Jun Shen

Dequan Wang, Xiaosong Wang, Lilong Wang et al. · berkeley

Foundation models, often pre-trained with large-scale data, have achieved paramount success in jump-starting various vision and language applications. Recent advances further enable adapting foundation models in downstream tasks efficiently using only a few training samples, e.g., in-context learning. Yet, the application of such learning paradigms in medical image analysis remains scarce due to the shortage of publicly accessible data and benchmarks. In this paper, we aim at approaches adapting the foundation models for medical image classification and present a novel dataset and benchmark for the evaluation, i.e., examining the overall performance of accommodating the large-scale foundation models downstream on a set of diverse real-world clinical tasks. We collect five sets of medical imaging data from multiple institutes targeting a variety of real-world clinical tasks (22,349 images in total), i.e., thoracic diseases screening in X-rays, pathological lesion tissue screening, lesion detection in endoscopy images, neonatal jaundice evaluation, and diabetic retinopathy grading. Results of multiple baseline methods are demonstrated using the proposed dataset from both accuracy and cost-effective perspectives.

Weihang Dai, Xiaomeng Li, Taihui Yu et al.

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is characterized by rapid, irregular heartbeats, and can lead to fatal complications such as heart failure. The disease is divided into two sub-types based on severity, which can be automatically classified through CT volumes for disease screening of severe cases. However, existing classification approaches rely on generic radiomic features that may not be optimal for the task, whilst deep learning methods tend to over-fit to the high-dimensional volume inputs. In this work, we propose a novel radiomics-informed deep-learning method, RIDL, that combines the advantages of deep learning and radiomic approaches to improve AF sub-type classification. Unlike existing hybrid techniques that mostly rely on naïve feature concatenation, we observe that radiomic feature selection methods can serve as an information prior, and propose supplementing low-level deep neural network (DNN) features with locally computed radiomic features. This reduces DNN over-fitting and allows local variations between radiomic features to be better captured. Furthermore, we ensure complementary information is learned by deep and radiomic features by designing a novel feature de-correlation loss. Combined, our method addresses the limitations of deep learning and radiomic approaches and outperforms state-of-the-art radiomic, deep learning, and hybrid approaches, achieving 86.9% AUC for the AF sub-type classification task. Code is available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/RIDL.

Xiaohong Liu, Guoxing Yang, Yulin Luo et al.

Radiology is a vital and complex component of modern clinical workflow and covers many tasks. Recently, vision-language (VL) foundation models in medicine have shown potential in processing multimodal information, offering a unified solution for various radiology tasks. However, existing studies either pre-trained VL models on natural data or did not fully integrate vision-language architecture and pretraining, often neglecting the unique multimodal complexity in radiology images and their textual contexts. Additionally, their practical applicability in real-world scenarios remains underexplored. Here, we present RadFound, a large and open-source vision-language foundation model tailored for radiology, that is trained on the most extensive dataset of over 8.1 million images and 250,000 image-text pairs, covering 19 major organ systems and 10 imaging modalities. To establish expert-level multimodal perception and generation capabilities, RadFound introduces an enhanced vision encoder to capture intra-image local features and inter-image contextual information, and a unified cross-modal learning design tailored to radiology. To fully assess the models' capability, we construct a benchmark, RadVLBench, including radiology interpretation tasks like medical vision-language question-answering, as well as text generation tasks ranging from captioning to report generation. We also propose a human evaluation framework. When evaluated on the real-world benchmark involving three representative modalities, 2D images (chest X-rays), multi-view images (mammograms), and 3D images (thyroid CT scans), RadFound significantly outperforms other VL foundation models on both quantitative metrics and human evaluation. In summary, the development of RadFound represents an advancement in radiology generalists, demonstrating broad applicability potential for integration into clinical workflows.

Zhibo Jin, Zhiyu Zhu, Xinyi Wang et al.

While deep neural networks have excellent results in many fields, they are susceptible to interference from attacking samples resulting in erroneous judgments. Feature-level attacks are one of the effective attack types, which targets the learnt features in the hidden layers to improve its transferability across different models. Yet it is observed that the transferability has been largely impacted by the neuron importance estimation results. In this paper, a double adversarial neuron attribution attack method, termed `DANAA', is proposed to obtain more accurate feature importance estimation. In our method, the model outputs are attributed to the middle layer based on an adversarial non-linear path. The goal is to measure the weight of individual neurons and retain the features that are more important towards transferability. We have conducted extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets to demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Davidjinzb/DANAA

Yukang Cui, Lingbo Cao, Michael V. Basin et al.

This paper studies the distributed resilient output containment control of heterogeneous multiagent systems against composite attacks, including denial-of-services (DoS) attacks, false-data injection (FDI) attacks, camouflage attacks, and actuation attacks. Inspired by digital twins, a twin layer (TL) with higher security and privacy is used to decouple the above problem into two tasks: defense protocols against DoS attacks on TL and defense protocols against actuation attacks on cyber-physical layer (CPL). First, considering modeling errors of leader dynamics, we introduce distributed observers to reconstruct the leader dynamics for each follower on TL under DoS attacks. Second, distributed estimators are used to estimate follower states according to the reconstructed leader dynamics on the TL. Third, according to the reconstructed leader dynamics, we design decentralized solvers that calculate the output regulator equations on CPL. Fourth, decentralized adaptive attack-resilient control schemes that resist unbounded actuation attacks are provided on CPL. Furthermore, we apply the above control protocols to prove that the followers can achieve uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) convergence, and the upper bound of the UUB convergence is determined explicitly. Finally, two simulation examples are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed control protocols.

Huan Wang, Jun Shen, Jun Yan et al.

This paper considers a practical few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) setting, termed discriminative FSAD, where a limited number of both normal and anomalous examples are available as references during inference. Existing FSAD methods rely on normal-only references through normality matching, ignoring the discriminative clues in anomalous references, while directly fitting both references can overfit to the seen anomalies. We introduce IDEAL, an intrinsic deviation learning framework that leverages both reference types to learn intrinsic deviation patterns characterizing generalizable abnormality as deviations from normality. IDEAL decomposes the learning process into two novel components: 1) a Normal Variation Eraser to suppress nuisance normal variations that may lead to noisy deviations from normality, thereby highlighting anomaly-relevant deviation representations; 2) an Intrinsic Deviation Encoder to decompose these denoised deviation representations into intrinsic deviation vectors capturing the most discriminative orthogonal deviation directions. At inference, IDEAL scores query-to-normal deviations preserved after projection onto the learned intrinsic deviation vectors, enabling generalization for both seen and unseen anomalies. Extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets show that IDEAL generalizes effectively to unseen anomalies and consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art FSAD methods. Code and data will be available at \href{https://github.com/mala-lab/IDEAL}{https://github.com/mala-lab/IDEAL}.

Mingyuan Li, Chunyu Liu, Zhuojun Li et al.

Traffic accidents result in millions of injuries and fatalities globally, with a significant number occurring at intersections each year. Traffic Signal Control (TSC) is an effective strategy for enhancing safety at these urban junctures. Despite the growing popularity of Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods in optimizing TSC, these methods often prioritize driving efficiency over safety, thus failing to address the critical balance between these two aspects. Additionally, these methods usually need more interpretability. CounterFactual (CF) learning is a promising approach for various causal analysis fields. In this study, we introduce a novel framework to improve RL for safety aspects in TSC. This framework introduces a novel method based on CF learning to address the question: ``What if, when an unsafe event occurs, we backtrack to perform alternative actions, and will this unsafe event still occur in the subsequent period?'' To answer this question, we propose a new structure causal model to predict the result after executing different actions, and we propose a new CF module that integrates with additional ``X'' modules to promote safe RL practices. Our new algorithm, CFLight, which is derived from this framework, effectively tackles challenging safety events and significantly improves safety at intersections through a near-zero collision control strategy. Through extensive numerical experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that CFLight reduces collisions and improves overall traffic performance compared to conventional RL methods and the recent safe RL model. Moreover, our method represents a generalized and safe framework for RL methods, opening possibilities for applications in other domains. The data and code are available in the github https://github.com/MJLee00/CFLight-Enhancing-Safety-with-Traffic-Signal-Control-through-Counterfactual-Learning.

Yuxi Liu, Zhenhao Zhang, Shaowen Qin et al.

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is one of the most important parts of a hospital, which admits critically ill patients and provides continuous monitoring and treatment. Various patient outcome prediction methods have been attempted to assist healthcare professionals in clinical decision-making. Existing methods focus on measuring the similarity between patients using deep neural networks to capture the hidden feature structures. However, the higher-order relationships are ignored, such as patient characteristics (e.g., diagnosis codes) and their causal effects on downstream clinical predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel Hypergraph Convolutional Network that allows the representation of non-pairwise relationships among diagnosis codes in a hypergraph to capture the hidden feature structures so that fine-grained patient similarity can be calculated for personalized mortality risk prediction. Evaluation using a publicly available eICU Collaborative Research Database indicates that our method achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art models on mortality risk prediction. Moreover, the results of several case studies demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the model decisions.

Marawan Elbatel, Mohamed Ghonim, Jiaji Mao et al.

Automated segmentation of liver lesions on non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) is clinically important but fundamentally challenging, particularly in low-resource settings across Africa and Asia where contrast agents are frequently unavailable. Progress has been limited by the absence of annotated NCCT benchmarks. Here we describe the TriALS challenge for automated liver lesion segmentation under contrast-limited conditions, supported by a multi-centre dataset of 150 cases with four-phase CT acquisitions (600 volumes) from Egyptian and Chinese institutions. Algorithms were evaluated on 70 cases from three institutions, including an independent external cohort. The top-performing method achieved a mean venous-phase Dice of 0.754, consistent with human-level performance, yet dropped to 0.57 on NCCT. On external validation, the leading method outperformed off-the-shelf models by up to 28% in Dice on NCCT. Algorithm performance was most strongly predicted by training data scale and pre-training strategy. A cross-year comparison exposed a persistent perceptual barrier on NCCT that scaling pre-training alone cannot overcome. Data, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/TriALS.

Huan Wang, Jun Shen, Haoran Li et al.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training of distributed clients while protecting privacy. To enhance generalization capability in FL, prototype-based FL is in the spotlight, since shared global prototypes offer semantic anchors for aligning client-specific local prototypes. However, existing methods update global prototypes at the prototype-level via averaging local prototypes or refining global anchors, which often leads to semantic drift across clients and subsequently yields a misaligned global signal. To alleviate this issue, we introduce hyper-prototypes, defined by a set of learnable global class-wise prototypes to preserve underlying semantic knowledge across clients. The hyper-prototypes are optimized via gradient matching to align with class-relevant characteristics distilled directly from clients' real samples, rather than prototype-level descriptors. We further propose FedHPro, a Federated Hyper-Prototype Learning framework, to leverage hyper-prototypes to promote inter-class separability via mutual-contrastive learning with client-specific margin, while encouraging intra-class uniformity through a consistency penalty. Comprehensive experiments under diverse heterogeneous scenarios confirm that 1) hyper-prototypes produce a more semantically consistent global signal, and 2) FedHPro achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/mala-lab/FedHPro}{https://github.com/mala-lab/FedHPro}.

Huan Wang, Jun Shen, Jun Yan et al.

Federated learning (FL) allows distributed clients to collaboratively train a global model in a privacy-preserving manner. However, one major challenge is domain skew, where clients' data originating from diverse domains may hinder the aggregated global model from learning a consistent representation space, resulting in poor generalizable ability in multiple domains. In this paper, we argue that the domain skew is reflected in the domain-specific biased features of each client, causing the local model's representations to collapse into a narrow low-dimensional subspace. We then propose Federated Feature Decoupling and Calibration ($F^2$DC), which liberates valuable class-relevant information by calibrating the domain-specific biased features, enabling more consistent representations across domains. A novel component, Domain Feature Decoupler (DFD), is first introduced in $F^2$DC to determine the robustness of each feature unit, thereby separating the local features into domain-robust features and domain-related features. A Domain Feature Corrector (DFC) is further proposed to calibrate these domain-related features by explicitly linking discriminative signals, capturing additional class-relevant clues that complement the domain-robust features. Finally, a domain-aware aggregation of the local models is performed to promote consensus among clients. Empirical results on three popular multi-domain datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed $F^2$DC and the contributions of its two modules. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/F2DC.

Meiyu Jiang, Jun Shen, Xuetao Jiang et al.

Wind energy is a widely distributed, renewable, and environmentally friendly energy source that plays a crucial role in mitigating global warming and addressing energy shortages. Nevertheless, wind power generation is characterized by volatility, intermittence, and randomness, which hinder its ability to serve as a reliable power source for the grid. Accurate wind power forecasting is crucial for developing a new power system that heavily relies on renewable energy sources. However, traditional wind power forecasting systems primarily focus on ultra-short-term or short-term forecasts, limiting their ability to address the diverse adjustment requirements of the power system simultaneously. To overcome these challenges, We propose an automatic framework capable of forecasting wind power across multi-time scale. The framework based on the tree-structured Parzen estimator (TPE) and temporal fusion transformer (TFT) that can provide ultra-short-term, short-term and medium-term wind power forecasting power.Our approach employs the TFT for wind power forecasting and categorizes features based on their properties. Additionally, we introduce a generic algorithm to simultaneously fine-tune the hyperparameters of the decomposition method and model. We evaluate the performance of our framework by conducting ablation experiments using three commonly used decomposition algorithms and six state-of-the-art models for forecasting multi-time scale. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method considerably improves prediction accuracy on the public dataset Engie https://opendata-renewables.engie.com. Compared to the second-best state-of-the-art model, our approach exhibits a reduction of 31.75% and 28.74% in normalized mean absolute error (nMAE) for 24-hour forecasting, and 20.79% and 16.93% in nMAE for 48-hour forecasting, respectively.

Zhiyu Zhu, Huaming Chen, Xinyi Wang et al.

Adversarial generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), are widely applied for generating various types of data, i.e., images, text, and audio. Accordingly, its promising performance has led to the GAN-based adversarial attack methods in the white-box and black-box attack scenarios. The importance of transferable black-box attacks lies in their ability to be effective across different models and settings, more closely aligning with real-world applications. However, it remains challenging to retain the performance in terms of transferable adversarial examples for such methods. Meanwhile, we observe that some enhanced gradient-based transferable adversarial attack algorithms require prolonged time for adversarial sample generation. Thus, in this work, we propose a novel algorithm named GE-AdvGAN to enhance the transferability of adversarial samples whilst improving the algorithm's efficiency. The main approach is via optimising the training process of the generator parameters. With the functional and characteristic similarity analysis, we introduce a novel gradient editing (GE) mechanism and verify its feasibility in generating transferable samples on various models. Moreover, by exploring the frequency domain information to determine the gradient editing direction, GE-AdvGAN can generate highly transferable adversarial samples while minimizing the execution time in comparison to the state-of-the-art transferable adversarial attack algorithms. The performance of GE-AdvGAN is comprehensively evaluated by large-scale experiments on different datasets, which results demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm. The code for our algorithm is available at: https://github.com/LMBTough/GE-advGAN

Binbin Yong, Haoran Pei, Jun Shen et al.

Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) was designed to combine the learning capabilities of neural network with the reasoning transparency of fuzzy logic. However, conventional ANFIS architectures suffer from structural complexity, where the product-based inference mechanism causes an exponential explosion of rules in high-dimensional spaces. We herein propose the Kolmogorov-Arnold Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (KANFIS), a compact neuro-symbolic architecture that unifies fuzzy reasoning with additive function decomposition. KANFIS employs an additive aggregation mechanism, under which both model parameters and rule complexity scale linearly with input dimensionality rather than exponentially. Furthermore, KANFIS is compatible with both Type-1 (T1) and Interval Type-2 (IT2) fuzzy logic systems, enabling explicit modeling of uncertainty and ambiguity in fuzzy representations. By using sparse masking mechanisms, KANFIS generates compact and structured rule sets, resulting in an intrinsically interpretable model with clear rule semantics and transparent inference processes. Empirical results demonstrate that KANFIS achieves competitive performance against representative neural and neuro-fuzzy baselines.

Haoran Li, Yuxin Lin, Huan Wang et al.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of vision loss worldwide, making early and accurate DR grading critical for timely intervention. Recent clinical practices leverage multi-view fundus images for DR detection with a wide coverage of the field of view (FOV), motivating deep learning methods to explore the potential of multi-view learning for DR grading. However, existing methods often overlook the inter-view correlations when fusing multi-view fundus images, failing to fully exploit the inherent consistency across views originating from the same patient. In this work, we present MVGFDR, an end-to-end Multi-View Graph Fusion framework for DR grading. Different from existing methods that directly fuse visual features from multiple views, MVGFDR is equipped with a novel Multi-View Graph Fusion (MVGF) module to explicitly disentangle the shared and view-specific visual features. Specifically, MVGF comprises three key components: (1) Multi-view Graph Initialization, which constructs visual graphs via residual-guided connections and employs Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients as frequency-domain anchors; (2) Multi-view Graph Fusion, which integrates selective nodes across multi-view graphs based on frequency-domain relevance to capture complementary view-specific information; and (3) Masked Cross-view Reconstruction, which leverages masked reconstruction of shared information across views to facilitate view-invariant representation learning. Extensive experimental results on MFIDDR, by far the largest multi-view fundus image dataset, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art approaches in diabetic retinopathy grading.

Zhijie Bao, Qingyun Liu, Ying Guo et al.

In China, receptionist nurses face overwhelming workloads in outpatient settings, limiting their time and attention for each patient and ultimately reducing service quality. In this paper, we present the Personalized Intelligent Outpatient Reception System (PIORS). This system integrates an LLM-based reception nurse and a collaboration between LLM and hospital information system (HIS) into real outpatient reception setting, aiming to deliver personalized, high-quality, and efficient reception services. Additionally, to enhance the performance of LLMs in real-world healthcare scenarios, we propose a medical conversational data generation framework named Service Flow aware Medical Scenario Simulation (SFMSS), aiming to adapt the LLM to the real-world environments and PIORS settings. We evaluate the effectiveness of PIORS and SFMSS through automatic and human assessments involving 15 users and 15 clinical experts. The results demonstrate that PIORS-Nurse outperforms all baselines, including the current state-of-the-art model GPT-4o, and aligns with human preferences and clinical needs. Further details and demo can be found at https://github.com/FudanDISC/PIORS

Qi Xiong, Xinman Zhang, Jun Shen

Blind iris images, which result from unknown degradation during the process of iris recognition at long distances, often lead to decreased iris recognition rates. Currently, little existing literature offers a solution to this problem. In response, we propose a prior embedding-driven architecture for long distance blind iris recognition. We first proposed a blind iris image restoration network called Iris-PPRGAN. To effectively restore the texture of the blind iris, Iris-PPRGAN includes a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) used as a Prior Decoder, and a DNN used as the encoder. To extract iris features more efficiently, we then proposed a robust iris classifier by modifying the bottleneck module of InsightFace, which called Insight-Iris. A low-quality blind iris image is first restored by Iris-PPRGAN, then the restored iris image undergoes recognition via Insight-Iris. Experimental results on the public CASIA-Iris-distance dataset demonstrate that our proposed method significantly superior results to state-of-the-art blind iris restoration methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, Specifically, the recognition rate for long-distance blind iris images reaches 90% after processing with our methods, representing an improvement of approximately ten percentage points compared to images without restoration.

Runsheng Ren, Jing Li, Yanxiu Li et al.

Accurately forecasting carbon prices is essential for informed energy market decision-making, guiding sustainable energy planning, and supporting effective decarbonization strategies. However, it remains challenging due to structural breaks and high-frequency noise caused by frequent policy interventions and market shocks. Existing studies, including the most recent baseline approaches, have attempted to incorporate breakpoints but often treat denoising and modeling as separate processes and lack systematic evaluation across advanced deep learning architectures, limiting the robustness and the generalization capability. To address these gaps, this paper proposes a comprehensive hybrid framework that integrates structural break detection (Bai-Perron, ICSS, and PELT algorithms), wavelet signal denoising, and three state-of-the-art deep learning models (LSTM, GRU, and TCN). Using European Union Allowance (EUA) spot prices from 2007 to 2024 and exogenous features such as energy prices and policy indicators, the framework constructs univariate and multivariate datasets for comparative evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed PELT-WT-TCN achieves the highest prediction accuracy, reducing forecasting errors by 22.35% in RMSE and 18.63% in MAE compared to the state-of-the-art baseline model (Breakpoints with Wavelet and LSTM), and by 70.55% in RMSE and 74.42% in MAE compared to the original LSTM without decomposition from the same baseline study. These findings underscore the value of integrating structural awareness and multiscale decomposition into deep learning architectures to enhance accuracy and interpretability in carbon price forecasting and other nonstationary financial time series.

Lehan Wang, Haonan Wang, Honglong Yang et al.

Several medical Multimodal Large Languange Models (MLLMs) have been developed to address tasks involving visual images with textual instructions across various medical modalities, achieving impressive results. Most current medical generalist models are region-agnostic, treating the entire image as a holistic representation. However, they struggle to identify which specific regions they are focusing on when generating a sentence. To mimic the behavior of doctors, who typically begin by reviewing the entire image before concentrating on specific regions for a thorough evaluation, we aim to enhance the capability of medical MLLMs in understanding anatomical regions within entire medical scans. To achieve it, we first formulate Region-Centric tasks and construct a large-scale dataset, MedRegInstruct, to incorporate regional information into training. Combining our collected dataset with other medical multimodal corpora for training, we propose a Region-Aware medical MLLM, MedRegA, which is the first bilingual generalist medical AI system to simultaneously handle image-level and region-level medical vision-language tasks across a broad range of modalities. Our MedRegA not only enables three region-centric tasks, but also achieves the best performance for visual question answering, report generation and medical image classification over 8 modalities, showcasing significant versatility. Experiments demonstrate that our model can not only accomplish powerful performance across various medical vision-language tasks in bilingual settings, but also recognize and detect structures in multimodal medical scans, boosting the interpretability and user interactivity of medical MLLMs. Our project page is https://medrega.github.io.

Yaqi Chen, Shixun Huang, Ryan Twemlow et al.

GNN prompting aims to adapt models across tasks and graphs without requiring extensive retraining. However, most existing graph prompt methods still require task-specific parameter updates and face the issue of generalizing across graphs, limiting their performance and undermining the core promise of prompting. In this work, we introduce a Cross-graph Tuning-free Prompting Framework (CTP), which supports both homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs, can be directly deployed to unseen graphs without further parameter tuning, and thus enables a plug-and-play GNN inference engine. Extensive experiments on few-shot prediction tasks show that, compared to SOTAs, CTP achieves an average accuracy gain of 30.8% and a maximum gain of 54%, confirming its effectiveness and offering a new perspective on graph prompt learning.

Jessica Liu, Huaming Chen, Jun Shen et al.

As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly becomes an integral part of our societal and individual activities, there is a growing imperative to develop responsible AI solutions. Despite a diverse assortment of machine learning fairness solutions is proposed in the literature, there is reportedly a lack of practical implementation of these tools in real-world applications. Industry experts have participated in thorough discussions on the challenges associated with operationalising fairness in the development of machine learning-empowered solutions, in which a shift toward human-centred approaches is promptly advocated to mitigate the limitations of existing techniques. In this work, we propose a human-in-the-loop approach for fairness auditing, presenting a mixed visual analytical system (hereafter referred to as 'FairCompass'), which integrates both subgroup discovery technique and the decision tree-based schema for end users. Moreover, we innovatively integrate an Exploration, Guidance and Informed Analysis loop, to facilitate the use of the Knowledge Generation Model for Visual Analytics in FairCompass. We evaluate the effectiveness of FairCompass for fairness auditing in a real-world scenario, and the findings demonstrate the system's potential for real-world deployability. We anticipate this work will address the current gaps in research for fairness and facilitate the operationalisation of fairness in machine learning systems.

Huiyuan Xiong, Jun Shen, Taohong Zhu et al.

High-definition (HD) map is crucial for autonomous driving systems. Most existing works design map elements detection heads based on the DETR decoder. However, the initial queries lack explicit incorporation of physical positional information, and vanilla self-attention entails high computational complexity. Therefore, we propose EAN-MapNet for Efficiently constructing HD map using Anchor Neighborhoods. Firstly, we design query units based on the anchor neighborhoods, allowing non-neighborhood central anchors to effectively assist in fitting the neighborhood central anchors to the target points representing map elements. Then, we propose grouped local self-attention (GL-SA) by leveraging the relative instance relationship among the queries. This facilitates direct feature interaction among queries of the same instances, while innovatively employing local queries as intermediaries for interaction among queries from different instances. Consequently, GL-SA significantly reduces the computational complexity of self-attention while ensuring ample feature interaction among queries. On the nuScenes dataset, EAN-MapNet achieves a state-of-the-art performance with 63.0 mAP after training for 24 epochs, surpassing MapTR by 12.7 mAP. Furthermore, it considerably reduces memory consumption by 8198M compared to MapTRv2.

Mingyuan Li, Jiahao Wang, Bo Du et al.

Effective traffic signal control (TSC) is crucial in mitigating urban congestion and reducing emissions. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been the research trend for TSC. However, existing RL algorithms face several real-world challenges that hinder their practical deployment in TSC: (1) Sensor accuracy deteriorates with increased sensor detection range, and data transmission is prone to noise, potentially resulting in unsafe TSC decisions. (2) During the training of online RL, interactions with the environment could be unstable, potentially leading to inappropriate traffic signal phase (TSP) selection and traffic congestion. (3) Most current TSC algorithms focus only on TSP decisions, overlooking the critical aspect of phase duration, affecting safety and efficiency. To overcome these challenges, we propose a robust two-stage fuzzy approach called FuzzyLight, which integrates compressed sensing and RL for TSC deployment. FuzzyLight offers several key contributions: (1) It employs fuzzy logic and compressed sensing to address sensor noise and enhances the efficiency of TSP decisions. (2) It maintains stable performance during training and combines fuzzy logic with RL to generate precise phases. (3) It works in real cities across 22 intersections and demonstrates superior performance in both real-world and simulated environments. Experimental results indicate that FuzzyLight enhances traffic efficiency by 48% compared to expert-designed timings in the real world. Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in simulated environments using six real-world datasets with transmission noise. The code and deployment video are available at the URL1

Songtao Huang, Hongjin Song, Tianqi Jiang et al.

Accurate traffic forecasting is essential for effective urban planning and congestion management. Deep learning (DL) approaches have gained colossal success in traffic forecasting but still face challenges in capturing the intricacies of traffic dynamics. In this paper, we identify and address this challenges by emphasizing that spatial features are inherently dynamic and change over time. A novel in-depth feature representation, called Dynamic Spatio-Temporal (Dyn-ST) features, is introduced, which encapsulates spatial characteristics across varying times. Moreover, a Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer Network (DST-GTN) is proposed by capturing Dyn-ST features and other dynamic adjacency relations between intersections. The DST-GTN can model dynamic ST relationships between nodes accurately and refine the representation of global and local ST characteristics by adopting adaptive weights in low-pass and all-pass filters, enabling the extraction of Dyn-ST features from traffic time-series data. Through numerical experiments on public datasets, the DST-GTN achieves state-of-the-art performance for a range of traffic forecasting tasks and demonstrates enhanced stability.

Yijie Zheng, Weijie Wu, Qingyun Li et al.

Language-Guided object recognition in remote sensing imagery is crucial for large-scale mapping and automated data annotation. However, existing open-vocabulary and visual grounding methods rely on explicit category cues, limiting their ability to handle complex or implicit queries that require advanced reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce a new suite of tasks, including Instruction-Oriented Object Counting, Detection, and Segmentation (InstructCDS), covering open-vocabulary, open-ended, and open-subclass scenarios. We further present EarthInstruct, the first InstructCDS benchmark for earth observation. It is constructed from two diverse remote sensing datasets with varying spatial resolutions and annotation rules across 20 categories, necessitating models to interpret dataset-specific instructions. Given the scarcity of semantically rich labeled data in remote sensing, we propose InstructSAM, a training-free framework for instruction-driven object recognition. InstructSAM leverages large vision-language models to interpret user instructions and estimate object counts, employs SAM2 for mask proposal, and formulates mask-label assignment as a binary integer programming problem. By integrating semantic similarity with counting constraints, InstructSAM efficiently assigns categories to predicted masks without relying on confidence thresholds. Experiments demonstrate that InstructSAM matches or surpasses specialized baselines across multiple tasks while maintaining near-constant inference time regardless of object count, reducing output tokens by 89% and overall runtime by over 32% compared to direct generation approaches. We believe the contributions of the proposed tasks, benchmark, and effective approach will advance future research in developing versatile object recognition systems.

Haoran Li, Jiahua Shi, Huaming Chen et al.

Artificially generated induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from somatic cells play an important role for disease modeling and drug screening of neurodegenerative diseases. Astrocytes differentiated from iPSCs are important targets to investigate neuronal metabolism. The astrocyte differentiation progress can be monitored through the variations of morphology observed from microscopy images at different differentiation stages, then determined by molecular biology techniques upon maturation. However, the astrocytes usually ``perfectly'' blend into the background and some of them are covered by interference information (i.e., dead cells, media sediments, and cell debris), which makes astrocytes difficult to observe. Due to the lack of annotated datasets, the existing state-of-the-art deep learning approaches cannot be used to address this issue. In this paper, we introduce a new task named astrocyte segmentation with a novel dataset, called IAI704, which contains 704 images and their corresponding pixel-level annotation masks. Moreover, a novel frequency domain denoising network, named FDNet, is proposed for astrocyte segmentation. In detail, our FDNet consists of a contextual information fusion module (CIF), an attention block (AB), and a Fourier transform block (FTB). CIF and AB fuse multi-scale feature embeddings to localize the astrocytes. FTB transforms feature embeddings into the frequency domain and conducts a high-pass filter to eliminate interference information. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed FDNet over the state-of-the-art substitutes in astrocyte segmentation, shedding insights for iPSC differentiation progress prediction.

Huan Wang, Haoran Li, Huaming Chen et al.

Federated learning aims at training models collaboratively across participants while protecting privacy. However, one major challenge for this paradigm is the data heterogeneity issue, where biased data preferences across multiple clients, harming the model's convergence and performance. In this paper, we first introduce powerful diffusion models into the federated learning paradigm and show that diffusion representations are effective steers during federated training. To explore the possibility of using diffusion representations in handling data heterogeneity, we propose a novel diffusion-inspired Federated paradigm with Diffusion Representation Collaboration, termed FedDifRC, leveraging meaningful guidance of diffusion models to mitigate data heterogeneity. The key idea is to construct text-driven diffusion contrasting and noise-driven diffusion regularization, aiming to provide abundant class-related semantic information and consistent convergence signals. On the one hand, we exploit the conditional feedback from the diffusion model for different text prompts to build a text-driven contrastive learning strategy. On the other hand, we introduce a noise-driven consistency regularization to align local instances with diffusion denoising representations, constraining the optimization region in the feature space. In addition, FedDifRC can be extended to a self-supervised scheme without relying on any labeled data. We also provide a theoretical analysis for FedDifRC to ensure convergence under non-convex objectives. The experiments on different scenarios validate the effectiveness of FedDifRC and the efficiency of crucial components.

Huan Wang, Haoran Li, Huaming Chen et al.

Federated learning (FL) aims to train models collaboratively across clients without sharing data for privacy-preserving. However, one major challenge is the data heterogeneity issue, which refers to the biased labeling preferences at multiple clients. A number of existing FL methods attempt to tackle data heterogeneity locally (e.g., regularizing local models) or globally (e.g., fine-tuning global model), often neglecting inherent semantic information contained in each client. To explore the possibility of using intra-client semantically meaningful knowledge in handling data heterogeneity, in this paper, we propose Federated Learning with Semantic-Aware Collaboration (FedSC) to capture client-specific and class-relevant knowledge across heterogeneous clients. The core idea of FedSC is to construct relational prototypes and consistent prototypes at semantic-level, aiming to provide fruitful class underlying knowledge and stable convergence signals in a prototype-wise collaborative way. On the one hand, FedSC introduces an inter-contrastive learning strategy to bring instance-level embeddings closer to relational prototypes with the same semantics and away from distinct classes. On the other hand, FedSC devises consistent prototypes via a discrepancy aggregation manner, as a regularization penalty to constrain the optimization region of the local model. Moreover, a theoretical analysis for FedSC is provided to ensure a convergence guarantee. Experimental results on various challenging scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of FedSC and the efficiency of crucial components.

Huan Wang, Haoran Li, Huaming Chen et al.

With the advancement of edge computing, federated learning (FL) displays a bright promise as a privacy-preserving collaborative learning paradigm. However, one major challenge for FL is the data heterogeneity issue, which refers to the biased labeling preferences among multiple clients, negatively impacting convergence and model performance. Most previous FL methods attempt to tackle the data heterogeneity issue locally or globally, neglecting underlying class-wise structure information contained in each client. In this paper, we first study how data heterogeneity affects the divergence of the model and decompose it into local, global, and sampling drift sub-problems. To explore the potential of using intra-client class-wise structural knowledge in handling these drifts, we thus propose Federated Learning with Structural Knowledge Collaboration (FedSKC). The key idea of FedSKC is to extract and transfer domain preferences from inter-client data distributions, offering diverse class-relevant knowledge and a fair convergent signal. FedSKC comprises three components: i) local contrastive learning, to prevent weight divergence resulting from local training; ii) global discrepancy aggregation, which addresses the parameter deviation between the server and clients; iii) global period review, correcting for the sampling drift introduced by the server randomly selecting devices. We have theoretically analyzed FedSKC under non-convex objectives and empirically validated its superiority through extensive experimental results.

Hai Jiang, Chushan Zheng, Jiawei Pan et al.

Background: Accurate assessment of metastatic burden in axillary lymph nodes is crucial for guiding breast cancer treatment decisions, yet conventional imaging modalities struggle to differentiate metastatic burden levels and capture comprehensive lymph node characteristics. This study leverages dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) to exploit spectral-spatial information for improved multi-class classification. Purpose: To develop a noninvasive DECT-based model classifying sentinel lymph nodes into three categories: no metastasis ($N_0$), low metastatic burden ($N_{+(1-2)}$), and heavy metastatic burden ($N_{+(\geq3)}$), thereby aiding therapeutic planning. Methods: We propose a novel space-squeeze method combining two innovations: (1) a channel-wise attention mechanism to compress and recalibrate spectral-spatial features across 11 energy levels, and (2) virtual class injection to sharpen inter-class boundaries and compact intra-class variations in the representation space. Results: Evaluated on 227 biopsy-confirmed cases, our method achieved an average test AUC of 0.86 (95% CI: 0.80-0.91) across three cross-validation folds, outperforming established CNNs (VGG, ResNet, etc). The channel-wise attention and virtual class components individually improved AUC by 5.01% and 5.87%, respectively, demonstrating complementary benefits. Conclusions: The proposed framework enhances diagnostic AUC by effectively integrating DECT's spectral-spatial data and mitigating class ambiguity, offering a promising tool for noninvasive metastatic burden assessment in clinical practice.

Haonan Wang, Jiaji Mao, Lehan Wang et al.

Medical AI assistants support doctors in disease diagnosis, medical image analysis, and report generation. However, they still face significant challenges in clinical use, including limited accuracy with multimodal content and insufficient validation in real-world settings. We propose RCMed, a full-stack AI assistant that improves multimodal alignment in both input and output, enabling precise anatomical delineation, accurate localization, and reliable diagnosis through hierarchical vision-language grounding. A self-reinforcing correlation mechanism allows visual features to inform language context, while language semantics guide pixel-wise attention, forming a closed loop that refines both modalities. This correlation is enhanced by a color region description strategy, translating anatomical structures into semantically rich text to learn shape-location-text relationships across scales. Trained on 20 million image-mask-description triplets, RCMed achieves state-of-the-art precision in contextualizing irregular lesions and subtle anatomical boundaries, excelling in 165 clinical tasks across 9 modalities. It achieved a 23.5% relative improvement in cell segmentation from microscopy images over prior methods. RCMed's strong vision-language alignment enables exceptional generalization, with state-of-the-art performance in external validation across 20 clinically significant cancer types, including novel tasks. This work demonstrates how integrated multimodal models capture fine-grained patterns, enabling human-level interpretation in complex scenarios and advancing human-centric AI healthcare.

Haoran Li, Xingjian Li, Jiahua Shi et al.

Cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) is a 3D imaging technology facilitating the study of macromolecular structures at near-atomic resolution. Recent volumetric segmentation approaches on cryo-ET images have drawn widespread interest in biological sector. However, existing methods heavily rely on manually labeled data, which requires highly professional skills, thereby hindering the adoption of fully-supervised approaches for cryo-ET images. Some unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches have been designed to enhance the segmentation network performance using unlabeled data. However, applying these methods directly to cryo-ET images segmentation tasks remains challenging due to two main issues: 1) the source data, usually obtained through simulation, contain a certain level of noise, while the target data, directly collected from raw-data from real-world scenario, have unpredictable noise levels. 2) the source data used for training typically consists of known macromoleculars, while the target domain data are often unknown, causing the model's segmenter to be biased towards these known macromolecules, leading to a domain shift problem. To address these challenges, in this work, we introduce the first voxel-wise unsupervised domain adaptation approach, termed Vox-UDA, specifically for cryo-ET subtomogram segmentation. Vox-UDA incorporates a noise generation module to simulate target-like noises in the source dataset for cross-noise level adaptation. Additionally, we propose a denoised pseudo-labeling strategy based on improved Bilateral Filter to alleviate the domain shift problem. Experimental results on both simulated and real cryo-ET subtomogram datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art UDA methods.

Mahdi Fahmideh, Jun Yan, Jun Shen et al.

Migration legacy systems to cloud platforms is a knowledge intensive process. There is an ever increasing body of knowledge reporting empirical scenarios of successful and problematic cloud migration. Reusing this body of knowledge, dispersed and fragmented over the academic/multi-vocal literature, has practical values to mitigate costly risks and pitfalls in further projects of legacy to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud migration. In line with this, knowledge management systems/platforms pertinent to cloud migration are a prime prerequisite and a strategic imperative for an organization. We have conducted a qualitative exploratory study to understand the benefits and challenges of developing Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) for cloud migration in real trials. Whilst our prototype system demonstration supported the importance and bene-fits of developing Cloud Migration KMS (CM-KMS), our semi-structured industry interview study with 11 participants highlighted challenging impediments against developing this class of KMS. As a result, this study proposes nine significant challenges that cause the abandon of the design and maintenance of CM-KMS, including continuous changes and updates, integration of knowledge, knowledge granularity, preservation of context, automation, deconstruction of traditional knowledge, dependency on experts, hybrid knowledge of both vendor-specific and vendor-neutral cloud platforms, and parsimony. Our results inform cloud architects to pay attention to adopt CM-KMS for the legacy-to-cloud migration in their organizations.

Liang Zhang, Qiang Wu, Jun Shen et al.

Many studies confirmed that a proper traffic state representation is more important than complex algorithms for the classical traffic signal control (TSC) problem. In this paper, we (1) present a novel, flexible and efficient method, namely advanced max pressure (Advanced-MP), taking both running and queuing vehicles into consideration to decide whether to change current signal phase; (2) inventively design the traffic movement representation with the efficient pressure and effective running vehicles from Advanced-MP, namely advanced traffic state (ATS); and (3) develop a reinforcement learning (RL) based algorithm template, called Advanced-XLight, by combining ATS with the latest RL approaches, and generate two RL algorithms, namely "Advanced-MPLight" and "Advanced-CoLight" from Advanced-XLight. Comprehensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that: (1) the Advanced-MP outperforms baseline methods, and it is also efficient and reliable for deployment; and (2) Advanced-MPLight and Advanced-CoLight can achieve the state-of-the-art.

Mahdi Fahmideh, Anuradha Gunawardana, Shiping Chen et al.

Blockchain has received expanding interest from various domains. Institutions, enterprises, governments, and agencies are interested in Blockchain potential to augment their software systems. The unique requirements and characteristics of Blockchain platforms raise new challenges involving extensive enhancement to conventional software development processes to meet the needs of these domains. Software engineering approaches supporting Blockchain-oriented developments have been slow to materialize, despite proposals in the literature, and they have yet to be objectively analyzed. A critical appraisal of these innovations is crucial to identify their respective strengths and weaknesses. We present an analytical evaluation of several prominent Blockchain-oriented methods through a comprehensive, criteria-based evaluation framework. The results can be used for comparing, adapting, and developing a new generation of Blockchain-oriented software development processes and innovations.

Qiang Wu, Liang Zhang, Jun Shen et al.

Since conventional approaches could not adapt to dynamic traffic conditions, reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted more attention to help solve the traffic signal control (TSC) problem. However, existing RL-based methods are rarely deployed considering that they are neither cost-effective in terms of computing resources nor more robust than traditional approaches, which raises a critical research question: how to construct an adaptive controller for TSC with less training and reduced complexity based on RL-based approach? To address this question, in this paper, we (1) innovatively specify the traffic movement representation as a simple but efficient pressure of vehicle queues in a traffic network, namely efficient pressure (EP); (2) build a traffic signal settings protocol, including phase duration, signal phase number and EP for TSC; (3) design a TSC approach based on the traditional max pressure (MP) approach, namely efficient max pressure (Efficient-MP) using the EP to capture the traffic state; and (4) develop a general RL-based TSC algorithm template: efficient Xlight (Efficient-XLight) under EP. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets in our traffic signal settings' protocol for TSC, we demonstrate that efficient pressure is complementary to traditional and RL-based modeling to design better TSC methods. Our code is released on Github.

Mahdi Fahmideh, John Grundy, Aakash Ahmed et al.

Many scientific and practical areas have shown increasing interest in reaping the benefits of blockchain technology to empower software systems. However, the unique characteristics and requirements associated with Blockchain Based Software (BBS) systems raise new challenges across the development lifecycle that entail an extensive improvement of conventional software engineering. This article presents a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art in BBS engineering research from a software engineering perspective. We characterize BBS engineering from the theoretical foundations, processes, models, and roles and discuss a rich repertoire of key development activities, principles, challenges, and techniques. The focus and depth of this survey not only gives software engineering practitioners and researchers a consolidated body of knowledge about current BBS development but also underpins a starting point for further research in this field.

Mahdi Fahmideh, Jun Yan, Jun Shen et al.

The compliance of IoT platforms to quality is paramount to achieve users satisfaction. Currently, we do not have a comprehensive set of guidelines to appraise and select the most suitable IoT platform architectures that meet relevant criteria. This paper is a tentative response to this critical knowledge gap where we adopted the design science research approach to develop a novel evaluation framework. Our research, on the one hand, stimulates an unbiased competition among IoT platform providers and, on the other hand, establishes a solid foundation for IoT platform consumers to make informed decisions in this multiplicity. The application of the framework is illustrated in example scenarios. Moreover, lessons learned from applying design science research are shared.

Xuetao Jiang, Binbin Yong, Soheila Garshasbi et al.

CNN models already play an important role in classification of crop and weed with high accuracy, more than 95% as reported in literature. However, to manually choose and fine-tune the deep learning models becomes laborious and indispensable in most traditional practices and research. Moreover, the classic objective functions are not thoroughly compatible with agricultural farming tasks as the corresponding models suffer from misclassifying crop to weed, often more likely than in other deep learning application domains. In this paper, we applied autonomous machine learning with a new objective function for crop and weed classification, achieving higher accuracy and lower crop killing rate (rate of identifying a crop as a weed). The experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art applications, for example, ResNet and VGG19.

Han Fu, Yunyu Bai, Zhuo Li et al.

Paper documents are widely used as an irreplaceable channel of information in many fields, especially in financial industry, fostering a great amount of demand for systems which can convert document images into structured data representations. In this paper, we present a machine learning framework for data ingestion in document images, which processes the images uploaded by users and return fine-grained data in JSON format. Details of model architectures, design strategies, distinctions with existing solutions and lessons learned during development are elaborated. We conduct abundant experiments on both synthetic and real-world data in State Street. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.

Bin Wang, Jun Shen, Shutao Zhang et al.

By incorporating the methods of Answer Set Programming (ASP) and Markov Logic Networks (MLN), LPMLN becomes a powerful tool for non-monotonic, inconsistent and uncertain knowledge representation and reasoning. To facilitate the applications and extend the understandings of LPMLN, we investigate the strong equivalences between LPMLN programs in this paper, which is regarded as an important property in the field of logic programming. In the field of ASP, two programs P and Q are strongly equivalent, iff for any ASP program R, the programs P and Q extended by R have the same stable models. In other words, an ASP program can be replaced by one of its strong equivalent without considering its context, which helps us to simplify logic programs, enhance inference engines, construct human-friendly knowledge bases etc. Since LPMLN is a combination of ASP and MLN, the notions of strong equivalences in LPMLN is quite different from that in ASP. Firstly, we present the notions of p-strong and w-strong equivalences between LPMLN programs. Secondly, we present a characterization of the notions by generalizing the SE-model approach in ASP. Finally, we show the use of strong equivalences in simplifying LPMLN programs, and present a sufficient and necessary syntactic condition that guarantees the strong equivalence between a single LPMLN rule and the empty program.

Jun Shen, Rida A. Bazzi

We study the dynamic software update problem for programs interacting with an environment that is not necessarily updated. We argue that such updates should be backward compatible. We propose a general definition of backward compatibility and cases of backward compatible program update. Based on our detailed study of real world program evolution, we propose classes of backward compatible update for interactive programs, which are included at an average of 32% of all studied program changes. The definitions of update classes are parameterized by our novel framework of program equivalence, which generalizes existing results on program equivalence to non-terminating executions. Our study of backward compatible updates is based on a typed extension of W language.