Longqing Ye

Longqing Ye

As a remarkable compact model, ShuffleNetV2 offers a good example to design efficient ConvNets but its limit is rarely noticed. In this paper, we rethink the design pattern of ShuffleNetV2 and find that the channel-wise redundancy problem still constrains the efficiency improvement of Shuffle block in the wider ShuffleNetV2. To resolve this issue, we propose another augmented variant of shuffle block in the form of bottleneck-like structure and more implicit short connections. To verify the effectiveness of this building block, we further build a more powerful and efficient model family, termed as AugShuffleNets. Evaluated on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, AugShuffleNet consistently outperforms ShuffleNetV2 in terms of accuracy with less computational cost and fewer parameter count.

Longqing Ye

In this paper, we propose a simple and general approach to augment regular convolution operator by injecting extra group-wise transformation during training and recover it during inference. Extra transformation is carefully selected to ensure it can be merged with regular convolution in each group and will not change the topological structure of regular convolution during inference. Compared with regular convolution operator, our approach (AugConv) can introduce larger learning capacity to improve model performance during training but will not increase extra computational overhead for model deployment. Based on ResNet, we utilize AugConv to build convolutional neural networks named AugResNet. Result on image classification dataset Cifar-10 shows that AugResNet outperforms its baseline in terms of model performance.

Longqing Ye

Deep neural networks, particularly those employing Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), are often perceived as complex, high-dimensional, non-linear systems. This complexity poses a significant challenge to understanding their internal learning mechanisms. In this work, we propose a novel analytical framework that recasts a multi-layer ReLU network into an equivalent single-layer linear model with input-dependent "effective weights". For any given input sample, the activation pattern of ReLU units creates a unique computational path, effectively zeroing out a subset of weights in the network. By composing the active weights across all layers, we can derive an effective weight matrix, $W_{\text{eff}}(x)$, that maps the input directly to the output for that specific sample. We posit that the evolution of these effective weights reveals fundamental principles of representation learning. Our work demonstrates that as training progresses, the effective weights corresponding to samples from the same class converge, while those from different classes diverge. By tracking the trajectories of these sample-wise effective weights, we provide a new lens through which to interpret the formation of class-specific decision boundaries and the emergence of semantic representations within the network.

Ran Wei, ZhiXiong Lan, Qing Yan et al.

Background: Chromosome karyotype analysis is crucial for diagnosing hereditary diseases, yet detecting structural abnormalities remains challenging. While AI has shown promise in medical imaging, its effectiveness varies across modalities. Leveraging advances in Foundation Models that integrate multimodal medical imaging for robust feature extraction and accurate diagnosis, we developed iMedImage, an end-to-end model for general medical image recognition, demonstrating strong performance across multiple imaging tasks, including chromosome abnormality detection. Materials and Methods: We constructed a comprehensive medical image dataset encompassing multiple modalities from common medical domains, including chromosome, cell, pathology, ultrasound, X-ray, CT, and MRI images. Based on this dataset, we developed the iMedImage model, which incorporates the following key features: (1) a unified representation method for diverse modality inputs and medical imaging tasks; (2) multi-level (case-level, image-level, patch-level) image recognition capabilities enhanced by Chain of Thought (CoT) embedding and Mixture of Experts (MoE) strategies. Results: The test set comprised data from 12 institutions across six regions in China, covering three mainstream scanning devices, and included naturally distributed, unscreened abnormal cases. On this diverse dataset, the model achieved a fully automated chromosome analysis workflow, including segmentation, karyotyping, and abnormality detection, reaching a sensitivity of 92.75% and a specificity of 91.5%. Conclusion: We propose iMedImage, an end-to-end foundation model for medical image analysis, demonstrating its superior performance across various medical imaging tasks. iMedImage provides clinicians with a precise imaging analysis tool and contributes to improving diagnostic accuracy and disease screening.

Longqing Ye

Convolutional networks (ConvNets) have shown impressive capability to solve various vision tasks. Nevertheless, the trade-off between performance and efficiency is still a challenge for a feasible model deployment on resource-constrained platforms. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept termed multi-path fully connected pattern (MPFC) to rethink the interdependencies of topology pattern, accuracy and efficiency for ConvNets. Inspired by MPFC, we further propose a dual-branch module named dynamic clone transformer (DCT) where one branch generates multiple replicas from inputs and another branch reforms those clones through a series of difference vectors conditional on inputs itself to produce more variants. This operation allows the self-expansion of channel-wise information in a data-driven way with little computational cost while providing sufficient learning capacity, which is a potential unit to replace computationally expensive pointwise convolution as an expansion layer in the bottleneck structure.