Ke Lei

Ke Lei, Ali B. Syed, Xucheng Zhu et al.

Manual prescription of the field of view (FOV) by MRI technologists is variable and prolongs the scanning process. Often, the FOV is too large or crops critical anatomy. We propose a deep-learning framework, trained by radiologists' supervision, for automating FOV prescription. An intra-stack shared feature extraction network and an attention network are used to process a stack of 2D image inputs to generate output scalars defining the location of a rectangular region of interest (ROI). The attention mechanism is used to make the model focus on the small number of informative slices in a stack. Then the smallest FOV that makes the neural network predicted ROI free of aliasing is calculated by an algebraic operation derived from MR sampling theory. We retrospectively collected 595 cases between February 2018 and February 2022. The framework's performance is examined quantitatively with intersection over union (IoU) and pixel error on position, and qualitatively with a reader study. We use the t-test for comparing quantitative results from all models and a radiologist. The proposed model achieves an average IoU of 0.867 and average ROI position error of 9.06 out of 512 pixels on 80 test cases, significantly better (P<0.05) than two baseline models and not significantly different from a radiologist (P>0.12). Finally, the FOV given by the proposed framework achieves an acceptance rate of 92% from an experienced radiologist.

Ke Lei, Yu Zhang, Changhao Pan et al.

Real-time and accurate spatial audio generation is pivotal for delivering an immersive experience. However, existing spatial audio synthesis technologies are often encumbered by a tradeoff between generation quality and high inference latency, as well as difficulty in capturing precise spatial information from multimodal inputs. To address these challenges, we propose SwanSphere, a unified streaming framework for high-fidelity spatial audio generation from panoramic videos and text prompts. SwanSphere mainly makes the following contributions: 1) We introduce a causal autoregressive diffusion transformer architecture that enables streaming high-quality spatial audio generation. 2) We design a Spatial Video-Audio Contrastive (SVAC) learning strategy to align the video encoder with the acoustic domain, and further employ a multi-objective online direct preference optimization (ODPO) scheme, resulting in strong spatial perception and robust multimodal spatial audio synthesis. 3) To alleviate the current scarcity of spatial audio datasets, we also develop an automated annotation pipeline for generating detailed spatial captions. Experimental results demonstrate that SwanSphere achieves superior performance in both video-to-spatial and text-to-spatial audio generation tasks. Demos can be found at: https://swanaigc.github.io.

Sashuai Zhou, Weinan Gan, Qijiong Liu et al.

Recent advances in LLM-based recommendation have shown promise, yet their cross-domain generalization is hindered by a fundamental mismatch between language-centric pretraining and the recommendation task. Existing methods, relying on language-level knowledge, fail to capture dynamic, item-level user interests across domains. To bridge this gap, we propose RecBase, a domain-agnostic foundational model pretrained with a recommendation-oriented objective. RecBase leverages a large-scale, heterogeneous, cross-domain corpus with unified textual representations and feature mappings to enhance cross-domain generalization. To further align item semantics across domains, we introduce a unified item tokenizer that encodes items into hierarchical concept identifiers, enabling structured representation and efficient vocabulary sharing. The model is trained using an autoregressive objective to capture complex item-level sequential patterns. On eight real-world datasets, our 1.5B-parameter model matches or surpasses the performance of LLM baselines up to 7B parameters in zero-shot and cross-domain recommendation tasks.

Ke Lei, John M. Pauly, Shreyas S. Vasanawala

In clinical practice MR images are often first seen by radiologists long after the scan. If image quality is inadequate either patients have to return for an additional scan, or a suboptimal interpretation is rendered. An automatic image quality assessment (IQA) would enable real-time remediation. Existing IQA works for MRI give only a general quality score, agnostic to the cause of and solution to low-quality scans. Furthermore, radiologists' image quality requirements vary with the scan type and diagnostic task. Therefore, the same score may have different implications for different scans. We propose a framework with multi-task CNN model trained with calibrated labels and inferenced with image rulers. Labels calibrated by human inputs follow a well-defined and efficient labeling task. Image rulers address varying quality standards and provide a concrete way of interpreting raw scores from the CNN. The model supports assessments of two of the most common artifacts in MRI: noise and motion. It achieves accuracies of around 90%, 6% better than the best previous method examined, and 3% better than human experts on noise assessment. Our experiments show that label calibration, image rulers, and multi-task training improve the model's performance and generalizability.

Ke Lei, Morteza Mardani, John M. Pauly et al.

Lack of ground-truth MR images impedes the common supervised training of neural networks for image reconstruction. To cope with this challenge, this paper leverages unpaired adversarial training for reconstruction networks, where the inputs are undersampled k-space and naively reconstructed images from one dataset, and the labels are high-quality images from another dataset. The reconstruction networks consist of a generator which suppresses the input image artifacts, and a discriminator using a pool of (unpaired) labels to adjust the reconstruction quality. The generator is an unrolled neural network -- a cascade of convolutional and data consistency layers. The discriminator is also a multilayer CNN that plays the role of a critic scoring the quality of reconstructed images based on the Wasserstein distance. Our experiments with knee MRI datasets demonstrate that the proposed unpaired training enables diagnostic-quality reconstruction when high-quality image labels are not available for the input types of interest, or when the amount of labels is small. In addition, our adversarial training scheme can achieve better image quality (as rated by expert radiologists) compared with the paired training schemes with pixel-wise loss.