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Shan Chen

@shan23chen.bsky.social
1.5K followers 231 following 36 posts

PhDing @Harvard @MassGenBrigham|PhD Fellow @Google | Previously @Bos_CHIP @BrandeisU More robustness and explainabilities 🧐 for Health AI. shanchen.dev

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Reposted by Shan Chen
Danielle Bitterman MD @daniellebitterman.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
As I shared in the NYT, models often see the data but fail to weigh it like a physician, drifting toward generic "average patient" responses. Context window ≠ Clinical reasoning. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/w...
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Danielle Bitterman MD @daniellebitterman.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
Check out our editorial on Zazzetti et al (2025)'s paper on synthetic data generation for breast cancer, in JCO CCI! Synthetic data could help with many gaps in clinical AI research, but challenges remain especially (IMO) issues with out-of-domain generalization @shan23chen.bsky.social
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Stella Li @stellali.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
🤔💭What even is reasoning? It's time to answer the hard questions! We built the first unified taxonomy of 28 cognitive elements underlying reasoning Spoiler—LLMs commonly employ sequential reasoning, rarely self-awareness, and often fail to use correct reasoning structures🧠
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Danielle Bitterman MD @daniellebitterman.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Super proud of @shan23chen.bsky.social for his podium presentation on his research into LLM sycophancy in the face of illogical medical queries at #AMIA25! Full paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Also cited yesterday in the NYT! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/w...
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Danielle Bitterman MD @daniellebitterman.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
LLMs tend to prioritize helpfulness > reason. We show that safety-aware, compute-efficient fine-tuning helps models reason more critically in healthcare domain, and generalizes to improved safety alignment across other domains. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @shan23chen.bsky.social
nature.com
When helpfulness backfires: LLMs and the risk of false medical information due to sycophantic behavior - npj Digital Medicine
npj Digital Medicine - When helpfulness backfires: LLMs and the risk of false medical information due to sycophantic behavior
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Scott McGrath @smcgrath.phd · 17/10/2025
An overemphasis on helpfulness makes LLMs vulnerable. Research shows models will comply with illogical medical requests, generating false information. This sycophantic tendency can be corrected with specific prompting and fine-tuning. #MedSky #MedAI #MLSky
nature.com
When helpfulness backfires: LLMs and the risk of false medical information due to sycophantic behavior - npj Digital Medicine
npj Digital Medicine - When helpfulness backfires: LLMs and the risk of false medical information due to sycophantic behavior
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Jirui Qi @jiruiqi.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
[1/]💡New Paper Large reasoning models (LRMs) are strong in English — but how well do they reason in your language? Our latest work uncovers their limitation and a clear trade-off: Controlling Thinking Trace Language Comes at the Cost of Accuracy 📄Link: arxiv.org/abs/2505.22888
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Danielle Bitterman MD @daniellebitterman.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
Agents are all the rage and we need to track their abilities in the medical domain. Enter MedBrowseComp, the 1st benchmark to assess agents' abilities to reason, navigate the web, and search for verifiable med info! Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.14963 Site: moreirap12.github.io/mbc-browse-a...
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Dennis Bontempi, Ph.D. @denbonte.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
✨ What if your face could tell something about how old your body really is? Excited to share our latest paper just published in The Lancet Digital Health (open access!) 👉 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
thelancet.com
FaceAge, a deep learning system to estimate biological age from face photographs to improve prognostication: a model development and validation study
Our results suggest that a deep learning model can estimate biological age from face photographs and thereby enhance survival prediction in patients with cancer. Further research, including validation...
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
congrats!
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
CALL FOR REMOTE SPEAKERS: Science in the News Seminar Series, hosted by Harvard x Beacon Hill Seminars scientists, engineers & doctors, from academic researchers to industry professionals! 🧑‍🔬🧑‍💻  Email the organizers at scienceinthenews.bhs@gmail.com to sign up for a date! (First-come-first-served)
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
Source: t.co/mV27ZZg5MN
t.co
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1ieonxv/comment/ma9f5me/
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Reposted by Shan Chen
TRIPOD Statement @tripodstatement.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
We have a NEW PAPER in @naturemedicine.bsky.social on reporting recommendations for addressing the unique challenges of #largelanguagemodels (LLMs) in biomedical applications www.nature.com/articles/s41... #MLSky #StatsSky #medSky #AISky #artificialintelligence #generativeAI #transparency
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 04/01/2025
Yea… he does have problems portraying female in stereotypical ways, big critics in China too
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
During the QA session, one stood up to her regarding this issue really respectfully and her response was: “That was not based on my judgment. That was based on the student's quote saying that the school was not teaching it, which meant that it applied to a lot of people from there."
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
Most of the talk discussed about bad practices. But only one slide mentioned specific group of people.
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Haha which one has more nowadays?
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Haha transformers really transformed both. However, I feel like the division is even further… currently, seems like RL is taking over LM post training and many NLProc are dealing with language model enabled new applications
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Danielle Bitterman MD @daniellebitterman.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
I am always worrying about Benzene (my cat)! www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/w... But please don't stop wearing sunscreen! Sun exposure is a known cancer risk, benzene risks unknown. This article has good tips if you want to minimize benzene exposure. Obligatory Benzene (cat) pic ⬇️
nytimes.com
Is It Time to Worry About Benzene in Personal Care Products?
The carcinogen has been found in sunscreen, deodorants, acne creams and other personal care products. Here’s what to know.
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Thanks!
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Imagine a world where these will be positively correlated
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Quite possible! Here, we found some early evidence that SAE features trained on language models are still meaningful to LLaVA. More details will be provided in the post, and more details will be provided soon! @JackGallifant @oldbayes.bsky.social @daniellebitterman.bsky.social
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Team @AnthropicAI & @thesubhashk @joshengels.bsky.social shows SAE features can be good for classifications. Good evidence by @arthurconmy.bsky.social & @neelnanda.bsky.social on SAE features are transferable across base and IT models. 🧐 How about LLaVA? tiny.cc/sae1
tiny.cc
Are SAE features from the Base Model still meaningful to LLaVA? — LessWrong
Shan Chen, Jack Gallifant, Kuleen Sasse, Danielle Bitterman[1] Please read this as a work in progress where we are colleagues sharing this in a lab (…
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
More on future potential reliance on LLM agent doing reviews and audits
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
I’m terrified by the massive openreview data. Potentially gonna bite back on us 🥲😥
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
END/🧵 Thanks to all our awesome co-authors: @jannahastings.bsky.social @daniellebitterman.bsky.social And all our awesome collaborators who are not on the right platform yet! 🦋 Happy Thanksgiving! 🍂
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
5/🧵 Dive deeper into our methods, findings, and the implications of our research by checking out the full 📜 paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2405.05506 All our data can be downloaded from our website: crosscare.net
arxiv.org
Cross-Care: Assessing the Healthcare Implications of Pre-training Data on Language Model Bias
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly essential in processing natural languages, yet their application is frequently compromised by biases and inaccuracies originating in their training data. ...
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
4.5/🧵 For the arxiv pretraining dataset, we also have an overall trend based on entity mentions! Guess which two terms are the big bump there back in 2019
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
4/🧵 We've also developed a new data visualization tool, available at [crosscare.net], to allow researchers and practitioners to explore these biases from different pretraining corpus and understand their implications better. Tools in progress! 🛠️📊
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
3.5/🧵 Moreover, alignment methods don’t resolve inconsistencies in disease prevalence across languages (EN 🇺🇸, ES 🇪🇸, FR 🇫🇷, ZH 🇨🇳). And tuning on English usually only affects English prompt output
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
3/🧵 By analyzing models across various architectures and sizes, we show that traditional alignment methods barely scratch the surface in fixing these discrepancies. This highlights the challenge in deploying LLMs for medical applications without reinforcing biases.
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
2.5/🧵How misaligned are things here? 📈Figure 2 shows the misalignment between real-world disease prevalence, pretraining data representation, and Llama3 70B.
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
2/🧵 Our study systematically explores how demographic biases embedded in pre-training corpora like ThePile affect LLM outputs. We reveal substantial misalignments between LLM representations of disease prevalence and actual data across demographics. 📷 👥
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Crosscare is accepted @neuripsconf.bsky.social 🎉 We showed LLMs are far from grounded with true prevalence, and groundings across languages are so inconsistent! Also, a dashboard for people to explore the prevalence data across diseases and racial groups: crosscare.net #NeurIPS2024
crosscare.net
Cross-Care Dataset
The Cross-Care Dataset provides comprehensive insights into co-occurrence patterns of various diseases. This dataset is invaluable for researchers and healthcare professionals seeking to understand co...
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Reposted by Shan Chen
Tim Miller @tim-miller.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
My department is hiring: apply to be my colleague! www.chip.org/employment/i...
chip.org
Instructor, Assistant, or Associate Professor Position in Computational Health Informatics | Chip
Join the forefront of healthcare innovation at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital, where informatics, computation, and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming care delivery and biomedical sc...
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
Oh dang, I gotta read this thanks
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
I recommend this! apex-magazine.com/short-fictio...
apex-magazine.com
Mountain - Apex Magazine
“Today is the day I’m finally going to get you to tell me what is up with you never going on land,” the Captain declared, arching an eyebrow.
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Maybe highly interesting to you aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-m...
aclanthology.org
Media Attitude Detection via Framing Analysis with Events and their Relations
Jin Zhao, Jingxuan Tu, Han Du, Nianwen Xue. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
xai historian
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Thank you!
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Me and @daniellebitterman.bsky.social would love to be added! Thanks!
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Million thanks to my wonderful advisor @daniellebitterman.bsky.social and all my colleagues and friends!
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
What were the questions?
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
Here are some reflections on many studies we did this year. Tons of progress has been made, but there are still safety concerns..🧐 Poster 10:30 riverfront at EMNLP2024 🏖️ Happy to chat and connect! 📃 huggingface.co/blog/shanche... 🔊 tinyurl.com/aimpodcast24 @daniellebitterman.bsky.social
huggingface.co
What We Learned About LLM/VLMs in Healthcare AI Evaluation:
A Blog post by Shan Chen on Hugging Face
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
Thanks!
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
I would love to join this! Thanks!
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
Thanks for organizing! Saving us from X is important!!
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Shan Chen @shan23chen.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
Thanks for putting this together!! May I be added too? Thanks!
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