitive mortality prediction but also meaningful phenotype topics for in-depth survival analysis. The software is available at GitHub: https://github.com/li-lab-mcgill/MixEHR-SurG.
Widely considered a cornerstone of human morality, trust shapes many aspects of human social interactions. In this work, we present a theore… (see more)tical analysis of the
