# COPER: Continuous Patient State Perceiver

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03196/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Irregular Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08926/) (2020)
- [Multitask learning and benchmarking with clinical time series data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07771/) (2017)
- [Multi-Time Attention Networks for Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10318/) (2021)
- [Deep EHR: A Survey of Recent Advances in Deep Learning Techniques for Electronic Health Record (EHR) Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03446/) (2017)
- [Estimating Missing Data in Temporal Data Streams Using Multi-directional Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08742/) (2017)
- [General-purpose, long-context autoregressive modeling with Perceiver AR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07765/) (2022)
- [A Review of Deep Learning Methods for Irregularly Sampled Medical Time Series Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12493/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Brief Review of Hypernetworks in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06955/) (2023)
- [Kepler-Encoder-v0.1: Towards a Multimodal Embedding Model for Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13522/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In electronic health records (EHRs), irregular time-series (ITS) occur naturally due to patient health dynamics, reflected by irregular hospital visits, diseases/conditions and the necessity to measure different vitals signs at each visit etc. ITS present challenges in training machine learning algorithms which mostly are built on assumption of coherent fixed dimensional feature space. In this paper, we propose a novel COntinuous patient state PERceiver model, called COPER, to cope with ITS in EHRs. COPER uses Perceiver model and the concept of neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to learn the continuous time dynamics of patient state, i.e., continuity of input space and continuity of output space. The neural ODEs help COPER to generate regular time-series to feed to Perceiver model which has the capability to handle multi-modality large-scale inputs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we use in-hospital mortality prediction task on MIMIC-III dataset and carefully design experiments to study irregularity. The results are compared with the baselines which prove the efficacy of the proposed model.