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David A Clifton

24 accepted papers

2026

LENS: Multi-level Evaluation of Multimodal Reasoning with Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant advances in integrating visual and linguistic information, yet their ability to reason about complex and real-world scenarios remains limited. Existing benchmarks are usually constructed in a task-oriented manner, without a guarantee…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Neuro-Symbolic Federated Learning over Heterogeneous Data-Views: A Structured Approach to Distributive EHR Modelling

AAAI 2026technical

Federated learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving model training across distributed Electronic Health Records (EHRs), but its deployment remains limited by data-view heterogeneity, where institutions maintain incompatible local schemas. Most existing methods address this by enforcing flat, aligned

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

DrAgent: Empowering Large Language Models as Medical Agents for Multi-hop Medical Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated outperforming human experts in medical examinations, it remains challenging to adopt LLMs in real-world clinical decision-making that typically involves multi-hop medical reasoning. Common practices include prompting commercial LLMs and fine-tu

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Enhancing Online Continual Learning with Plug-and-Play State Space Model and Class-Conditional Mixture of Discretization

CVPR 2025poster

Online continual learning (OCL) seeks to learn new tasks from data streams that appear only once, while retaining knowledge of previously learned tasks. Most existing methods rely on replay, focusing on enhancing memory retention through regularization or distillation. However, they often overlook t…

2025

F^3OCUS - Federated Finetuning of Vision-Language Foundation Models with Optimal Client Layer Updating Strategy via Multi-objective Meta-Heuristics

CVPR 2025highlight

Effective training of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on resource-constrained client devices in Federated Learning (FL) requires the usage of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies. To this end, we demonstrate the impact of two factors, viz., client-specific layer importance score tha…

2025

Information Transfer Across Clinical Tasks via Adaptive Parameter Optimisation

AISTATS 2025oral

This paper presents Adaptive Parameter Optimisation (APO), a novel framework for optimising shared models across multiple clinical tasks, addressing the challenges of balancing strict parameter sharing—often leading to task conflicts—and soft parameter sharing, which may limit effective cross-task i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Microtitre Plate Image Augmentation with Generative Adversarial Networks

ICASSP 2025accepted

Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing (AST) based on microorganism culturing is the gold-standard technique to determine whether a pathogen is susceptible or resistant to available antibiotics. While broth microdilution offers a potential high-throughput method for AST, reading and interpreting microtit…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Optimising Clinical Federated Learning through Mode Connectivity-based Model Aggregation

AISTATS 2025poster

Federated Learning (FL) involves a server aggregating local models from clients to compute a global model. However, this process can struggle to position the global model in low-loss regions of the parameter space for all clients, resulting in subpar convergence and inequitable performance across cl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Optimization Inspired Few-Shot Adaptation for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in real-world applications. However, adapting LLMs to novel tasks via fine-tuning often requires substantial training data and computational resources that are impractical in few-shot scenarios. Existing approaches, such as In-con…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Oracle-MoE: Locality-preserving Routing in the Oracle Space for Memory-constrained Large Language Model Inference

ICML 2025poster

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is widely adopted to deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices with limited memory budgets. Although MoE is, in theory, an inborn memory-friendly architecture requiring only a few activated experts to reside in the memory for inference, current MoE architectures ca…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SpikeLLM: Scaling up Spiking Neural Network to Large Language Models via Saliency-based Spiking

ICLR 2025poster

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters have improved performance in various applications, but their inference processes demand significant energy and computational resources. In contrast, the human brain, with approximately 86 billion neurons, is much more en…

2024

CC-SAM: Enhancing SAM with Cross-feature Attention and Context for Ultrasound Image Segmentation

ECCV 2024poster

"The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has achieved remarkable successes in the realm of natural image segmentation, but its deployment in the medical imaging sphere has encountered challenges. Specifically, the model struggles with medical images that feature low contrast, faint boundaries, intricate mo…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Dynamic Inter-treatment Information Sharing for Individualized Treatment Effects Estimation

AISTATS 2024poster

Estimation of individualized treatment effects (ITE) from observational studies is a fundamental problem in causal inference and holds significant importance across domains, including healthcare. However, limited observational datasets pose challenges in reliable ITE estimation as data have to be sp…

2024

Federated Learning For Heterogeneous Electronic Health Records Utilising Augmented Temporal Graph Attention Networks

AISTATS 2024poster

The proliferation of decentralised electronic healthcare records (EHRs) across medical institutions requires innovative federated learning strategies for collaborative data analysis and global model training, prioritising data privacy. A prevalent issue during decentralised model training is the dat…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark

EMNLP 2024main

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) to assist clinicians has attracted remarkable attention. Existing works mainly adopt the close-ended question-answering (QA) task with answer options for evaluation. However, many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set o…

2023

Adversarial De-confounding in Individualised Treatment Effects Estimation

AISTATS 2023poster

Observational studies have recently received significant attention from the machine learning community due to the increasingly available non-experimental observational data and the limitations of the experimental studies, such as considerable cost, impracticality, small and less representative sampl…

2023

Disfluent Cues for Enhanced Speech Understanding in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2023long findings

In computational linguistics, the common practice is to "clean" disfluent content from spontaneous speech. However, we hypothesize that these disfluencies might serve as more than mere noise, potentially acting as informative cues. We use a range of pre-trained models for a reading comprehension tas…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Rethinking Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation: A Variance-Reduction Perspective

NeurIPS 2023poster

For medical image segmentation, contrastive learning is the dominant practice to improve the quality of visual representations by contrasting semantically similar and dissimilar pairs of samples. This is enabled by the observation that without accessing ground truth labels, negative examples with tr…

2022

Expectation-Maximization Contrastive Learning for Compact Video-and-Language Representations

NeurIPS 2022accept

Most video-and-language representation learning approaches employ contrastive learning, e.g., CLIP, to project the video and text features into a common latent space according to the semantic similarities of text-video pairs. However, such learned shared latent spaces are not often optimal, and the…

2022

Retrieve, Reason, and Refine: Generating Accurate and Faithful Patient Instructions

NeurIPS 2022accept

The "Patient Instruction" (PI), which contains critical instructional information provided both to carers and to the patient at the time of discharge, is essential for the patient to manage their condition outside hospital. An accurate and easy-to-follow PI can improve the self-management of patient…

2022

SoQal: Selective Oracle Questioning for Consistency Based Active Learning of Cardiac Signals

ICML 2022spotlight

Clinical settings are often characterized by abundant unlabelled data and limited labelled data. This is typically driven by the high burden placed on oracles (e.g., physicians) to provide annotations. One way to mitigate this burden is via active learning (AL) which involves the (a) acquisition and…

2021

CLOCS: Contrastive Learning of Cardiac Signals Across Space, Time, and Patients

ICML 2021spotlight

The healthcare industry generates troves of unlabelled physiological data. This data can be exploited via contrastive learning, a self-supervised pre-training method that encourages representations of instances to be similar to one another. We propose a family of contrastive learning methods, CLOCS,…

2021

CROCS: Clustering and Retrieval of Cardiac Signals Based on Patient Disease Class, Sex, and Age

NeurIPS 2021poster

The process of manually searching for relevant instances in, and extracting information from, clinical databases underpin a multitude of clinical tasks. Such tasks include disease diagnosis, clinical trial recruitment, and continuing medical education. This manual search-and-extract process, however…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2021

ProSelfLC: Progressive Self Label Correction for Training Robust Deep Neural Networks

CVPR 2021poster

To train robust deep neural networks (DNNs), we systematically study several target modification approaches, which include output regularisation, self and non-self label correction (LC). Two key issues are discovered: (1) Self LC is the most appealing as it exploits its own knowledge and requires no…

Cited by 80PDFcodeScholar