Accurate flood prediction is crucial for disaster prevention and mitigation. Hydrological data exhibit highly nonlinear temporal patterns and encompass complex spatial relationships between rainfall and flow. Existing flood prediction models struggle to capture these intricate temporal features and spatial dependencies. This paper presents an adaptive periodic and spatial self-attention method based on LSTM (APS-LSTM) to address these challenges. The APS-LSTM learns temporal features from a multi-periodicity perspective and captures diverse spatial dependencies from different period divisions. The APS-LSTM consists of three main stages, (i) Multi-Period Division, that utilizes Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to divide various periodic patterns; (ii) Spatio-Temporal Information Extraction, that performs periodic and spatial self-attention focusing on intra- and inter-periodic temporal patterns and spatial dependencies; (iii) Adaptive Aggregation, that relies on amplitude strength to aggregate the computational results from each periodic division. The abundant experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of APS-LSTM. The code is available: https://github.com/oopcmd/APS-LSTM.
Despite significant advancements in robotic systems and surgical data science, ensuring safe and optimal execution in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) remains a complex challenge. Current surgical error detection methods involve two parts: identifying surgical gestures and then detecting errors within each gesture clip. These methods seldom consider the rich contextual and semantic information inherent in surgical videos, limiting their performance due to reliance on accurate gesture identification. Motivated by the chain-of-thought prompting in natural language processing, this letter presents a novel and real-time end-to-end error detection framework, Chain-of-Thought (COG) prompting, leveraging contextual information from surgical videos. This encompasses two reasoning modules designed to mimic the decision-making processes of expert surgeons. Concretely, we first design a Gestural-Visual Reasoning module, which utilizes transformer and attention architectures for gesture prompting, while the second, a Multi-Scale Temporal Reasoning module, employs a multi-stage temporal convolutional network with both slow and fast paths for temporal information extraction. We extensively validate our method on the public benchmark RMIS dataset JIGSAWS. Our method encapsulates the reasoning processes inherent to surgical activities enabling it to outperform the state-of-the-art by 4.6% in F1 score, 4.6% in Accuracy, and 5.9% in Jaccard index while processing each frame in 6.69 milliseconds on average, demonstrating the great potential of our approach in enhancing the safety and efficacy of RMIS procedures and surgical education. The code will be available.
Event cameras draw inspiration from biological systems, boasting low latency and high dynamic range while consuming minimal power. The most current approach to processing Event Cloud often involves converting it into frame-based representations, which neglects the sparsity of events, loses fine-grained temporal information, and increases the computational burden. In contrast, Point Cloud is a popular representation for processing 3-dimensional data and serves as an alternative method to exploit local and global spatial features. Nevertheless, previous point-based methods show an unsatisfactory performance compared to the frame-based method in dealing with spatio-temporal event streams. In order to bridge the gap, we propose EventMamba, an efficient and effective framework based on Point Cloud representation by rethinking the distinction between Event Cloud and Point Cloud, emphasizing vital temporal information. The Event Cloud is subsequently fed into a hierarchical structure with staged modules to process both implicit and explicit temporal features. Specifically, we redesign the global extractor to enhance explicit temporal extraction among a long sequence of events with temporal aggregation and State Space Model (SSM) based Mamba. Our model consumes minimal computational resources in the experiments and still exhibits SOTA point-based performance on six different scales of action recognition datasets. It even outperformed all frame-based methods on both Camera Pose Relocalization (CPR) and eye-tracking regression tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/rhwxmx/EventMamba.
We introduce SoftTiger, a clinical large language model (CLaM) designed as a foundation model for healthcare workflows. The narrative and unstructured nature of clinical notes is a major obstacle for healthcare intelligentization. We address a critical problem of structuring clinical notes into clinical data, according to international interoperability standards. We collect and annotate data for three subtasks, namely, international patient summary, clinical impression and medical encounter. We then supervised fine-tuned a state-of-the-art LLM using public and credentialed clinical data. The training is orchestrated in a way that the target model can first support basic clinical tasks such as abbreviation expansion and temporal information extraction, and then learn to perform more complex downstream clinical tasks. Moreover, we address several modeling challenges in the healthcare context, e.g., extra long context window. Our blind pairwise evaluation shows that SoftTiger outperforms other popular open-source models and GPT-3.5, comparable to Gemini-pro, with a mild gap from GPT-4. We believe that LLMs may become a step-stone towards healthcare digitalization and democratization. Therefore, we publicly release SoftTiger models at scales of 13 billion and 70 billion parameters, as well as datasets and code for our innovative scalable evaluation, hopefully, making a significant contribution to the healthcare industry.
Temporal information extraction (TIE) has attracted a great deal of interest over the last two decades, leading to the development of a significant number of datasets. Despite its benefits, having access to a large volume of corpora makes it difficult when it comes to benchmark TIE systems. On the one hand, different datasets have different annotation schemes, thus hindering the comparison between competitors across different corpora. On the other hand, the fact that each corpus is commonly disseminated in a different format requires a considerable engineering effort for a researcher/practitioner to develop parsers for all of them. This constraint forces researchers to select a limited amount of datasets to evaluate their systems which consequently limits the comparability of the systems. Yet another obstacle that hinders the comparability of the TIE systems is the evaluation metric employed. While most research works adopt traditional metrics such as precision, recall, and $F_1$, a few others prefer temporal awareness -- a metric tailored to be more comprehensive on the evaluation of temporal systems. Although the reason for the absence of temporal awareness in the evaluation of most systems is not clear, one of the factors that certainly weights this decision is the necessity to implement the temporal closure algorithm in order to compute temporal awareness, which is not straightforward to implement neither is currently easily available. All in all, these problems have limited the fair comparison between approaches and consequently, the development of temporal extraction systems. To mitigate these problems, we have developed tieval, a Python library that provides a concise interface for importing different corpora and facilitates system evaluation. In this paper, we present the first public release of tieval and highlight its most relevant features.
In the electronic health record, using clinical notes to identify entities such as disorders and their temporality (e.g. the order of an event relative to a time index) can inform many important analyses. However, creating training data for clinical entity tasks is time consuming and sharing labeled data is challenging due to privacy concerns. The information needs of the COVID-19 pandemic highlight the need for agile methods of training machine learning models for clinical notes. We present Trove, a framework for weakly supervised entity classification using medical ontologies and expert-generated rules. Our approach, unlike hand-labeled notes, is easy to share and modify, while offering performance comparable to learning from manually labeled training data. In this work, we validate our framework on six benchmark tasks and demonstrate Trove's ability to analyze the records of patients visiting the emergency department at Stanford Health Care for COVID-19 presenting symptoms and risk factors.
Temporal knowledge bases associate relational (s,r,o) triples with a set of times (or a single time instant) when the relation is valid. While time-agnostic KB completion (KBC) has witnessed significant research, temporal KB completion (TKBC) is in its early days. In this paper, we consider predicting missing entities (link prediction) and missing time intervals (time prediction) as joint TKBC tasks where entities, relations, and time are all embedded in a uniform, compatible space. We present TIMEPLEX, a novel time-aware KBC method, that also automatically exploits the recurrent nature of some relations and temporal interactions between pairs of relations. TIMEPLEX achieves state-of-the-art performance on both prediction tasks. We also find that existing TKBC models heavily overestimate link prediction performance due to imperfect evaluation mechanisms. In response, we propose improved TKBC evaluation protocols for both link and time prediction tasks, dealing with subtle issues that arise from the partial overlap of time intervals in gold instances and system predictions.
Inspired by the recent social movement of #MeToo, we are building a chatbot to assist survivors of sexual harassment cases (designed for the city of Maastricht but can easily be extended). The motivation behind this work is twofold: properly assist survivors of such events by directing them to appropriate institutions that can offer them help and increase the incident documentation so as to gather more data about harassment cases which are currently under reported. We break down the problem into three data science/machine learning components: harassment type identification (treated as a classification problem), spatio-temporal information extraction (treated as Named Entity Recognition problem) and dialogue with the users (treated as a slot-filling based chatbot). We are able to achieve a success rate of more than 98% for the identification of a harassment-or-not case and around 80% for the specific type harassment identification. Locations and dates are identified with more than 90% accuracy and time occurrences prove more challenging with almost 80%. Finally, initial validation of the chatbot shows great potential for the further development and deployment of such a beneficial for the whole society tool.
The current leading paradigm for temporal information extraction from text consists of three phases: (1) recognition of events and temporal expressions, (2) recognition of temporal relations among them, and (3) time-line construction from the temporal relations. In contrast to the first two phases, the last phase, time-line construction, received little attention and is the focus of this work. In this paper, we propose a new method to construct a linear time-line from a set of (extracted) temporal relations. But more importantly, we propose a novel paradigm in which we directly predict start and end-points for events from the text, constituting a time-line without going through the intermediate step of prediction of temporal relations as in earlier work. Within this paradigm, we propose two models that predict in linear complexity, and a new training loss using TimeML-style annotations, yielding promising results.