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Weizhi Ma

Weizhi Ma contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Patient-Zero: Scaling Synthetic Patient Agents to Real-World Distributions without Real Patient Data

Synthetic data generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising solution in the medical domain to mitigate data scarcity and privacy constraints. However, existing approaches remain constrained by their derivative nature, relying on real-world records, which pose privacy risks and distribution biases. Furthermore, current patient agents face the Stability-Plasticity Dilemma, struggling to maintain clinical consistency during dynamic inquiries. To address these challenges, we introduce Patient-Zero, a novel framework for ab initio patient simulation that requires no real medical records. Our Medically-Aligned Hierarchical Synthesis framework generates comprehensive and diverse patient records from abstract clinical guidelines via stratified attribute permutation. To support rigorous clinical interaction, we design a Dual-Track Cognitive Memory System to enable agents dynamically update memory while preserving logical consistency and persona adherence. Extensive evaluations show that Patient-Zero establishes a new state-of-the-art in both data quality and interaction fidelity. In human expert evaluations, senior licensed physicians judge our synthetic data to be statistically indistinguishable from real human-authored data and higher in clinical quality. Furthermore, downstream medical reasoning model trained on our synthetic dataset shows substantial performance gains (MedQA +24.0%; MMLU +14.5%), demonstrating the practical utility of our framework.

preprint2026arXiv

TheraAgent: Self-Improving Therapeutic Agent for Precise and Comprehensive Treatment Planning

Formulating a treatment plan is inherently a complex reasoning and refinement task rather than a simple generation problem. However, existing large language models (LLMs) mainly rely on one-shot output without explicit verification, which may result in rough, incomplete, and potentially unsafe treatment plans. To address these limitations, we propose TheraAgent, an agentic framework that replaces one-shot generation with an iterative generate-judge-refine pipeline. By mirroring the actual reasoning process of human experts who iteratively revise treatment plans, our framework progressively transforms coarse and incomplete drafts into precise, comprehensive, and safer therapeutic regimens. To facilitate the critical judge component, we introduce TheraJudge, a treatment-specific evaluation module integrated into the inference loop to enforce clinical standards. Experiments show TheraAgent achieves state-of-the-art results on HealthBench, leading in Accuracy and Completeness. In expert evaluations, it attains an 86% win rate against physicians, with superior Targeting and Harm Control. Moreover, the highly agreement between TheraJudge and HealthBench evaluations confirms the reliability of our framework.

preprint2022arXiv

A Survey on Dropout Methods and Experimental Verification in Recommendation

Overfitting is a common problem in machine learning, which means the model too closely fits the training data while performing poorly in the test data. Among various methods of coping with overfitting, dropout is one of the representative ways. From randomly dropping neurons to dropping neural structures, dropout has achieved great success in improving model performances. Although various dropout methods have been designed and widely applied in past years, their effectiveness, application scenarios, and contributions have not been comprehensively summarized and empirically compared by far. It is the right time to make a comprehensive survey. In this paper, we systematically review previous dropout methods and classify them into three major categories according to the stage where dropout operation is performed. Specifically, more than seventy dropout methods published in top AI conferences or journals (e.g., TKDE, KDD, TheWebConf, SIGIR) are involved. The designed taxonomy is easy to understand and capable of including new dropout methods. Then, we further discuss their application scenarios, connections, and contributions. To verify the effectiveness of distinct dropout methods, extensive experiments are conducted on recommendation scenarios with abundant heterogeneous information. Finally, we propose some open problems and potential research directions about dropout that worth to be further explored.

preprint2022arXiv

A Survey on the Fairness of Recommender Systems

Recommender systems are an essential tool to relieve the information overload challenge and play an important role in people's daily lives. Since recommendations involve allocations of social resources (e.g., job recommendation), an important issue is whether recommendations are fair. Unfair recommendations are not only unethical but also harm the long-term interests of the recommender system itself. As a result, fairness issues in recommender systems have recently attracted increasing attention. However, due to multiple complex resource allocation processes and various fairness definitions, the research on fairness in recommendation is scattered. To fill this gap, we review over 60 papers published in top conferences/journals, including TOIS, SIGIR, and WWW. First, we summarize fairness definitions in the recommendation and provide several views to classify fairness issues. Then, we review recommendation datasets and measurements in fairness studies and provide an elaborate taxonomy of fairness methods in the recommendation. Finally, we conclude this survey by outlining some promising future directions.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Representation Alignment and Uniformity in Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) plays a critical role in the development of recommender systems. Most CF methods utilize an encoder to embed users and items into the same representation space, and the Bayesian personalized ranking (BPR) loss is usually adopted as the objective function to learn informative encoders. Existing studies mainly focus on designing more powerful encoders (e.g., graph neural network) to learn better representations. However, few efforts have been devoted to investigating the desired properties of representations in CF, which is important to understand the rationale of existing CF methods and design new learning objectives. In this paper, we measure the representation quality in CF from the perspective of alignment and uniformity on the hypersphere. We first theoretically reveal the connection between the BPR loss and these two properties. Then, we empirically analyze the learning dynamics of typical CF methods in terms of quantified alignment and uniformity, which shows that better alignment or uniformity both contribute to higher recommendation performance. Based on the analyses results, a learning objective that directly optimizes these two properties is proposed, named DirectAU. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets, and the proposed learning framework with a simple matrix factorization model leads to significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art CF methods. Our implementations are publicly available at https://github.com/THUwangcy/DirectAU.

preprint2020arXiv

Neural Logic Reasoning

Recent years have witnessed the success of deep neural networks in many research areas. The fundamental idea behind the design of most neural networks is to learn similarity patterns from data for prediction and inference, which lacks the ability of cognitive reasoning. However, the concrete ability of reasoning is critical to many theoretical and practical problems. On the other hand, traditional symbolic reasoning methods do well in making logical inference, but they are mostly hard rule-based reasoning, which limits their generalization ability to different tasks since difference tasks may require different rules. Both reasoning and generalization ability are important for prediction tasks such as recommender systems, where reasoning provides strong connection between user history and target items for accurate prediction, and generalization helps the model to draw a robust user portrait over noisy inputs. In this paper, we propose Logic-Integrated Neural Network (LINN) to integrate the power of deep learning and logic reasoning. LINN is a dynamic neural architecture that builds the computational graph according to input logical expressions. It learns basic logical operations such as AND, OR, NOT as neural modules, and conducts propositional logical reasoning through the network for inference. Experiments on theoretical task show that LINN achieves significant performance on solving logical equations and variables. Furthermore, we test our approach on the practical task of recommendation by formulating the task into a logical inference problem. Experiments show that LINN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation models in Top-K recommendation, which verifies the potential of LINN in practice.