Tao Tan

Tianyu Zhang, Luyi Han, Anna D'Angelo et al.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most sensitive technique for breast cancer detection among current clinical imaging modalities. Contrast-enhanced MRI (CE-MRI) provides superior differentiation between tumors and invaded healthy tissue, and has become an indispensable technique in the detection and evaluation of cancer. However, the use of gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCA) to obtain CE-MRI may be associated with nephrogenic systemic fibrosis and may lead to bioaccumulation in the brain, posing a potential risk to human health. Moreover, and likely more important, the use of gadolinium-based contrast agents requires the cannulation of a vein, and the injection of the contrast media which is cumbersome and places a burden on the patient. To reduce the use of contrast agents, diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is emerging as a key imaging technique, although currently usually complementing breast CE-MRI. In this study, we develop a multi-sequence fusion network to synthesize CE-MRI based on T1-weighted MRI and DWIs. DWIs with different b-values are fused to efficiently utilize the difference features of DWIs. Rather than proposing a pure data-driven approach, we invent a multi-sequence attention module to obtain refined feature maps, and leverage hierarchical representation information fused at different scales while utilizing the contributions from different sequences from a model-driven approach by introducing the weighted difference module. The results show that the multi-b-value DWI-based fusion model can potentially be used to synthesize CE-MRI, thus theoretically reducing or avoiding the use of GBCA, thereby minimizing the burden to patients. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/Netherlands-Cancer-Institute/CE-MRI}.

Shan Huang, Xiaohong Liu, Tao Tan et al.

Magnetic resonance images (MRI) acquired with low through-plane resolution compromise time and cost. The poor resolution in one orientation is insufficient to meet the requirement of high resolution for early diagnosis of brain disease and morphometric study. The common Single image super-resolution (SISR) solutions face two main challenges: (1) local detailed and global anatomical structural information combination; and (2) large-scale restoration when applied for reconstructing thick-slice MRI into high-resolution (HR) iso-tropic data. To address these problems, we propose a novel two-stage network for brain MRI SR named TransMRSR based on the convolutional blocks to extract local information and transformer blocks to capture long-range dependencies. TransMRSR consists of three modules: the shallow local feature extraction, the deep non-local feature capture, and the HR image reconstruction. We perform a generative task to encapsulate diverse priors into a generative network (GAN), which is the decoder sub-module of the deep non-local feature capture part, in the first stage. The pre-trained GAN is used for the second stage of SR task. We further eliminate the potential latent space shift caused by the two-stage training strategy through the self-distilled truncation trick. The extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior performance to other SSIR methods on both public and private datasets. Code is released at https://github.com/goddesshs/TransMRSR.git .

Luyi Han, Tao Tan, Tianyu Zhang et al.

Multi-sequence MRIs can be necessary for reliable diagnosis in clinical practice due to the complimentary information within sequences. However, redundant information exists across sequences, which interferes with mining efficient representations by modern machine learning or deep learning models. To handle various clinical scenarios, we propose a sequence-to-sequence generation framework (Seq2Seq) for imaging-differentiation representation learning. In this study, not only do we propose arbitrary 3D/4D sequence generation within one model to generate any specified target sequence, but also we are able to rank the importance of each sequence based on a new metric estimating the difficulty of a sequence being generated. Furthermore, we also exploit the generation inability of the model to extract regions that contain unique information for each sequence. We conduct extensive experiments using three datasets including a toy dataset of 20,000 simulated subjects, a brain MRI dataset of 1,251 subjects, and a breast MRI dataset of 2,101 subjects, to demonstrate that (1) our proposed Seq2Seq is efficient and lightweight for complex clinical datasets and can achieve excellent image quality; (2) top-ranking sequences can be used to replace complete sequences with non-inferior performance; (3) combining MRI with our imaging-differentiation map leads to better performance in clinical tasks such as glioblastoma MGMT promoter methylation status prediction and breast cancer pathological complete response status prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/fiy2W/mri_seq2seq.

Luyi Han, Yunzhi Huang, Tao Tan et al.

Domain adaptation has been widely adopted to transfer styles across multi-vendors and multi-centers, as well as to complement the missing modalities. In this challenge, we proposed an unsupervised domain adaptation framework for cross-modality vestibular schwannoma (VS) and cochlea segmentation and Koos grade prediction. We learn the shared representation from both ceT1 and hrT2 images and recover another modality from the latent representation, and we also utilize proxy tasks of VS segmentation and brain parcellation to restrict the consistency of image structures in domain adaptation. After generating missing modalities, the nnU-Net model is utilized for VS and cochlea segmentation, while a semi-supervised contrastive learning pre-train approach is employed to improve the model performance for Koos grade prediction. On CrossMoDA validation phase Leaderboard, our method received rank 4 in task1 with a mean Dice score of 0.8394 and rank 2 in task2 with Macro-Average Mean Square Error of 0.3941. Our code is available at https://github.com/fiy2W/cmda2022.superpolymerization.

Tianyu Zhang, Tao Tan, Luyi Han et al.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is highly sensitive for lesion detection in the breasts. Sequences obtained with different settings can capture the specific characteristics of lesions. Such multi-parameter MRI information has been shown to improve radiologist performance in lesion classification, as well as improving the performance of artificial intelligence models in various tasks. However, obtaining multi-parameter MRI makes the examination costly in both financial and time perspectives, and there may be safety concerns for special populations, thus making acquisition of the full spectrum of MRI sequences less durable. In this study, different than naive input fusion or feature concatenation from existing MRI parameters, a novel $\textbf{I}$ntegrated MRI $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{P}$arameter reinf$\textbf{O}$rcement fusion generato$\textbf{R}$ wi$\textbf{T}$h $\textbf{A}$tte$\textbf{NT}$ion Network (IMPORTANT-Net) is developed to generate missing parameters. First, the parameter reconstruction module is used to encode and restore the existing MRI parameters to obtain the corresponding latent representation information at any scale level. Then the multi-parameter fusion with attention module enables the interaction of the encoded information from different parameters through a set of algorithmic strategies, and applies different weights to the information through the attention mechanism after information fusion to obtain refined representation information. Finally, a reinforcement fusion scheme embedded in a $V^{-}$-shape generation module is used to combine the hierarchical representations to generate the missing MRI parameter. Results showed that our IMPORTANT-Net is capable of generating missing MRI parameters and outperforms comparable state-of-the-art networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Netherlands-Cancer-Institute/MRI_IMPORTANT_NET.

Tao Wang, Xinlin Zhang, Yuanbo Zhou et al.

In recent years, deep learning has become a breakthrough technique in assisting medical image diagnosis. Supervised learning using convolutional neural networks (CNN) provides state-of-the-art performance and has served as a benchmark for various medical image segmentation and classification. However, supervised learning deeply relies on large-scale annotated data, which is expensive, time-consuming, and even impractical to acquire in medical imaging applications. Active Learning (AL) methods have been widely applied in natural image classification tasks to reduce annotation costs by selecting more valuable examples from the unlabeled data pool. However, their application in medical image segmentation tasks is limited, and there is currently no effective and universal AL-based method specifically designed for 3D medical image segmentation. To address this limitation, we propose an AL-based method that can be simultaneously applied to 2D medical image classification, segmentation, and 3D medical image segmentation tasks. We extensively validated our proposed active learning method on three publicly available and challenging medical image datasets, Kvasir Dataset, COVID-19 Infection Segmentation Dataset, and BraTS2019 Dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our PCDAL can achieve significantly improved performance with fewer annotations in 2D classification and segmentation and 3D segmentation tasks. The codes of this study are available at https://github.com/ortonwang/PCDAL.

Yiping Jiao, Jeroen van der Laak, Shadi Albarqouni et al. · eth-zurich

We introduce LYSTO, the Lymphocyte Assessment Hackathon, which was held in conjunction with the MICCAI 2019 Conference in Shenzen (China). The competition required participants to automatically assess the number of lymphocytes, in particular T-cells, in histopathological images of colon, breast, and prostate cancer stained with CD3 and CD8 immunohistochemistry. Differently from other challenges setup in medical image analysis, LYSTO participants were solely given a few hours to address this problem. In this paper, we describe the goal and the multi-phase organization of the hackathon; we describe the proposed methods and the on-site results. Additionally, we present post-competition results where we show how the presented methods perform on an independent set of lung cancer slides, which was not part of the initial competition, as well as a comparison on lymphocyte assessment between presented methods and a panel of pathologists. We show that some of the participants were capable to achieve pathologist-level performance at lymphocyte assessment. After the hackathon, LYSTO was left as a lightweight plug-and-play benchmark dataset on grand-challenge website, together with an automatic evaluation platform. LYSTO has supported a number of research in lymphocyte assessment in oncology. LYSTO will be a long-lasting educational challenge for deep learning and digital pathology, it is available at https://lysto.grand-challenge.org/.

Rongsheng Wang, Yaofei Duan, ChanTong Lam et al.

General large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have shown remarkable success. However, such LLMs have not been widely adopted for medical purposes, due to poor accuracy and inability to provide medical advice. We propose IvyGPT, an LLM based on LLaMA that is trained and fine-tuned with high-quality medical question-answer (QA) instances and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). After supervised fine-tuning, IvyGPT has good multi-turn conversation capabilities, but it cannot perform like a doctor in other aspects, such as comprehensive diagnosis. Through RLHF, IvyGPT can output richer diagnosis and treatment answers that are closer to human. In the training, we used QLoRA to train 33 billion parameters on a small number of NVIDIA A100 (80GB) GPUs. Experimental results show that IvyGPT has outperformed other medical GPT models.

Yuanbin Chen, Tao Wang, Hui Tang et al.

While supervised learning has achieved remarkable success, obtaining large-scale labeled datasets in biomedical imaging is often impractical due to high costs and the time-consuming annotations required from radiologists. Semi-supervised learning emerges as an effective strategy to overcome this limitation by leveraging useful information from unlabeled datasets. In this paper, we present a novel semi-supervised learning method, Dual-Decoder Consistency via Pseudo-Labels Guided Data Augmentation (DCPA), for medical image segmentation. We devise a consistency regularization to promote consistent representations during the training process. Specifically, we use distinct decoders for student and teacher networks while maintain the same encoder. Moreover, to learn from unlabeled data, we create pseudo-labels generated by the teacher networks and augment the training data with the pseudo-labels. Both techniques contribute to enhancing the performance of the proposed method. The method is evaluated on three representative medical image segmentation datasets. Comprehensive comparisons with state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods were conducted under typical scenarios, utilizing 10% and 20% labeled data, as well as in the extreme scenario of only 5% labeled data. The experimental results consistently demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to other methods across the three semi-supervised settings. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/BinYCn/DCPA.git.

Xin Wang, Tao Tan, Yuan Gao et al.

Asymmetry is a crucial characteristic of bilateral mammograms (Bi-MG) when abnormalities are developing. It is widely utilized by radiologists for diagnosis. The question of 'what the symmetrical Bi-MG would look like when the asymmetrical abnormalities have been removed ?' has not yet received strong attention in the development of algorithms on mammograms. Addressing this question could provide valuable insights into mammographic anatomy and aid in diagnostic interpretation. Hence, we propose a novel framework, DisAsymNet, which utilizes asymmetrical abnormality transformer guided self-adversarial learning for disentangling abnormalities and symmetric Bi-MG. At the same time, our proposed method is partially guided by randomly synthesized abnormalities. We conduct experiments on three public and one in-house dataset, and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in abnormality classification, segmentation, and localization tasks. Additionally, reconstructed normal mammograms can provide insights toward better interpretable visual cues for clinical diagnosis. The code will be accessible to the public.

Tao Wang, Yuanbin Chen, Xinlin Zhang et al.

Supervised learning algorithms based on Convolutional Neural Networks have become the benchmark for medical image segmentation tasks, but their effectiveness heavily relies on a large amount of labeled data. However, annotating medical image datasets is a laborious and time-consuming process. Inspired by semi-supervised algorithms that use both labeled and unlabeled data for training, we propose the PLGDF framework, which builds upon the mean teacher network for segmenting medical images with less annotation. We propose a novel pseudo-label utilization scheme, which combines labeled and unlabeled data to augment the dataset effectively. Additionally, we enforce the consistency between different scales in the decoder module of the segmentation network and propose a loss function suitable for evaluating the consistency. Moreover, we incorporate a sharpening operation on the predicted results, further enhancing the accuracy of the segmentation. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that the PLGDF framework can largely improve performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Meanwhile, our framework yields superior performance compared to six state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods. The codes of this study are available at https://github.com/ortonwang/PLGDF.

Yanfeng Li, Yue Sun, Keren Fu et al.

Existing multi-object image generation methods face difficulties in achieving precise alignment between localized image generation regions and their corresponding semantics based on language descriptions, frequently resulting in inconsistent object quantities and attribute aliasing. To mitigate this limitation, mainstream approaches typically rely on external control signals to explicitly constrain the spatial layout, local semantic and visual attributes of images. However, this strong dependency makes the input format rigid, rendering it incompatible with the heterogeneous resource conditions of users and diverse constraint requirements. To address these challenges, we propose MoGen, a user-friendly multi-object image generation method. First, we design a Regional Semantic Anchor (RSA) module that precisely anchors phrase units in language descriptions to their corresponding image regions during the generation process, enabling text-to-image generation that follows quantity specifications for multiple objects. Building upon this foundation, we further introduce an Adaptive Multi-modal Guidance (AMG) module, which adaptively parses and integrates various combinations of multi-source control signals to formulate corresponding structured intent. This intent subsequently guides selective constraints on scene layouts and object attributes, achieving dynamic fine-grained control. Experimental results demonstrate that MoGen significantly outperforms existing methods in generation quality, quantity consistency, and fine-grained control, while exhibiting superior accessibility and control flexibility. Code is available at: https://github.com/Tear-kitty/MoGen/tree/master.

Siqi Luo, Yi Xin, Yuntao Du et al.

Deep neural networks often encounter significant performance drops while facing with domain shifts between training (source) and test (target) data. To address this issue, Test Time Adaptation (TTA) methods have been proposed to adapt pre-trained source model to handle out-of-distribution streaming target data. Although these methods offer some relief, they lack a reliable mechanism for domain shift correction, which can often be erratic in real-world applications. In response, we develop Few-Shot Test Time Adaptation (FS-TTA), a novel and practical setting that utilizes a few-shot support set on top of TTA. Adhering to the principle of few inputs, big gains, FS-TTA reduces blind exploration in unseen target domains. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage framework to tackle FS-TTA, including (i) fine-tuning the pre-trained source model with few-shot support set, along with using feature diversity augmentation module to avoid overfitting, (ii) implementing test time adaptation based on prototype memory bank guidance to produce high quality pseudo-label for model adaptation. Through extensive experiments on three cross-domain classification benchmarks, we demonstrate the superior performance and reliability of our FS-TTA and framework.

Qinzhuo Wu, Weikai Xu, Wei Liu et al.

Recently, mobile AI agents based on VLMs have been gaining increasing attention. These works typically utilize VLM as a foundation, fine-tuning it with instruction-based mobile datasets. However, these VLMs are typically pre-trained on general-domain data, which often results in a lack of fundamental capabilities specific to the mobile domain. Therefore, they may struggle to recognize specific UI elements and understand intra-UI fine-grained information. In addition, the current fine-tuning task focuses on interacting with the most relevant element for the given instruction. These fine-tuned VLMs may still ignore the relationships between UI pages, neglect the roles of elements in page transitions and lack inter-UI understanding. To address issues, we propose a VLM called MobileVLM, which includes two additional pre-training stages to enhance both intra- and inter-UI understanding. We defined four UI-based pre-training tasks, enabling the model to better perceive fine-grained elements and capture page transition actions. To address the lack of mobile pre-training data, we built a large Chinese mobile dataset Mobile3M from scratch, which contains 3 million UI pages, and real-world transition actions, forming a directed graph structure. Experimental results show MobileVLM excels on both our test set and public mobile benchmarks, outperforming existing VLMs.

Shihan Deng, Weikai Xu, Hongda Sun et al.

With the remarkable advancements of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have become a research hotspot in human-computer interaction. However, there is a scarcity of benchmarks available for LLM-based mobile agents. Benchmarking these agents generally faces three main challenges: (1) The inefficiency of UI-only operations imposes limitations to task evaluation. (2) Specific instructions within a singular application lack adequacy for assessing the multi-dimensional reasoning and decision-making capacities of LLM mobile agents. (3) Current evaluation metrics are insufficient to accurately assess the process of sequential actions. To this end, we propose Mobile-Bench, a novel benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of LLM-based mobile agents. First, we expand conventional UI operations by incorporating 103 collected APIs to accelerate the efficiency of task completion. Subsequently, we collect evaluation data by combining real user queries with augmentation from LLMs. To better evaluate different levels of planning capabilities for mobile agents, our data is categorized into three distinct groups: SAST, SAMT, and MAMT, reflecting varying levels of task complexity. Mobile-Bench comprises 832 data entries, with more than 200 tasks specifically designed to evaluate multi-APP collaboration scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce a more accurate evaluation metric, named CheckPoint, to assess whether LLM-based mobile agents reach essential points during their planning and reasoning steps.

Xiangyu Xiong, Yue Sun, Xiaohong Liu et al.

Although current data augmentation methods are successful to alleviate the data insufficiency, conventional augmentation are primarily intra-domain while advanced generative adversarial networks (GANs) generate images remaining uncertain, particularly in small-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a parameterized GAN (ParaGAN) that effectively controls the changes of synthetic samples among domains and highlights the attention regions for downstream classification. Specifically, ParaGAN incorporates projection distance parameters in cyclic projection and projects the source images to the decision boundary to obtain the class-difference maps. Our experiments show that ParaGAN can consistently outperform the existing augmentation methods with explainable classification on two small-scale medical datasets.

Tianyu Zhang, Xinglong Liang, Jarek van Dijk et al.

Synthesizing high fidelity contrast enhanced MRI is clinically valuable for safer and more efficient breast cancer screening, yet remains challenging due to complex lesion textures and heterogeneous enhancement patterns.

Jie Song, Jun Jia, Wei Sun et al.

Multimodal image fusion enables precise lesion localization and characterization for accurate diagnosis, thereby strengthening clinical decision-making and driving its growing prominence in medical imaging research. A powerful multimodal image fusion model relies on high-quality, clinically representative multimodal training data and a rigorously engineered model architecture. Therefore, the development of such professional radiomics models represents a collaborative achievement grounded in standardized acquisition, clinical-specific expertise, and algorithmic design proficiency, which necessitates protection of associated intellectual property rights. However, current multimodal image fusion models generate fused outputs without built-in mechanisms to safeguard intellectual property rights, inadvertently exposing proprietary model knowledge and sensitive training data through inference leakage. For example, malicious users can exploit fusion outputs and model distillation or other inference-based reverse engineering techniques to approximate the fusion performance of proprietary models. To address this issue, we propose AMIF, the first Authorizable Medical Image Fusion model with built-in authentication, which integrates authorization access control into the image fusion objective. For unauthorized usage, AMIF embeds explicit and visible copyright identifiers into fusion results. In contrast, high-quality fusion results are accessible upon successful key-based authentication.

Xin Wang, Tao Tan, Yuan Gao et al.

Precision breast cancer (BC) risk assessment is crucial for developing individualized screening and prevention. Despite the promising potential of recent mammogram (MG) based deep learning models in predicting BC risk, they mostly overlook the 'time-to-future-event' ordering among patients and exhibit limited explorations into how they track history changes in breast tissue, thereby limiting their clinical application. In this work, we propose a novel method, named OA-BreaCR, to precisely model the ordinal relationship of the time to and between BC events while incorporating longitudinal breast tissue changes in a more explainable manner. We validate our method on public EMBED and inhouse datasets, comparing with existing BC risk prediction and time prediction methods. Our ordinal learning method OA-BreaCR outperforms existing methods in both BC risk and time-to-future-event prediction tasks. Additionally, ordinal heatmap visualizations show the model's attention over time. Our findings underscore the importance of interpretable and precise risk assessment for enhancing BC screening and prevention efforts. The code will be accessible to the public.

Yuanbo Zhou, Xinlin Zhang, Wei Deng et al.

We introduce DiffSteISR, a pioneering framework for reconstructing real-world stereo images. DiffSteISR utilizes the powerful prior knowledge embedded in pre-trained text-to-image model to efficiently recover the lost texture details in low-resolution stereo images. Specifically, DiffSteISR implements a time-aware stereo cross attention with temperature adapter (TASCATA) to guide the diffusion process, ensuring that the generated left and right views exhibit high texture consistency thereby reducing disparity error between the super-resolved images and the ground truth (GT) images. Additionally, a stereo omni attention control network (SOA ControlNet) is proposed to enhance the consistency of super-resolved images with GT images in the pixel, perceptual, and distribution space. Finally, DiffSteISR incorporates a stereo semantic extractor (SSE) to capture unique viewpoint soft semantic information and shared hard tag semantic information, thereby effectively improving the semantic accuracy and consistency of the generated left and right images. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DiffSteISR accurately reconstructs natural and precise textures from low-resolution stereo images while maintaining a high consistency of semantic and texture between the left and right views.

Luyi Han, Tao Tan, Tianyu Zhang et al.

Adversarial learning helps generative models translate MRI from source to target sequence when lacking paired samples. However, implementing MRI synthesis with adversarial learning in clinical settings is challenging due to training instability and mode collapse. To address this issue, we leverage intermediate sequences to estimate the common latent space among multi-sequence MRI, enabling the reconstruction of distinct sequences from the common latent space. We propose a generative model that compresses discrete representations of each sequence to estimate the Gaussian distribution of vector-quantized common (VQC) latent space between multiple sequences. Moreover, we improve the latent space consistency with contrastive learning and increase model stability by domain augmentation. Experiments using BraTS2021 dataset show that our non-adversarial model outperforms other GAN-based methods, and VQC latent space aids our model to achieve (1) anti-interference ability, which can eliminate the effects of noise, bias fields, and artifacts, and (2) solid semantic representation ability, with the potential of one-shot segmentation. Our code is publicly available.

Qimin Yang, Rongsheng Wang, Jiexin Chen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely applied in various professional fields. By fine-tuning the models using domain specific question and answer datasets, the professional domain knowledge and Q\&A abilities of these models have significantly improved, for example, medical professional LLMs that use fine-tuning of doctor-patient Q\&A data exhibit extraordinary disease diagnostic abilities. However, we observed that despite improvements in specific domain knowledge, the performance of medical LLM in long-context understanding has significantly declined, especially compared to general language models with similar parameters. The purpose of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of reduced performance in understanding long-context in medical LLM. We designed a series of experiments to conduct open-book professional knowledge exams on all models to evaluate their ability to read long-context. By adjusting the proportion and quantity of general data and medical data in the process of fine-tuning, we can determine the best data composition to optimize the professional model and achieve a balance between long-context performance and specific domain knowledge.

Qilang Ye, Yu Zhou, Lian He et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold rich implicit knowledge and powerful transferability. In this paper, we explore the combination of LLMs with the human skeleton to perform action classification and description. However, when treating LLM as a recognizer, two questions arise: 1) How can LLMs understand skeleton? 2) How can LLMs distinguish among actions? To address these problems, we introduce a novel paradigm named learning Skeleton representation with visUal-motion knowledGe for Action Recognition (SUGAR). In our pipeline, we first utilize off-the-shelf large-scale video models as a knowledge base to generate visual, motion information related to actions. Then, we propose to supervise skeleton learning through this prior knowledge to yield discrete representations. Finally, we use the LLM with untouched pre-training weights to understand these representations and generate the desired action targets and descriptions. Notably, we present a Temporal Query Projection (TQP) module to continuously model the skeleton signals with long sequences. Experiments on several skeleton-based action classification benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our SUGAR. Moreover, experiments on zero-shot scenarios show that SUGAR is more versatile than linear-based methods.

Haojing Chen, Yutong Li, Zhihang Liu et al.

Optical Remote Sensing Image Salient Object Detection (ORSI-SOD) remains challenging due to complex backgrounds, low contrast, irregular object shapes, and large variations in object scale. Existing discriminative methods directly regress saliency maps, while recent diffusion-based generative approaches suffer from stochastic sampling and high computational cost. In this paper, we propose ORSIFlow, a saliency-guided rectified flow framework that reformulates ORSI-SOD as a deterministic latent flow generation problem. ORSIFlow performs saliency mask generation in a compact latent space constructed by a frozen variational autoencoder, enabling efficient inference with only a few steps. To enhance saliency awareness, we design a Salient Feature Discriminator for global semantic discrimination and a Salient Feature Calibrator for precise boundary refinement. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks show that ORSIFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency. Codes are available at: https://github.com/Ch3nSir/ORSIFlow.

Rongsheng Wang, Haoming Chen, Ruizhe Zhou et al.

ChatGPT and other general large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, but they have also raised concerns about the misuse of AI-generated texts. Existing AI-generated text detection models, such as based on BERT and RoBERTa, are prone to in-domain over-fitting, leading to poor out-of-domain (OOD) detection performance. In this paper, we first collected Chinese text responses generated by human experts and 9 types of LLMs, for which to multiple domains questions, and further created a dataset that mixed human-written sentences and sentences polished by LLMs. We then proposed LLM-Detector, a novel method for both document-level and sentence-level text detection through Instruction Tuning of LLMs. Our method leverages the wealth of knowledge LLMs acquire during pre-training, enabling them to detect the text they generate. Instruction tuning aligns the model's responses with the user's expected text detection tasks. Experimental results show that previous methods struggle with sentence-level AI-generated text detection and OOD detection. In contrast, our proposed method not only significantly outperforms baseline methods in both sentence-level and document-level text detection but also demonstrates strong generalization capabilities. Furthermore, since LLM-Detector is trained based on open-source LLMs, it is easy to customize for deployment.

Tao Tan, Yining Qian, Ang Lv et al.

Large language models (LLMs) enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have introduced a new paradigm for web search. However, the limited context awareness of LLMs degrades their performance on RAG tasks. Existing methods to enhance context awareness are often inefficient, incurring time or memory overhead during inference, and many are tailored to specific position embeddings. In this paper, we propose Position-Embedding-Agnostic attention Re-weighting (PEAR), which enhances the context awareness of LLMs with zero inference overhead. Specifically, on a proxy task focused on context copying, we first detect heads which suppress the models' context awareness thereby diminishing RAG performance. To weaken the impact of these heads, we re-weight their outputs with learnable coefficients. The LLM (with frozen parameters) is optimized by adjusting these coefficients to minimize loss on the proxy task. As a result, the coefficients are optimized to values less than one, thereby reducing their tendency to suppress RAG performance. During inference, the optimized coefficients are fixed to re-weight these heads, regardless of the specific task at hand. Our proposed PEAR offers two major advantages over previous approaches: (1) It introduces zero additional inference overhead in terms of memory usage or inference time, while outperforming competitive baselines in accuracy and efficiency across various RAG tasks. (2) It is independent of position embedding algorithms, ensuring broader applicability.

Hong Xie, Xiao Hu, Tao Tan et al.

The reinforcement fine-tuning area is undergoing an explosion papers largely on optimizing design choices. Though performance gains are often claimed, inconsistent conclusions also arise from time to time, making the progress illusive. Reflecting on this illusion, we still lack principled answers to two fundamental questions: 1) what is the role of each design choice? 2) which ones are critical? This paper aims to shed light on them. The underlying challenge is that design choices are entangled together, making their contribution to learning and generalization difficult to attribute. To address this challenge, we first construct a minimalist baseline for disentangling factors: one rollout per query in each round, the outcome reward serving as the training signal without any advantage trick, and a batch size of thirty-two. This baseline connects to batched contextual bandit learning, which facilitates experimental analysis. Centering around this baseline, we design an experiment pipeline, examining the marginal gains of factors like advantage, number of rollouts, etc. Experiments on three base models and two datasets, not only reveal new understanding on the role of various design choices on learning and generalization dynamics, but also identify critical ones that deserve more effort.

Luyi Han, Tao Tan, Ritse Mann

The domain adaptation approach has gained significant acceptance in transferring styles across various vendors and centers, along with filling the gaps in modalities. However, multi-center application faces the challenge of the difficulty of domain adaptation due to their intra-domain differences. We focus on introducing a fine-grained unsupervised framework for domain adaptation to facilitate cross-modality segmentation of vestibular schwannoma (VS) and cochlea. We propose to use a vector to control the generator to synthesize a fake image with given features. And then, we can apply various augmentations to the dataset by searching the feature dictionary. The diversity augmentation can increase the performance and robustness of the segmentation model. On the CrossMoDA validation phase Leaderboard, our method received a mean Dice score of 0.765 and 0.836 on VS and cochlea, respectively.

Pujun Feng, Xiaoyu Guo, Seyed Ehsan Saffari et al.

Clinical decision-making is a feedback system where risk estimates influence treatment, which in turn changes disease trajectories, and both shape clinicians' measurement practices. Static prediction often fails clinically: models trained on observational care logs conflate disease biology with clinician behavior, particularly under treatment confounder feedback and irregular or informative observation. This Review focuses on intervention-aware disease trajectory modeling in clinical AI--methods estimating patient-specific longitudinal disease evolution and assessing trajectory changes under alternative treatments. We organize the field around six linked components: three decision tasks (factual forecasting, counterfactual estimation, policy evaluation) and three data-generating mechanisms (disease evolution, treatment assignment, observation process) that determine identifiability. We present the first unified framework bridging forecasting, counterfactual trajectories, and policy evaluation across discrete/continuous time, explicitly addressing treatment assignment, time-varying confounding, and observation bias. We synthesize key method families (multistate/joint models, temporal point-process, deep sequence architectures, longitudinal causal inference), map them to relevant components, and align evaluation with claim strength via overlap diagnostics, uncertainty quantification, off-policy robustness, and target-trial validation. This synthesis advances benchmark prediction to decision-grade clinical evidence, enabling treatment-sensitive individualized futures, pre-deployment policy stress-testing, and safer closed-loop learning health systems that adapt/abstain when evidence is insufficient.

Yanfeng Li, Kahou Chan, Yue Sun et al.

Multi-object images are prevalent in various real-world scenarios, including augmented reality, advertisement design, and medical imaging. Efficient and precise editing of these images is critical for these applications. With the advent of Stable Diffusion (SD), high-quality image generation and editing have entered a new era. However, existing methods often struggle to consider each object both individually and part of the whole image editing, both of which are crucial for ensuring consistent quantity perception, resulting in suboptimal perceptual performance. To address these challenges, we propose MoEdit, an auxiliary-free multi-object image editing framework. MoEdit facilitates high-quality multi-object image editing in terms of style transfer, object reinvention, and background regeneration, while ensuring consistent quantity perception between inputs and outputs, even with a large number of objects. To achieve this, we introduce the Feature Compensation (FeCom) module, which ensures the distinction and separability of each object attribute by minimizing the in-between interlacing. Additionally, we present the Quantity Attention (QTTN) module, which perceives and preserves quantity consistency by effective control in editing, without relying on auxiliary tools. By leveraging the SD model, MoEdit enables customized preservation and modification of specific concepts in inputs with high quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our MoEdit achieves State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance in multi-object image editing. Data and codes will be available at https://github.com/Tear-kitty/MoEdit.

Rongsheng Wang, Haoming Chen, Ruizhe Zhou et al.

Existing research has demonstrated that refining large language models (LLMs) through the utilization of machine-generated instruction-following data empowers these models to exhibit impressive zero-shot capabilities for novel tasks, without requiring human-authored instructions. In this paper, we systematically investigate, preprocess, and integrate three Chinese instruction-following datasets with the aim of enhancing the Chinese conversational capabilities of Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model. Through instruction fine-tuning on this carefully processed dataset, we successfully construct the Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model named "Aurora." To assess the performance of Aurora, we utilize three widely recognized benchmark tests: C-Eval, MMLU, and CMMLU. Empirical studies validate the effectiveness of instruction fine-tuning applied to Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model. This work is pioneering in the execution of instruction fine-tuning on a sparse expert-mixed model, marking a significant breakthrough in enhancing the capabilities of this model architecture. Our code, data and model are publicly available at https://github.com/WangRongsheng/Aurora

Xiao Hu, Hong Xie, Tao Tan et al.

A large number of heuristics have been proposed to optimize the reinforcement fine-tuning of LLMs. However, inconsistent claims are made from time to time, making this area elusive. Reflecting on this situation, two fundamental questions still lack a clear understanding: 1) what is the role of each optimizing choice? 2) which ones are the bottlenecks? This paper aims to shed light on them, and it faces the challenge of several entangled confounding factors in the fine-tuning process. To tackle this challenge, we propose a bottom-up experiment pipeline. The bottom layer is composed of a minimalist configuration: one training data, one rollout per round and the reward directly serve as the learning signal without advantage function design. This minimalist configuration connects to multi-armed bandit learning with extremely large discrete action space, which offers theories to corroborate the experiment findings. The up procedure of the experiment pipeline expanding the minimalist configuration layer by layer, examining the role of each design choice. Experimental results on three LLMs and two reasoning datasets not only reveal new understanding of the design choice but also yield essential insights to shape the area.

Yibin Ye, Xichao Teng, Shuo Chen et al.

Absolute Visual Localization (AVL) enables Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to determine its position in GNSS-denied environments by establishing geometric relationships between UAV images and geo-tagged reference maps. While many previous works have achieved AVL with image retrieval and matching techniques, research in low-altitude multi-view scenarios still remains limited. Low-altitude Multi-view condition presents greater challenges due to extreme viewpoint changes. To explore the best UAV AVL approach in such condition, we proposed this benchmark. Firstly, a large-scale Low-altitude Multi-view dataset called AnyVisLoc was constructed. This dataset includes 18,000 images captured at multiple scenes and altitudes, along with 2.5D reference maps containing aerial photogrammetry maps and historical satellite maps. Secondly, a unified framework was proposed to integrate the state-of-the-art AVL approaches and comprehensively test their performance. The best combined method was chosen as the baseline and the key factors that influencing localization accuracy are thoroughly analyzed based on it. This baseline achieved a 74.1% localization accuracy within 5m under Low-altitude, Multi-view conditions. In addition, a novel retrieval metric called PDM@K was introduced to better align with the characteristics of the UAV AVL task. Overall, this benchmark revealed the challenges of Low-altitude, Multi-view UAV AVL and provided valuable guidance for future research. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/UAV-AVL/Benchmark

Hong Xie, Haoran Gu, Yanying Huang et al.

This paper proposes a variant of multiple-play stochastic bandits tailored to resource allocation problems arising from LLM applications, edge intelligence, etc. The model is composed of $M$ arms and $K$ plays. Each arm has a stochastic number of capacities, and each unit of capacity is associated with a reward function. Each play is associated with a priority weight. When multiple plays compete for the arm capacity, the arm capacity is allocated in a larger priority weight first manner. Instance independent and instance dependent regret lower bounds of $Ω( α_1 σ\sqrt{KM T} )$ and $Ω(α_1 σ^2 \frac{M}Δ \ln T)$ are proved, where $α_1$ is the largest priority weight and $σ$ characterizes the reward tail. When model parameters are given, we design an algorithm named \texttt{MSB-PRS-OffOpt} to locate the optimal play allocation policy with a computational complexity of $O(MK^3)$. Utilizing \texttt{MSB-PRS-OffOpt} as a subroutine, an approximate upper confidence bound (UCB) based algorithm is designed, which has instance independent and instance dependent regret upper bounds matching the corresponding lower bound up to factors of $ \sqrt{K \ln KT }$ and $α_1 K^2$ respectively. To this end, we address nontrivial technical challenges arising from optimizing and learning under a special nonlinear combinatorial utility function induced by the prioritized resource sharing mechanism.

Yijie Zhu, Lingsen Zhang, Zitong Yu et al.

Emotional understanding and generation are often treated as separate tasks, yet they are inherently complementary and can mutually enhance each other. In this paper, we propose the UniEmo, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates these two tasks. The key challenge lies in the abstract nature of emotions, necessitating the extraction of visual representations beneficial for both tasks. To address this, we propose a hierarchical emotional understanding chain with learnable expert queries that progressively extracts multi-scale emotional features, thereby serving as a foundational step for unification. Simultaneously, we fuse these expert queries and emotional representations to guide the diffusion model in generating emotion-evoking images. To enhance the diversity and fidelity of the generated emotional images, we further introduce the emotional correlation coefficient and emotional condition loss into the fusion process. This step facilitates fusion and alignment for emotional generation guided by the understanding. In turn, we demonstrate that joint training allows the generation component to provide implicit feedback to the understanding part. Furthermore, we propose a novel data filtering algorithm to select high-quality and diverse emotional images generated by the well-trained model, which explicitly feedback into the understanding part. Together, these generation-driven dual feedback processes enhance the model's understanding capacity. Extensive experiments show that UniEmo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both emotional understanding and generation tasks. The code for the proposed method is available at https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/UniEmo.

Yibin Ye, Xichao Teng, Shuo Chen et al.

Optical-SAR image matching is a fundamental task for image fusion and visual navigation. However, all large-scale open SAR dataset for methods development are collected from single platform, resulting in limited satellite types and spatial resolutions. Since images captured by different sensors vary significantly in both geometric and radiometric appearance, existing methods may fail to match corresponding regions containing the same content. Besides, most of existing datasets have not been categorized based on the characteristics of different scenes. To encourage the design of more general multi-modal image matching methods, we introduce a large-scale Multi-sources,Multi-resolutions, and Multi-scenes dataset for Optical-SAR image matching(3MOS). It consists of 155K optical-SAR image pairs, including SAR data from six commercial satellites, with resolutions ranging from 1.25m to 12.5m. The data has been classified into eight scenes including urban, rural, plains, hills, mountains, water, desert, and frozen earth. Extensively experiments show that none of state-of-the-art methods achieve consistently superior performance across different sources, resolutions and scenes. In addition, the distribution of data has a substantial impact on the matching capability of deep learning models, this proposes the domain adaptation challenge in optical-SAR image matching. Our data and code will be available at:https://github.com/3M-OS/3MOS.

Luyi Han, Tao Tan, Tianyu Zhang et al.

Clinicians compare breast DCE-MRI after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) with pre-treatment scans to evaluate the response to NAC. Clinical evidence supports that accurate longitudinal deformable registration without deforming treated tumor regions is key to quantifying tumor changes. We propose a conditional pyramid registration network based on unsupervised keypoint detection and selective volume-preserving to quantify changes over time. In this approach, we extract the structural and the abnormal keypoints from DCE-MRI, apply the structural keypoints for the registration algorithm to restrict large deformation, and employ volume-preserving loss based on abnormal keypoints to keep the volume of the tumor unchanged after registration. We use a clinical dataset with 1630 MRI scans from 314 patients treated with NAC. The results demonstrate that our method registers with better performance and better volume preservation of the tumors. Furthermore, a local-global-combining biomarker based on the proposed method achieves high accuracy in pathological complete response (pCR) prediction, indicating that predictive information exists outside tumor regions. The biomarkers could potentially be used to avoid unnecessary surgeries for certain patients. It may be valuable for clinicians and/or computer systems to conduct follow-up tumor segmentation and response prediction on images registered by our method. Our code is available on \url{https://github.com/fiy2W/Treatment-aware-Longitudinal-Registration}.

Xin Wang, Yuan Gao, George Yiasemis et al.

Efficient and explainable breast cancer (BC) risk prediction is critical for large-scale population-based screening. Breast MRI provides functional information for personalized risk assessment. Yet effective modeling remains challenging as fully 3D CNNs capture volumetric context at high computational cost, whereas lightweight 2D CNNs fail to model inter-slice continuity. Importantly, breast MRI modeling for shor- and long-term BC risk stratification remains underexplored. In this study, we propose LoGo-MR, a 2.5D local-global structural modeling framework for five-year BC risk prediction. Aligned with clinical interpretation, our framework first employs neighbor-slice encoding to capture subtle local cues linked to short-term risk. It then integrates transformer-enhanced multiple-instance learning (MIL) to model distributed global patterns related to long-term risk and provide interpretable slice importance. We further apply this framework across axial, sagittal, and coronal planes as LoGo3-MR to capture complementary volumetric information. This multi-plane formulation enables voxel-level risk saliency mapping, which may assist radiologists in localizing risk-relevant regions during breast MRI interpretation. Evaluated on a large breast MRI screening cohort (~7.5K), our method outperforms 2D/3D baselines and existing SOTA MIL methods, achieving AUCs of 0.77-0.69 for 1- to 5-year prediction and improving C-index by ~6% over 3D CNNs. LoGo3-MR further improves overall performance with interpretable localization across three planes, and validation across seven backbones shows consistent gains. These results highlight the clinical potential of efficient MRI-based BC risk stratification for large-scale screening. Code will be released publicly.

Wei Yang, Hong Xie, Tao Tan et al.

While open sourced Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have proliferated, selecting the optimal pretrained model for a specific downstream task remains challenging. Exhaustive evaluation is often infeasible due to computational constraints and data limitations in few shot scenarios. Existing selection methods fail to fully address this: they either rely on data-intensive proxies or use symmetric textual descriptors that neglect the inherently directional and model-specific nature of transferability. To address this problem, we propose a framework that grounds model selection in the internal functional dynamics of the visual encoder. Our approach represents each task via layer wise conductance and derives a target-conditioned block importance distribution through entropy regularized alignment. Building on this, we introduce Directional Conductance Divergence (DCD), an asymmetric metric that quantifies how effectively a source task covers the target's salient functional blocks. This allows for predicting target model rankings by aggregating source task ranks without direct inference. Experimental results on 48 VLMs across 21 datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 14.7% improvement in NDCG@5 over SWAB.

Xinyu Xie, Yawen Cui, Tao Tan et al.

Multimodal image fusion aims to integrate information from different imaging techniques to produce a comprehensive, detail-rich single image for downstream vision tasks. Existing methods based on local convolutional neural networks (CNNs) struggle to capture global features efficiently, while Transformer-based models are computationally expensive, although they excel at global modeling. Mamba addresses these limitations by leveraging selective structured state space models (S4) to effectively handle long-range dependencies while maintaining linear complexity. In this paper, we propose FusionMamba, a novel dynamic feature enhancement framework that aims to overcome the challenges faced by CNNs and Vision Transformers (ViTs) in computer vision tasks. The framework improves the visual state-space model Mamba by integrating dynamic convolution and channel attention mechanisms, which not only retains its powerful global feature modeling capability, but also greatly reduces redundancy and enhances the expressiveness of local features. In addition, we have developed a new module called the dynamic feature fusion module (DFFM). It combines the dynamic feature enhancement module (DFEM) for texture enhancement and disparity perception with the cross-modal fusion Mamba module (CMFM), which focuses on enhancing the inter-modal correlation while suppressing redundant information. Experiments show that FusionMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance in a variety of multimodal image fusion tasks as well as downstream experiments, demonstrating its broad applicability and superiority.

Yanfeng Li, Tao Tan, Qingquan Gao et al.

High-fidelity 3D meshes can be tokenized into one-dimension (1D) sequences and directly modeled using autoregressive approaches for faces and vertices. However, existing methods suffer from insufficient resource utilization, resulting in slow inference and the ability to handle only small-scale sequences, which severely constrains the expressible structural details. We introduce the Latent Autoregressive Network (LANE), which incorporates compact autoregressive dependencies in the generation process, achieving a $6\times$ improvement in maximum generatable sequence length compared to existing methods. To further accelerate inference, we propose the Adaptive Computation Graph Reconfiguration (AdaGraph) strategy, which effectively overcomes the efficiency bottleneck of traditional serial inference through spatiotemporal decoupling in the generation process. Experimental validation demonstrates that LANE achieves superior performance across generation speed, structural detail, and geometric consistency, providing an effective solution for high-quality 3D mesh generation.

Tao Wang, Zhenxuan Zhang, Yuanbo Zhou et al.

The effectiveness of convolutional neural networks in medical image segmentation relies on large-scale, high-quality annotations, which are costly and time-consuming to obtain. Even expert-labeled datasets inevitably contain noise arising from subjectivity and coarse delineations, which disrupt feature learning and adversely impact model performance. To address these challenges, this study propose a Geometric-Structural Dual-Guided Network (GSD-Net), which integrates geometric and structural cues to improve robustness against noisy annotations. It incorporates a Geometric Distance-Aware module that dynamically adjusts pixel-level weights using geometric features, thereby strengthening supervision in reliable regions while suppressing noise. A Structure-Guided Label Refinement module further refines labels with structural priors, and a Knowledge Transfer module enriches supervision and improves sensitivity to local details. To comprehensively assess its effectiveness, we evaluated GSD-Net on six publicly available datasets: four containing three types of simulated label noise, and two with multi-expert annotations that reflect real-world subjectivity and labeling inconsistencies. Experimental results demonstrate that GSD-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance under noisy annotations, achieving improvements of 2.52% on Kvasir, 22.76% on Shenzhen, 8.87% on BU-SUC, and 4.59% on BraTS2020 under SR simulated noise. The codes of this study are available at https://github.com/ortonwang/GSD-Net.

Xinglong Liang, Jiaju Huang, Luyi Han et al.

PET-CT lesion segmentation is challenging due to noise sensitivity, small and variable lesion morphology, and interference from physiological high-metabolic signals. Current mainstream approaches follow the practice of one network solving the segmentation of multiple cancer lesions by treating all cancers as a single task. However, this overlooks the unique characteristics of different cancer types. Considering the specificity and similarity of different cancers in terms of metastatic patterns, organ preferences, and FDG uptake intensity, we propose DpDNet, a Dual-Prompt-Driven network that incorporates specific prompts to capture cancer-specific features and common prompts to retain shared knowledge. Additionally, to mitigate information forgetting caused by the early introduction of prompts, prompt-aware heads are employed after the decoder to adaptively handle multiple segmentation tasks. Experiments on a PET-CT dataset with four cancer types show that DpDNet outperforms state-of-the-art models. Finally, based on the segmentation results, we calculated MTV, TLG, and SUVmax for breast cancer survival analysis. The results suggest that DpDNet has the potential to serve as a valuable tool for personalized risk stratification, supporting clinicians in optimizing treatment strategies and improving outcomes. Code is available at https://github.com/XinglongLiang08/DpDNet.

Yaofei Duan, Yuhao Huang, Xin Yang et al.

Deep learning-based diagnostic models often suffer performance drops due to distribution shifts between training (source) and test (target) domains. Collecting and labeling sufficient target domain data for model retraining represents an optimal solution, yet is limited by time and scarce resources. Active learning (AL) offers an efficient approach to reduce annotation costs while maintaining performance, but struggles to handle the challenge posed by distribution variations across different datasets. In this study, we propose a novel unsupervised Active learning framework for Domain Adaptation, named ADAptation, which efficiently selects informative samples from multi-domain data pools under limited annotation budget. As a fundamental step, our method first utilizes the distribution homogenization capabilities of diffusion models to bridge cross-dataset gaps by translating target images into source-domain style. We then introduce two key innovations: (a) a hypersphere-constrained contrastive learning network for compact feature clustering, and (b) a dual-scoring mechanism that quantifies and balances sample uncertainty and representativeness. Extensive experiments on four breast ultrasound datasets (three public and one in-house/multi-center) across five common deep classifiers demonstrate that our method surpasses existing strong AL-based competitors, validating its effectiveness and generalization for clinical domain adaptation. The code is available at the anonymized link: https://github.com/miccai25-966/ADAptation.

Zehui Lin, Zhuoneng Zhang, Xindi Hu et al.

Ultrasound is widely used in clinical practice due to its affordability, portability, and safety. However, current AI research often overlooks combined disease prediction and tissue segmentation. We propose UniUSNet, a universal framework for ultrasound image classification and segmentation. This model handles various ultrasound types, anatomical positions, and input formats, excelling in both segmentation and classification tasks. Trained on a comprehensive dataset with over 9.7K annotations from 7 distinct anatomical positions, our model matches state-of-the-art performance and surpasses single-dataset and ablated models. Zero-shot and fine-tuning experiments show strong generalization and adaptability with minimal fine-tuning. We plan to expand our dataset and refine the prompting mechanism, with model weights and code available at (https://github.com/Zehui-Lin/UniUSNet).

Yunlong Dong, Xiaohong Liu, Yixuan Gao et al.

Recently, Users Generated Content (UGC) videos becomes ubiquitous in our daily lives. However, due to the limitations of photographic equipments and techniques, UGC videos often contain various degradations, in which one of the most visually unfavorable effects is the underexposure. Therefore, corresponding video enhancement algorithms such as Low-Light Video Enhancement (LLVE) have been proposed to deal with the specific degradation. However, different from video enhancement algorithms, almost all existing Video Quality Assessment (VQA) models are built generally rather than specifically, which measure the quality of a video from a comprehensive perspective. To the best of our knowledge, there is no VQA model specially designed for videos enhanced by LLVE algorithms. To this end, we first construct a Low-Light Video Enhancement Quality Assessment (LLVE-QA) dataset in which 254 original low-light videos are collected and then enhanced by leveraging 8 LLVE algorithms to obtain 2,060 videos in total. Moreover, we propose a quality assessment model specialized in LLVE, named Light-VQA. More concretely, since the brightness and noise have the most impact on low-light enhanced VQA, we handcraft corresponding features and integrate them with deep-learning-based semantic features as the overall spatial information. As for temporal information, in addition to deep-learning-based motion features, we also investigate the handcrafted brightness consistency among video frames, and the overall temporal information is their concatenation. Subsequently, spatial and temporal information is fused to obtain the quality-aware representation of a video. Extensive experimental results show that our Light-VQA achieves the best performance against the current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) on LLVE-QA and public dataset. Dataset and Codes can be found at https://github.com/wenzhouyidu/Light-VQA.

Xiaomeng Dong, Tao Tan, Michael Potter et al.

There is a parameter ubiquitous throughout the deep learning world: learning rate. There is likewise a ubiquitous question: what should that learning rate be? The true answer to this question is often tedious and time consuming to obtain, and a great deal of arcane knowledge has accumulated in recent years over how to pick and modify learning rates to achieve optimal training performance. Moreover, the long hours spent carefully crafting the perfect learning rate can come to nothing the moment your network architecture, optimizer, dataset, or initial conditions change ever so slightly. But it need not be this way. We propose a new answer to the great learning rate question: the Autonomous Learning Rate Controller. Find it at https://github.com/fastestimator/ARC/tree/v2.0

Tao Tan, Rui Xie, Meng Yang et al.

The rapid deployment of distributed energy resources (DERs) is one of the essential efforts to mitigate global climate change. However, a vast number of small-scale DERs are difficult to manage individually, motivating the introduction of virtual power plants (VPPs). A VPP operator coordinates a group of DERs by setting suitable prices, and aggregates them for interaction with the power grid. In this context, optimal pricing plays a critical role in VPP operation. This paper proposes a robust optimal operation model for VPPs that considers uncertainty in the price elasticity of demand. Specifically, the demand elasticity is found to be influenced by the pricing decision, giving rise to decision-dependent uncertainty (DDU). An improved column-and-constraint (C&CG) algorithm, together with tailored transformation and reformulation techniques, is developed to solve the robust model with DDU efficiently. Case studies based on actual electricity consumption data of London households demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm.

Minzheng Wang, Run Luo, Yanbo Wang et al.

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for closed-ended tasks, extending it to open-ended social language games via self-play reveals a critical issue: evolution impasse. Due to the vast strategy space, language agents frequently converge to homogenized behaviors, leading to deterministic match outcomes that eliminate the gradient signals necessary for policy evolution. To tackle this issue, we propose Dual-scale Evolutionary Policy Training (DEPT) for social language games. DEPT introduces a time-scaled evolutionary perception mechanism that detects impasse by quantifying dual-scale value baseline divergence alongside match entropy. Upon perceiving the collapse, it then activates asymmetric advantage reshaping to dynamically modulate the optimization landscape for intervention. Thus, our method effectively restores gradient signals and enforces sustained strategic exploration. Extensive experiments on multiple social language games demonstrate that DEPT outperforms strong baselines, avoiding policy degeneration and driving the continuous evolution of social language agents.

Zehui Lin, Luyi Han, Xin Wang et al.

IMPORTANCE: Modern ultrasound systems are universal diagnostic tools capable of imaging the entire body. However, current AI solutions remain fragmented into single-task tools. This critical gap between hardware versatility and software specificity limits workflow integration and clinical utility. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy, versatility, and efficiency of single general-purpose deep learning models for multi-organ classification and segmentation. DESIGN: The Universal UltraSound Image Challenge 2025 (UUSIC25) involved developing algorithms on 11,644 images aggregated from 12 sources (9 public, 3 private). Evaluation used an independent, multi-center private test set of 2,479 images, including data from a center completely unseen during training to assess generalization. OUTCOMES: Diagnostic performance (Dice Similarity Coefficient [DSC]; Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve [AUC]) and computational efficiency (inference time, GPU memory). RESULTS: Of 15 valid algorithms, the top model (SMART) achieved a macro-averaged DSC of 0.854 across 5 segmentation tasks and AUC of 0.766 for binary classification. Models demonstrated high capability in anatomical segmentation (e.g., fetal head DSC: 0.942) but variability in complex diagnostic tasks subject to domain shift. Specifically, in breast cancer molecular subtyping, the top model's performance dropped from an AUC of 0.571 (internal) to 0.508 (unseen external center), highlighting the challenge of generalization. CONCLUSIONS: General-purpose AI models can achieve high accuracy and efficiency across multiple tasks using a single architecture. However, significant performance degradation on unseen data suggests domain generalization is critical for future clinical deployment.