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Ahmed Alaa

31 accepted papers

2026

Position: Deciphering the Functions of DNAs, RNAs, and Proteins Should Consider Multi-Modal Large Language Models

ICML 2026spotlight

Understanding the functions of DNAs, RNAs, and proteins is fundamental to advancing life science research and enabling translational applications such as drug discovery and precision medicine. While deep learning methods have shown promise in biomolecular function prediction, they typically constrai…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ReasonEdit: Editing Vision--Language Models using Human Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Model editing aims to correct errors in large, pretrained models without altering unrelated behaviors. While some recent works have edited vision–language models (VLMs), no existing editors tackle reasoning-heavy tasks, which typically require humans and models to reason about images. We therefore p…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Generalized Venn and Venn-Abers Calibration with Applications in Conformal Prediction

ICML 2025poster

Ensuring model calibration is critical for reliable prediction, yet popular distribution-free methods such as histogram binning and isotonic regression offer only asymptotic guarantees. We introduce a unified framework for Venn and Venn-Abers calibration that extends Vovk's approach beyond binary cl…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Lifelong Knowledge Editing requires Better Regularization

EMNLP 2025

Knowledge editing is a promising way to improve factuality in large language models, but recent studies have shown significant model degradation during sequential editing. In this paper, we formalize the popular locate-then-edit methods as a two-step fine-tuning process, allowing us to precisely ide

2025

Position: Medical Large Language Model Benchmarks Should Prioritize Construct Validity

ICML 2025oral

Medical large language models (LLMs) research often makes bold claims, from encoding clinical knowledge to reasoning like a physician. These claims are usually backed by evaluation on competitive benchmarks—a tradition inherited from mainstream machine learning. But how do we separate real progress…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Viability of Machine Translation for Healthcare in Low-Resourced Languages

EMNLP 2025

Machine Translation errors in high-stakes settings like healthcare pose unique risks that could lead to clinical harm. The challenges are even more pronounced for low-resourced languages where human translators are scarce and MT tools perform poorly. In this work, we provide a taxonomy of Machine Tr

2024

InstructCV: Instruction-Tuned Text-to-Image Diffusion Models as Vision Generalists

ICLR 2024poster

Recent advances in generative diffusion models have enabled text-controlled synthesis of realistic and diverse images with impressive quality. Despite these remarkable advances, the application of text-to-image generative models in computer vision for standard visual recognition tasks remains limite…

2024

Med-Real2Sim: Non-Invasive Medical Digital Twins using Physics-Informed Self-Supervised Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

A digital twin is a virtual replica of a real-world physical phenomena that uses mathematical modeling to characterize and simulate its defining features. By constructing digital twins for disease processes, we can perform in-silico simulations that mimic patients' health conditions and counterfactu…

2024

Prediction-powered Generalization of Causal Inferences

ICML 2024poster

Causal inferences from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) may not pertain to a *target* population where some effect modifiers have a different distribution. Prior work studies *generalizing* the results of a trial to a target population with no outcome but covariate data available. We show how the…

2023

Aligning Synthetic Medical Images with Clinical Knowledge using Human Feedback

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Generative models capable of precisely capturing nuanced clinical features in medical images hold great promise for facilitating clinical data sharing, enhancing rare disease datasets, and efficiently synthesizing (annotated) medical images at scale. Despite their potential, assessing the quality of…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2023

Conformal Meta-learners for Predictive Inference of Individual Treatment Effects

NeurIPS 2023oral

We investigate the problem of machine learning-based (ML) predictive inference on individual treatment effects (ITEs). Previous work has focused primarily on developing ML-based “meta-learners” that can provide point estimates of the conditional average treatment effect (CATE)—these are model-agnost…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2023

DiffInfinite: Large Mask-Image Synthesis via Parallel Random Patch Diffusion in Histopathology

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

We present DiffInfinite, a hierarchical diffusion model that generates arbitrarily large histological images while preserving long-range correlation structural information. Our approach first generates synthetic segmentation masks, subsequently used as conditions for the high-fidelity generative dif…

2022

ETAB: A Benchmark Suite for Visual Representation Learning in Echocardiography

NeurIPS 2022accept

Echocardiography is one of the most commonly used diagnostic imaging modalities in cardiology. Application of deep learning models to echocardiograms can enable automated identification of cardiac structures, estimation of cardiac function, and prediction of clinical outcomes. However, a major hindr…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2022

How Faithful is your Synthetic Data? Sample-level Metrics for Evaluating and Auditing Generative Models

ICML 2022spotlight

Devising domain- and model-agnostic evaluation metrics for generative models is an important and as yet unresolved problem. Most existing metrics, which were tailored solely to the image synthesis setup, exhibit a limited capacity for diagnosing the different modes of failure of generative models ac…

2021

Learning Matching Representations for Individualized Organ Transplantation Allocation

AISTATS 2021poster

Organ transplantation can improve life expectancy for recipients, but the probability of a successful transplant depends on the compatibility between donor and recipient features. Current medical practice relies on coarse rules for donor-recipient matching, but is short of domain knowledge regarding…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2021

Learning Queueing Policies for Organ Transplantation Allocation using Interpretable Counterfactual Survival Analysis

ICML 2021spotlight

Organ transplantation is often the last resort for treating end-stage illnesses, but managing transplant wait-lists is challenging because of organ scarcity and the complexity of assessing donor-recipient compatibility. In this paper, we develop a data-driven model for (real-time) organ allocation u…

2020

Discriminative Jackknife: Quantifying Uncertainty in Deep Learning via Higher-Order Influence Functions

ICML 2020poster

Deep learning models achieve high predictive accuracy across a broad spectrum of tasks, but rigorously quantifying their predictive uncertainty remains challenging. Usable estimates of predictive uncertainty should (1) cover the true prediction targets with high probability, and (2) discriminate bet…

2020

Frequentist Uncertainty in Recurrent Neural Networks via Blockwise Influence Functions

ICML 2020poster

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are instrumental in modelling sequential and time-series data. Yet, when using RNNs to inform decision-making, predictions by themselves are not sufficient {—} we also need estimates of predictive uncertainty. Existing approaches for uncertainty quantification in RNN…

2020

Learning Dynamic and Personalized Comorbidity Networks from Event Data using Deep Diffusion Processes

AISTATS 2020poster

Comorbid diseases co-occur and progress via complex temporal patterns that vary among individuals. In electronic medical records, we only observe onsets of diseases, but not their triggering comorbidities — i.e., the mechanisms underlying temporal relations between diseases need to be inferred. Lear…

2020

Time Series Deconfounder: Estimating Treatment Effects over Time in the Presence of Hidden Confounders

ICML 2020poster

The estimation of treatment effects is a pervasive problem in medicine. Existing methods for estimating treatment effects from longitudinal observational data assume that there are no hidden confounders, an assumption that is not testable in practice and, if it does not hold, leads to biased estimat…

Cited by 128SourcePDFScholar
2020

Unlabelled Data Improves Bayesian Uncertainty Calibration under Covariate Shift

ICML 2020poster

Modern neural networks have proven to be powerful function approximators, providing state-of-the-art performance in a multitude of applications. They however fall short in their ability to quantify confidence in their predictions — this is crucial in high-stakes applications that involve critical de…

Cited by 57SourcePDFScholar
2018

AutoPrognosis: Automated Clinical Prognostic Modeling via Bayesian Optimization with Structured Kernel Learning

ICML 2018oral

Clinical prognostic models derived from largescale healthcare data can inform critical diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. To enable off-theshelf usage of machine learning (ML) in prognostic research, we developed AUTOPROGNOSIS: a system for automating the design of predictive modeling pipelines t…

2018

Limits of Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: Guidelines for Practical Algorithm Design

ICML 2018oral

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects from observational data is a central problem in many domains. Because counterfactual data is inaccessible, the problem differs fundamentally from supervised learning, and entails a more complex set of modeling choices. Despite a variety of recently proposed…

2016

ForecastICU: A Prognostic Decision Support System for Timely Prediction of Intensive Care Unit Admission

ICML 2016poster

We develop ForecastICU: a prognostic decision support system that monitors hospitalized patients and prompts alarms for intensive care unit (ICU) admissions. ForecastICU is first trained in an offline stage by constructing a Bayesian belief system that corresponds to its belief about how trajectorie…

Cited by 59SourcePDFScholar