Jing Zhang

Nicholas Heller, Fabian Isensee, Dasha Trofimova et al.

This paper presents the challenge report for the 2021 Kidney and Kidney Tumor Segmentation Challenge (KiTS21) held in conjunction with the 2021 international conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI). KiTS21 is a sequel to its first edition in 2019, and it features a variety of innovations in how the challenge was designed, in addition to a larger dataset. A novel annotation method was used to collect three separate annotations for each region of interest, and these annotations were performed in a fully transparent setting using a web-based annotation tool. Further, the KiTS21 test set was collected from an outside institution, challenging participants to develop methods that generalize well to new populations. Nonetheless, the top-performing teams achieved a significant improvement over the state of the art set in 2019, and this performance is shown to inch ever closer to human-level performance. An in-depth meta-analysis is presented describing which methods were used and how they faired on the leaderboard, as well as the characteristics of which cases generally saw good performance, and which did not. Overall KiTS21 facilitated a significant advancement in the state of the art in kidney tumor segmentation, and provides useful insights that are applicable to the field of semantic segmentation as a whole.

Xinyu Tian, Shu Zou, Zhaoyuan Yang et al.

Few-shot adaptation for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) presents a dilemma: balancing in-distribution accuracy with out-of-distribution generalization. Recent research has utilized low-level concepts such as visual attributes to enhance generalization. However, this study reveals that VLMs overly rely on a small subset of attributes on decision-making, which co-occur with the category but are not inherently part of it, termed spuriously correlated attributes. This biased nature of VLMs results in poor generalization. To address this, 1) we first propose Spurious Attribute Probing (SAP), identifying and filtering out these problematic attributes to significantly enhance the generalization of existing attribute-based methods; 2) We introduce Spurious Attribute Shielding (SAS), a plug-and-play module that mitigates the influence of these attributes on prediction, seamlessly integrating into various Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods. In experiments, SAP and SAS significantly enhance accuracy on distribution shifts across 11 datasets and 3 generalization tasks without compromising downstream performance, establishing a new state-of-the-art benchmark.

Jinlong Fan, Bingyu Hu, Xingguang Li et al.

Reconstructing high-fidelity animatable human avatars from monocular videos remains challenging due to insufficient geometric information in single-view observations. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting methods have shown promise, they struggle with surface detail preservation due to the free-form nature of 3D Gaussian primitives. To address both the representation limitations and information scarcity, we propose a novel method, \textbf{FMGS-Avatar}, that integrates two key innovations. First, we introduce Mesh-Guided 2D Gaussian Splatting, where 2D Gaussian primitives are attached directly to template mesh faces with constrained position, rotation, and movement, enabling superior surface alignment and geometric detail preservation. Second, we leverage foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, such as Sapiens, to complement the limited visual cues from monocular videos. However, when distilling multi-modal prior knowledge from foundation models, conflicting optimization objectives can emerge as different modalities exhibit distinct parameter sensitivities. We address this through a coordinated training strategy with selective gradient isolation, enabling each loss component to optimize its relevant parameters without interference. Through this combination of enhanced representation and coordinated information distillation, our approach significantly advances 3D monocular human avatar reconstruction. Experimental evaluation demonstrates superior reconstruction quality compared to existing methods, with notable gains in geometric accuracy and appearance fidelity while providing rich semantic information. Additionally, the distilled prior knowledge within a shared canonical space naturally enables spatially and temporally consistent rendering under novel views and poses.