Leilei Ma

Leilei Ma, Dengdi Sun, Lei Wang et al.

Extracting image semantics effectively and assigning corresponding labels to multiple objects or attributes for natural images is challenging due to the complex scene contents and confusing label dependencies. Recent works have focused on modeling label relationships with graph and understanding object regions using class activation maps (CAM). However, these methods ignore the complex intra- and inter-category relationships among specific semantic features, and CAM is prone to generate noisy information. To this end, we propose a novel semantic-aware dual contrastive learning framework that incorporates sample-to-sample contrastive learning (SSCL) as well as prototype-to-sample contrastive learning (PSCL). Specifically, we leverage semantic-aware representation learning to extract category-related local discriminative features and construct category prototypes. Then based on SSCL, label-level visual representations of the same category are aggregated together, and features belonging to distinct categories are separated. Meanwhile, we construct a novel PSCL module to narrow the distance between positive samples and category prototypes and push negative samples away from the corresponding category prototypes. Finally, the discriminative label-level features related to the image content are accurately captured by the joint training of the above three parts. Experiments on five challenging large-scale public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Code and supplementary materials are released on https://github.com/yu-gi-oh-leilei/SADCL.

Lei Wang, Yibing Zhan, Leilei Ma et al.

Recently, Mix-style data augmentation methods (e.g., Mixup and CutMix) have shown promising performance in various visual tasks. However, these methods are primarily designed for single-label images, ignoring the considerable discrepancies between single- and multi-label images, i.e., a multi-label image involves multiple co-occurred categories and fickle object scales. On the other hand, previous multi-label image classification (MLIC) methods tend to design elaborate models, bringing expensive computation. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective augmentation strategy for multi-label image classification, namely SpliceMix. The "splice" in our method is two-fold: 1) Each mixed image is a splice of several downsampled images in the form of a grid, where the semantics of images attending to mixing are blended without object deficiencies for alleviating co-occurred bias; 2) We splice mixed images and the original mini-batch to form a new SpliceMixed mini-batch, which allows an image with different scales to contribute to training together. Furthermore, such splice in our SpliceMixed mini-batch enables interactions between mixed images and original regular images. We also offer a simple and non-parametric extension based on consistency learning (SpliceMix-CL) to show the flexible extensibility of our SpliceMix. Extensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate that only using SpliceMix with a baseline model (e.g., ResNet) achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the generalizability of our SpliceMix is further validated by the improvements in current MLIC methods when married with our SpliceMix. The code is available at https://github.com/zuiran/SpliceMix.

Leilei Ma, Hongxing Xie, Lei Wang et al.

Recently, large-scale visual language pre-trained (VLP) models have demonstrated impressive performance across various downstream tasks. Motivated by these advancements, pioneering efforts have emerged in multi-label image recognition with missing labels, leveraging VLP prompt-tuning technology. However, they usually cannot match text and vision features well, due to complicated semantics gaps and missing labels in a multi-label image. To tackle this challenge, we propose $\textbf{T}$ext-$\textbf{R}$egion $\textbf{M}$atching for optimizing $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{L}$abel prompt tuning, namely TRM-ML, a novel method for enhancing meaningful cross-modal matching. Compared to existing methods, we advocate exploring the information of category-aware regions rather than the entire image or pixels, which contributes to bridging the semantic gap between textual and visual representations in a one-to-one matching manner. Concurrently, we further introduce multimodal contrastive learning to narrow the semantic gap between textual and visual modalities and establish intra-class and inter-class relationships. Additionally, to deal with missing labels, we propose a multimodal category prototype that leverages intra- and inter-category semantic relationships to estimate unknown labels, facilitating pseudo-label generation. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO, PASCAL VOC, Visual Genome, NUS-WIDE, and CUB-200-211 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin. Our code is available here: https://github.com/yu-gi-oh-leilei/TRM-ML.

Haifeng Zhao, Lixiang Jiang, Leilei Ma et al.

Medical images from different healthcare centers exhibit varied data distributions, posing significant challenges for adapting lung nodule detection due to the domain shift between training and application phases. Traditional unsupervised domain adaptive detection methods often struggle with this shift, leading to suboptimal outcomes. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel domain adaptive approach for lung nodule detection that leverages mean teacher self-training and contrastive learning. First, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning strategy to refine nodule representations and enhance the distinction between nodules and background. Second, we introduce a nodule-level domain-invariant feature learning (NDL) module to capture domain-invariant features through adversarial learning across different domains. Additionally, we propose a new annotated dataset of X-ray images to aid in advancing lung nodule detection research. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple X-ray datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in mitigating domain shift impacts.

Haifeng Zhao, Yuguang Jin, Leilei Ma

Significant advancements have been made in single label incremental learning (SLCIL),yet the more practical and challenging multi label class incremental learning (MLCIL) remains understudied. Recently,visual language models such as CLIP have achieved good results in classification tasks. However,directly using CLIP to solve MLCIL issue can lead to catastrophic forgetting. To tackle this issue, we integrate an improved data replay mechanism and prompt loss to curb knowledge forgetting. Specifically,our model enhances the prompt information to better adapt to multi-label classification tasks and employs confidence-based replay strategy to select representative samples. Moreover, the prompt loss significantly reduces the model's forgetting of previous knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate that our method has substantially improved the performance of MLCIL tasks across multiple benchmark datasets,validating its effectiveness.

LeiLei Ma, Shuo Xu, MingKun Xie et al.

Modeling label correlations has always played a pivotal role in multi-label image classification (MLC), attracting significant attention from researchers. However, recent studies have overemphasized co-occurrence relationships among labels, which can lead to overfitting risk on this overemphasis, resulting in suboptimal models. To tackle this problem, we advocate for balancing correlative and discriminative relationships among labels to mitigate the risk of overfitting and enhance model performance. To this end, we propose the Multi-Label Visual Prompt Tuning framework, a novel and parameter-efficient method that groups classes into multiple class subsets according to label co-occurrence and mutual exclusivity relationships, and then models them respectively to balance the two relationships. In this work, since each group contains multiple classes, multiple prompt tokens are adopted within Vision Transformer (ViT) to capture the correlation or discriminative label relationship within each group, and effectively learn correlation or discriminative representations for class subsets. On the other hand, each group contains multiple group-aware visual representations that may correspond to multiple classes, and the mixture of experts (MoE) model can cleverly assign them from the group-aware to the label-aware, adaptively obtaining label-aware representation, which is more conducive to classification. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach achieves competitive results and outperforms SOTA methods on multiple pre-trained models.

Huanli Zhuo, Leilei Ma, Haifeng Zhao et al.

Although SAM-based single-source domain generalization models for medical image segmentation can mitigate the impact of domain shift on the model in cross-domain scenarios, these models still face two major challenges. First, the segmentation of SAM is highly dependent on domain-specific expert-annotated prompts, which prevents SAM from achieving fully automated medical image segmentation and therefore limits its application in clinical settings. Second, providing poor prompts (such as bounding boxes that are too small or too large) to the SAM prompt encoder can mislead SAM into generating incorrect mask results. Therefore, we propose the FA-SAM, a single-source domain generalization framework for medical image segmentation that achieves fully automated SAM. FA-SAM introduces two key innovations: an Auto-prompted Generation Model (AGM) branch equipped with a Shallow Feature Uncertainty Modeling (SUFM) module, and an Image-Prompt Embedding Fusion (IPEF) module integrated into the SAM mask decoder. Specifically, AGM models the uncertainty distribution of shallow features through the SUFM module to generate bounding box prompts for the target domain, enabling fully automated segmentation with SAM. The IPEF module integrates multiscale information from SAM image embeddings and prompt embeddings to capture global and local details of the target object, enabling SAM to mitigate the impact of poor prompts. Extensive experiments on publicly available prostate and fundus vessel datasets validate the effectiveness of FA-SAM and highlight its potential to address the above challenges.

Haifeng Zhao, Yufei Zhang, Leilei Ma et al.

Radiology report generation represents a significant application within medical AI, and has achieved impressive results. Concurrently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains. However, empirical validation indicates that general LLMs tend to focus more on linguistic fluency rather than clinical effectiveness, and lack the ability to effectively capture the relationship between X-ray images and their corresponding texts, thus resulting in poor clinical practicability. To address these challenges, we propose Optimal Transport-Driven Radiology Report Generation (OTDRG), a novel framework that leverages Optimal Transport (OT) to align image features with disease labels extracted from reports, effectively bridging the cross-modal gap. The core component of OTDRG is Alignment \& Fine-Tuning, where OT utilizes results from the encoding of label features and image visual features to minimize cross-modal distances, then integrating image and text features for LLMs fine-tuning. Additionally, we design a novel disease prediction module to predict disease labels contained in X-ray images during validation and testing. Evaluated on the MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray datasets, OTDRG achieves state-of-the-art performance in both natural language generation (NLG) and clinical efficacy (CE) metrics, delivering reports that are not only linguistically coherent but also clinically accurate.