Clinical coding translates medical information from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) into structured codes such as ICD-10, which are essential for healthcare applications. Advances in deep learning and natural language processing have enabled automatic ICD coding models to achieve notable accuracy metrics on in-domain datasets when adequately trained. However, the scarcity of clinical medical texts and the variability across different datasets pose significant challenges, making it difficult for current state-of-the-art models to ensure robust generalization performance across diverse data distributions. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4o, have shown great generalization capabilities across general domains and potential in medical information processing tasks. However, their performance in generating clinical codes remains suboptimal. In this study, we propose a novel ICD coding paradigm based on code verification to leverage the capabilities of LLMs. Instead of directly generating accurate codes from a vast code space, we simplify the task by verifying the code assignment from a given candidate set. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that LLMs function more effectively as code verifiers rather than code generators, with GPT-4o achieving the best performance on the CodiEsp dataset under zero-shot settings. Furthermore, our results indicate that LLM-based systems can perform on par with state-of-the-art clinical coding systems while offering superior generalizability across institutions, languages, and ICD versions.

The ubiquitous use of face recognition has sparked increasing privacy concerns, as unauthorized access to sensitive face images could compromise the information of individuals. This paper presents an in-depth study of the privacy protection of face images’ visual information and against recovery. Drawing on the perceptual disparity between humans and models, we propose to conceal visual information by pruning human-perceivable low-frequency components. For impeding recovery, we first elucidate the seeming paradox between reducing model-exploitable information and retaining high recognition accuracy. Based on recent theoretical insights and our observation on model attention, we propose a solution to the dilemma, by advocating for the training and inference of recognition models on randomly selected frequency components. We distill our findings into a novel privacy-preserving face recognition method, PartialFace. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PartialFace effectively balances privacy protection goals and recognition accuracy. Code is available at: https://github.com/Tencent/TFace.

Abstract There are some problems in abnormal node sensing in regional wireless networks, such as low sensing accuracy and poor judgment results of abnormal states of sensing nodes. Therefore, this paper develops a method for abnormal node sensing in regional wireless networks based on convolutional neural network. In addition, we will analyze the structure of regional wireless network nodes and determine the distribution mode of wireless network nodes. The regional wireless network node data are extracted and the pivot quantity and two-dimensional Gaussian distribution state are constructed using the median to build the regional wireless network node deployment model according to the confidence interval of the data characteristics; analyze the basic principle of convolution neural network, determine the operation mode of convolution kernel, classify the regional wireless network node data using Bayesian network, set a safety distance to determine the abnormal node of the regional wireless network, train the determined abnormal data as the input data of convolutional neural network and input it into the constructed perception model of the abnormal node of the regional wireless network, the loss function is set to continuously update the iterative results to realize the perception of abnormal node in the regional wireless network. The simulation results show that the sensing range of this method is relatively consistent with the range set by the sample, and the sensing accuracy reaches more than 95%, and the abnormal state error of abnormal nodes in the evaluation sample area is always less than 2%, which verifies that this method improves the sensing accuracy, reduces the error, and has higher application value.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely-used technique that utilizes large networks to improve the performance of compact models. Previous KD approaches usually aim to guide the student to mimic the teacher's behavior completely in the representation space. However, such one-to-one corresponding constraints may lead to inflexible knowledge transfer from the teacher to the student, especially those with low model capacities. Inspired by the ultimate goal of KD methods, we propose a novel Evaluation-oriented KD method (EKD) for deep face recognition to directly reduce the performance gap between the teacher and student models during training. Specifically, we adopt the commonly used evaluation metrics in face recognition, i.e., False Positive Rate (FPR) and True Positive Rate (TPR) as the performance indicator. According to the evaluation protocol, the critical pair relations that cause the TPR and FPR difference between the teacher and student models are selected. Then, the critical relations in the student are constrained to approximate the corresponding ones in the teacher by a novel rank-based loss function, giving more flexibility to the student with low capacity. Extensive experimental results on popular benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our EKD over state-of-the-art competitors.

With the wide application of face recognition systems, there is rising concern that original face images could be exposed to malicious intents and consequently cause personal privacy breaches. This paper presents DuetFace, a novel privacy-preserving face recognition method that employs collaborative inference in the frequency domain. Starting from a counterintuitive discovery that face recognition can achieve surprisingly good performance with only visually indistinguishable high-frequency channels, this method designs a credible split of frequency channels by their cruciality for visualization and operates the server-side model on non-crucial channels. However, the model degrades in its attention to facial features due to the missing visual information. To compensate, the method introduces a plug-in interactive block to allow attention transfer from the client-side by producing a feature mask. The mask is further refined by deriving and overlaying a facial region of interest (ROI). Extensive experiments on multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in protecting face images from undesired visual inspection, reconstruction, and identification while maintaining high task availability and performance. Results show that the proposed method achieves a comparable recognition accuracy and computation cost to the unprotected ArcFace and outperforms the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/TFace/tree/master/recognition/tasks/duetface.

Demographic bias is a significant challenge in practical face recognition systems. Existing methods heavily rely on accurate demographic annotations. However, such annotations are usually unavailable in real scenarios. Moreover, these methods are typically designed for a specific demographic group and are not general enough. In this paper, we propose a false positive rate penalty loss, which mitigates face recognition bias by increasing the consistency of instance False Positive Rate (FPR). Specifically, we first define the instance FPR as the ratio between the number of the non-target similarities above a unified threshold and the total number of the non-target similarities. The unified threshold is estimated for a given total FPR. Then, an additional penalty term, which is in proportion to the ratio of instance FPR overall FPR, is introduced into the denominator of the softmax-based loss. The larger the instance FPR, the larger the penalty. By such unequal penalties, the instance FPRs are supposed to be consistent. Compared with the previous debiasing methods, our method requires no demographic annotations. Thus, it can mitigate the bias among demographic groups divided by various attributes, and these attributes are not needed to be previously predefined during training. Extensive experimental results on popular benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art competitors. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/xkx0430/FairnessFR.