Yong Cheng
Research Areas
Authored Publications
Google Publications
Other Publications
Sort By
Towards Conversational Diagnostic AI
Anil Palepu
Khaled Saab
Jan Freyberg
Ryutaro Tanno
Amy Wang
Brenna Li
Nenad Tomašev
Le Hou
Albert Webson
Kavita Kulkarni
Sara Mahdavi
Juro Gottweis
Joelle Barral
Kat Chou
Arxiv (2024) (to appear)
Preview abstract
At the heart of medicine lies the physician-patient dialogue, where skillful history-taking paves the way for accurate diagnosis, effective management, and enduring trust. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems capable of diagnostic dialogue could increase accessibility, consistency, and quality of care. However, approximating clinicians' expertise is an outstanding grand challenge. Here, we introduce AMIE (Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer), a Large Language Model (LLM) based AI system optimized for diagnostic dialogue.
AMIE uses a novel self-play based simulated environment with automated feedback mechanisms for scaling learning across diverse disease conditions, specialties, and contexts. We designed a framework for evaluating clinically-meaningful axes of performance including history-taking, diagnostic accuracy, management reasoning, communication skills, and empathy. We compared AMIE's performance to that of primary care physicians (PCPs) in a randomized, double-blind crossover study of text-based consultations with validated patient actors in the style of an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). The study included 149 case scenarios from clinical providers in Canada, the UK, and India, 20 PCPs for comparison with AMIE, and evaluations by specialist physicians and patient actors. AMIE demonstrated greater diagnostic accuracy and superior performance on 28 of 32 axes according to specialist physicians and 24 of 26 axes according to patient actors. Our research has several limitations and should be interpreted with appropriate caution. Clinicians were limited to unfamiliar synchronous text-chat which permits large-scale LLM-patient interactions but is not representative of usual clinical practice. While further research is required before AMIE could be translated to real-world settings, the results represent a milestone towards conversational diagnostic AI.
View details
Spae: Semantic pyramid autoencoder for multimodal generation with frozen LLMs
Lijun Yu
Zhiruo Wang
Yonatan Bisk
Alex Hauptmann
Lu Jiang
NeurIPS (2023)
Preview abstract
In this work, we introduce Semantic Pyramid AutoEncoder (SPAE) for enabling frozen LLMs to perform both understanding and generation tasks involving non-linguistic modalities such as images or videos. SPAE converts between raw pixels and interpretable lexical tokens (or words) extracted from the LLM's vocabulary. The resulting tokens capture both the semantic meaning and the fine-grained details needed for visual reconstruction, effectively translating the visual content into a language comprehensible to the LLM, and empowering it to perform a wide array of multimodal tasks. Our approach is validated through in-context learning experiments with frozen PaLM 2 and GPT 3.5 on a diverse set of image understanding and generation tasks. Our method marks the first successful attempt to enable a frozen LLM to generate image content while surpassing state-of-the-art performance in image understanding tasks, under the same setting, by over 25%.
View details
MAGVIT: Masked Generative Video Transformer
Lijun Yu
Han Zhang
Huiwen Chang
Alex Hauptmann
Lu Jiang
CVPR (2023)
Preview abstract
This paper introduces a Masked Generative Video Transformer, named MAGVIT, for multi-task video generation. We train a single MAGVIT model and apply it to multiple video generation tasks at inference time. To this end, two new designs are proposed: an improved 3D tokenizer model to quantize a video into spatial-temporal visual tokens, and a novel technique to embed conditions inside the mask to facilitate multi-task training.
We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the compelling quality, efficiency, and flexibility of the proposed model.
First, MAGVIT radically improves the previous best fidelity on two video generation tasks.
In terms of efficiency, MAGVIT offers leading video generation speed at inference time, which is estimated to be one or two orders-of-magnitudes faster than other models. As for flexibility, we verified that a single trained MAGVIT is able to generically perform 8+ tasks at several video benchmarks from drastically different visual domains. We will open source our framework and models.
View details
VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation
Lijun Yu
Xiuye Gu
Rachel Hornung
Hassan Akbari
Ming-Chang Chiu
Josh Dillon
Agrim Gupta
Meera Hahn
Anja Hauth
David Hendon
Alonso Martinez
Grant Schindler
Huisheng Wang
Jimmy Yan
Xuan Yang
Lu Jiang
arxiv Preprint (2023) (to appear)
Preview abstract
We present VideoPoet, a language model capable of synthesizing high-quality video, with matching audio, from a large variety of conditioning signals. VideoPoet employs a decoder-only transformer architecture that processes multimodal inputs -- including images, videos, text, and audio. The training protocol follows that of Large Language Models (LLMs), consisting of two stages: pretraining and task-specific adaptation. During pretraining, VideoPoet incorporates a mixture of multimodal generative objectives within an autoregressive Transformer framework. The pretrained LLM serves as a foundation that can be adapted for a range of video generation tasks. We present empirical results demonstrating the model's state-of-the-art capabilities in zero-shot video generation, specifically highlighting VideoPoet's ability to generate high-fidelity motions. Project page: http://sites.research.google/videopoet/
View details
Towards Accurate Differential Diagnosis with Large Language Models
Daniel McDuff
Anil Palepu
Amy Wang
Yash Sharma
Kavita Kulkarni
Le Hou
Sara Mahdavi
Sushant Prakash
Anupam Pathak
Shwetak Patel
Ewa Dominowska
Juro Gottweis
Joelle Barral
Kat Chou
Jake Sunshine
Arxiv (2023)
Preview abstract
An accurate differential diagnosis (DDx) is a cornerstone of medical care, often reached through an iterative process of interpretation that combines clinical history, physical examination, investigations and procedures. Interactive interfaces powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to both assist and automate aspects of this process. In this study, we introduce an LLM optimized for diagnostic reasoning, and evaluate its ability to generate a DDx alone or as an aid to clinicians. 20 clinicians evaluated 302 challenging, real-world medical cases sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) case reports. Each case report was read by two clinicians, who were randomized to one of two assistive conditions: either assistance from search engines and standard medical resources, or LLM assistance in addition to these tools. All clinicians provided a baseline, unassisted DDx prior to using the respective assistive tools. Our LLM for DDx exhibited standalone performance that exceeded that of unassisted clinicians (top-10 accuracy 59.1% vs 33.6%, [p = 0.04]). Comparing the two assisted study arms, the DDx quality score was higher for clinicians assisted by our LLM (top-10 accuracy 51.7%) compared to clinicians without its assistance (36.1%) (McNemar's Test: 45.7, p < 0.01) and clinicians with search (44.4%) (4.75, p = 0.03). Further, clinicians assisted by our LLM arrived at more comprehensive differential lists than those without its assistance. Our study suggests that our LLM for DDx has potential to improve clinicians' diagnostic reasoning and accuracy in challenging cases, meriting further real-world evaluation for its ability to empower physicians and widen patients' access to specialist-level expertise.
View details
Preview abstract
We present Mu2SLAM, a multilingual sequence-to-sequence model pre-trained jointly on un-labeled speech, unlabeled text and supervised data spanning Automatic Speech Recognition(ASR), Automatic Speech Translation (AST)and Machine Translation (MT), in over 100 languages. By leveraging a quantized representation of speech as a target, Mu2SLAM trains ona sequence-to-sequence masked denoising objective similar to T5 on both unlabeled speech and text, while utilizing the supervised tasks to improve cross-lingual and cross-modal representation alignment within the model. On CoVoSTAST, Mu2SLAM establishes a new state-of-the-art for models trained on public datasets, improv-ing on xx-en translation over the previous best by 1.9 Bleu points and on en-xx translation by 0.9 Bleu points. On Voxpopuli ASR, our model matches the performance of a mSLAM model finetuned with a RNN-T decoder, despite using a relatively weaker sequence-to-sequence architecture. On text understanding tasks, our model improves by more than 6% over mSLAM on XNLI, getting closer to the performance of mT5 models of comparable capacity on XNLI and TydiQA, paving the way towards a single model for all speech and text understanding tasks.
View details
Preview abstract
Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) typically learns to maximize the likelihood of training examples from a combination set of multiple language pairs. However, this mechanical combination only relies on the basic sharing to learn the inductive bias, which undermines the generalization and transferability of multilingual NMT models. In this paper, we introduce a multilingual crossover encoder-decoder (mXEnDec) to fuse language pairs at instance level to exploit cross-lingual signals. For better fusions on multilingual data, we propose several techniques to deal with the language interpolation, dissimilar language fusion and heavy data imbalance. Experimental results on a large-scale WMT multilingual data set show that our approach significantly improves model performance on general multilingual test sets and the model transferability on zero-shot test sets (up to $+5.53$ BLEU).
Results on noisy inputs demonstrates the capability of our approach to improve model robustness against the code-switching noise. We also conduct qualitative and quantitative representation comparisons to analyze the advantages of our approach at the representation level.
View details
Preview abstract
Recently, self-supervised pre-training of text representations has been success-fully applied to low-resource Neural Machine Translation (NMT). However, it usually fails to achieve dramatic success on resource-rich NMT. In this paper, we propose a joint training approach, F2-XEnDec, to jointly self-supervised and supervised train NMT models. To this end, a new task called crossover encoder-decoder (XEnDec) is designed to entangle their representations. The key idea is to combine pseudo parallel sentences (also generated byXEnDec)) used in self-supervised training and parallel sentences in supervised training through a second crossover. Experiments on two resource-rich translation benchmarks, WMT’14English-German and English-French, demonstrate our approach achieve substantial improvements over the Transformer. We also show that our approach is capable of improving the model robustness against input perturbations, in particular for code-switched perturbations.
View details
Preview abstract
In this paper, we propose a new adversarial augmentation method for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The main idea is to minimize the vicinal risk over virtual sentences sampled from two vicinity distributions, in which the crucial one is a novel vicinity distribution for adversarial sentences that
describes a smooth interpolated embedding space centered around observed training sentence pairs. We then discuss our approach, AdvAug, to train NMT models using the embeddings of virtual sentences in sequence-tosequence learning. Experiments on ChineseEnglish, English-French, and English-German
translation benchmarks show that AdvAug achieves significant improvements over the Transformer (up to 4.9 BLEU points), and substantially outperforms other data augmentation techniques (e.g. back-translation) without using extra corpora.
View details
Towards Web-based Etymological Hanzi learning
Genze Wu
Jia Xing
Julia (Wenli) Zhu
Jun Chen
Kevin Jing
Sijia Ma
Wenhui Guo
Yaolin Chen
Yingying Zhao
(2020)
Preview abstract
Modern-day Chinese characters, or Hanzi, originate from the ancient oracle-bone scripts (甲骨文). Such etymological relationship creates unique opportunities for Chinese literacy learning. This work proposes to use Web-based tools and the latest machine learning techniques to scale-up and enhance etymological Hanzi learning. By sharing our implementation details from launching an interactive sketch-based learning exhibition, we hope education-AI becomes more widely incorporated into today’s commercial Web applications.
View details
Living Jiagu : Enabling Constructive Etymology for Chinese Learning
Sijia Ma
Jun Chen
Wenhui Guo
Yingying Zhao
Yaolin Chen
Kevin Jing
Julia (Wenli) Zhu
Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, pp. 1-4
Preview abstract
Living Jiagu is an interactive, wall-sized exhibition for the engaging learning of Chinese writing. Living Jiagu leverages state-of-the-art machine learning technologies to enable the recognition and recall of Chinese characters via constructive etymology in context. That is, learning the writing and meaning of a pictographic character from image prompts similar to the creators of Oracle Bone Script (OBS) 3000 years ago and experiencing how these characters function and interact in natural scene. An installation of Living Jiagu received positive feedback from over one thousand users.
View details
Preview abstract
While neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved remarkable success, NMT systems are prone to make word omission errors. In this work, we propose a contrastive learning approach to reducing word omission errors in NMT. The basic idea is to enable the NMT model to assign a higher probability to a ground-truth translation and a lower probability to an erroneous translation, which is automatically constructed from the ground-truth translation by omitting words. We design different types of negative examples depending on the number of omitted words, word frequency, and part of speech. Experiments on Chinese-to-English, German-to-English, and Russian-to-English translation tasks show that our approach is effective in reducing word omission errors and achieves better translation performance than three baseline methods.
View details
Preview abstract
Generating high-quality paraphrases is a fundamental yet challenging natural language processing task. Despite the effectiveness of previous work based on generative models, there remain problems
with exposure bias in recurrent neural networks, and often a failure to generate realistic sentences. To overcome these challenges, we propose the first end-to-end conditional generative architecture for generating paraphrases via adversarial training, which does not depend on extra linguistic information.
Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming previous generative architectures on both automatic metrics (BLEU, METEOR, and TER) and human evaluations.
View details
Preview abstract
Neural machine translation (NMT) suffers from the vulnerability to noisy perturbations in the input, which can cause a model trained on the clean data to behave abnormally on the noisy input. We propose an approach to improving the robustness of NMT models, which consists of two parts: (1) attack the translation model with adversarial source examples; (2) defend the translation model with adversarial target input to be robust against adversarial source input. For the generation of adversarial input, we propose to use a gradient-based method to craft adversarial examples that are advised by the translation loss in NMT based on the clean input. Experimental results on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements on the standard clean data and performs robustness on the noisy data.
View details
No Results Found