8.3CLSep 18, 2025
Reasoning over Boundaries: Enhancing Specification Alignment via Test-time DeliberationHaoran Zhang, Yafu Li, Xuyang Hu et al.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in diverse real-world scenarios, each governed by bespoke behavioral and safety specifications (spec) custom-tailored by users or organizations. These spec, categorized into safety-spec and behavioral-spec, vary across scenarios and evolve with changing preferences and requirements. We formalize this challenge as specification alignment, focusing on LLMs' ability to follow dynamic, scenario-specific spec from both behavioral and safety perspectives. To address this challenge, we propose Align3, a lightweight method that employs Test-Time Deliberation (TTD) with hierarchical reflection and revision to reason over the specification boundaries. We further present SpecBench, a unified benchmark for measuring specification alignment, covering 5 scenarios, 103 spec, and 1,500 prompts. Experiments on 15 reasoning and 18 instruct models with several TTD methods, including Self-Refine, TPO, and MoreThink, yield three key findings: (i) test-time deliberation enhances specification alignment; (ii) Align3 advances the safety-helpfulness trade-off frontier with minimal overhead; (iii) SpecBench effectively reveals alignment gaps. These results highlight the potential of test-time deliberation as an effective strategy for reasoning over the real-world specification boundaries.
3.6CVMay 18, 2025
SMFusion: Semantic-Preserving Fusion of Multimodal Medical Images for Enhanced Clinical DiagnosisHaozhe Xiang, Han Zhang, Yu Cheng et al.
Multimodal medical image fusion plays a crucial role in medical diagnosis by integrating complementary information from different modalities to enhance image readability and clinical applicability. However, existing methods mainly follow computer vision standards for feature extraction and fusion strategy formulation, overlooking the rich semantic information inherent in medical images. To address this limitation, we propose a novel semantic-guided medical image fusion approach that, for the first time, incorporates medical prior knowledge into the fusion process. Specifically, we construct a publicly available multimodal medical image-text dataset, upon which text descriptions generated by BiomedGPT are encoded and semantically aligned with image features in a high-dimensional space via a semantic interaction alignment module. During this process, a cross attention based linear transformation automatically maps the relationship between textual and visual features to facilitate comprehensive learning. The aligned features are then embedded into a text-injection module for further feature-level fusion. Unlike traditional methods, we further generate diagnostic reports from the fused images to assess the preservation of medical information. Additionally, we design a medical semantic loss function to enhance the retention of textual cues from the source images. Experimental results on test datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations while preserving more critical medical information.