Rainfall Distribution in Landfalling Tropical Cyclones

Accurate prediction of rainfall distribution in landfalling tropical cyclones (LTCs) is very important to disaster prevention but quite challenging to operational forecasters. This chapter will describe the rainfall distribution in LTCs, including both axisymmetric and asymmetric distributions and their major controlling parameters, such as environmental vertical wind shear, TC intensity and motion, and coastline. In addition to the composite results from many LTC cases, several case studies are also given to illustrate the predominant factors that are key to the asymmetric rainfall distribution in LTCs. Future directions in this area and potential ways to improve the operational forecasts of rainfall distribution in LTCs are also discussed briefly

Trial2Vec: Zero-Shot Clinical Trial Document Similarity Search using Self-Supervision

Clinical trials are essential for drug development but are extremely expensive and time-consuming to conduct. It is beneficial to study similar historical trials when designing a clinical trial. However, lengthy trial documents and lack of labeled data make trial similarity search difficult. We propose a zero-shot clinical trial retrieval method, Trial2Vec, which learns through self-supervision without annotating similar clinical trials. Specifically, the meta-structure of trial documents (e.g., title, eligibility criteria, target disease) along with clinical knowledge (e.g., UMLS knowledge base https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/index.html) are leveraged to automatically generate contrastive samples. Besides, Trial2Vec encodes trial documents considering meta-structure thus producing compact embeddings aggregating multi-aspect information from the whole document. We show that our method yields medically interpretable embeddings by visualization and it gets a 15% average improvement over the best baselines on precision/recall for trial retrieval, which is evaluated on our labeled 1600 trial pairs. In addition, we prove the pre-trained embeddings benefit the downstream trial outcome prediction task over 240k trials. Software ias available at https://github.com/RyanWangZf/Trial2Vec.Comment: Findings of EMNLP 202

AutoTrial: Prompting Language Models for Clinical Trial Design

Clinical trials are critical for drug development. Constructing the appropriate eligibility criteria (i.e., the inclusion/exclusion criteria for patient recruitment) is essential for the trial's success. Proper design of clinical trial protocols should consider similar precedent trials and their eligibility criteria to ensure sufficient patient coverage. In this paper, we present a method named AutoTrial to aid the design of clinical eligibility criteria using language models. It allows (1) controllable generation under instructions via a hybrid of discrete and neural prompting, (2) scalable knowledge incorporation via in-context learning, and (3) explicit reasoning chains to provide rationales for understanding the outputs. Experiments on over 70K clinical trials verify that AutoTrial generates high-quality criteria texts that are fluent and coherent and with high accuracy in capturing the relevant clinical concepts to the target trial. It is noteworthy that our method, with a much smaller parameter size, gains around 60% winning rate against the GPT-3.5 baselines via human evaluations.Comment: EMNLP 2023 Mai

SPOT: Sequential Predictive Modeling of Clinical Trial Outcome with Meta-Learning

Clinical trials are essential to drug development but time-consuming, costly, and prone to failure. Accurate trial outcome prediction based on historical trial data promises better trial investment decisions and more trial success. Existing trial outcome prediction models were not designed to model the relations among similar trials, capture the progression of features and designs of similar trials, or address the skewness of trial data which causes inferior performance for less common trials. To fill the gap and provide accurate trial outcome prediction, we propose Sequential Predictive mOdeling of clinical Trial outcome (SPOT) that first identifies trial topics to cluster the multi-sourced trial data into relevant trial topics. It then generates trial embeddings and organizes them by topic and time to create clinical trial sequences. With the consideration of each trial sequence as a task, it uses a meta-learning strategy to achieve a point where the model can rapidly adapt to new tasks with minimal updates. In particular, the topic discovery module enables a deeper understanding of the underlying structure of the data, while sequential learning captures the evolution of trial designs and outcomes. This results in predictions that are not only more accurate but also more interpretable, taking into account the temporal patterns and unique characteristics of each trial topic. We demonstrate that SPOT wins over the prior methods by a significant margin on trial outcome benchmark data: with a 21.5\% lift on phase I, an 8.9\% lift on phase II, and a 5.5\% lift on phase III trials in the metric of the area under precision-recall curve (PR-AUC)

MindMap: Knowledge Graph Prompting Sparks Graph of Thoughts in Large Language Models

LLMs usually exhibit limitations in their ability to incorporate new knowledge, the generation of hallucinations, and the transparency of their decision-making process. In this paper, we explore how to prompt LLMs with knowledge graphs (KG), working as a remedy to engage LLMs with up-to-date knowledge and elicit the reasoning pathways from LLMs. Specifically, we build a prompting pipeline that endows LLMs with the capability of comprehending KG inputs and inferring with a combined implicit knowledge and the retrieved external knowledge. In addition, we investigate eliciting the mind map on which LLMs perform the reasoning and generate the answers. It is identified that the produced mind map exhibits the reasoning pathways of LLMs grounded on the ontology of knowledge, hence bringing the prospects of probing and gauging LLM inference in production. The experiments on three question & answering datasets also show that MindMap prompting leads to a striking empirical gain. For instance, prompting a GPT-3.5 with MindMap yields an overwhelming performance over GPT-4 consistently. We also demonstrate that with structured facts retrieved from KG, MindMap can outperform a series of prompting-with-document-retrieval methods, benefiting from more accurate, concise, and comprehensive knowledge from KGs.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, 9 table

Pruning Adversarially Robust Neural Networks without Adversarial Examples

Adversarial pruning compresses models while preserving robustness. Current methods require access to adversarial examples during pruning. This significantly hampers training efficiency. Moreover, as new adversarial attacks and training methods develop at a rapid rate, adversarial pruning methods need to be modified accordingly to keep up. In this work, we propose a novel framework to prune a previously trained robust neural network while maintaining adversarial robustness, without further generating adversarial examples. We leverage concurrent self-distillation and pruning to preserve knowledge in the original model as well as regularizing the pruned model via the Hilbert-Schmidt Information Bottleneck. We comprehensively evaluate our proposed framework and show its superior performance in terms of both adversarial robustness and efficiency when pruning architectures trained on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 datasets against five state-of-the-art attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/neu-spiral/PwoA/.Comment: Published at ICDM 2022 as a conference pape