Yiyu Shi

Hanrui Wang, Pengyu Liu, Jinglei Cheng et al. · mit

Among different quantum algorithms, PQC for QML show promises on near-term devices. To facilitate the QML and PQC research, a recent python library called TorchQuantum has been released. It can construct, simulate, and train PQC for machine learning tasks with high speed and convenient debugging supports. Besides quantum for ML, we want to raise the community's attention on the reversed direction: ML for quantum. Specifically, the TorchQuantum library also supports using data-driven ML models to solve problems in quantum system research, such as predicting the impact of quantum noise on circuit fidelity and improving the quantum circuit compilation efficiency. This paper presents a case study of the ML for quantum part. Since estimating the noise impact on circuit reliability is an essential step toward understanding and mitigating noise, we propose to leverage classical ML to predict noise impact on circuit fidelity. Inspired by the natural graph representation of quantum circuits, we propose to leverage a graph transformer model to predict the noisy circuit fidelity. We firstly collect a large dataset with a variety of quantum circuits and obtain their fidelity on noisy simulators and real machines. Then we embed each circuit into a graph with gate and noise properties as node features, and adopt a graph transformer to predict the fidelity. Evaluated on 5 thousand random and algorithm circuits, the graph transformer predictor can provide accurate fidelity estimation with RMSE error 0.04 and outperform a simple neural network-based model by 0.02 on average. It can achieve 0.99 and 0.95 R$^2$ scores for random and algorithm circuits, respectively. Compared with circuit simulators, the predictor has over 200X speedup for estimating the fidelity.

An Zeng, Chunbiao Wu, Meiping Huang et al.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounts for about half of non-communicable diseases. Vessel stenosis in the coronary artery is considered to be the major risk of CVD. Computed tomography angiography (CTA) is one of the widely used noninvasive imaging modalities in coronary artery diagnosis due to its superior image resolution. Clinically, segmentation of coronary arteries is essential for the diagnosis and quantification of coronary artery disease. Recently, a variety of works have been proposed to address this problem. However, on one hand, most works rely on in-house datasets, and only a few works published their datasets to the public which only contain tens of images. On the other hand, their source code have not been published, and most follow-up works have not made comparison with existing works, which makes it difficult to judge the effectiveness of the methods and hinders the further exploration of this challenging yet critical problem in the community. In this paper, we propose a large-scale dataset for coronary artery segmentation on CTA images. In addition, we have implemented a benchmark in which we have tried our best to implement several typical existing methods. Furthermore, we propose a strong baseline method which combines multi-scale patch fusion and two-stage processing to extract the details of vessels. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves better performance than existing works on the proposed large-scale dataset. The benchmark and the dataset are published at https://github.com/XiaoweiXu/ImageCAS-A-Large-Scale-Dataset-and-Benchmark-for-Coronary-Artery-Segmentation-based-on-CT.

Zhiding Liang, Jinglei Cheng, Hang Ren et al. · mit

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have demonstrated great potentials in the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. In the workflow of VQA, the parameters of ansatz are iteratively updated to approximate the desired quantum states. We have seen various efforts to draft better ansatz with less gates. Some works consider the physical meaning of the underlying circuits, while others adopt the ideas of neural architecture search (NAS) for ansatz generator. However, these designs do not exploit the full advantages of VQAs. Because most techniques target gate ansatz, and the parameters are usually rotation angles of the gates. In quantum computers, the gate ansatz will eventually be transformed into control signals such as microwave pulses on superconducting qubits. These control pulses need elaborate calibrations to minimize the errors such as over-rotation and under-rotation. In the case of VQAs, this procedure will introduce redundancy, but the variational properties of VQAs can naturally handle problems of over-rotation and under-rotation by updating the amplitude and frequency parameters. Therefore, we propose NAPA, a native-pulse ansatz generator framework for VQAs. We generate native-pulse ansatz with trainable parameters for amplitudes and frequencies. In our proposed NAPA, we are tuning parametric pulses, which are natively supported on NISQ computers. Given the limited availability of gradient-based optimizers for pulse-level quantum programs, we choose to deploy non-gradient optimizers in our framework. To constrain the number of parameters sent to the optimizer, we adopt a progressive way to generate our native-pulse ansatz. Experiments are conducted on both simulators and quantum devices for Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) tasks to evaluate our methods.

Ningzhi Tang, Chaoran Chen, Gelei Xu et al.

AI coding agents increasingly act directly within software environments, yet existing analyses of their failures rely on benchmark trajectories that miss how developers actually experience misalignment. We present an observational study of 20,574 coding-agent sessions from 1,639 repositories across IDE and CLI workflows. We operationalize misalignment as a breakdown made visible through developer pushback, and annotate each episode along four axes: form, cause, cost, and resolution. We identify seven recurring forms, spanning how agents read projects, interpret developer intent, follow rules, bound their actions, implement and execute code, and report progress. 90.50\% of episodes impose effort and trust costs rather than irreversible system damage, yet 91.49\% of visible resolutions still require explicit user correction. Misalignment patterns also differ across IDE and CLI settings, persist across adjacent sessions, and shift over time: while overall rates decline, constraint violations and inaccurate self-reporting grow in share. Our findings inform the design of training, evaluation, and interfaces for keeping coding agents aligned with real developer workflows.

Yu Fu, Yanyan Huang, Yalin Wang et al.

Chronological age of healthy brain is able to be predicted using deep neural networks from T1-weighted magnetic resonance images (T1 MRIs), and the predicted brain age could serve as an effective biomarker for detecting aging-related diseases or disorders. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural network architecture, referred to as optimal transport based feature pyramid fusion (OTFPF) network, for the brain age estimation with T1 MRIs. The OTFPF consists of three types of modules: Optimal Transport based Feature Pyramid Fusion (OTFPF) module, 3D overlapped ConvNeXt (3D OL-ConvNeXt) module and fusion module. These modules strengthen the OTFPF network's understanding of each brain's semi-multimodal and multi-level feature pyramid information, and significantly improve its estimation performances. Comparing with recent state-of-the-art models, the proposed OTFPF converges faster and performs better. The experiments with 11,728 MRIs aged 3-97 years show that OTFPF network could provide accurate brain age estimation, yielding mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.097, Pearson's correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.993 and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC) of 0.989, between the estimated and chronological ages. Widespread quantitative experiments and ablation experiments demonstrate the superiority and rationality of OTFPF network. The codes and implement details will be released on GitHub: https://github.com/ZJU-Brain/OTFPF after final decision.

Bingqian Lu, Zheyu Yan, Yiyu Shi et al.

In view of the performance limitations of fully-decoupled designs for neural architectures and accelerators, hardware-software co-design has been emerging to fully reap the benefits of flexible design spaces and optimize neural network performance. Nonetheless, such co-design also enlarges the total search space to practically infinity and presents substantial challenges. While the prior studies have been focusing on improving the search efficiency (e.g., via reinforcement learning), they commonly rely on co-searches over the entire architecture-accelerator design space. In this paper, we propose a \emph{semi}-decoupled approach to reduce the size of the total design space by orders of magnitude, yet without losing optimality. We first perform neural architecture search to obtain a small set of optimal architectures for one accelerator candidate. Importantly, this is also the set of (close-to-)optimal architectures for other accelerator designs based on the property that neural architectures' ranking orders in terms of inference latency and energy consumption on different accelerator designs are highly similar. Then, instead of considering all the possible architectures, we optimize the accelerator design only in combination with this small set of architectures, thus significantly reducing the total search cost. We validate our approach by conducting experiments on various architecture spaces for accelerator designs with different dataflows. Our results highlight that we can obtain the optimal design by only navigating over the reduced search space. The source code of this work is at \url{https://github.com/Ren-Research/CoDesign}.

Lukas Johanns, Marilin Moor, Davide Panzeri et al.

Biological image analysis increasingly demands integration across heterogeneous tools, programming environments, and domain knowledge that few researchers can command simultaneously. We present Agentic-J, a containerised, multi-agent AI assistant, primarily for ImageJ/Fiji that enables biologists to specify analysis tasks in natural language, from nuclei segmentation and cell tracking to multi-condition quantification. The agent generates executable scripts organised into a documented project structure, so every analysis decision is traceable and the workflow can be reproduced or shared. The specialised sub-agents handle plugin management, code generation, debugging, quality assurance, and statistical reporting. In this paper we introduce the system's design, demonstrate real biological microscopy image analysis workflows, and detailed the technical implementation.

Yawen Wu, Dewen Zeng, Xiaowei Xu et al.

Many works have shown that deep learning-based medical image classification models can exhibit bias toward certain demographic attributes like race, gender, and age. Existing bias mitigation methods primarily focus on learning debiased models, which may not necessarily guarantee all sensitive information can be removed and usually comes with considerable accuracy degradation on both privileged and unprivileged groups. To tackle this issue, we propose a method, FairPrune, that achieves fairness by pruning. Conventionally, pruning is used to reduce the model size for efficient inference. However, we show that pruning can also be a powerful tool to achieve fairness. Our observation is that during pruning, each parameter in the model has different importance for different groups' accuracy. By pruning the parameters based on this importance difference, we can reduce the accuracy difference between the privileged group and the unprivileged group to improve fairness without a large accuracy drop. To this end, we use the second derivative of the parameters of a pre-trained model to quantify the importance of each parameter with respect to the model accuracy for each group. Experiments on two skin lesion diagnosis datasets over multiple sensitive attributes demonstrate that our method can greatly improve fairness while keeping the average accuracy of both groups as high as possible.

Yawen Wu, Dewen Zeng, Zhepeng Wang et al.

Supervised deep learning needs a large amount of labeled data to achieve high performance. However, in medical imaging analysis, each site may only have a limited amount of data and labels, which makes learning ineffective. Federated learning (FL) can learn a shared model from decentralized data. But traditional FL requires fully-labeled data for training, which is very expensive to obtain. Self-supervised contrastive learning (CL) can learn from unlabeled data for pre-training, followed by fine-tuning with limited annotations. However, when adopting CL in FL, the limited data diversity on each site makes federated contrastive learning (FCL) ineffective. In this work, we propose two federated self-supervised learning frameworks for volumetric medical image segmentation with limited annotations. The first one features high accuracy and fits high-performance servers with high-speed connections. The second one features lower communication costs, suitable for mobile devices. In the first framework, features are exchanged during FCL to provide diverse contrastive data to each site for effective local CL while keeping raw data private. Global structural matching aligns local and remote features for a unified feature space among different sites. In the second framework, to reduce the communication cost for feature exchanging, we propose an optimized method FCLOpt that does not rely on negative samples. To reduce the communications of model download, we propose the predictive target network update (PTNU) that predicts the parameters of the target network. Based on PTNU, we propose the distance prediction (DP) to remove most of the uploads of the target network. Experiments on a cardiac MRI dataset show the proposed two frameworks substantially improve the segmentation and generalization performance compared with state-of-the-art techniques.

Yawen Wu, Dewen Zeng, Zhepeng Wang et al.

Supervised deep learning needs a large amount of labeled data to achieve high performance. However, in medical imaging analysis, each site may only have a limited amount of data and labels, which makes learning ineffective. Federated learning (FL) can help in this regard by learning a shared model while keeping training data local for privacy. Traditional FL requires fully-labeled data for training, which is inconvenient or sometimes infeasible to obtain due to high labeling cost and the requirement of expertise. Contrastive learning (CL), as a self-supervised learning approach, can effectively learn from unlabeled data to pre-train a neural network encoder, followed by fine-tuning for downstream tasks with limited annotations. However, when adopting CL in FL, the limited data diversity on each client makes federated contrastive learning (FCL) ineffective. In this work, we propose an FCL framework for volumetric medical image segmentation with limited annotations. More specifically, we exchange the features in the FCL pre-training process such that diverse contrastive data are provided to each site for effective local CL while keeping raw data private. Based on the exchanged features, global structural matching further leverages the structural similarity to align local features to the remote ones such that a unified feature space can be learned among different sites. Experiments on a cardiac MRI dataset show the proposed framework substantially improves the segmentation performance compared with state-of-the-art techniques.

Zheyu Yan, Xiaobo Sharon Hu, Yiyu Shi

Computing-in-Memory (CiM) architectures based on emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) devices have demonstrated great potential for deep neural network (DNN) acceleration thanks to their high energy efficiency. However, NVM devices suffer from various non-idealities, especially device-to-device variations due to fabrication defects and cycle-to-cycle variations due to the stochastic behavior of devices. As such, the DNN weights actually mapped to NVM devices could deviate significantly from the expected values, leading to large performance degradation. To address this issue, most existing works focus on maximizing average performance under device variations. This objective would work well for general-purpose scenarios. But for safety-critical applications, the worst-case performance must also be considered. Unfortunately, this has been rarely explored in the literature. In this work, we formulate the problem of determining the worst-case performance of CiM DNN accelerators under the impact of device variations. We further propose a method to effectively find the specific combination of device variation in the high-dimensional space that leads to the worst-case performance. We find that even with very small device variations, the accuracy of a DNN can drop drastically, causing concerns when deploying CiM accelerators in safety-critical applications. Finally, we show that surprisingly none of the existing methods used to enhance average DNN performance in CiM accelerators are very effective when extended to enhance the worst-case performance, and further research down the road is needed to address this problem.

Guangxin Zhao, Jiahao Zheng, Malaz Boustani et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential for healthcare applications. However, existing evaluation benchmarks provide minimal coverage of Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). To address this gap, we introduce ADRD-Bench, the first ADRD-specific benchmark dataset designed for rigorous evaluation of LLMs. ADRD-Bench has two components: 1) ADRD Unified QA, a synthesis of 1,352 questions consolidated from seven established medical benchmarks, providing a unified assessment of clinical knowledge; and 2) ADRD Caregiving QA, a novel set of 149 questions derived from the Aging Brain Care (ABC) program, a widely used, evidence-based brain health management program. Guided by a program with national expertise in comprehensive ADRD care, this new set was designed to mitigate the lack of practical caregiving context in existing benchmarks. We evaluated 33 state-of-the-art LLMs on the proposed ADRD-Bench. Results showed that the accuracy of open-weight general models ranged from 0.63 to 0.93 (mean: 0.78; std: 0.09). The accuracy of open-weight medical models ranged from 0.48 to 0.93 (mean: 0.82; std: 0.13). The accuracy of closed-source general models ranged from 0.83 to 0.91 (mean: 0.89; std: 0.03). While top-tier models achieved high accuracies (>0.9), case studies revealed that inconsistent reasoning quality and stability limit their reliability, highlighting a critical need for domain-specific improvement to enhance LLMs' knowledge and reasoning grounded in daily caregiving data. The entire dataset is available at https://github.com/IIRL-ND/ADRD-Bench.

Zheyu Yan, Yifan Qin, Xiaobo Sharon Hu et al.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of tasks. However, deploying DNNs on edge devices poses significant challenges due to stringent power and computational budgets. An effective solution to this issue is software-hardware (SW-HW) co-design, which allows for the tailored creation of DNN models and hardware architectures that optimally utilize available resources. However, SW-HW co-design traditionally suffers from slow optimization speeds because their optimizers do not make use of heuristic knowledge, also known as the ``cold start'' problem. In this study, we present a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to address this issue. By utilizing the abundant knowledge of pre-trained LLMs in the co-design optimization process, we effectively bypass the cold start problem, substantially accelerating the design process. The proposed method achieves a significant speedup of 25x. This advancement paves the way for the rapid and efficient deployment of DNNs on edge devices.

Xinrong Hu, Yu-Jen Chen, Tsung-Yi Ho et al.

Recent advances in denoising diffusion probabilistic models have shown great success in image synthesis tasks. While there are already works exploring the potential of this powerful tool in image semantic segmentation, its application in weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) remains relatively under-explored. Observing that conditional diffusion models (CDM) is capable of generating images subject to specific distributions, in this work, we utilize category-aware semantic information underlied in CDM to get the prediction mask of the target object with only image-level annotations. More specifically, we locate the desired class by approximating the derivative of the output of CDM w.r.t the input condition. Our method is different from previous diffusion model methods with guidance from an external classifier, which accumulates noises in the background during the reconstruction process. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art CAM and diffusion model methods on two public medical image segmentation datasets, which demonstrates that CDM is a promising tool in WSSS. Also, experiment shows our method is more time-efficient than existing diffusion model methods, making it practical for wider applications.

Xinrong Hu, Xiaowei Xu, Yiyu Shi

The emerging scale segmentation model, Segment Anything (SAM), exhibits impressive capabilities in zero-shot segmentation for natural images. However, when applied to medical images, SAM suffers from noticeable performance drop. To make SAM a real ``foundation model" for the computer vision community, it is critical to find an efficient way to customize SAM for medical image dataset. In this work, we propose to freeze SAM encoder and finetune a lightweight task-specific prediction head, as most of weights in SAM are contributed by the encoder. In addition, SAM is a promptable model, while prompt is not necessarily available in all application cases, and precise prompts for multiple class segmentation are also time-consuming. Therefore, we explore three types of prompt-free prediction heads in this work, include ViT, CNN, and linear layers. For ViT head, we remove the prompt tokens in the mask decoder of SAM, which is named AutoSAM. AutoSAM can also generate masks for different classes with one single inference after modification. To evaluate the label-efficiency of our finetuning method, we compare the results of these three prediction heads on a public medical image segmentation dataset with limited labeled data. Experiments demonstrate that finetuning SAM significantly improves its performance on medical image dataset, even with just one labeled volume. Moreover, AutoSAM and CNN prediction head also has better segmentation accuracy than training from scratch and self-supervised learning approaches when there is a shortage of annotations.

Yi Sheng, Junhuan Yang, Lei Yang et al.

Model fairness (a.k.a., bias) has become one of the most critical problems in a wide range of AI applications. An unfair model in autonomous driving may cause a traffic accident if corner cases (e.g., extreme weather) cannot be fairly regarded; or it will incur healthcare disparities if the AI model misdiagnoses a certain group of people (e.g., brown and black skin). In recent years, there have been emerging research works on addressing unfairness, and they mainly focus on a single unfair attribute, like skin tone; however, real-world data commonly have multiple attributes, among which unfairness can exist in more than one attribute, called 'multi-dimensional fairness'. In this paper, we first reveal a strong correlation between the different unfair attributes, i.e., optimizing fairness on one attribute will lead to the collapse of others. Then, we propose a novel Multi-Dimension Fairness framework, namely Muffin, which includes an automatic tool to unite off-the-shelf models to improve the fairness on multiple attributes simultaneously. Case studies on dermatology datasets with two unfair attributes show that the existing approach can achieve 21.05% fairness improvement on the first attribute while it makes the second attribute unfair by 1.85%. On the other hand, the proposed Muffin can unite multiple models to achieve simultaneously 26.32% and 20.37% fairness improvement on both attributes; meanwhile, it obtains 5.58% accuracy gain.

Yawen Wu, Dewen Zeng, Zhepeng Wang et al.

In dermatological disease diagnosis, the private data collected by mobile dermatology assistants exist on distributed mobile devices of patients. Federated learning (FL) can use decentralized data to train models while keeping data local. Existing FL methods assume all the data have labels. However, medical data often comes without full labels due to high labeling costs. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, contrastive learning (CL) and masked autoencoders (MAE), can leverage the unlabeled data to pre-train models, followed by fine-tuning with limited labels. However, combining SSL and FL has unique challenges. For example, CL requires diverse data but each device only has limited data. For MAE, while Vision Transformer (ViT) based MAE has higher accuracy over CNNs in centralized learning, MAE's performance in FL with unlabeled data has not been investigated. Besides, the ViT synchronization between the server and clients is different from traditional CNNs. Therefore, special synchronization methods need to be designed. In this work, we propose two federated self-supervised learning frameworks for dermatological disease diagnosis with limited labels. The first one features lower computation costs, suitable for mobile devices. The second one features high accuracy and fits high-performance servers. Based on CL, we proposed federated contrastive learning with feature sharing (FedCLF). Features are shared for diverse contrastive information without sharing raw data for privacy. Based on MAE, we proposed FedMAE. Knowledge split separates the global and local knowledge learned from each client. Only global knowledge is aggregated for higher generalization performance. Experiments on dermatological disease datasets show superior accuracy of the proposed frameworks over state-of-the-arts.

Zheyu Yan, Yifan Qin, Wujie Wen et al.

Compute-in-Memory (CiM), built upon non-volatile memory (NVM) devices, is promising for accelerating deep neural networks (DNNs) owing to its in-situ data processing capability and superior energy efficiency. Unfortunately, the well-trained model parameters, after being mapped to NVM devices, can often exhibit large deviations from their intended values due to device variations, resulting in notable performance degradation in these CiM-based DNN accelerators. There exists a long list of solutions to address this issue. However, they mainly focus on improving the mean performance of CiM DNN accelerators. How to guarantee the worst-case performance under the impact of device variations, which is crucial for many safety-critical applications such as self-driving cars, has been far less explored. In this work, we propose to use the k-th percentile performance (KPP) to capture the realistic worst-case performance of DNN models executing on CiM accelerators. Through a formal analysis of the properties of KPP and the noise injection-based DNN training, we demonstrate that injecting a novel right-censored Gaussian noise, as opposed to the conventional Gaussian noise, significantly improves the KPP of DNNs. We further propose an automated method to determine the optimal hyperparameters for injecting this right-censored Gaussian noise during the training process. Our method achieves up to a 26% improvement in KPP compared to the state-of-the-art methods employed to enhance DNN robustness under the impact of device variations.

Jiahe Shi, Yawen Wu, Dewen Zeng et al.

The ubiquity of edge devices has led to a growing amount of unlabeled data produced at the edge. Deep learning models deployed on edge devices are required to learn from these unlabeled data to continuously improve accuracy. Self-supervised representation learning has achieved promising performances using centralized unlabeled data. However, the increasing awareness of privacy protection limits centralizing the distributed unlabeled image data on edge devices. While federated learning has been widely adopted to enable distributed machine learning with privacy preservation, without a data selection method to efficiently select streaming data, the traditional federated learning framework fails to handle these huge amounts of decentralized unlabeled data with limited storage resources on edge. To address these challenges, we propose a Self-supervised On-device Federated learning framework with coreset selection, which we call SOFed, to automatically select a coreset that consists of the most representative samples into the replay buffer on each device. It preserves data privacy as each client does not share raw data while learning good visual representations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and significance of the proposed method in visual representation learning.

Gelei Xu, Yawen Wu, Jingtong Hu et al.

Dermatological diseases pose a major threat to the global health, affecting almost one-third of the world's population. Various studies have demonstrated that early diagnosis and intervention are often critical to prognosis and outcome. To this end, the past decade has witnessed the rapid evolvement of deep learning based smartphone apps, which allow users to conveniently and timely identify issues that have emerged around their skins. In order to collect sufficient data needed by deep learning and at the same time protect patient privacy, federated learning is often used, where individual clients aggregate a global model while keeping datasets local. However, existing federated learning frameworks are mostly designed to optimize the overall performance, while common dermatological datasets are heavily imbalanced. When applying federated learning to such datasets, significant disparities in diagnosis accuracy may occur. To address such a fairness issue, this paper proposes a fairness-aware federated learning framework for dermatological disease diagnosis. The framework is divided into two stages: In the first in-FL stage, clients with different skin types are trained in a federated learning process to construct a global model for all skin types. An automatic weight aggregator is used in this process to assign higher weights to the client with higher loss, and the intensity of the aggregator is determined by the level of difference between losses. In the latter post-FL stage, each client fine-tune its personalized model based on the global model in the in-FL stage. To achieve better fairness, models from different epochs are selected for each client to keep the accuracy difference of different skin types within 0.05. Experiments indicate that our proposed framework effectively improves both fairness and accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art.

Boyang Li, Qing Lu, Weiwen Jiang et al.

In most popular public accessible cryptocurrency systems, the mining pool plays a key role because mining cryptocurrency with the mining pool turns the non-profitable situation into profitable for individual miners. In many recent novel blockchain consensuses, the deep learning training procedure becomes the task for miners to prove their workload, thus the computation power of miners will not purely be spent on the hash puzzle. In this way, the hardware and energy will support the blockchain service and deep learning training simultaneously. While the incentive of miners is to earn tokens, individual miners are motivated to join mining pools to become more competitive. In this paper, we are the first to demonstrate a mining pool solution for novel consensuses based on deep learning. The mining pool manager partitions the full searching space into subspaces and all miners are scheduled to collaborate on the Neural Architecture Search (NAS) tasks in the assigned subspace. Experiments demonstrate that the performance of this type of mining pool is more competitive than an individual miner. Due to the uncertainty of miners' behaviors, the mining pool manager checks the standard deviation of the performance of high reward miners and prepares backup miners to ensure the completion of the tasks of high reward miners.

Yejia Zhang, Xinrong Hu, Nishchal Sapkota et al.

Self-supervised instance discrimination is an effective contrastive pretext task to learn feature representations and address limited medical image annotations. The idea is to make features of transformed versions of the same images similar while forcing all other augmented images' representations to contrast. However, this instance-based contrastive learning leaves performance on the table by failing to maximize feature affinity between images with similar content while counter-productively pushing their representations apart. Recent improvements on this paradigm (e.g., leveraging multi-modal data, different images in longitudinal studies, spatial correspondences) either relied on additional views or made stringent assumptions about data properties, which can sacrifice generalizability and applicability. To address this challenge, we propose a new self-supervised contrastive learning method that uses unsupervised feature clustering to better select positive and negative image samples. More specifically, we produce pseudo-classes by hierarchically clustering features obtained by an auto-encoder in an unsupervised manner, and prevent destructive interference during contrastive learning by avoiding the selection of negatives from the same pseudo-class. Experiments on 2D skin dermoscopic image segmentation and 3D multi-class whole heart CT segmentation demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised contrastive techniques on these tasks.

Qing Lu, Xiaowei Xu, Shunjie Dong et al.

Accurately segmenting temporal frames of cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a crucial step in various real-time MRI guided cardiac interventions. To achieve fast and accurate visual assistance, there are strict requirements on the maximum latency and minimum throughput of the segmentation framework. State-of-the-art neural networks on this task are mostly hand-crafted to satisfy these constraints while achieving high accuracy. On the other hand, while existing literature have demonstrated the power of neural architecture search (NAS) in automatically identifying the best neural architectures for various medical applications, they are mostly guided by accuracy, sometimes with computation complexity, and the importance of real-time constraints are overlooked. A major challenge is that such constraints are non-differentiable and are thus not compatible with the widely used differentiable NAS frameworks. In this paper, we present a strategy that directly handles real-time constraints in a differentiable NAS framework named RT-DNAS. Experiments on extended 2017 MICCAI ACDC dataset show that compared with state-of-the-art manually and automatically designed architectures, RT-DNAS is able to identify ones with better accuracy while satisfying the real-time constraints.

Ching-Hao Chiu, Hao-Wei Chung, Yu-Jen Chen et al.

Fairness has become increasingly pivotal in facial recognition. Without bias mitigation, deploying unfair AI would harm the interest of the underprivileged population. In this paper, we observe that though the higher accuracy that features from the deeper layer of a neural networks generally offer, fairness conditions deteriorate as we extract features from deeper layers. This phenomenon motivates us to extend the concept of multi-exit framework. Unlike existing works mainly focusing on accuracy, our multi-exit framework is fairness-oriented, where the internal classifiers are trained to be more accurate and fairer. During inference, any instance with high confidence from an internal classifier is allowed to exit early. Moreover, our framework can be applied to most existing fairness-aware frameworks. Experiment results show that the proposed framework can largely improve the fairness condition over the state-of-the-art in CelebA and UTK Face datasets.

Hanrui Wang, Yilian Liu, Pengyu Liu et al.

Quantum state preparation, a crucial subroutine in quantum computing, involves generating a target quantum state from initialized qubits. Arbitrary state preparation algorithms can be broadly categorized into arithmetic decomposition (AD) and variational quantum state preparation (VQSP). AD employs a predefined procedure to decompose the target state into a series of gates, whereas VQSP iteratively tunes ansatz parameters to approximate target state. VQSP is particularly apt for Noisy-Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) machines due to its shorter circuits. However, achieving noise-robust parameter optimization still remains challenging. We present RobustState, a novel VQSP training methodology that combines high robustness with high training efficiency. The core idea involves utilizing measurement outcomes from real machines to perform back-propagation through classical simulators, thus incorporating real quantum noise into gradient calculations. RobustState serves as a versatile, plug-and-play technique applicable for training parameters from scratch or fine-tuning existing parameters to enhance fidelity on target machines. It is adaptable to various ansatzes at both gate and pulse levels and can even benefit other variational algorithms, such as variational unitary synthesis. Comprehensive evaluation of RobustState on state preparation tasks for 4 distinct quantum algorithms using 10 real quantum machines demonstrates a coherent error reduction of up to 7.1 $\times$ and state fidelity improvement of up to 96\% and 81\% for 4-Q and 5-Q states, respectively. On average, RobustState improves fidelity by 50\% and 72\% for 4-Q and 5-Q states compared to baseline approaches.

Xinrong Hu, Corey Wang, Yiyu Shi

This work presents a novel framework CISFA (Contrastive Image synthesis and Self-supervised Feature Adaptation)that builds on image domain translation and unsupervised feature adaptation for cross-modality biomedical image segmentation. Different from existing works, we use a one-sided generative model and add a weighted patch-wise contrastive loss between sampled patches of the input image and the corresponding synthetic image, which serves as shape constraints. Moreover, we notice that the generated images and input images share similar structural information but are in different modalities. As such, we enforce contrastive losses on the generated images and the input images to train the encoder of a segmentation model to minimize the discrepancy between paired images in the learned embedding space. Compared with existing works that rely on adversarial learning for feature adaptation, such a method enables the encoder to learn domain-independent features in a more explicit way. We extensively evaluate our methods on segmentation tasks containing CT and MRI images for abdominal cavities and whole hearts. Experimental results show that the proposed framework not only outputs synthetic images with less distortion of organ shapes, but also outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods by a large margin.

Ruiyang Qin, Jun Xia, Zhenge Jia et al.

After a large language model (LLM) is deployed on edge devices, it is desirable for these devices to learn from user-generated conversation data to generate user-specific and personalized responses in real-time. However, user-generated data usually contains sensitive and private information, and uploading such data to the cloud for annotation is not preferred if not prohibited. While it is possible to obtain annotation locally by directly asking users to provide preferred responses, such annotations have to be sparse to not affect user experience. In addition, the storage of edge devices is usually too limited to enable large-scale fine-tuning with full user-generated data. It remains an open question how to enable on-device LLM personalization, considering sparse annotation and limited on-device storage. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to select and store the most representative data online in a self-supervised way. Such data has a small memory footprint and allows infrequent requests of user annotations for further fine-tuning. To enhance fine-tuning quality, multiple semantically similar pairs of question texts and expected responses are generated using the LLM. Our experiments show that the proposed framework achieves the best user-specific content-generating capability (accuracy) and fine-tuning speed (performance) compared with vanilla baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first on-device LLM personalization framework.

Boyang Li, Bingyu Shen, Qing Lu et al.

The continuous thriving of the Blockchain society motivates research in novel designs of schemes supporting cryptocurrencies. Previously multiple Proof-of-Deep-Learning(PoDL) consensuses have been proposed to replace hashing with useful work such as deep learning model training tasks. The energy will be more efficiently used while maintaining the ledger. However deep learning models are problem-specific and can be extremely complex. Current PoDL consensuses still require much work to realize in the real world. In this paper, we proposed a novel consensus named Proof-of-Federated-Learning-Subchain(PoFLSC) to fill the gap. We applied a subchain to record the training, challenging, and auditing activities and emphasized the importance of valuable datasets in partner selection. We simulated 20 miners in the subchain to demonstrate the effectiveness of PoFLSC. When we reduce the pool size concerning the reservation priority order, the drop rate difference in the performance in different scenarios further exhibits that the miner with a higher Shapley Value (SV) will gain a better opportunity to be selected when the size of the subchain pool is limited. In the conducted experiments, the PoFLSC consensus supported the subchain manager to be aware of reservation priority and the core partition of contributors to establish and maintain a competitive subchain.

Zixuan Pan, Jianxu Chen, Yiyu Shi

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art generative performance and have been used as strong pixel-level representation learners. This paper decomposes the interrelation between the generative capability and representation learning ability inherent in diffusion models. We present the masked diffusion model (MDM), a scalable self-supervised representation learner for semantic segmentation, substituting the conventional additive Gaussian noise of traditional diffusion with a masking mechanism. Our proposed approach convincingly surpasses prior benchmarks, demonstrating remarkable advancements in both medical and natural image semantic segmentation tasks, particularly in few-shot scenarios.

Ching-Hao Chiu, Hao-Wei Chung, Yu-Jen Chen et al.

Fairness has become increasingly pivotal in medical image recognition. However, without mitigating bias, deploying unfair medical AI systems could harm the interests of underprivileged populations. In this paper, we observe that while features extracted from the deeper layers of neural networks generally offer higher accuracy, fairness conditions deteriorate as we extract features from deeper layers. This phenomenon motivates us to extend the concept of multi-exit frameworks. Unlike existing works mainly focusing on accuracy, our multi-exit framework is fairness-oriented; the internal classifiers are trained to be more accurate and fairer, with high extensibility to apply to most existing fairness-aware frameworks. During inference, any instance with high confidence from an internal classifier is allowed to exit early. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can improve the fairness condition over the state-of-the-art in two dermatological disease datasets.

Yu-Jen Chen, Xinrong Hu, Yiyu Shi et al.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is commonly used for brain tumor segmentation, which is critical for patient evaluation and treatment planning. To reduce the labor and expertise required for labeling, weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods with class activation mapping (CAM) have been proposed. However, existing CAM methods suffer from low resolution due to strided convolution and pooling layers, resulting in inaccurate predictions. In this study, we propose a novel CAM method, Attentive Multiple-Exit CAM (AME-CAM), that extracts activation maps from multiple resolutions to hierarchically aggregate and improve prediction accuracy. We evaluate our method on the BraTS 2021 dataset and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Zhenge Jia, Yiyu Shi, Jingtong Hu et al.

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is one of the most commonly applied tools for cardiac function imaging in the clinical routine of the emergency department and pediatric intensive care unit. The prior studies demonstrate that AI-assisted software can guide nurses or novices without prior sonography experience to acquire POCUS by recognizing the interest region, assessing image quality, and providing instructions. However, these AI algorithms cannot simply replace the role of skilled sonographers in acquiring diagnostic-quality POCUS. Unlike chest X-ray, CT, and MRI, which have standardized imaging protocols, POCUS can be acquired with high inter-observer variability. Though being with variability, they are usually all clinically acceptable and interpretable. In challenging clinical environments, sonographers employ novel heuristics to acquire POCUS in complex scenarios. To help novice learners to expedite the training process while reducing the dependency on experienced sonographers in the curriculum implementation, We will develop a framework to perform real-time AI-assisted quality assessment and probe position guidance to provide training process for novice learners with less manual intervention.

Dewen Zeng, Yawen Wu, Xinrong Hu et al.

Contrastive learning with the nearest neighbor has proved to be one of the most efficient self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques by utilizing the similarity of multiple instances within the same class. However, its efficacy is constrained as the nearest neighbor algorithm primarily identifies "easy" positive pairs, where the representations are already closely located in the embedding space. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Contrastive Learning with Synthetic Positives (CLSP) that utilizes synthetic images, generated by an unconditional diffusion model, as the additional positives to help the model learn from diverse positives. Through feature interpolation in the diffusion model sampling process, we generate images with distinct backgrounds yet similar semantic content to the anchor image. These images are considered "hard" positives for the anchor image, and when included as supplementary positives in the contrastive loss, they contribute to a performance improvement of over 2% and 1% in linear evaluation compared to the previous NNCLR and All4One methods across multiple benchmark datasets such as CIFAR10, achieving state-of-the-art methods. On transfer learning benchmarks, CLSP outperforms existing SSL frameworks on 6 out of 8 downstream datasets. We believe CLSP establishes a valuable baseline for future SSL studies incorporating synthetic data in the training process.

Ningzhi Tang, David Meininger, Gelei Xu et al.

Code modification requires developers to comprehend code, plan changes, articulate intent, and validate outcomes, making it cognitively demanding. While natural language (NL) code summaries offer a promising external representation of this process, existing approaches remain limited. Systems grounded in exploratory data analysis are restricted to narrow domains, while general-purpose systems enforce fixed NL representations and assume that developers can directly translate vague intent into precise textual edits. We present NaturalEdit, which treats NL code summaries as interactive representations tightly linked to source code. Grounded in the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations, NaturalEdit introduces three key features: (1) adaptive, multi-faceted code summaries with a flexible Abstraction Gradient; (2) interactive mapping mechanisms between summaries and code that ensure tight, structurally stable Closeness of Mapping; and (3) intent-driven bidirectional synchronization that reduces Viscosity during editing while preserving Visibility and Consistency through incremental diffs. A technical evaluation confirms the viability of NaturalEdit, and a user study with 20 developers shows that it improves comprehension, intent articulation, and validation while increasing developers' confidence and sense of control.

Yu-Jen Chen, Yiyu Shi, Tsung-Yi Ho

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a commonly used technique for brain tumor segmentation, which is critical for evaluating patients and planning treatment. To make the labeling process less laborious and dependent on expertise, weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods using class activation mapping (CAM) have been proposed. However, current CAM-based WSSS methods generate the object localization map using internal neural network information, such as gradient or trainable parameters, which can lead to suboptimal solutions. To address these issues, we propose the confidence-induced CAM (Cfd-CAM), which calculates the weight of each feature map by using the confidence of the target class. Our experiments on two brain tumor datasets show that Cfd-CAM outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods under the same level of supervision. Overall, our proposed Cfd-CAM approach improves the accuracy of brain tumor segmentation and may provide valuable insights for developing better WSSS methods for other medical imaging tasks.

Zixuan Pan, Jun Xia, Zheyu Yan et al.

Reconstruction-based methods, particularly those leveraging autoencoders, have been widely adopted for anomaly detection task in brain MRI. Unlike most existing works try to improve the task accuracy through architectural or algorithmic innovations, we tackle this task from image quality assessment (IQA) perspective, an under-explored direction in the field. Due to the limitations of conventional metrics such as l1 in capturing the nuanced differences in reconstructed images for medical anomaly detection, we propose fusion quality, a novel metric that wisely integrates the structure-level sensitivity of Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) with the pixel-level precision of l1. The metric offers a more comprehensive assessment of reconstruction quality, considering intensity (subtractive property of l1 and divisive property of SSIM), contrast, and structural similarity. Furthermore, the proposed metric makes subtle regional variations more impactful in the final assessment. Thus, considering the inherent divisive properties of SSIM, we design an average intensity ratio (AIR)-based data transformation that amplifies the divisive discrepancies between normal and abnormal regions, thereby enhancing anomaly detection. By fusing the aforementioned two components, we devise the IQA approach. Experimental results on two distinct brain MRI datasets show that our IQA approach significantly enhances medical anomaly detection performance when integrated with state-of-the-art baselines.

Yi Sheng, Junhuan Yang, Jinyang Li et al.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly integrates into our daily lives, fairness has emerged as a critical concern, particularly in medical AI, where datasets often reflect inherent biases due to social factors like the underrepresentation of marginalized communities and socioeconomic barriers to data collection. Traditional approaches to mitigating these biases have focused on data augmentation and the development of fairness-aware training algorithms. However, this paper argues that the architecture of neural networks, a core component of Machine Learning (ML), plays a crucial role in ensuring fairness. We demonstrate that addressing fairness effectively requires a holistic approach that simultaneously considers data, algorithms, and architecture. Utilizing Automated ML (AutoML) technology, specifically Neural Architecture Search (NAS), we introduce a novel framework, BiaslessNAS, designed to achieve fair outcomes in analyzing skin lesion datasets. BiaslessNAS incorporates fairness considerations at every stage of the NAS process, leading to the identification of neural networks that are not only more accurate but also significantly fairer. Our experiments show that BiaslessNAS achieves a 2.55% increase in accuracy and a 65.50% improvement in fairness compared to traditional NAS methods, underscoring the importance of integrating fairness into neural network architecture for better outcomes in medical AI applications.

Ningzhi Tang, Chaoran Chen, Zihan Fang et al.

IDE-integrated AI coding assistants, which operate conversationally within developers' working codebases with access to project context and multi-file editing, are rapidly reshaping software development. However, empirical investigation of this shift remains limited: existing studies largely rely on small-scale, controlled settings or analyze general-purpose chatbots rather than codebase-aware IDE workflows. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first large-scale study of real-world conversational programming in IDE-native settings, analyzing 74,998 developer messages from 11,579 chat sessions across 1,300 repositories and 899 developers using Cursor and GitHub Copilot. These chats were committed to public repositories as part of routine development, capturing in-the-wild behavior. Our findings reveal three shifts in how programming work is organized: conversational programming operates as progressive specification, with developers iteratively refining outputs rather than specifying complete tasks upfront; developers redistribute cognitive work to AI, delegating diagnosis, comprehension, and validation rather than engaging with code and outputs directly; and developers actively manage the collaboration, externalizing plans into persistent artifacts, and negotiating AI autonomy through context injection and behavioral constraints. These results provide foundational empirical insights into AI-assisted development and offer implications for the design of future programming environments.

Gelei Xu, Ruiyang Qin, Zhi Zheng et al.

Timely stress detection is crucial for protecting vulnerable groups from long-term detrimental effects by enabling early intervention. Wearable devices, by collecting real-time physiological signals, offer a solution for accurate stress detection accommodating individual differences. This position paper introduces an adaptive framework for personalized stress detection using PPG and EDA signals. Unlike traditional methods that rely on a generalized model, which may suffer performance drops when applied to new users due to domain shifts, this framework aims to provide each user with a personalized model for higher stress detection accuracy. The framework involves three stages: developing a generalized model offline with an initial dataset, adapting the model to the user's unlabeled data, and fine-tuning it with a small set of labeled data obtained through user interaction. This approach not only offers a foundation for mobile applications that provide personalized stress detection and intervention but also has the potential to address a wider range of mental health issues beyond stress detection using physiological signals.

Xinrong Hu, Dewen Zeng, Yawen Wu et al.

In the field of medical images, although various works find Swin Transformer has promising effectiveness on pixelwise dense prediction, whether pre-training these models without using extra dataset can further boost the performance for the downstream semantic segmentation remains unexplored.Applications of previous representation learning methods are hindered by the limited number of 3D volumes and high computational cost. In addition, most of pretext tasks designed specifically for Transformer are not applicable to hierarchical structure of Swin Transformer. Thus, this work proposes a token-level representation learning loss that maximizes agreement between token embeddings from different augmented views individually instead of volume-level global features. Moreover, we identify a potential representation collapse exclusively caused by this new loss. To prevent collapse, we invent a simple "rotate-and-restore" mechanism, which rotates and flips one augmented view of input volume, and later restores the order of tokens in the feature maps. We also modify the contrastive loss to address the discrimination between tokens at the same position but from different volumes. We test our pre-training scheme on two public medical segmentation datasets, and the results on the downstream segmentation task show more improvement of our methods than other state-of-the-art pre-trainig methods.

Song Guo, Fan Wu, Lei Zhang et al.

Existing methods for fine-tuning sparse LLMs often suffer from resource-intensive requirements and high retraining costs. Additionally, many fine-tuning methods often rely on approximations or heuristic optimization strategies, which may lead to suboptimal solutions. To address these issues, we propose an efficient and fast framework for fine-tuning sparse LLMs based on minimizing reconstruction error. Our approach involves sampling a small dataset for calibration and utilizing backpropagation to iteratively optimize block-wise reconstruction error, on a block-by-block basis, aiming for optimal solutions. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superiority of our method over other baselines. For instance, on the Wikitext2 dataset with LlamaV1-7B at 70% sparsity, our proposed EBFT achieves a perplexity of 16.88, surpassing the state-of-the-art DSnoT with a perplexity of 75.14. Moreover, with a structured sparsity ratio of 26\%, EBFT achieves a perplexity of 16.27, outperforming LoRA (perplexity 16.44). Furthermore, the fine-tuning process of EBFT for LlamaV1-7B only takes approximately 30 minutes, and the entire framework can be executed on a single 16GB GPU. The source code is available at https://github.com/sunggo/EBFT.

Minghao Guo, Qingyue Jiao, Zeru Shi et al.

Long-term agent memory is increasingly multimodal, yet existing evaluations rarely test whether agents preserve the visual evidence needed for later reasoning. In prior work, many visually grounded questions can be answered using only captions or textual traces, allowing answers to be inferred without preserving the fine-grained visual evidence. Meanwhile, harder cases that require reasoning over changing visual states are largely absent. Therefore, we introduce MemEye, a framework that evaluates memory capabilities from two dimensions: one measures the granularity of decisive visual evidence (from scene-level to pixel-level evidence), and the other measures how retrieved evidence must be used (from single evidence to evolutionary synthesis). Under this framework, we construct a new benchmark across 8 life-scenario tasks, with ablation-driven validation gates for assessing answerability, shortcut resistance, visual necessity, and reasoning structure. By evaluating 13 memory methods across 4 VLM backbones, we show that current architectures still struggle to preserve fine-grained visual details and reason about state changes over time. Our findings show that long-term multimodal memory depends on evidence routing, temporal tracking, and detail extraction.

Peipei Zhou, Zheng Dong, Insup Lee et al.

This report summarizes the discussions and recommendations from the NSF Workshop on Algorithm-Hardware Co-design for Medical Applications, held on September 26-27, 2024, in Pittsburgh, PA. The workshop assembled an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers, clinicians, and industry leaders to examine foundational challenges and develop a strategic roadmap for algorithm-hardware co-design in medical computing. The workshop focuses on four thematic areas: (1) teleoperations, telehealth, and surgical operations; (2) wearable and implantable medicine, including implantable living pharmacies; (3) home ICU, hospital systems, and elderly care; and (4) medical sensing, imaging, and reconstruction. This report calls for a fundamental shift in how next-generation medical technologies are conceived, designed, validated, and translated into practice. The report recommends that NSF sustain investment in shared standardized data infrastructures and compute infrastructures, develop clinic workflow-aware systems and human-AI collaboration frameworks, promote scalable validation ecosystems grounded in objective, continuous measures, and physics-informed, and enable safe, accountable, and resilient platforms, including virtual-physical healthcare ecosystems, to de-risk translational pathways. The workshop information can be found on the website: https://sites.google.com/view/nsfworkshop.

Qingpeng Kong, Ching-Hao Chiu, Dewen Zeng et al.

Numerous studies have revealed that deep learning-based medical image classification models may exhibit bias towards specific demographic attributes, such as race, gender, and age. Existing bias mitigation methods often achieve high level of fairness at the cost of significant accuracy degradation. In response to this challenge, we propose an innovative and adaptable Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss-based channel pruning framework, which achieves fairness through channel pruning. Traditionally, channel pruning is utilized to accelerate neural network inference. However, our work demonstrates that pruning can also be a potent tool for achieving fairness. Our key insight is that different channels in a layer contribute differently to the accuracy of different groups. By selectively pruning critical channels that lead to the accuracy difference between the privileged and unprivileged groups, we can effectively improve fairness without sacrificing accuracy significantly. Experiments conducted on two skin lesion diagnosis datasets across multiple sensitive attributes validate the effectiveness of our method in achieving state-of-the-art trade-off between accuracy and fairness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kqp1227/Sensitive-Channel-Pruning.

Xueyang Li, Mingze Jiang, Gelei Xu et al.

Agentic AI is advancing rapidly, yet truly autonomous medical-imaging triage, where a system decides when to stop, escalate, or defer under real constraints, remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AT-CXR, an uncertainty-aware agent for chest X-rays. The system estimates per-case confidence and distributional fit, then follows a stepwise policy to issue an automated decision or abstain with a suggested label for human intervention. We evaluate two router designs that share the same inputs and actions: a deterministic rule-based router and an LLM-decided router. Across five-fold evaluation on a balanced subset of NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset, both variants outperform strong zero-shot vision-language models and state-of-the-art supervised classifiers, achieving higher full-coverage accuracy and superior selective-prediction performance, evidenced by a lower area under the risk-coverage curve (AURC) and a lower error rate at high coverage, while operating with lower latency that meets practical clinical constraints. The two routers provide complementary operating points, enabling deployments to prioritize maximal throughput or maximal accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/XLIAaron/uncertainty-aware-cxr-agent.

Xiaolin Lin, Jingcun Wang, Olga Kondrateva et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted long-context processing. However, the increasing key-value (KV) cache size poses critical challenges to memory and execution efficiency. Most KV cache compression methods rely on heuristic token eviction using all attention heads in Grouped Query Attention (GQA)-based LLMs. This method ignores the different functionalities of attention heads, leading to the eviction of critical tokens and thus degrades the performance of LLMs. To address the issue above, instead of using all the attention heads in GQA-based LLMs to determine important tokens as in the previous work, we first identify the attention heads in each layer that are not only capable of retrieving the initial and final tokens of a prompt, but also capable of retrieving important tokens within the text and attending to their surrounding semantic context. Afterwards, we exploit such heads to determine the important tokens and retain their corresponding KV cache pairs. Furthermore, we analyze the cache eviction error of each layer individually and introduce a layer-adaptive KV cache allocation strategy. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed CompressKV consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under various memory budgets on LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/TUDa-HWAI/CompressKV.git.

Yuying Duan, Gelei Xu, Yiyu Shi et al.

With the emerging application of Federated Learning (FL) in finance, hiring and healthcare, FL models are regulated to be fair, preventing disparities with respect to legally protected attributes such as race or gender. Two concepts of fairness are important in FL: global and local fairness. Global fairness addresses the disparity across the entire population and local fairness is concerned with the disparity within each client. Prior fair FL frameworks have improved either global or local fairness without considering both. Furthermore, while the majority of studies on fair FL focuses on binary settings, many real-world applications are multi-class problems. This paper proposes a framework that investigates the minimum accuracy lost for enforcing a specified level of global and local fairness in multi-class FL settings. Our framework leads to a simple post-processing algorithm that derives fair outcome predictors from the Bayesian optimal score functions. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the current state of the art (SOTA) with regard to the accuracy-fairness tradoffs, computational and communication costs. Codes are available at: https://github.com/papersubmission678/The-cost-of-local-and-global-fairness-in-FL .

Zixuan Pan, Kaiyuan Tang, Jun Xia et al.

2D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a novel image representation technique that can support efficient rendering on low-end devices. However, scaling to high-resolution images requires optimizing and storing millions of unstructured Gaussian primitives independently, leading to slow convergence and redundant parameters. To address this, we propose Structured Gaussian Image (SGI), a compact and efficient framework for representing high-resolution images. SGI decomposes a complex image into multi-scale local spaces defined by a set of seeds. Each seed corresponds to a spatially coherent region and, together with lightweight multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), generates structured implicit 2D neural Gaussians. This seed-based formulation imposes structural regularity on otherwise unstructured Gaussian primitives, which facilitates entropy-based compression at the seed level to reduce the total storage. However, optimizing seed parameters directly on high-resolution images is a challenging and non-trivial task. Therefore, we designed a multi-scale fitting strategy that refines the seed representation in a coarse-to-fine manner, substantially accelerating convergence. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that SGI achieves up to 7.5x compression over prior non-quantized 2D Gaussian methods and 1.6x over quantized ones, while also delivering 1.6x and 6.5x faster optimization, respectively, without degrading, and often improving, image fidelity. Code is available at https://github.com/zx-pan/SGI.

Xueyang Li, Zongren Wang, Yuliang Zhang et al.

Bladder cancer is one of the most prevalent malignancies worldwide, with a recurrence rate of up to 78%, necessitating accurate post-operative monitoring for effective patient management. Multi-sequence contrast-enhanced MRI is commonly used for recurrence detection; however, interpreting these scans remains challenging, even for experienced radiologists, due to post-surgical alterations such as scarring, swelling, and tissue remodeling. AI-assisted diagnostic tools have shown promise in improving bladder cancer recurrence prediction, yet progress in this field is hindered by the lack of dedicated multi-sequence MRI datasets for recurrence assessment study. In this work, we first introduce a curated multi-sequence, multi-modal MRI dataset specifically designed for bladder cancer recurrence prediction, establishing a valuable benchmark for future research. We then propose H-CNN-ViT, a new Hierarchical Gated Attention Multi-Branch model that enables selective weighting of features from the global (ViT) and local (CNN) paths based on contextual demands, achieving a balanced and targeted feature fusion. Our multi-branch architecture processes each modality independently, ensuring that the unique properties of each imaging channel are optimally captured and integrated. Evaluated on our dataset, H-CNN-ViT achieves an AUC of 78.6%, surpassing state-of-the-art models. Our model is publicly available at https://github.com/XLIAaron/H-CNN-ViT.

Yifan Qin, Jiahao Zheng, Zheyu Yan et al.

Compute-in-memory (CiM) architectures promise significant improvements in energy efficiency and throughput for deep neural network acceleration by alleviating the von Neumann bottleneck. However, their reliance on emerging non-volatile memory devices introduces device-level non-idealities-such as write variability, conductance drift, and stochastic noise-that fundamentally challenge reliability, predictability, and safety, especially in safety-critical applications. This talk examines the reliability limits of CiM-based neural accelerators and presents a series of techniques that bridge device physics, architecture, and learning algorithms to address these challenges. We first demonstrate that even small device variations can lead to disproportionately large accuracy degradation and catastrophic failures in safety-critical inference workloads, revealing a critical gap between average-case evaluations and worst-case behavior. Building on this insight, we introduce SWIM, a selective write-verify mechanism that strategically applies verification only where it is most impactful, significantly improving reliability while maintaining CiM's efficiency advantages. Finally, we explore a learning-centric solution that improves realistic worst-case performance by training neural networks with right-censored Gaussian noise, aligning training assumptions with hardware-induced variability and enabling robust deployment without excessive hardware overhead. Together, these works highlight the necessity of cross-layer co-design for CiM accelerators and provide a principled path toward dependable, efficient neural inference on emerging memory technologies-paving the way for their adoption in safety- and reliability-critical systems.