Yihang Wu

Zhigen Li, Jianxiang Peng, Yanmeng Wang et al.

Dialogue agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) show superior performance in various tasks. Despite the better user understanding and human-like responses, their lack of controllability remains a key challenge, often leading to unfocused conversations or task failure. To address this, we introduce Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to regulate dialogue flow. Specifically, we propose ChatSOP, a novel SOP-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) planning framework designed to enhance the controllability of LLM-driven dialogue agents. To enable this, we curate a dataset comprising SOP-annotated multi-scenario dialogues, generated using a semi-automated role-playing system with GPT-4o and validated through strict manual quality control. Additionally, we propose a novel method that integrates Chain of Thought reasoning with supervised fine-tuning for SOP prediction and utilizes SOP-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search for optimal action planning during dialogues. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, such as achieving a 27.95% improvement in action accuracy compared to baseline models based on GPT-3.5 and also showing notable gains for open-source models. Dataset and codes are publicly available.

Xinyuan Zhao, Yihang Wu, Ahmad Chaddad et al.

While deep learning models like Vision Transformer (ViT) have achieved significant advances, they typically require large datasets. With data privacy regulations, access to many original datasets is restricted, especially medical images. Federated learning (FL) addresses this challenge by enabling global model aggregation without data exchange. However, the heterogeneity of the data and the class imbalance that exist in local clients pose challenges for the generalization of the model. This study proposes a FL framework leveraging a dynamic adaptive focal loss (DAFL) and a client-aware aggregation strategy for local training. Specifically, we design a dynamic class imbalance coefficient that adjusts based on each client's sample distribution and class data distribution, ensuring minority classes receive sufficient attention and preventing sparse data from being ignored. To address client heterogeneity, a weighted aggregation strategy is adopted, which adapts to data size and characteristics to better capture inter-client variations. The classification results on three public datasets (ISIC, Ocular Disease and RSNA-ICH) show that the proposed framework outperforms DenseNet121, ResNet50, ViT-S/16, ViT-L/32, FedCLIP, Swin Transformer, CoAtNet, and MixNet in most cases, with accuracy improvements ranging from 0.98\% to 41.69\%. Ablation studies on the imbalanced ISIC dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed loss function and aggregation strategy compared to traditional loss functions and other FL approaches. The codes can be found at: https://github.com/AIPMLab/ViT-FLDAF.

Rongjun Li, Ziyu Zhou, Yihang Wu

Enterprise routers assign queries to expert agents, yet deployed profiles stay static while agents evolve (prompts, tools, models), and developers rarely keep descriptions or exemplars current. We present FlyRoute, a self-evolving profiling framework that grows capability evidence from real traffic: dispatch candidates, quality-gate successful pairs into each agent's success store, periodically distill evidence into learned capability descriptions, and inject those descriptions together with BM25-retrieved successes into an LLM router. To make this flywheel data-efficient, FlyRoute introduces a targeted exploration policy that combines profile uncertainty, BM25 relevance, and lexical novelty, prioritizing under-profiled agents only for plausible queries and avoiding redundant evidence collection. In experiments on our proprietary enterprise developer-support dataset of real routed queries, FlyRoute improves a same-backbone zero-shot LLM router from 72.57% to 78.04% with only five seed queries per agent, showing that profile retrieval already strengthens cold-start routing. After streaming 7,211 labeled training queries through the flywheel, accuracy rises to 89.83% (+17.26pp over zero-shot; +11.79pp over cold start), with consistent gains across four expert domains under standard routing accuracy on single-gold test queries.

Yihang Wu, Yihang Sun, Shaofeng Zhang et al.

Transformer-based models have advanced feedforward novel view synthesis (NVS). Current architectures such as GS-LRM and LVSM mix semantic information (e.g., RGB) and spatial information (e.g., Plücker rays) into a shared feature space. Since Plücker rays naturally carry lattice-like spatial structure, these designs can make the spatial bias interfere with appearance representation and degrade rendering fidelity. To this end, we propose to decouple the representation of feedforward NVS transformers into separate semantic and spatial tokens. The decoupled design keeps semantic and spatial information explicit in their branches while preserving cross-branch interaction through shared attention routing. Built on this design, we introduce optional categorized supervision and bidirectional modulation: the former provides branch-specific training signals, while the latter improves interaction between the two branches. Notably, the base decoupled design introduces virtually zero additional inference latency due to its architectural design. The proposed designs achieve consistent improvements, demonstrating effectiveness across decoder-only and encoder-decoder feedforward NVS models.

Ahmad Chaddad, Yihang Wu, Yuchen Jiang et al.

Traditional machine learning assumes that training and test sets are derived from the same distribution; however, this assumption does not always hold in practical applications. This distribution disparity can lead to severe performance drops when the trained model is used in new data sets. Domain adaptation (DA) is a machine learning technique that aims to address this problem by reducing the differences between domains. This paper presents simulation-based algorithms of recent DA techniques, mainly related to unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where labels are available only in the source domain. Our study compares these techniques with public data sets and diverse characteristics, highlighting their respective strengths and drawbacks. For example, Safe Self-Refinement for Transformer-based DA (SSRT) achieved the highest accuracy (91.6\%) in the office-31 data set during our simulations, however, the accuracy dropped to 72.4\% in the Office-Home data set when using limited batch sizes. In addition to improving the reader's comprehension of recent techniques in DA, our study also highlights challenges and upcoming directions for research in this domain. The codes are available at https://github.com/AIPMLab/Domain_Adaptation.

Yiwen Zhang, Keyan Ding, Yihang Wu et al.

Retrieving molecular structures from tandem mass spectra is a crucial step in rapid compound identification. Existing retrieval methods, such as traditional mass spectral library matching, suffer from limited spectral library coverage, while recent cross-modal representation learning frameworks often encounter modality misalignment, resulting in suboptimal retrieval accuracy and generalization. To address these limitations, we propose GLMR, a Generative Language Model-based Retrieval framework that mitigates the cross-modal misalignment through a two-stage process. In the pre-retrieval stage, a contrastive learning-based model identifies top candidate molecules as contextual priors for the input mass spectrum. In the generative retrieval stage, these candidate molecules are integrated with the input mass spectrum to guide a generative model in producing refined molecular structures, which are then used to re-rank the candidates based on molecular similarity. Experiments on both MassSpecGym and the proposed MassRET-20k dataset demonstrate that GLMR significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving over 40% improvement in top-1 accuracy and exhibiting strong generalizability.

Yihang Wu, Ahmad Chaddad, Christian Desrosiers et al.

Despite the remarkable performance of vision language models (VLMs) such as Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP), the large size of these models is a considerable obstacle to their use in federated learning (FL) systems where the parameters of local client models need to be transferred to a global server for aggregation. Another challenge in FL is the heterogeneity of data from different clients, which affects the generalization performance of the solution. In addition, natural pre-trained VLMs exhibit poor generalization ability in the medical datasets, suggests there exists a domain gap. To solve these issues, we introduce a novel method for the Federated Adversarial Adaptation (FAA) of CLIP. Our method, named FAA-CLIP, handles the large communication costs of CLIP using a light-weight feature adaptation module (FAM) for aggregation, effectively adapting this VLM to each client's data while greatly reducing the number of parameters to transfer. By keeping CLIP frozen and only updating the FAM parameters, our method is also computationally efficient. Unlike existing approaches, our FAA-CLIP method directly addresses the problem of domain shifts across clients via a domain adaptation (DA) module. This module employs a domain classifier to predict if a given sample is from the local client or the global server, allowing the model to learn domain-invariant representations. Extensive experiments on six different datasets containing both natural and medical images demonstrate that FAA-CLIP can generalize well on both natural and medical datasets compared to recent FL approaches. Our codes are available at https://github.com/AIPMLab/FAA-CLIP.

Wei Zhang, Songhua Li, Yihang Wu et al.

3D change detection from multi-view images is essential for urban monitoring, disaster assessment, and autonomous driving. However, existing methods predominantly operate in the 2D domain, where viewpoint variations are mistaken for physical changes and depth is unavailable. While visual geometry foundation models like VGGT rapidly produce dense point clouds from unposed images, independent per-epoch reconstruction encounters fundamental obstacles: unpredictable inter-epoch scale ambiguity, registration-change paradox where scene changes corrupt alignment, and pervasive edge-flying noise. To address these challenges, we present VGGT-CD, a training-free pipeline decoupling cross-temporal registration from dynamic-change interference. In the Coarse Stage, sparse keyframe joint inference establishes a unified metric space and yields an initial Sim(3) prior. In the Fine Stage, dense reconstructions are purified by isolating static-background correspondences. A closed-form centroid alignment refines the translation while locking scale and rotation, using a residual self-check to mathematically guarantee non-degradation. Evaluated on an 11-scene benchmark from the World Across Time dataset, VGGT-CD reduces Absolute Trajectory Error by 44% outdoors and 59% indoors. It completes registration over 6 times faster, producing high-purity 3D change maps without task-specific training.

Yunyao Lu, Yihang Wu, Reem Kateb et al.

Traditional supervised medical image segmentation models require large amounts of labeled data for training; however, obtaining such large-scale labeled datasets in the real world is extremely challenging. Recent semi-supervised segmentation models also suffer from noisy pseudo-label issue and limited supervision in feature space. To solve these challenges, we propose an innovative semi-supervised 3D medical image segmentation method to reduce the dependency on large, expert-labeled datasets. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-network architecture to address the limitations of existing methods in using contextual information and generating reliable pseudo-labels. In addition, a self-supervised contrastive learning strategy is used to enhance the representation of the network and reduce prediction uncertainty by distinguishing between reliable and unreliable predictions. Experiments on clinical magnetic resonance imaging demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. Our code is available at https://github.com/AIPMLab/Semi-supervised-Segmentation.

Li Peng, Jiayao Zhang, Yihang Wu et al.

The explosive growth of data has highlighted its critical role in driving economic growth through data marketplaces, which enable extensive data sharing and access to high-quality datasets. To support effective trading, signaling mechanisms provide participants with information about data products before transactions, enabling informed decisions and facilitating trading. However, due to the inherent free-duplication nature of data, commonly practiced signaling methods face a dilemma between privacy and reliability, undermining the effectiveness of signals in guiding decision-making. To address this, this paper explores the benefits and develops a non-TCP-based construction for a desirable signaling mechanism that simultaneously ensures privacy and reliability. We begin by formally defining the desirable utility signaling mechanism and proving its ability to prevent suboptimal decisions for both participants and facilitate informed data trading. To design a protocol to realize its functionality, we propose leveraging maliciously secure multi-party computation (MPC) to ensure the privacy and robustness of signal computation and introduce an MPC-based hash verification scheme to ensure input reliability. In multi-seller scenarios requiring fair data valuation, we further explore the design and optimization of the MPC-based KNN-Shapley method with improved efficiency. Rigorous experiments demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of our approach.

Yihang Wu, Muhammad Owais, Reem Kateb et al.

Deep models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformer (ViT), demonstrate remarkable performance in image classification. However, those deep models require large data to fine-tune, which is impractical in the medical domain due to the data privacy issue. Furthermore, despite the feasible performance of contrastive language image pre-training (CLIP) in the natural domain, the potential of CLIP has not been fully investigated in the medical field. To face these challenges, we considered three scenarios: 1) we introduce a novel CLIP variant using four CNNs and eight ViTs as image encoders for the classification of brain cancer and skin cancer, 2) we combine 12 deep models with two federated learning techniques to protect data privacy, and 3) we involve traditional machine learning (ML) methods to improve the generalization ability of those deep models in unseen domain data. The experimental results indicate that maxvit shows the highest averaged (AVG) test metrics (AVG = 87.03\%) in HAM10000 dataset with multimodal learning, while convnext\_l demonstrates remarkable test with an F1-score of 83.98\% compared to swin\_b with 81.33\% in FL model. Furthermore, the use of support vector machine (SVM) can improve the overall test metrics with AVG of $\sim 2\%$ for swin transformer series in ISIC2018. Our codes are available at https://github.com/AIPMLab/SkinCancerSimulation.

Yihang Wu, Ahmad Chaddad

Domain adaptation (DA) is a quickly expanding area in machine learning that involves adjusting a model trained in one domain to perform well in another domain. While there have been notable progressions, the fundamental concept of numerous DA methodologies has persisted: aligning the data from various domains into a shared feature space. In this space, knowledge acquired from labeled source data can improve the model training on target data that lacks sufficient labels. In this study, we demonstrate the use of 10 deep learning models to simulate common DA techniques and explore their application in four medical image datasets. We have considered various situations such as multi-modality, noisy data, federated learning (FL), interpretability analysis, and classifier calibration. The experimental results indicate that using DA with ResNet34 in a brain tumor (BT) data set results in an enhancement of 4.7\% in model performance. Similarly, the use of DA can reduce the impact of Gaussian noise, as it provides $\sim 3\%$ accuracy increase using ResNet34 on a BT dataset. Furthermore, simply introducing DA into FL framework shows limited potential (e.g., $\sim 0.3\%$ increase in performance) for skin cancer classification. In addition, the DA method can improve the interpretability of the models using the gradcam++ technique, which offers clinical values. Calibration analysis also demonstrates that using DA provides a lower expected calibration error (ECE) value $\sim 2\%$ compared to CNN alone on a multi-modality dataset.

Ahmad Chaddad, Yihang Wu, Xianrui Chen

Deep models based on vision transformer (ViT) and convolutional neural network (CNN) have demonstrated remarkable performance on natural datasets. However, these models may not be similar in medical imaging, where abnormal regions cover only a small portion of the image. This challenge motivates this study to investigate the latest deep models for bladder cancer classification tasks. We propose the following to evaluate these deep models: 1) standard classification using 13 models (four CNNs and eight transormer-based models), 2) calibration analysis to examine if these models are well calibrated for bladder cancer classification, and 3) we use GradCAM++ to evaluate the interpretability of these models for clinical diagnosis. We simulate $\sim 300$ experiments on a publicly multicenter bladder cancer dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate that the ConvNext series indicate limited generalization ability to classify bladder cancer images (e.g., $\sim 60\%$ accuracy). In addition, ViTs show better calibration effects compared to ConvNext and swin transformer series. We also involve test time augmentation to improve the models interpretability. Finally, no model provides a one-size-fits-all solution for a feasible interpretable model. ConvNext series are suitable for in-distribution samples, while ViT and its variants are suitable for interpreting out-of-distribution samples.

Yihang Wu, Ahmad Chaddad

Despite the remarkable performance of deep models in medical imaging, they still require source data for training, which limits their potential in light of privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL), as a decentralized learning framework that trains a shared model with multiple hospitals (a.k.a., FL clients), provides a feasible solution. However, data heterogeneity and resource costs hinder the deployment of FL models, especially when using vision language models (VLM). To address these challenges, we propose a novel contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) based FL approach for medical image classification (FedMedCLIP). Specifically, we introduce a masked feature adaptation module (FAM) as a communication module to reduce the communication load while freezing the CLIP encoders to reduce the computational overhead. Furthermore, we propose a masked multi-layer perceptron (MLP) as a private local classifier to adapt to the client tasks. Moreover, we design an adaptive Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based distillation regularization method to enable mutual learning between FAM and MLP. Finally, we incorporate model compression to transmit the FAM parameters while using ensemble predictions for classification. Extensive experiments on four publicly available medical datasets demonstrate that our model provides feasible performance (e.g., 8\% higher compared to second best baseline on ISIC2019) with reasonable resource cost (e.g., 120$\times$ faster than FedAVG).

Ahmad Chaddad, Jihao Peng, Yihang Wu

The use of deep learning (DL) in medical image analysis has significantly improved the ability to predict lung cancer. In this study, we introduce a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model, named ResNet+, which is based on the established ResNet framework. This model is specifically designed to improve the prediction of lung cancer and diseases using the images. To address the challenge of missing feature information that occurs during the downsampling process in CNNs, we integrate the ResNet-D module, a variant designed to enhance feature extraction capabilities by modifying the downsampling layers, into the traditional ResNet model. Furthermore, a convolutional attention module was incorporated into the bottleneck layers to enhance model generalization by allowing the network to focus on relevant regions of the input images. We evaluated the proposed model using five public datasets, comprising lung cancer (LC2500 $n$=3183, IQ-OTH/NCCD $n$=1336, and LCC $n$=25000 images) and lung disease (ChestXray $n$=5856, and COVIDx-CT $n$=425024 images). To address class imbalance, we used data augmentation techniques to artificially increase the representation of underrepresented classes in the training dataset. The experimental results show that ResNet+ model demonstrated remarkable accuracy/F1, reaching 98.14/98.14\% on the LC25000 dataset and 99.25/99.13\% on the IQ-OTH/NCCD dataset. Furthermore, the ResNet+ model saved computational cost compared to the original ResNet series in predicting lung cancer images. The proposed model outperformed the baseline models on publicly available datasets, achieving better performance metrics. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/AIPMLab/Graduation-2024/tree/main/Peng.

Qiyao Wang, Guhong Chen, Hongbo Wang et al.

Intellectual Property (IP) is a highly specialized domain that integrates technical and legal knowledge, making it inherently complex and knowledge-intensive. Recent advancements in LLMs have demonstrated their potential to handle IP-related tasks, enabling more efficient analysis, understanding, and generation of IP-related content. However, existing datasets and benchmarks focus narrowly on patents or cover limited aspects of the IP field, lacking alignment with real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce IPBench, the first comprehensive IP task taxonomy and a large-scale bilingual benchmark encompassing 8 IP mechanisms and 20 distinct tasks, designed to evaluate LLMs in real-world IP scenarios. We benchmark 17 main LLMs, ranging from general purpose to domain-specific, including chat-oriented and reasoning-focused models, under zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought settings. Our results show that even the top-performing model, DeepSeek-V3, achieves only 75.8% accuracy, indicating significant room for improvement. Notably, open-source IP and law-oriented models lag behind closed-source general-purpose models. To foster future research, we publicly release IPBench, and will expand it with additional tasks to better reflect real-world complexities and support model advancements in the IP domain. We provide the data and code in the supplementary URLs.

Ahmad Chaddad, Yan Hu, Yihang Wu et al.

Objective. This paper presents an overview of generalizable and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in deep learning (DL) for medical imaging, aimed at addressing the urgent need for transparency and explainability in clinical applications. Methodology. We propose to use four CNNs in three medical datasets (brain tumor, skin cancer, and chest x-ray) for medical image classification tasks. In addition, we perform paired t-tests to show the significance of the differences observed between different methods. Furthermore, we propose to combine ResNet50 with five common XAI techniques to obtain explainable results for model prediction, aiming at improving model transparency. We also involve a quantitative metric (confidence increase) to evaluate the usefulness of XAI techniques. Key findings. The experimental results indicate that ResNet50 can achieve feasible accuracy and F1 score in all datasets (e.g., 86.31\% accuracy in skin cancer). Furthermore, the findings show that while certain XAI methods, such as XgradCAM, effectively highlight relevant abnormal regions in medical images, others, like EigenGradCAM, may perform less effectively in specific scenarios. In addition, XgradCAM indicates higher confidence increase (e.g., 0.12 in glioma tumor) compared to GradCAM++ (0.09) and LayerCAM (0.08). Implications. Based on the experimental results and recent advancements, we outline future research directions to enhance the robustness and generalizability of DL models in the field of biomedical imaging.

Xinyuan Zhao, Yihang Wu, Ahmad Chaddad et al.

Gaze estimation methods commonly use facial appearances to predict the direction of a person gaze. However, previous studies show three major challenges with convolutional neural network (CNN)-based, transformer-based, and contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP)-based methods, including late fusion of image features, lack of factor-aware conditioning, and impractical capacity scaling. To address these challenges, we propose Globally-conditioned Multi-scale Gaze estimation (GMGaze), which leverages a multi-scale transformer architecture. Specifically, the model first introduces semantic prototype conditioning, which modulates the CLIP global image embedding using four learned prototype banks (i.e., illumination, background, head pose and appearance) to generate two complementary context-biased global tokens. These tokens, along with the CLIP patch and CNN tokens, are fused at the first layer. This early unified fusion prevents information loss common in late-stage merging. Finally, each token passes through sparse Mixture-of-Experts modules, providing conditional computational capacity without uniformly increasing dense parameters. For cross-domain adaptation, we incorporate an adversarial domain adaptation technique with a feature separation loss that encourages the two global tokens to remain de-correlated. Experiments using four public benchmarks (MPIIFaceGaze, EYEDIAP, Gaze360, and ETH-XGaze) show that GMGaze achieves mean angular errors of 2.49$^\circ$, 3.22$^\circ$, 10.16$^\circ$, and 1.44$^\circ$, respectively, outperforming previous baselines in all within-domain settings. In cross-domain evaluations, it provides state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on two standard transfer routes.

Jiayao Zhang, Yuran Bi, Mengye Cheng et al.

Data is the new oil of the 21st century. The growing trend of trading data for greater welfare has led to the emergence of data markets. A data market is any mechanism whereby the exchange of data products including datasets and data derivatives takes place as a result of data buyers and data sellers being in contact with one another, either directly or through mediating agents. It serves as a coordinating mechanism by which several functions, including the pricing and the distribution of data as the most important ones, interact to make the value of data fully exploited and enhanced. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of this important and emerging direction from the aspects of data search, data productization, data transaction, data pricing, revenue allocation as well as privacy, security, and trust issues. We also investigate the government policies and industry status of data markets across different countries and different domains. Finally, we identify the unresolved challenges and discuss possible future directions for the development of data markets.

Yihang Wu, Xiao Cao, Kaixin Li et al.

In text-to-image generation tasks, the advancements of diffusion models have facilitated the fidelity of generated results. However, these models encounter challenges when processing text prompts containing multiple entities and attributes. The uneven distribution of attention results in the issues of entity leakage and attribute misalignment. Training from scratch to address this issue requires numerous labeled data and is resource-consuming. Motivated by this, we propose an attribution-focusing mechanism, a training-free phase-wise mechanism by modulation of attention for diffusion model. One of our core ideas is to guide the model to concentrate on the corresponding syntactic components of the prompt at distinct timesteps. To achieve this, we incorporate a temperature control mechanism within the early phases of the self-attention modules to mitigate entity leakage issues. An object-focused masking scheme and a phase-wise dynamic weight control mechanism are integrated into the cross-attention modules, enabling the model to discern the affiliation of semantic information between entities more effectively. The experimental results in various alignment scenarios demonstrate that our model attain better image-text alignment with minimal additional computational cost.

Yuchen Jiang, Xinyuan Zhao, Yihang Wu et al.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in the medical field, the need for its explainability has grown. In medical image analysis, a high degree of transparency and model interpretability can help clinicians better understand and trust the decision-making process of AI models. In this study, we propose a Knowledge Distillation (KD)-based approach that aims to enhance the transparency of the AI model in medical image analysis. The initial step is to use traditional CNN to obtain a teacher model and then use KD to simplify the CNN architecture, retain most of the features of the data set, and reduce the number of network layers. It also uses the feature map of the student model to perform hierarchical analysis to identify key features and decision-making processes. This leads to intuitive visual explanations. We selected three public medical data sets (brain tumor, eye disease, and Alzheimer's disease) to test our method. It shows that even when the number of layers is reduced, our model provides a remarkable result in the test set and reduces the time required for the interpretability analysis.

Wei Zhang, Yihang Wu, Songhua Li et al.

3D reconstruction, which aims to recover the dense three-dimensional structure of a scene, is a cornerstone technology for numerous applications, including augmented/virtual reality, autonomous driving, and robotics. While traditional pipelines like Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) achieve high precision through iterative optimization, they are limited by complex workflows, high computational cost, and poor robustness in challenging scenarios like texture-less regions. Recently, deep learning has catalyzed a paradigm shift in 3D reconstruction. A new family of models, exemplified by DUSt3R, has pioneered a feed-forward approach. These models employ a unified deep network to jointly infer camera poses and dense geometry directly from an Unconstrained set of images in a single forward pass. This survey provides a systematic review of this emerging domain. We begin by dissecting the technical framework of these feed-forward models, including their Transformer-based correspondence modeling, joint pose and geometry regression mechanisms, and strategies for scaling from two-view to multi-view scenarios. To highlight the disruptive nature of this new paradigm, we contrast it with both traditional pipelines and earlier learning-based methods like MVSNet. Furthermore, we provide an overview of relevant datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the technology's broad application prospects and identify key future challenges and opportunities, such as model accuracy and scalability, and handling dynamic scenes.

Ziyu Zhou, Yihang Wu, Jingyuan Yang et al.

Black-Box prompt optimization methods have emerged as a promising strategy for refining input prompts to better align large language models (LLMs), thereby enhancing their task performance. Although these methods have demonstrated encouraging results, most studies and experiments have primarily focused on smaller-scale models (e.g., 7B, 14B) or earlier versions (e.g., GPT-3.5) of LLMs. As the scale of LLMs continues to increase, such as with DeepSeek V3 (671B), it remains an open question whether these black-box optimization techniques will continue to yield significant performance improvements for models of such scale. In response to this, we select three well-known black-box optimization methods and evaluate them on large-scale LLMs (DeepSeek V3 and Gemini 2.0 Flash) across four NLU and NLG datasets. The results show that these black-box prompt optimization methods offer only limited improvements on these large-scale LLMs. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the scale of the model is the primary factor contributing to the limited benefits observed. To explore this hypothesis, we conducted experiments on LLMs of varying sizes (Qwen 2.5 series, ranging from 7B to 72B) and observed an inverse scaling law, wherein the effectiveness of black-box optimization methods diminished as the model size increased.

Binbin Wen, Yihang Wu, Tareef Daqqaq et al.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into medicine is remarkable, offering advanced diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities. However, the inherent opacity of complex AI models presents significant challenges to their clinical practicality. This paper focuses primarily on investigating the application of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods, with the aim of making AI decisions transparent and interpretable. Our research focuses on implementing simulations using various medical datasets to elucidate the internal workings of the XAI model. These dataset-driven simulations demonstrate how XAI effectively interprets AI predictions, thus improving the decision-making process for healthcare professionals. In addition to a survey of the main XAI methods and simulations, ongoing challenges in the XAI field are discussed. The study highlights the need for the continuous development and exploration of XAI, particularly from the perspective of diverse medical datasets, to promote its adoption and effectiveness in the healthcare domain.

Yunyao Lu, Yihang Wu, Ahmad Chaddad et al.

Despite the remarkable performance of supervised medical image segmentation models, relying on a large amount of labeled data is impractical in real-world situations. Semi-supervised learning approaches aim to alleviate this challenge using unlabeled data through pseudo-label generation. Yet, existing semi-supervised segmentation methods still suffer from noisy pseudo-labels and insufficient supervision within the feature space. To solve these challenges, this paper proposes a novel semi-supervised 3D medical image segmentation framework based on a dual-network architecture. Specifically, we investigate a Cross Consistency Enhancement module using both cross pseudo and entropy-filtered supervision to reduce the noisy pseudo-labels, while we design a dynamic weighting strategy to adjust the contributions of pseudo-labels using an uncertainty-aware mechanism (i.e., Kullback-Leibler divergence). In addition, we use a self-supervised contrastive learning mechanism to align uncertain voxel features with reliable class prototypes by effectively differentiating between trustworthy and uncertain predictions, thus reducing prediction uncertainty. Extensive experiments are conducted on three 3D segmentation datasets, Left Atrial, NIH Pancreas and BraTS-2019. The proposed approach consistently exhibits superior performance across various settings (e.g., 89.95\% Dice score on left Atrial with 10\% labeled data) compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the usefulness of the proposed modules is further validated via ablation experiments.

Yanmei Hu, Yihang Wu, Bing Sun et al.

Identifying influential nodes in complex networks is a fundamental task in network analysis with wide-ranging applications across domains. While deep learning has advanced node influence detection, existing supervised approaches remain constrained by their reliance on labeled data, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where labels are scarce or unavailable. While contrastive learning demonstrates significant potential for performance enhancement, existing approaches predominantly rely on multiple-embedding generation to construct positive/negative sample pairs. To overcome these limitations, we propose ReCC (\textit{r}egular \textit{e}quivalence-based \textit{c}ontrastive \textit{c}lustering), a novel deep unsupervised framework for influential node identification. We first reformalize influential node identification as a label-free deep clustering problem, then develop a contrastive learning mechanism that leverages regular equivalence-based similarity, which captures structural similarities between nodes beyond local neighborhoods, to generate positive and negative samples. This mechanism is integrated into a graph convolutional network to learn node embeddings that are used to differentiate influential from non-influential nodes. ReCC is pre-trained using network reconstruction loss and fine-tuned with a combined contrastive and clustering loss, with both phases being independent of labeled data. Additionally, ReCC enhances node representations by combining structural metrics with regular equivalence-based similarities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReCC outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across several benchmarks.

Ahmad Chaddad, Yihang Wu, Reem Kateb et al.

Domain adaptation (DA) techniques have the potential in machine learning to alleviate distribution differences between training and test sets by leveraging information from source domains. In image classification, most advances in DA have been made using natural images rather than medical data, which are harder to work with. Moreover, even for natural images, the use of mainstream datasets can lead to performance bias. {With the aim of better understanding the benefits of DA for both natural and medical images, this study performs 557 simulation studies using seven widely-used DA techniques for image classification in five natural and eight medical datasets that cover various scenarios, such as out-of-distribution, dynamic data streams, and limited training samples.} Our experiments yield detailed results and insightful observations highlighting the performance and medical applicability of these techniques. Notably, our results have shown the outstanding performance of the Deep Subdomain Adaptation Network (DSAN) algorithm. This algorithm achieved feasible classification accuracy (91.2\%) in the COVID-19 dataset using Resnet50 and showed an important accuracy improvement in the dynamic data stream DA scenario (+6.7\%) compared to the baseline. Our results also demonstrate that DSAN exhibits remarkable level of explainability when evaluated on COVID-19 and skin cancer datasets. These results contribute to the understanding of DA techniques and offer valuable insight into the effective adaptation of models to medical data.

Yanmei Hu, Siyuan Yin, Yihang Wu et al.

Identifying influential nodes in complex networks is of great importance, and has many applications in practice. For example, finding influential nodes in e-commerce network can provide merchants with customers with strong purchase intent; identifying influential nodes in computer information system can help locating the components that cause the system break down and identifying influential nodes in these networks can accelerate the flow of information in networks. Thus, a lot of efforts have been made on the problem of indentifying influential nodes. However, previous efforts either consider only one aspect of the network structure, or using global centralities with high time consuming as node features to identify influential nodes, and the existing methods do not consider the relationships between different centralities. To solve these problems, we propose a Graph Convolutional Network Framework based on Feature Network, abbreviated as FNGCN (graph convolutional network is abbreviated as GCN in the following text). Further, to exclude noises and reduce redundency, FNGCN utilizes feature network to represent the complicated relationships among the local centralities, based on which the most suitable local centralities are determined. By taking a shallow GCN and a deep GCN into the FNGCN framework, two FNGCNs are developed. With ground truth obtained from the widely used Susceptible Infected Recovered (SIR) model, the two FNGCNs are compared with the state-of-art methods on several real-world networks. Experimental results show that the two FNGCNs can identify the influential nodes more accurately than the compared methods, indicating that the proposed framework is effective in identifying influential nodes in complex networks.

Jun Huang, Ting Liu, Yihang Wu et al.

Advancements in generative models have enabled image inpainting models to generate content within specific regions of an image based on provided prompts and masks. However, existing inpainting methods often suffer from problems such as semantic misalignment, structural distortion, and style inconsistency. In this work, we present MTADiffusion, a Mask-Text Alignment diffusion model designed for object inpainting. To enhance the semantic capabilities of the inpainting model, we introduce MTAPipeline, an automatic solution for annotating masks with detailed descriptions. Based on the MTAPipeline, we construct a new MTADataset comprising 5 million images and 25 million mask-text pairs. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task training strategy that integrates both inpainting and edge prediction tasks to improve structural stability. To promote style consistency, we present a novel inpainting style-consistency loss using a pre-trained VGG network and the Gram matrix. Comprehensive evaluations on BrushBench and EditBench demonstrate that MTADiffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other methods.

Guocong Li, Weize Liu, Yihang Wu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit excellent performance in natural language processing (NLP), but remain highly sensitive to the quality of input queries, especially when these queries contain misleading or inaccurate information. Existing methods focus on correcting the output, but they often overlook the potential of improving the ability of LLMs to detect and correct misleading content in the input itself. In this paper, we propose a novel three-stage fine-tuning method that enhances the ability of LLMs to detect and correct misleading information in the input, further improving response accuracy and reducing hallucinations. Specifically, the three stages include (1) training LLMs to identify misleading information, (2) training LLMs to correct the misleading information using built-in or external knowledge, and (3) training LLMs to generate accurate answers based on the corrected queries. To evaluate our method, we conducted experiments on three datasets for the hallucination detection task and the question answering~(QA) task, as well as two datasets containing misleading information that we constructed. The experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the accuracy and factuality of LLM responses, while also enhancing the ability to detect hallucinations and reducing the generation of hallucinations in the output, particularly when the query contains misleading information.