Yuejie Zhang

Xinyu Huang, Youcai Zhang, Jinyu Ma et al. · microsoft-research

This paper presents Tag2Text, a vision language pre-training (VLP) framework, which introduces image tagging into vision-language models to guide the learning of visual-linguistic features. In contrast to prior works which utilize object tags either manually labeled or automatically detected with an off-the-shelf detector with limited performance, our approach explicitly learns an image tagger using tags parsed from image-paired text and thus provides a strong semantic guidance to vision-language models. In this way, Tag2Text can utilize large-scale annotation-free image tags in accordance with image-text pairs, and provides more diverse tag categories beyond objects. As a result, Tag2Text demonstrates the ability of a foundational image tagging model, with superior zero-shot performance even comparable to fully supervised models. Moreover, by leveraging the tagging guidance, Tag2Text effectively enhances the performance of vision-language models on both generation-based and alignment-based tasks. Across a wide range of downstream benchmarks, Tag2Text achieves state-of-the-art results with similar model sizes and data scales, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed tagging guidance. Code, demo and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/xinyu1205/recognize-anything.

Jilan Xu, Junlin Hou, Yuejie Zhang et al.

Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects with image-level supervision. Existing works mainly rely on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) derived from a classification model. However, CAM-based methods usually focus on the most discriminative parts of an object (i.e., incomplete localization problem). In this paper, we empirically prove that this problem is associated with the mixup of the activation values between less discriminative foreground regions and the background. To address it, we propose Class RE-Activation Mapping (CREAM), a novel clustering-based approach to boost the activation values of the integral object regions. To this end, we introduce class-specific foreground and background context embeddings as cluster centroids. A CAM-guided momentum preservation strategy is developed to learn the context embeddings during training. At the inference stage, the re-activation mapping is formulated as a parameter estimation problem under Gaussian Mixture Model, which can be solved by deriving an unsupervised Expectation-Maximization based soft-clustering algorithm. By simply integrating CREAM into various WSOL approaches, our method significantly improves their performance. CREAM achieves the state-of-the-art performance on CUB, ILSVRC and OpenImages benchmark datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/Jazzcharles/CREAM.

Junlin Hou, Jilan Xu, Fan Xiao et al.

Automatic diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading based on fundus photography has been widely explored to benefit the routine screening and early treatment. Existing researches generally focus on single-field fundus images, which have limited field of view for precise eye examinations. In clinical applications, ophthalmologists adopt two-field fundus photography as the dominating tool, where the information from each field (i.e.,macula-centric and optic disc-centric) is highly correlated and complementary, and benefits comprehensive decisions. However, automatic DR grading based on two-field fundus photography remains a challenging task due to the lack of publicly available datasets and effective fusion strategies. In this work, we first construct a new benchmark dataset (DRTiD) for DR grading, consisting of 3,100 two-field fundus images. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest public DR dataset with diverse and high-quality two-field images. Then, we propose a novel DR grading approach, namely Cross-Field Transformer (CrossFiT), to capture the correspondence between two fields as well as the long-range spatial correlations within each field. Considering the inherent two-field geometric constraints, we particularly define aligned position embeddings to preserve relative consistent position in fundus. Besides, we perform masked cross-field attention during interaction to flter the noisy relations between fields. Extensive experiments on our DRTiD dataset and a public DeepDRiD dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our CrossFiT network. The new dataset and the source code of CrossFiT will be publicly available at https://github.com/FDU-VTS/DRTiD.

Jiashuo Yu, Jinyu Liu, Ying Cheng et al.

Weakly-supervised audio-visual violence detection aims to distinguish snippets containing multimodal violence events with video-level labels. Many prior works perform audio-visual integration and interaction in an early or intermediate manner, yet overlooking the modality heterogeneousness over the weakly-supervised setting. In this paper, we analyze the modality asynchrony and undifferentiated instances phenomena of the multiple instance learning (MIL) procedure, and further investigate its negative impact on weakly-supervised audio-visual learning. To address these issues, we propose a modality-aware contrastive instance learning with self-distillation (MACIL-SD) strategy. Specifically, we leverage a lightweight two-stream network to generate audio and visual bags, in which unimodal background, violent, and normal instances are clustered into semi-bags in an unsupervised way. Then audio and visual violent semi-bag representations are assembled as positive pairs, and violent semi-bags are combined with background and normal instances in the opposite modality as contrastive negative pairs. Furthermore, a self-distillation module is applied to transfer unimodal visual knowledge to the audio-visual model, which alleviates noises and closes the semantic gap between unimodal and multimodal features. Experiments show that our framework outperforms previous methods with lower complexity on the large-scale XD-Violence dataset. Results also demonstrate that our proposed approach can be used as plug-in modules to enhance other networks. Codes are available at https://github.com/JustinYuu/MACIL_SD.

Jilan Xu, Junlin Hou, Yuejie Zhang et al.

In this paper, we consider the problem of open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVS), which aims to segment objects of arbitrary classes instead of pre-defined, closed-set categories. The main contributions are as follows: First, we propose a transformer-based model for OVS, termed as OVSegmentor, which only exploits web-crawled image-text pairs for pre-training without using any mask annotations. OVSegmentor assembles the image pixels into a set of learnable group tokens via a slot-attention based binding module, and aligns the group tokens to the corresponding caption embedding. Second, we propose two proxy tasks for training, namely masked entity completion and cross-image mask consistency. The former aims to infer all masked entities in the caption given the group tokens, that enables the model to learn fine-grained alignment between visual groups and text entities. The latter enforces consistent mask predictions between images that contain shared entities, which encourages the model to learn visual invariance. Third, we construct CC4M dataset for pre-training by filtering CC12M with frequently appeared entities, which significantly improves training efficiency. Fourth, we perform zero-shot transfer on three benchmark datasets, PASCAL VOC 2012, PASCAL Context, and COCO Object. Our model achieves superior segmentation results over the state-of-the-art method by using only 3\% data (4M vs 134M) for pre-training. Code and pre-trained models will be released for future research.

Junlin Hou, Fan Xiao, Jilan Xu et al.

The ultra-wide optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) has become an important imaging modality in diabetic retinopathy (DR) diagnosis. However, there are few researches focusing on automatic DR analysis using ultra-wide OCTA. In this paper, we present novel and practical deep-learning solutions based on ultra-wide OCTA for the Diabetic Retinopathy Analysis Challenge (DRAC). In the segmentation of DR lesions task, we utilize UNet and UNet++ to segment three lesions with strong data augmentation and model ensemble. In the image quality assessment task, we create an ensemble of InceptionV3, SE-ResNeXt, and Vision Transformer models. Pre-training on the large dataset as well as the hybrid MixUp and CutMix strategy are both adopted to boost the generalization ability of our model. In the DR grading task, we build a Vision Transformer (ViT) and fnd that the ViT model pre-trained on color fundus images serves as a useful substrate for OCTA images. Our proposed methods ranked 4th, 3rd, and 5th on the three leaderboards of DRAC, respectively. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/FDU-VTS/DRAC.

Xinyu Huang, Yi-Jie Huang, Youcai Zhang et al.

In this paper, we introduce the Recognize Anything Plus Model (RAM++), an open-set image tagging model effectively leveraging multi-grained text supervision. Previous approaches (e.g., CLIP) primarily utilize global text supervision paired with images, leading to sub-optimal performance in recognizing multiple individual semantic tags. In contrast, RAM++ seamlessly integrates individual tag supervision with global text supervision, all within a unified alignment framework. This integration not only ensures efficient recognition of predefined tag categories, but also enhances generalization capabilities for diverse open-set categories. Furthermore, RAM++ employs large language models (LLMs) to convert semantically constrained tag supervision into more expansive tag description supervision, thereby enriching the scope of open-set visual description concepts. Comprehensive evaluations on various image recognition benchmarks demonstrate RAM++ exceeds existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-set image tagging models on most aspects. Specifically, for predefined commonly used tag categories, RAM++ showcases 10.2 mAP and 15.4 mAP enhancements over CLIP on OpenImages and ImageNet. For open-set categories beyond predefined, RAM++ records improvements of 5.0 mAP and 6.4 mAP over CLIP and RAM respectively on OpenImages. For diverse human-object interaction phrases, RAM++ achieves 7.8 mAP and 4.7 mAP improvements on the HICO benchmark. Code, datasets and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/xinyu1205/recognize-anything}.

Xinyu Huang, Youcai Zhang, Ying Cheng et al.

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) with large-scale image-text pairs has demonstrated superior performance in various fields. However, the image-text pairs co-occurrent on the Internet typically lack explicit alignment information, which is suboptimal for VLP. Existing methods proposed to adopt an off-the-shelf object detector to utilize additional image tag information. However, the object detector is time-consuming and can only identify the pre-defined object categories, limiting the model capacity. Inspired by the observation that the texts incorporate incomplete fine-grained image information, we introduce IDEA, which stands for increasing text diversity via online multi-label recognition for VLP. IDEA shows that multi-label learning with image tags extracted from the texts can be jointly optimized during VLP. Moreover, IDEA can identify valuable image tags online to provide more explicit textual supervision. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that IDEA can significantly boost the performance on multiple downstream datasets with a small extra computational cost.

Junlin Hou, Jilan Xu, Nan Zhang et al.

This paper presents our solution for the 2nd COVID-19 Severity Detection Competition. This task aims to distinguish the Mild, Moderate, Severe, and Critical grades in COVID-19 chest CT images. In our approach, we devise a novel infection-aware 3D Contrastive Mixup Classification network for severity grading. Specifcally, we train two segmentation networks to first extract the lung region and then the inner lesion region. The lesion segmentation mask serves as complementary information for the original CT slices. To relieve the issue of imbalanced data distribution, we further improve the advanced Contrastive Mixup Classification network by weighted cross-entropy loss. On the COVID-19 severity detection leaderboard, our approach won the first place with a Macro F1 Score of 51.76%. It significantly outperforms the baseline method by over 11.46%.

Junlin Hou, Jilan Xu, Nan Zhang et al.

This paper presents our solution for the 2nd COVID-19 Competition, occurring in the framework of the AIMIA Workshop at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2022). In our approach, we employ the winning solution last year which uses a strong 3D Contrastive Mixup Classifcation network (CMC v1) as the baseline method, composed of contrastive representation learning and mixup classification. In this paper, we propose CMC v2 by introducing natural video priors to COVID-19 diagnosis. Specifcally, we adapt a pre-trained (on video dataset) video transformer backbone to COVID-19 detection. Moreover, advanced training strategies, including hybrid mixup and cutmix, slicelevel augmentation, and small resolution training are also utilized to boost the robustness and the generalization ability of the model. Among 14 participating teams, CMC v2 ranked 1st in the 2nd COVID-19 Competition with an average Macro F1 Score of 89.11%.

Yang Yi, Xuequan Lu, Shang Gao et al.

Spectral graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) have been producing encouraging results in graph classification tasks. However, most spectral GCNNs utilize fixed graphs when aggregating node features, while omitting edge feature learning and failing to get an optimal graph structure. Moreover, many existing graph datasets do not provide initialized edge features, further restraining the ability of learning edge features via spectral GCNNs. In this paper, we try to address this issue by designing an edge feature scheme and an add-on layer between every two stacked graph convolution layers in GCNN. Both are lightweight while effective in filling the gap between edge feature learning and performance enhancement of graph classification. The edge feature scheme makes edge features adapt to node representations at different graph convolution layers. The add-on layers help adjust the edge features to an optimal graph structure. To test the effectiveness of our method, we take Euclidean positions as initial node features and extract graphs with semantic information from point cloud objects. The node features of our extracted graphs are more scalable for edge feature learning than most existing graph datasets (in one-hot encoded label format). Three new graph datasets are constructed based on ModelNet40, ModelNet10 and ShapeNet Part datasets. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art graph classification methods on the new datasets by reaching 96.56% overall accuracy on Graph-ModelNet40, 98.79% on Graph-ModelNet10 and 97.91% on Graph-ShapeNet Part. The constructed graph datasets will be released to the community.

Junlin Hou, Jilan Xu, Rui Feng et al.

This paper presents our solution for the 2nd COVID-19 Competition, occurring in the framework of the AIMIA Workshop in the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2022). In our approach, we employ an effective 3D Contrastive Mixup Classification network for COVID-19 diagnosis on chest CT images, which is composed of contrastive representation learning and mixup classification. For the COVID-19 detection challenge, our approach reaches 0.9245 macro F1 score on 484 validation CT scans, which significantly outperforms the baseline method by 16.5%. In the COVID-19 severity detection challenge, our approach achieves 0.7186 macro F1 score on 61 validation samples, which also surpasses the baseline by 8.86%.

Jinyu Liu, Ying Cheng, Yuejie Zhang et al.

Visual-only self-supervised learning has achieved significant improvement in video representation learning. Existing related methods encourage models to learn video representations by utilizing contrastive learning or designing specific pretext tasks. However, some models are likely to focus on the background, which is unimportant for learning video representations. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new view called long-range residual frame to obtain more motion-specific information. Based on this, we propose the Motion-Contrastive Perception Network (MCPNet), which consists of two branches, namely, Motion Information Perception (MIP) and Contrastive Instance Perception (CIP), to learn generic video representations by focusing on the changing areas in videos. Specifically, the MIP branch aims to learn fine-grained motion features, and the CIP branch performs contrastive learning to learn overall semantics information for each instance. Experiments on two benchmark datasets UCF-101 and HMDB-51 show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art visual-only self-supervised approaches.

Weiwei Tian, Xinyu Huang, Junlin Hou et al.

Owing to a large amount of multi-modal data in modern medical systems, such as medical images and reports, Medical Vision-Language Pre-training (Med-VLP) has demonstrated incredible achievements in coarse-grained downstream tasks (i.e., medical classification, retrieval, and visual question answering). However, the problem of transferring knowledge learned from Med-VLP to fine-grained multi-organ segmentation tasks has barely been investigated. Multi-organ segmentation is challenging mainly due to the lack of large-scale fully annotated datasets and the wide variation in the shape and size of the same organ between individuals with different diseases. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-training & fine-tuning framework for Multi-Organ Segmentation by harnessing Medical repOrt Supervision (MOSMOS). Specifically, we first introduce global contrastive learning to maximally align the medical image-report pairs in the pre-training stage. To remedy the granularity discrepancy, we further leverage multi-label recognition to implicitly learn the semantic correspondence between image pixels and organ tags. More importantly, our pre-trained models can be transferred to any segmentation model by introducing the pixel-tag attention maps. Different network settings, i.e., 2D U-Net and 3D UNETR, are utilized to validate the generalization. We have extensively evaluated our approach using different diseases and modalities on BTCV, AMOS, MMWHS, and BRATS datasets. Experimental results in various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. This framework can serve as the foundation to facilitate future research on automatic annotation tasks under the supervision of medical reports.

Qingqiu Li, Jilan Xu, Runtian Yuan et al.

Automatic generation of radiology reports holds crucial clinical value, as it can alleviate substantial workload on radiologists and remind less experienced ones of potential anomalies. Despite the remarkable performance of various image captioning methods in the natural image field, generating accurate reports for medical images still faces challenges, i.e., disparities in visual and textual data, and lack of accurate domain knowledge. To address these issues, we propose an enhanced knowledge injection framework, which utilizes two branches to extract different types of knowledge. The Weighted Concept Knowledge (WCK) branch is responsible for introducing clinical medical concepts weighted by TF-IDF scores. The Multimodal Retrieval Knowledge (MRK) branch extracts triplets from similar reports, emphasizing crucial clinical information related to entity positions and existence. By integrating this finer-grained and well-structured knowledge with the current image, we are able to leverage the multi-source knowledge gain to ultimately facilitate more accurate report generation. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two public benchmarks, demonstrating that our method achieves superior performance over other state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of two extracted knowledge sources.

Qiujie Xie, Qingqiu Li, Zhuohao Yu et al. · pku

As LLM-as-a-Judge emerges as a new paradigm for assessing large language models (LLMs), concerns have been raised regarding the alignment, bias, and stability of LLM evaluators. While substantial work has focused on alignment and bias, little research has concentrated on the stability of LLM evaluators. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments involving 9 widely used LLM evaluators across 2 different evaluation settings to investigate the uncertainty in model-based LLM evaluations. We pinpoint that LLM evaluators exhibit varying uncertainty based on model families and sizes. With careful comparative analyses, we find that employing special prompting strategies, whether during inference or post-training, can alleviate evaluation uncertainty to some extent. By utilizing uncertainty to enhance LLM's reliability and detection capability in Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data, we further fine-tune an uncertainty-aware LLM evaluator named ConfiLM using a human-annotated fine-tuning set and assess ConfiLM's OOD evaluation ability on a manually designed test set sourced from the 2024 Olympics. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating uncertainty as additional information during the fine-tuning phase can largely improve the model's evaluation performance in OOD scenarios. The code and data are released at: https://github.com/hasakiXie123/LLM-Evaluator-Uncertainty.

Hongzhou Yu, Tianhao Cheng, Yingwen Wang et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in medical applications such as disease diagnosis and treatment planning. However, most existing medical LLMs struggle with the deep reasoning required for complex medical problems, such as differential diagnosis and medication recommendations. We propose FineMedLM-o1, which leverages high-quality medical synthetic data and long-form reasoning data for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), enabling advanced dialogue and deep reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we introduce Test-Time Training (TTT) in the medical domain for the first time, facilitating domain adaptation and ensuring reliable, accurate reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that FineMedLM-o1 achieves a 23% average performance improvement over prior models on key medical benchmarks. Furthermore, the introduction of TTT provides an additional 14% performance boost, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing medical reasoning capabilities. To support this process, we also propose a novel method for synthesizing medical dialogue. Compared to other open-source datasets, our dataset stands out as superior in both quality and complexity. The project and data will be released on GitHub.

Jianfa Bai, Kejin Lu, Runtian Yuan et al.

Robust detection of COVID-19 from chest CT remains challenging in multi-institutional settings due to substantial source shift, source imbalance, and hidden test-source identities. In this work, we propose a three-stage source-aware multi-expert framework for multi-source COVID-19 CT classification. First, we build a lung-aware 3D expert by combining original CT volumes and lung-extracted CT volumes for volumetric classification. Second, we develop two MedSigLIP-based experts: a slice-wise representation and probability learning module, and a Transformer-based inter-slice context modeling module for capturing cross-slice dependency. Third, we train a source classifier to predict the latent source identity of each test scan. By leveraging the predicted source information, we perform model fusion and voting based on different experts. On the validation set covering all four sources, the Stage 1 model achieves the best macro-F1 of 0.9711, ACC of 0.9712, and AUC of 0.9791. Stage~2a and Stage~2b achieve the best AUC scores of 0.9864 and 0.9854, respectively. Stage~3 source classifier reaches 0.9107 ACC and 0.9114 F1. These results demonstrate that source-aware expert modeling and hierarchical voting provide an effective solution for robust COVID-19 CT classification under heterogeneous multi-source conditions.

Kejin Lu, Jianfa Bai, Qingqiu Li et al.

Accurate classification of lung diseases from chest CT scans plays an important role in computer-aided diagnosis systems. However, medical imaging datasets often suffer from severe class imbalance, which may significantly degrade the performance of deep learning models, especially for minority disease categories. To address this issue, we propose a gender-aware two-stage lung disease classification framework. The proposed approach explicitly incorporates gender information into the disease recognition pipeline. In the first stage, a gender classifier is trained to predict the patient's gender from CT scans. In the second stage, the input CT image is routed to a corresponding gender-specific disease classifier to perform final disease prediction. This design enables the model to better capture gender-related imaging characteristics and alleviate the influence of imbalanced data distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the recognition performance for minority disease categories, particularly squamous cell carcinoma, while maintaining competitive performance on other classes.

Ling Zhou, Runtian Yuan, Yi Liu et al.

Ultrasound imaging is a prevalent diagnostic tool known for its simplicity and non-invasiveness. However, its inherent characteristics often introduce substantial noise, posing considerable challenges for automated lesion or organ segmentation in ultrasound video sequences. To address these limitations, we propose the Dual Semantic-Aware Network (DSANet), a novel framework designed to enhance noise robustness in ultrasound video segmentation by fostering mutual semantic awareness between local and global features. Specifically, we introduce an Adjacent-Frame Semantic-Aware (AFSA) module, which constructs a channel-wise similarity matrix to guide feature fusion across adjacent frames, effectively mitigating the impact of random noise without relying on pixel-level relationships. Additionally, we propose a Local-and-Global Semantic-Aware (LGSA) module that reorganizes and fuses temporal unconditional local features, which capture spatial details independently at each frame, with conditional global features that incorporate temporal context from adjacent frames. This integration facilitates multi-level semantic representation, significantly improving the model's resilience to noise interference. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that DSANet substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in segmentation accuracy. Moreover, since our model avoids pixel-level feature dependencies, it achieves significantly higher inference FPS than video-based methods, and even surpasses some image-based models. Code can be found in \href{https://github.com/ZhouL2001/DSANet}{DSANet}

Jilan Xu, Yifei Huang, Junlin Hou et al.

Understanding human actions from videos of first-person view poses significant challenges. Most prior approaches explore representation learning on egocentric videos only, while overlooking the potential benefit of exploiting existing large-scale third-person videos. In this paper, (1) we develop EgoInstructor, a retrieval-augmented multimodal captioning model that automatically retrieves semantically relevant third-person instructional videos to enhance the video captioning of egocentric videos. (2) For training the cross-view retrieval module, we devise an automatic pipeline to discover ego-exo video pairs from distinct large-scale egocentric and exocentric datasets. (3) We train the cross-view retrieval module with a novel EgoExoNCE loss that pulls egocentric and exocentric video features closer by aligning them to shared text features that describe similar actions. (4) Through extensive experiments, our cross-view retrieval module demonstrates superior performance across seven benchmarks. Regarding egocentric video captioning, EgoInstructor exhibits significant improvements by leveraging third-person videos as references. Project page is available at: https://jazzcharles.github.io/Egoinstructor/

Bowen Zhao, Changkai Ji, Yuejie Zhang et al.

With the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 (GPT-3.5) exhibiting remarkable reasoning and comprehension abilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP), most Question Answering (QA) research has primarily centered around general QA tasks based on GPT, neglecting the specific challenges posed by Complex Table QA. In this paper, we propose to incorporate GPT-3.5 to address such challenges, in which complex tables are reconstructed into tuples and specific prompt designs are employed for dialogues. Specifically, we encode each cell's hierarchical structure, position information, and content as a tuple. By enhancing the prompt template with an explanatory description of the meaning of each tuple and the logical reasoning process of the task, we effectively improve the hierarchical structure awareness capability of GPT-3.5 to better parse the complex tables. Extensive experiments and results on Complex Table QA datasets, i.e., the open-domain dataset HiTAB and the aviation domain dataset AIT-QA show that our approach significantly outperforms previous work on both datasets, leading to state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Jilan Xu, Yifei Huang, Baoqi Pei et al.

Generating videos in the first-person perspective has broad application prospects in the field of augmented reality and embodied intelligence. In this work, we explore the cross-view video prediction task, where given an exo-centric video, the first frame of the corresponding ego-centric video, and textual instructions, the goal is to generate futur frames of the ego-centric video. Inspired by the notion that hand-object interactions (HOI) in ego-centric videos represent the primary intentions and actions of the current actor, we present EgoExo-Gen that explicitly models the hand-object dynamics for cross-view video prediction. EgoExo-Gen consists of two stages. First, we design a cross-view HOI mask prediction model that anticipates the HOI masks in future ego-frames by modeling the spatio-temporal ego-exo correspondence. Next, we employ a video diffusion model to predict future ego-frames using the first ego-frame and textual instructions, while incorporating the HOI masks as structural guidance to enhance prediction quality. To facilitate training, we develop an automated pipeline to generate pseudo HOI masks for both ego- and exo-videos by exploiting vision foundation models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed EgoExo-Gen achieves better prediction performance compared to previous video prediction models on the Ego-Exo4D and H2O benchmark datasets, with the HOI masks significantly improving the generation of hands and interactive objects in the ego-centric videos.

Xiaze Zhang, Ziheng Ding, Qi Jing et al.

Point clouds have shown significant potential in various domains, including Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). However, existing approaches either rely on dense point clouds to achieve high localization accuracy or use generalized descriptors to reduce map size. Unfortunately, these two aspects seem to conflict with each other. To address this limitation, we propose a unified architecture, DeepPointMap, achieving excellent preference on both aspects. We utilize neural network to extract highly representative and sparse neural descriptors from point clouds, enabling memory-efficient map representation and accurate multi-scale localization tasks (e.g., odometry and loop-closure). Moreover, we showcase the versatility of our framework by extending it to more challenging multi-agent collaborative SLAM. The promising results obtained in these scenarios further emphasize the effectiveness and potential of our approach.

Bowen Zhao, Tianhao Cheng, Yuejie Zhang et al.

Multimodal Question Answering (MMQA) is crucial as it enables comprehensive understanding and accurate responses by integrating insights from diverse data representations such as tables, charts, and text. Most existing researches in MMQA only focus on two modalities such as image-text QA, table-text QA and chart-text QA, and there remains a notable scarcity in studies that investigate the joint analysis of text, tables, and charts. In this paper, we present C$\text{T}^2$C-QA, a pioneering Chinese reasoning-based QA dataset that includes an extensive collection of text, tables, and charts, meticulously compiled from 200 selectively sourced webpages. Our dataset simulates real webpages and serves as a great test for the capability of the model to analyze and reason with multimodal data, because the answer to a question could appear in various modalities, or even potentially not exist at all. Additionally, we present AED (\textbf{A}llocating, \textbf{E}xpert and \textbf{D}esicion), a multi-agent system implemented through collaborative deployment, information interaction, and collective decision-making among different agents. Specifically, the Assignment Agent is in charge of selecting and activating expert agents, including those proficient in text, tables, and charts. The Decision Agent bears the responsibility of delivering the final verdict, drawing upon the analytical insights provided by these expert agents. We execute a comprehensive analysis, comparing AED with various state-of-the-art models in MMQA, including GPT-4. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that current methodologies, including GPT-4, are yet to meet the benchmarks set by our dataset.

Qingqiu Li, Runtian Yuan, Junlin Hou et al.

To make a more accurate diagnosis of COVID-19, we propose a straightforward yet effective model. Firstly, we analyse the characteristics of 3D CT scans and remove the non-lung parts, facilitating the model to focus on lesion-related areas and reducing computational cost. We use ResNeSt50 as the strong feature extractor, initializing it with pretrained weights which have COVID-19-specific prior knowledge. Our model achieves a Macro F1 Score of 0.94 on the validation set of the 4th COV19D Competition Challenge $\mathrm{I}$, surpassing the baseline by 16%. This indicates its effectiveness in distinguishing between COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cases, making it a robust method for COVID-19 detection.

Qingqiu Li, Zihang Cui, Seongsu Bae et al.

Chest X-rays (CXRs) are the most frequently performed imaging examinations in clinical settings. Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have enabled automated CXR interpretation, enhancing diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. However, despite their strong visual understanding, current Medical LMMs (MLMMs) still face two major challenges: (1) Insufficient region-level understanding and interaction, and (2) Limited accuracy and interpretability due to single-step reasoning. In this paper, we empower MLMMs with anatomy-centric reasoning capabilities to enhance their interactivity and explainability. Specifically, we first propose an Anatomical Ontology-Guided Reasoning (AOR) framework, which centers on cross-modal region-level information to facilitate multi-step reasoning. Next, under the guidance of expert physicians, we develop AOR-Instruction, a large instruction dataset for MLMMs training. Our experiments demonstrate AOR's superior performance in both VQA and report generation tasks.

Runtian Yuan, Mohan Chen, Jilan Xu et al.

Referring Medical Image Sequence Segmentation (Ref-MISS) is a novel and challenging task that aims to segment anatomical structures in medical image sequences (\emph{e.g.} endoscopy, ultrasound, CT, and MRI) based on natural language descriptions. This task holds significant clinical potential and offers a user-friendly advancement in medical imaging interpretation. Existing 2D and 3D segmentation models struggle to explicitly track objects of interest across medical image sequences, and lack support for nteractive, text-driven guidance. To address these limitations, we propose Text-Promptable Propagation (TPP), a model designed for referring medical image sequence segmentation. TPP captures the intrinsic relationships among sequential images along with their associated textual descriptions. Specifically, it enables the recognition of referred objects through cross-modal referring interaction, and maintains continuous tracking across the sequence via Transformer-based triple propagation, using text embeddings as queries. To support this task, we curate a large-scale benchmark, Ref-MISS-Bench, which covers 4 imaging modalities and 20 different organs and lesions. Experimental results on this benchmark demonstrate that TPP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both medical segmentation and referring video object segmentation.

Runtian Yuan, Qingqiu Li, Junlin Hou et al.

In response to the need for rapid and accurate COVID-19 diagnosis during the global pandemic, we present a two-stage framework that leverages pseudo labels for domain adaptation to enhance the detection of COVID-19 from CT scans. By utilizing annotated data from one domain and non-annotated data from another, the model overcomes the challenge of data scarcity and variability, common in emergent health crises. The innovative approach of generating pseudo labels enables the model to iteratively refine its learning process, thereby improving its accuracy and adaptability across different hospitals and medical centres. Experimental results on COV19-CT-DB database showcase the model's potential to achieve high diagnostic precision, significantly contributing to efficient patient management and alleviating the strain on healthcare systems. Our method achieves 0.92 Macro F1 Score on the validation set of Covid-19 domain adaptation challenge.

Runtian Yuan, Qingqiu Li, Junlin Hou et al.

We present our solution for the Multi-Source COVID-19 Detection Challenge, which aims to classify chest CT scans into COVID and Non-COVID categories across data collected from four distinct hospitals and medical centers. A major challenge in this task lies in the domain shift caused by variations in imaging protocols, scanners, and patient populations across institutions. To enhance the cross-domain generalization of our model, we incorporate Variance Risk Extrapolation (VREx) into the training process. VREx encourages the model to maintain consistent performance across multiple source domains by explicitly minimizing the variance of empirical risks across environments. This regularization strategy reduces overfitting to center-specific features and promotes learning of domain-invariant representations. We further apply Mixup data augmentation to improve generalization and robustness. Mixup interpolates both the inputs and labels of randomly selected pairs of training samples, encouraging the model to behave linearly between examples and enhancing its resilience to noise and limited data. Our method achieves an average macro F1 score of 0.96 across the four sources on the validation set, demonstrating strong generalization.

Qingqiu Li, Runtian Yuan, Junlin Hou et al.

To enable more accurate diagnosis of lung disease in chest CT scans, we propose a straightforward yet effective model. Firstly, we analyze the characteristics of 3D CT scans and remove non-lung regions, which helps the model focus on lesion-related areas and reduces computational cost. We adopt ResNeSt50 as a strong feature extractor, and use a weighted cross-entropy loss to mitigate class imbalance, especially for the underrepresented squamous cell carcinoma category. Our model achieves a Macro F1 Score of 0.80 on the validation set of the Fair Disease Diagnosis Challenge, demonstrating its strong performance in distinguishing between different lung conditions.

Qingqiu Li, Xiaohan Yan, Jilan Xu et al.

Learning medical visual representations through vision-language pre-training has reached remarkable progress. Despite the promising performance, it still faces challenges, i.e., local alignment lacks interpretability and clinical relevance, and the insufficient internal and external representation learning of image-report pairs. To address these issues, we propose an Anatomical Structure-Guided (ASG) framework. Specifically, we parse raw reports into triplets <anatomical region, finding, existence>, and fully utilize each element as supervision to enhance representation learning. For anatomical region, we design an automatic anatomical region-sentence alignment paradigm in collaboration with radiologists, considering them as the minimum semantic units to explore fine-grained local alignment. For finding and existence, we regard them as image tags, applying an image-tag recognition decoder to associate image features with their respective tags within each sample and constructing soft labels for contrastive learning to improve the semantic association of different image-report pairs. We evaluate the proposed ASG framework on two downstream tasks, including five public benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Jiashuo Yu, Ying Cheng, Rui-Wei Zhao et al.

Recognizing and localizing events in videos is a fundamental task for video understanding. Since events may occur in auditory and visual modalities, multimodal detailed perception is essential for complete scene comprehension. Most previous works attempted to analyze videos from a holistic perspective. However, they do not consider semantic information at multiple scales, which makes the model difficult to localize events in different lengths. In this paper, we present a Multimodal Pyramid Attentional Network (\textbf{MM-Pyramid}) for event localization. Specifically, we first propose the attentive feature pyramid module. This module captures temporal pyramid features via several stacking pyramid units, each of them is composed of a fixed-size attention block and dilated convolution block. We also design an adaptive semantic fusion module, which leverages a unit-level attention block and a selective fusion block to integrate pyramid features interactively. Extensive experiments on audio-visual event localization and weakly-supervised audio-visual video parsing tasks verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Ying Cheng, Ruize Wang, Zhihao Pan et al.

When watching videos, the occurrence of a visual event is often accompanied by an audio event, e.g., the voice of lip motion, the music of playing instruments. There is an underlying correlation between audio and visual events, which can be utilized as free supervised information to train a neural network by solving the pretext task of audio-visual synchronization. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised framework with co-attention mechanism to learn generic cross-modal representations from unlabelled videos in the wild, and further benefit downstream tasks. Specifically, we explore three different co-attention modules to focus on discriminative visual regions correlated to the sounds and introduce the interactions between them. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the pretext task while having fewer parameters compared with existing methods. To further evaluate the generalizability and transferability of our approach, we apply the pre-trained model on two downstream tasks, i.e., sound source localization and action recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model provides competitive results with other self-supervised methods, and also indicate that our approach can tackle the challenging scenes which contain multiple sound sources.