Gaoxiang Luo

Recently, vision foundation models have been shown to boost the efficiency of flow-based generative models by revealing the intrinsic union-of-manifold structures and lowering the complexity of the latent/target distribution. In this paper, we exploit the multimodality aspect of the union-of-manifold structures, and aim to further improve the learning and inference efficiency for flow-matching models. To this end, we propose an efficient source and coupling co-design method termed Mixture-Modeling Flow Matching (MM-FM), by integrating a data-adaptive multimodal source distribution (implemented as Gaussian mixture models) and mode-dependent data coupling. The former shortens the distance between the source and the target, and the latter promotes local and straighter flows. We also derive theoretical results to confirm our intuition in a quantitative sense. In our experiments on ImageNet256x256 with multimodal DINOv2-B latents, MM-FM exhibits superior learning efficiency and state-of-the-art unconditional generation quality: FID=2.74 with autoguidance in only 80 epochs.

Systematic reviews are essential for evidence synthesis in education, yet data extraction remains a bottleneck: labor-intensive and error-prone. Large language models offer automation potential, but questions remain about AI performance compared to human coders and how researchers experience these tools in practice. We present MetaMate, an open-access web-based tool for automated data extraction in educational systematic reviews. Our mixed-methods evaluation combines a quantitative validation study benchmarking MetaMate against trained human coders across 32 studies and 20 data elements with a qualitative user study involving six educational researchers using think-aloud protocols. MetaMate achieves precision (81–96%), recall (90–100%), and F1 scores (88–96%) comparable to or exceeding human coders, with strengths in mathematical reasoning and semantic comprehension. Qualitative findings reveal insights about trust calibration, verification behaviors, usability challenges, and human-AI collaboration. We contribute empirical evidence on LLM extraction capabilities and design implications for AI-assisted research tools balancing automation with human oversight. MetaMate is available at https://metamate.online.

Selecting an optimal set of exemplars is critical for good performance of in-context learning. However, prior exemplar search methods narrowly optimize for predictive accuracy, critically neglecting model calibration—a key determinant of trustworthiness and safe deployment. In this paper, we formulate exemplar selection as a multi-objective optimization problem, explicitly targeting both the maximization of predictive accuracy and the minimization of expected calibration error. We solve this problem with a sample-efficient Combinatorial Bayesian Optimization algorithm (COM-BOM) to find the Pareto-front that optimally trade-offs the two objectives of accuracy and calibration. We evaluate COM-BOM on multiple tasks from un-saturated MMLU-pro benchmark and find that COM-BOM beats or matches the baselines in jointly optimizing the two objectives, while requiring a minimal number of LLM API calls.

Language models (LMs) such as BERT and GPT have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP). However, the medical field faces challenges in training LMs due to limited data access and privacy constraints imposed by regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized solution that enables collaborative learning while ensuring data privacy. In this study, we evaluated FL on 2 biomedical NLP tasks encompassing 8 corpora using 6 LMs. Our results show that: (1) FL models consistently outperformed models trained on individual clients’ data and sometimes performed comparably with models trained with polled data; (2) with the fixed number of total data, FL models training with more clients produced inferior performance but pre-trained transformer-based models exhibited great resilience. (3) FL models significantly outperformed pre-trained LLMs with few-shot prompting.

Transfer learning (TL) from pretrained deep models is a standard practice in modern medical image classification (MIC). However, what levels of features to be reused are problem-dependent, and uniformly finetuning all layers of pretrained models may be suboptimal. This insight has partly motivated the recent differential TL strategies, such as TransFusion (TF) and layer-wise finetuning (LWFT), which treat the layers in the pretrained models differentially. In this paper, we add one more strategy into this family, called TruncatedTL, which reuses and finetunes appropriate bottom layers and directly discards the remaining layers. This yields not only superior MIC performance but also compact models for efficient inference, compared to other differential TL methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sun-umn/TTL

Federated learning (FL) allows multiple distributed data holders to collaboratively learn a shared model without data sharing. However, individual health system data are heterogeneous. “Personalized” FL variations have been developed to counter data heterogeneity, but few have been evaluated using real-world healthcare data. The purpose of this study is to investigate the performance of a single-site versus a 3-client federated model using a previously described Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19) diagnostic model. Additionally, to investigate the effect of system heterogeneity, we evaluate the performance of 4 FL variations.We leverage a FL healthcare collaborative including data from 5 international healthcare systems (US and Europe) encompassing 42 hospitals. We implemented a COVID-19 computer vision diagnosis system using the Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm implemented on Clara Train SDK 4.0. To study the effect of data heterogeneity, training data was pooled from 3 systems locally and federation was simulated. We compared a centralized/pooled model, versus FedAvg, and 3 personalized FL variations (FedProx, FedBN, and FedAMP).We observed comparable model performance with respect to internal validation (local model: AUROC 0.94 vs FedAvg: 0.95, P = .5) and improved model generalizability with the FedAvg model (P \< .05). When investigating the effects of model heterogeneity, we observed poor performance with FedAvg on internal validation as compared to personalized FL algorithms. FedAvg did have improved generalizability compared to personalized FL algorithms. On average, FedBN had the best rank performance on internal and external validation.FedAvg can significantly improve the generalization of the model compared to other personalization FL algorithms; however, at the cost of poor internal validity. Personalized FL may offer an opportunity to develop both internal and externally validated algorithms.

The goal of spatially explainable artificial intelligence (AI) classification approach is to build a classifier to distinguish two classes (e.g., responder, non-responder) based on the their spatial arrangements (e.g., spatial interactions between different point categories) given multi-category point data from two classes. This problem is important for generating hypotheses towards discovering new immunotherapies for cancer treatment as well as for other applications in biomedical research and microbial ecology. This problem is challenging due to an exponential number of category subsets which may vary in the strength of their spatial interactions. Most prior efforts on using human selected spatial association measures may not be sufficient for capturing the relevant spatial interactions (e.g., surrounded by) which may be of biological significance. In addition, the related deep neural networks are limited to category pairs and do not explore larger subsets of point categories. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Spatial-interaction Aware Multi-Category deep neural Network (SAMCNet) architecture and contribute novel local reference frame characterization and point pair prioritization layers for spatially explainable classification. Experimental results on multiple cancer datasets (e.g., MxIF) show that the proposed architecture provides higher prediction accuracy over baseline methods. A real-world case study demonstrates that the proposed work discovers patterns that are missed by the existing methods and has the potential to inspire new scientific discoveries.