Jianxin Wang

Chengchao Shen, Jianzhong Chen, Shu Wang et al.

Asymmetric appearance between positive pair effectively reduces the risk of representation degradation in contrastive learning. However, there are still a mass of appearance similarities between positive pair constructed by the existing methods, which inhibits the further representation improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel asymmetric patch sampling strategy for contrastive learning, to further boost the appearance asymmetry for better representations. Specifically, dual patch sampling strategies are applied to the given image, to obtain asymmetric positive pairs. First, sparse patch sampling is conducted to obtain the first view, which reduces spatial redundancy of image and allows a more asymmetric view. Second, a selective patch sampling is proposed to construct another view with large appearance discrepancy relative to the first one. Due to the inappreciable appearance similarity between positive pair, the trained model is encouraged to capture the similarity on semantics, instead of low-level ones. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the existing self-supervised methods on both ImageNet-1K and CIFAR dataset, e.g., 2.5% finetune accuracy improvement on CIFAR100. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on downstream tasks, object detection and instance segmentation on COCO.Additionally, compared to other self-supervised methods, our method is more efficient on both memory and computation during training. The source code is available at https://github.com/visresearch/aps.

Yixiong Liang, Shuo Feng, Qing Liu et al.

Cervical abnormal cell detection is a challenging task as the morphological discrepancies between abnormal and normal cells are usually subtle. To determine whether a cervical cell is normal or abnormal, cytopathologists always take surrounding cells as references to identify its abnormality. To mimic these behaviors, we propose to explore contextual relationships to boost the performance of cervical abnormal cell detection. Specifically, both contextual relationships between cells and cell-to-global images are exploited to enhance features of each region of interest (RoI) proposals. Accordingly, two modules, dubbed as RoI-relationship attention module (RRAM) and global RoI attention module (GRAM), are developed and their combination strategies are also investigated. We establish a strong baseline by using Double-Head Faster R-CNN with feature pyramid network (FPN) and integrate our RRAM and GRAM into it to validate the effectiveness of the proposed modules. Experiments conducted on a large cervical cell detection dataset reveal that the introduction of RRAM and GRAM both achieves better average precision (AP) than the baseline methods. Moreover, when cascading RRAM and GRAM, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, we also show the proposed feature enhancing scheme can facilitate both image-level and smear-level classification. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/CVIU-CSU/CR4CACD.

Chengchao Shen, Dawei Liu, Hao Tang et al.

The existing contrastive learning methods widely adopt one-hot instance discrimination as pretext task for self-supervised learning, which inevitably neglects rich inter-instance similarities among natural images, then leading to potential representation degeneration. In this paper, we propose a novel image mix method, PatchMix, for contrastive learning in Vision Transformer (ViT), to model inter-instance similarities among images. Following the nature of ViT, we randomly mix multiple images from mini-batch in patch level to construct mixed image patch sequences for ViT. Compared to the existing sample mix methods, our PatchMix can flexibly and efficiently mix more than two images and simulate more complicated similarity relations among natural images. In this manner, our contrastive framework can significantly reduce the gap between contrastive objective and ground truth in reality. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on both ImageNet-1K and CIFAR datasets, e.g., 3.0% linear accuracy improvement on ImageNet-1K and 8.7% kNN accuracy improvement on CIFAR100. Moreover, our method achieves the leading transfer performance on downstream tasks, object detection and instance segmentation on COCO dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/visresearch/patchmix

Meng Wang, Chuqi Lei, Jianxin Wang et al.

Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) is an important molecule family in the field of human immunity, which recognizes foreign threats and triggers immune responses by presenting peptides to T cells. In recent years, the synthesis of tumor vaccines to induce specific immune responses has become the forefront of cancer treatment. Computationally modeling the binding patterns between peptide and HLA can greatly accelerate the development of tumor vaccines. However, most of the prediction methods performance is very limited and they cannot fully take advantage of the analysis of existing biological knowledge as the basis of modeling. In this paper, we propose TripHLApan, a novel pan-specific prediction model, for HLA molecular peptide binding prediction. TripHLApan exhibits powerful prediction ability by integrating triple coding matrix, BiGRU + Attention models, and transfer learning strategy. The comprehensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of TripHLApan in predicting HLA-I and HLA-II peptide binding in different test environments. The predictive power of HLA-I is further demonstrated in the latest data set. In addition, we show that TripHLApan has strong binding reconstitution ability in the samples of a melanoma patient. In conclusion, TripHLApan is a powerful tool for predicting the binding of HLA-I and HLA-II molecular peptides for the synthesis of tumor vaccines.

Tao Sheng, Chengchao Shen, Yuan Liu et al.

Federated learning achieves joint training of deep models by connecting decentralized data sources, which can significantly mitigate the risk of privacy leakage. However, in a more general case, the distributions of labels among clients are different, called ``label distribution skew''. Directly applying conventional federated learning without consideration of label distribution skew issue significantly hurts the performance of the global model. To this end, we propose a novel federated learning method, named FedMGD, to alleviate the performance degradation caused by the label distribution skew issue. It introduces a global Generative Adversarial Network to model the global data distribution without access to local datasets, so the global model can be trained using the global information of data distribution without privacy leakage. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on several public benchmarks. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Sheng-T/FedMGD}.

Shichao Kan, Yixiong Liang, Min Li et al.

A fundamental challenge in deep metric learning is the generalization capability of the feature embedding network model since the embedding network learned on training classes need to be evaluated on new test classes. To address this challenge, in this paper, we introduce a new method called coded residual transform (CRT) for deep metric learning to significantly improve its generalization capability. Specifically, we learn a set of diversified prototype features, project the feature map onto each prototype, and then encode its features using their projection residuals weighted by their correlation coefficients with each prototype. The proposed CRT method has the following two unique characteristics. First, it represents and encodes the feature map from a set of complimentary perspectives based on projections onto diversified prototypes. Second, unlike existing transformer-based feature representation approaches which encode the original values of features based on global correlation analysis, the proposed coded residual transform encodes the relative differences between the original features and their projected prototypes. Embedding space density and spectral decay analysis show that this multi-perspective projection onto diversified prototypes and coded residual representation are able to achieve significantly improved generalization capability in metric learning. Finally, to further enhance the generalization performance, we propose to enforce the consistency on their feature similarity matrices between coded residual transforms with different sizes of projection prototypes and embedding dimensions. Our extensive experimental results and ablation studies demonstrate that the proposed CRT method outperform the state-of-the-art deep metric learning methods by large margins and improving upon the current best method by up to 4.28% on the CUB dataset.

Xu Tian, Jin Liu, Hulin Kuang et al.

Accurately detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) and predicting mini-mental state examination (MMSE) score are important tasks in elderly health by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Most of the previous methods on these two tasks are based on single-task learning and rarely consider the correlation between them. Since the MMSE score, which is an important basis for AD diagnosis, can also reflect the progress of cognitive impairment, some studies have begun to apply multi-task learning methods to these two tasks. However, how to exploit feature correlation remains a challenging problem for these methods. To comprehensively address this challenge, we propose a MRI-based multi-task decoupled learning method for AD detection and MMSE score prediction. First, a multi-task learning network is proposed to implement AD detection and MMSE score prediction, which exploits feature correlation by adding three multi-task interaction layers between the backbones of the two tasks. Each multi-task interaction layer contains two feature decoupling modules and one feature interaction module. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization between tasks of the features selected by the feature decoupling module, we propose the feature consistency loss constrained feature decoupling module. Finally, in order to exploit the specific distribution information of MMSE score in different groups, a distribution loss is proposed to further enhance the model performance. We evaluate our proposed method on multi-site datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed multi-task decoupled representation learning method achieves good performance, outperforming single-task learning and other existing state-of-the-art methods.

Chengchao Shen, Jianzhong Chen, Jianxin Wang

The existing contrastive learning methods mainly focus on single-grained representation learning, e.g., part-level, object-level or scene-level ones, thus inevitably neglecting the transferability of representations on other granularity levels. In this paper, we aim to learn multi-grained representations, which can effectively describe the image on various granularity levels, thus improving generalization on extensive downstream tasks. To this end, we propose a novel Multi-Grained Contrast method (MGC) for unsupervised representation learning. Specifically, we construct delicate multi-grained correspondences between positive views and then conduct multi-grained contrast by the correspondences to learn more general unsupervised representations. Without pretrained on large-scale dataset, our method significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on extensive downstream tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, scene parsing, semantic segmentation and keypoint detection. Moreover, experimental results support the data-efficient property and excellent representation transferability of our method. The source code and trained weights are available at \url{https://github.com/visresearch/mgc}.

Wenbin Liao, Jiewen Xiao, Chengbo Zhao et al.

The species identification of Macrofungi, i.e. mushrooms, has always been a challenging task. There are still a large number of poisonous mushrooms that have not been found, which poses a risk to people's life. However, the traditional identification method requires a large number of experts with knowledge in the field of taxonomy for manual identification, it is not only inefficient but also consumes a lot of manpower and capital costs. In this paper, we propose a new model based on attention-mechanism, MushroomNet, which applies the lightweight network MobileNetV3 as the backbone model, combined with the attention structure proposed by us, and has achieved excellent performance in the mushroom recognition task. On the public dataset, the test accuracy of the MushroomNet model has reached 83.9%, and on the local dataset, the test accuracy has reached 77.4%. The proposed attention mechanisms well focused attention on the bodies of mushroom image for mixed channel attention and the attention heat maps visualized by Grad-CAM. Further, in this study, genetic distance was added to the mushroom image recognition task, the genetic distance was used as the representation space, and the genetic distance between each pair of mushroom species in the dataset was used as the embedding of the genetic distance representation space, so as to predict the image distance and species. identify. We found that using the MES activation function can predict the genetic distance of mushrooms very well, but the accuracy is lower than that of SoftMax. The proposed MushroomNet was demonstrated it shows great potential for automatic and online mushroom image and the proposed automatic procedure would assist and be a reference to traditional mushroom classification.

Yu Liang, Zhongjin Zhang, Yuxuan Zhu et al.

Semantic ID (SID)-based recommendation is a promising paradigm for scaling sequential recommender systems, but existing methods largely follow a semantic-centric pipeline: item embeddings are learned from foundation models and discretized using generic quantization schemes. This design is misaligned with generative recommendation objectives: semantic embeddings are weakly coupled with collaborative prediction, and generic quantization is inefficient at reducing sequential uncertainty for autoregressive modeling. To address these, we propose ReSID, a recommendation-native, principled SID framework that rethinks representation learning and quantization from the perspective of information preservation and sequential predictability, without relying on LLMs. ReSID consists of two components: (i) Field-Aware Masked Auto-Encoding (FAMAE), which learns predictive-sufficient item representations from structured features, and (ii) Globally Aligned Orthogonal Quantization (GAOQ), which produces compact and predictable SID sequences by jointly reducing semantic ambiguity and prefix-conditional uncertainty. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments across ten datasets show the effectiveness of ReSID. ReSID consistently outperforms strong sequential and SID-based generative baselines by an average of over 10%, while reducing tokenization cost by up to 122x. Code is available at https://github.com/FuCongResearchSquad/ReSID.

Jianxin Wang, José Bento

The asymptotic mean squared test error and sensitivity of the Random Features Regression model (RFR) have been recently studied. We build on this work and identify in closed-form the family of Activation Functions (AFs) that minimize a combination of the test error and sensitivity of the RFR under different notions of functional parsimony. We find scenarios under which the optimal AFs are linear, saturated linear functions, or expressible in terms of Hermite polynomials. Finally, we show how using optimal AFs impacts well-established properties of the RFR model, such as its double descent curve, and the dependency of its optimal regularization parameter on the observation noise level.

Jiewen Xiao, Wenbin Liao, Ming Zhang et al.

Molecular and morphological characters, as important parts of biological taxonomy, are contradictory but need to be integrated. Organism's image recognition and bioinformatics are emerging and hot problems nowadays but with a gap between them. In this work, a multi-branching recognition framework mediated by genetic information bridges this barrier, which establishes the link between macro-morphology and micro-molecular information of mushrooms. The novel multi-perspective structure is proposed to fuse the feature images from three branching models, which significantly improves the accuracy of recognition by about 10% and up to more than 90%. Further, genetic information is implemented to the mushroom image recognition task by using genetic distance embeddings as the representation space for predicting image distance and species identification. Semantic overfitting of traditional classification tasks and the granularity of fine-grained image recognition are also discussed in depth for the first time. The generalizability of the model was investigated in fine-grained scenarios using zero-shot learning tasks, which could predict the taxonomic and evolutionary information of unseen samples. We presented the first method to map images to DNA, namely used an encoder mapping image to genetic distances, and then decoded DNA through a pre-trained decoder, where the total test accuracy on 37 species for DNA prediction is 87.45%. This study creates a novel recognition framework by systematically studying the mushroom image recognition problem, bridging the gap between macroscopic biological information and microscopic molecular information, which will provide a new reference for intelligent biometrics in the future.

Shunfeng Chu, Jun Li, Jianxin Wang et al.

As an emerging technology, digital twin (DT) can provide real-time status and dynamic topology mapping for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, DT and its implementation within industrial IoT networks necessitates substantial, distributed data support, which often leads to ``data silos'' and raises privacy concerns. To address these issues, we develop a dynamic resource scheduling algorithm tailored for the asynchronous federated learning (FL)-based lightweight DT empowered IoT network. Specifically, our approach aims to minimize a multi-objective function that encompasses both energy consumption and latency by optimizing IoT device selection and transmit power control, subject to FL model performance constraints. We utilize the Lyapunov method to decouple the formulated problem into a series of one-slot optimization problems and develop a two-stage optimization algorithm to achieve the optimal transmission power control and IoT device scheduling strategies. In the first stage, we derive closed-form solutions for optimal transmit power on the IoT device side. In the second stage, since partial state information is unknown, e.g., the transmitting power and computational frequency of IoT device, the edge server employs a multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework to model the IoT device selection problem and utilizes an efficient online algorithm, namely the client utility-based upper confidence bound (CU-UCB), to address it. Numerical results validate our algorithm's superiority over benchmark schemes, and simulations demonstrate that our algorithm achieves faster training speeds on the Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets within the same training duration.

Shunyang Zhang, Senzhang Wang, Xianzhen Tan et al.

Spatial time series imputation is critically important to many real applications such as intelligent transportation and air quality monitoring. Although recent transformer and diffusion model based approaches have achieved significant performance gains compared with conventional statistic based methods, spatial time series imputation still remains as a challenging issue due to the complex spatio-temporal dependencies and the noise uncertainty of the spatial time series data. Especially, recent diffusion process based models may introduce random noise to the imputations, and thus cause negative impact on the model performance. To this end, we propose a self-adaptive noise scaling diffusion model named SaSDim to more effectively perform spatial time series imputation. Specially, we propose a new loss function that can scale the noise to the similar intensity, and propose the across spatial-temporal global convolution module to more effectively capture the dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments conducted on three real world datasets verify the effectiveness of SaSDim by comparison with current state-of-the-art baselines.

Xincheng Liao, Junwen Duan, Yixi Huang et al.

Unified information extraction (UIE) aims to extract diverse structured information from unstructured text. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for UIE, they require significant computational resources and often struggle to generalize to unseen tasks. We propose RUIE (Retrieval-based Unified Information Extraction), a framework that leverages in-context learning for efficient task generalization. RUIE introduces a novel demonstration selection mechanism combining LLM preferences with a keyword-enhanced reward model, and employs a bi-encoder retriever trained through contrastive learning and knowledge distillation. As the first trainable retrieval framework for UIE, RUIE serves as a universal plugin for various LLMs. Experimental results on eight held-out datasets demonstrate RUIE's effectiveness, with average F1-score improvements of 19.22 and 3.22 compared to instruction-tuning methods and other retrievers, respectively.

Han Jiang, Junwen Duan, Zhe Qu et al.

Unsupervised rationale extraction aims to extract concise and contiguous text snippets to support model predictions without any annotated rationale. Previous studies have used a two-phase framework known as the Rationalizing Neural Prediction (RNP) framework, which follows a generate-then-predict paradigm. They assumed that the extracted explanation, called rationale, should be sufficient to predict the golden label. However, the assumption above deviates from the original definition and is too strict to perform well. Furthermore, these two-phase models suffer from the interlocking problem and spurious correlations. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel single-phase framework called You Only Forward Once (YOFO), derived from a relaxed version of rationale where rationales aim to support model predictions rather than make predictions. In our framework, A pre-trained language model like BERT is deployed to simultaneously perform prediction and rationalization with less impact from interlocking or spurious correlations. Directly choosing the important tokens in an unsupervised manner is intractable. Instead of directly choosing the important tokens, YOFO gradually removes unimportant tokens during forward propagation. Through experiments on the BeerAdvocate and Hotel Review datasets, we demonstrate that our model is able to extract rationales and make predictions more accurately compared to RNP-based models. We observe an improvement of up to 18.4\% in token-level F1 compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. We also conducted analyses and experiments to explore the extracted rationales and token decay strategies. The results show that YOFO can extract precise and important rationales while removing unimportant tokens in the middle part of the model.

Yuan Liu, Shu Wang, Zhe Qu et al.

Federated Domain Generalization (FedDG) aims to train the global model for generalization ability to unseen domains with multi-domain training samples. However, clients in federated learning networks are often confined to a single, non-IID domain due to inherent sampling and temporal limitations. The lack of cross-domain interaction and the in-domain divergence impede the learning of domain-common features and limit the effectiveness of existing FedDG, referred to as the single-source FedDG (sFedDG) problem. To address this, we introduce the Federated Global Consistent Augmentation (FedGCA) method, which incorporates a style-complement module to augment data samples with diverse domain styles. To ensure the effective integration of augmented samples, FedGCA employs both global guided semantic consistency and class consistency, mitigating inconsistencies from local semantics within individual clients and classes across multiple clients. The conducted extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FedGCA.

Shiyong Meng, Tao Zou, Bolei Chen et al.

Since floorplan data is readily available, long-term persistent, and robust to changes in visual appearance, visual Floorplan Localization (FLoc) has garnered significant attention. Existing methods either ingeniously match geometric priors or utilize sparse semantics to reduce FLoc uncertainty. However, they still suffer from ambiguous FLoc caused by repetitive structures within minimalist floorplans. Moreover, expensive but limited semantic annotations restrict their applicability. To address these issues, we propose DisCo-FLoc, which utilizes dual-level visual-geometric Contrasts to Disambiguate depth-aware visual Floc, without requiring additional semantic labels. Our solution begins with a ray regression predictor tailored for ray-casting-based FLoc, predicting a series of FLoc candidates using depth estimation expertise. In addition, a novel contrastive learning method with position-level and orientation-level constraints is proposed to strictly match depth-aware visual features with the corresponding geometric structures in the floorplan. Such matches can effectively eliminate FLoc ambiguity and select the optimal imaging pose from FLoc candidates. Exhaustive comparative studies on two standard visual Floc benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art semantic-based method, achieving significant improvements in both robustness and accuracy.

Long Phan, Alice Gatti, Ziwen Han et al. · amazon-science, apple-ml

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 2,500 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai.

Yijun Zhu, Jianxin Wang, Chengchao Shen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks, yet their significant computational and memory requirements present major challenges for deployment. A common approach uses Taylor expansion on the loss function to estimate neuron importance. However, its reliance on one-hot cross entropy loss, a key limitation is that it narrowly assesses importance based only on the probability assigned to the single predicted next token, thereby ignoring the other potential predictions of the original model. An intuitive solution to address this is to employ self distillation criterion for importance evaluation. However, this approach introduces significant computational overhead by requiring a separate teacher model for supervision. To this end, we propose a simple but effective criterion, information entropy of the model's output distribution, to efficiently evaluate importance scores of neurons with Taylor pruning without requirement of additional teacher. Compared to plain cross entropy criterion, it provides a more holistic criterion for Taylor pruning to prune neurons with the least impact on the prediction of model in a global manner, thereby preserving the fidelity of the model's predictive capabilities. Experimental results on extensive zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing pruning methods across the LLaMA and Qwen series models. The source code and trained weights are availabel at https://github.com/visresearch/HFPrune.

Zhihao Jia, Mingyi Jia, Junwen Duan et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generalization and reasoning abilities, making them well-suited for complex decision-making tasks such as medical consultation (MC). However, existing LLM-based methods often fail to capture the dual nature of MC, which entails two distinct sub-tasks: symptom inquiry, a sequential decision-making process, and disease diagnosis, a classification problem. This mismatch often results in ineffective symptom inquiry and unreliable disease diagnosis. To address this, we propose \textbf{DDO}, a novel LLM-based framework that performs \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{D}ecision \textbf{O}ptimization by decoupling the two sub-tasks and optimizing them with distinct objectives through a collaborative multi-agent workflow. Experiments on three real-world MC datasets show that DDO consistently outperforms existing LLM-based approaches and achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art generation-based methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in the MC task. The code is available at https://github.com/zh-jia/DDO.

Yi Luo, Haochen Zhao, Xiao Liang et al.

Drug synergy prediction is a critical task in the development of effective combination therapies for complex diseases, including cancer. Although existing methods have shown promising results, they often operate as black-box predictors that rely predominantly on statistical correlations between drug characteristics and results. To address this limitation, we propose CausalDDS, a novel framework that disentangles drug molecules into causal and spurious substructures, utilizing the causal substructure representations for predicting drug synergy. By focusing on causal sub-structures, CausalDDS effectively mitigates the impact of redundant features introduced by spurious substructures, enhancing the accuracy and interpretability of the model. In addition, CausalDDS employs a conditional intervention mechanism, where interventions are conditioned on paired molecular structures, and introduces a novel optimization objective guided by the principles of sufficiency and independence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline models, particularly in cold start and out-of-distribution settings. Besides, CausalDDS effectively identifies key substructures underlying drug synergy, providing clear insights into how drug combinations work at the molecular level. These results underscore the potential of CausalDDS as a practical tool for predicting drug synergy and facilitating drug discovery.

Yilin Zhao, Jiawei Huang, Xianshi Su et al.

Accurately detecting super host that establishes connections to a large number of distinct peers is significant for mitigating web attacks and ensuring high quality of web service. Existing sketch-based approaches estimate the number of distinct connections called flow cardinality according to full IP addresses, while ignoring the fact that a malicious or victim super host often communicates with hosts within the same subnet, resulting in high false positive rates and low accuracy. Though hierarchical-structure based approaches could capture flow cardinality in subnet, they inherently suffer from high memory usage. To address these limitations, we propose SegSketch, a segmented cardinality estimation approach that employs a lightweight halved-segment hashing strategy to infer common prefix lengths of IP addresses, and estimates cardinality within subnet to enhance detection accuracy under constrained memory size. Experiments driven by real-world traces demonstrate that, SegSketch improves F1-Score by up to 8.04x compared to state-of-the-art solutions, particularly under small memory budgets.

Hailin Yue, Hulin Kuang, Jin Liu et al.

Accurately predicting the survival of cancer patients is crucial for personalized treatment. However, existing studies focus solely on the relationships between samples with known survival risks, without fully leveraging the value of censored samples. Furthermore, these studies may suffer performance degradation in modality-missing scenarios and even struggle during the inference process. In this study, we propose a bipartite patient-modality graph learning with event-conditional modelling of censoring for cancer survival prediction (CenSurv). Specifically, we first use graph structure to model multimodal data and obtain representation. Then, to alleviate performance degradation in modality-missing scenarios, we design a bipartite graph to simulate the patient-modality relationship in various modality-missing scenarios and leverage a complete-incomplete alignment strategy to explore modality-agnostic features. Finally, we design a plug-and-play event-conditional modeling of censoring (ECMC) that selects reliable censored data using dynamic momentum accumulation confidences, assigns more accurate survival times to these censored data, and incorporates them as uncensored data into training. Comprehensive evaluations on 5 publicly cancer datasets showcase the superiority of CenSurv over the best state-of-the-art by 3.1% in terms of the mean C-index, while also exhibiting excellent robustness under various modality-missing scenarios. In addition, using the plug-and-play ECMC module, the mean C-index of 8 baselines increased by 1.3% across 5 datasets. Code of CenSurv is available at https://github.com/yuehailin/CenSurv.

Junjian Li, Hulin Kuang, Jin Liu et al.

Multiple instance learning (MIL) has shown significant promise in histopathology whole slide image (WSI) analysis for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. However, the inherent spatial heterogeneity of WSIs presents critical challenges, as morphologically similar tissue types are often dispersed across distant anatomical regions. Conventional MIL methods struggle to model these scattered tissue distributions and capture cross-regional spatial interactions effectively. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Multiple instance learning framework with Context-Aware Clustering (MiCo), designed to enhance cross-regional intra-tissue correlations and strengthen inter-tissue semantic associations in WSIs. MiCo begins by clustering instances to distill discriminative morphological patterns, with cluster centroids serving as semantic anchors. To enhance cross-regional intra-tissue correlations, MiCo employs a Cluster Route module, which dynamically links instances of the same tissue type across distant regions via feature similarity. These semantic anchors act as contextual hubs, propagating semantic relationships to refine instance-level representations. To eliminate semantic fragmentation and strengthen inter-tissue semantic associations, MiCo integrates a Cluster Reducer module, which consolidates redundant anchors while enhancing information exchange between distinct semantic groups. Extensive experiments on two challenging tasks across nine large-scale public cancer datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MiCo, showcasing its superiority over state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/junjianli106/MiCo.

Chengchao Shen, Dawei Liu, Jianxin Wang

Contrastive learning for single object centric images has achieved remarkable progress on unsupervised representation, but suffering inferior performance on the widespread images with multiple objects. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method, Multiple Object Stitching (MOS), to refine the unsupervised representation for multi-object images. Specifically, we construct the multi-object images by stitching the single object centric ones, where the objects in the synthesized multi-object images are predetermined. Hence, compared to the existing contrastive methods, our method provides additional object correspondences between multi-object images without human annotations. In this manner, our method pays more attention to the representations of each object in multi-object image, thus providing more detailed representations for complicated downstream tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Experimental results on ImageNet, CIFAR and COCO datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the leading unsupervised representation performance on both single object centric images and multi-object ones. The source code is available at https://github.com/visresearch/MultipleObjectStitching.

Chengchao Shen, Hourun Zhu, Gongfan Fang et al.

Transformer models achieve excellent scaling property, where the performance is improved with the increment of model capacity. However, large-scale model parameters lead to an unaffordable cost of computing and memory. We analyze popular transformer architectures and find that multilayer perceptron (MLP) modules take up the majority of model parameters. To this end, we focus on the recoverability of the compressed models and propose a Diversity-Guided MLP Reduction (DGMR) method to significantly reduce the parameters of large vision transformers with only negligible performance degradation. Specifically, we conduct a Gram-Schmidt weight pruning strategy to eliminate redundant neurons of MLP hidden layer, while preserving weight diversity for better performance recover during distillation. Compared to the model trained from scratch, our pruned model only requires 0.06\% data of LAION-2B (for the training of large vision transformers) without labels (ImageNet-1K) to recover the original performance. Experimental results on several state-of-the-art large vision transformers demonstrate that our method achieves a more than 57.0\% parameter and FLOPs reduction in a near lossless manner. Notably, for EVA-CLIP-E (4.4B), our method accomplishes a 71.5\% parameter and FLOPs reduction without performance degradation. The source code and trained weights are available at https://github.com/visresearch/DGMR.

Renye Zhang, Mengyun Yang, Qichang Zhao et al.

Drug repositioning aims to identify potential new indications for existing drugs to reduce the time and financial costs associated with developing new drugs. Most existing deep learning-based drug repositioning methods predominantly utilize graph-based representations. However, graph-based drug repositioning methods struggle to perform effective inference in cold-start scenarios involving novel drugs because of the lack of association information with the diseases. Unlike traditional graph-based approaches, we propose a bidirectional behavior learning strategy for drug repositioning, known as BiBLDR. This innovative framework redefines drug repositioning as a behavior sequential learning task to capture drug-disease interaction patterns. First, we construct bidirectional behavioral sequences based on drug and disease sides. The consideration of bidirectional information ensures a more meticulous and rigorous characterization of the behavioral sequences. Subsequently, we propose a two-stage strategy for drug repositioning. In the first stage, we construct prototype spaces to characterize the representational attributes of drugs and diseases. In the second stage, these refined prototypes and bidirectional behavior sequence data are leveraged to predict potential drug-disease associations. Based on this learning approach, the model can more robustly and precisely capture the interactive relationships between drug and disease features from bidirectional behavioral sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Meanwhile, BiBLDR demonstrates significantly superior performance compared to previous methods in cold-start scenarios. Our code is published in https://github.com/Renyeeah/BiBLDR.

Mingyi Jia, Junwen Duan, Yan Song et al.

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), while integral to modern healthcare, present challenges for clinical reasoning and diagnosis due to their complexity and information redundancy. To address this, we proposed medIKAL (Integrating Knowledge Graphs as Assistants of LLMs), a framework that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance diagnostic capabilities. medIKAL assigns weighted importance to entities in medical records based on their type, enabling precise localization of candidate diseases within KGs. It innovatively employs a residual network-like approach, allowing initial diagnosis by the LLM to be merged into KG search results. Through a path-based reranking algorithm and a fill-in-the-blank style prompt template, it further refined the diagnostic process. We validated medIKAL's effectiveness through extensive experiments on a newly introduced open-sourced Chinese EMR dataset, demonstrating its potential to improve clinical diagnosis in real-world settings.

Guangyan Zhou, Bin Wang, Jianxin Wang et al.

In this paper, we investigate the hitting set problem and demonstrate that solution independence is the crucial property underlying the construction of self-referential instances. As a special case of the hitting set problem, the vertex cover problem lacks the solution independence property. This distinction accounts for its ability to evade exhaustive search, as correlations among candidate solutions can be leveraged to compress the overall search space. In contrast, the dominating set problem on hypergraphs, which is also a special case of the hitting set problem, satisfies the solution independence property, thereby enabling the construction of self-referential instances. Moreover, we prove that these self-referential instances possess an irreducible property, implying that any algorithm for solving such instances must process nearly the entire graph to yield a correct solution.

Zichen Wang, Hao Miao, Senzhang Wang et al.

Accurately predicting the trajectory of vehicles is critically important for ensuring safety and reliability in autonomous driving. Although considerable research efforts have been made recently, the inherent trajectory uncertainty caused by various factors including the dynamic driving intends and the diverse driving scenarios still poses significant challenges to accurate trajectory prediction. To address this issue, we propose C2F-TP, a coarse-to-fine denoising framework for uncertainty-aware vehicle trajectory prediction. C2F-TP features an innovative two-stage coarse-to-fine prediction process. Specifically, in the spatial-temporal interaction stage, we propose a spatial-temporal interaction module to capture the inter-vehicle interactions and learn a multimodal trajectory distribution, from which a certain number of noisy trajectories are sampled. Next, in the trajectory refinement stage, we design a conditional denoising model to reduce the uncertainty of the sampled trajectories through a step-wise denoising operation. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real datasets NGSIM and highD that are widely adopted in trajectory prediction. The result demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal.

Bolei Chen, Jiaxu Kang, Haonan Yang et al.

Since a building's floorplans are easily accessible, consistent over time, and inherently robust to changes in visual appearance, self-localization within the floorplan has attracted researchers' interest. However, since floorplans are minimalist representations of a building's structure, modal and geometric differences between visual perceptions and floorplans pose challenges to this task. While existing methods cleverly utilize 2D geometric features and pose filters to achieve promising performance, they fail to address the localization errors caused by frequent visual changes and view occlusions due to variously shaped 3D objects. To tackle these issues, this paper views the 2D Floorplan Localization (FLoc) problem from a higher dimension by injecting 3D geometric priors into the visual FLoc algorithm. For the 3D geometric prior modeling, we first model geometrically aware view invariance using multi-view constraints, i.e., leveraging imaging geometric principles to provide matching constraints between multiple images that see the same points. Then, we further model the view-scene aligned geometric priors, enhancing the cross-modal geometry-color correspondences by associating the scene's surface reconstruction with the RGB frames of the sequence. Both 3D priors are modeled through self-supervised contrastive learning, thus no additional geometric or semantic annotations are required. These 3D priors summarized in extensive realistic scenes bridge the modal gap while improving localization success without increasing the computational burden on the FLoc algorithm. Sufficient comparative studies demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and substantially boosts the FLoc accuracy. All data and code will be released after the anonymous review.

Yifan Yin, Zhengtao Han, Shivam Aarya et al.

Fine-grained robot manipulation, such as lifting and rotating a bottle to display the label on the cap, requires robust reasoning about object parts and their relationships with intended tasks. Despite recent advances in training general-purpose robot manipulation policies guided by language instructions, there is a notable lack of large-scale datasets for fine-grained manipulation tasks with part-level instructions and diverse 3D object instances annotated with part-level labels. In this work, we introduce PartInstruct, the first large-scale benchmark for training and evaluating fine-grained robot manipulation models using part-level instructions. PartInstruct comprises 513 object instances across 14 categories, each annotated with part-level information, and 1302 fine-grained manipulation tasks organized into 16 task classes. Our training set consists of over 10,000 expert demonstrations synthesized in a 3D simulator, where each demonstration is paired with a high-level task instruction, a chain of base part-based skill instructions, and ground-truth 3D information about the object and its parts. Additionally, we designed a comprehensive test suite to evaluate the generalizability of learned policies across new states, objects, and tasks. We evaluated several state-of-the-art robot manipulation approaches, including end-to-end vision-language policy learning and bi-level planning models for robot manipulation on our benchmark. The experimental results reveal that current models struggle to robustly ground part concepts and predict actions in 3D space, and face challenges when manipulating object parts in long-horizon tasks.

Yihao Liu, Zhihao Cui, Liming Li et al.

Gliomas are the most common primary tumors of the central nervous system. Multimodal MRI is widely used for the preliminary screening of gliomas and plays a crucial role in auxiliary diagnosis, therapeutic efficacy, and prognostic evaluation. Currently, the computer-aided diagnostic studies of gliomas using MRI have focused on independent analysis events such as tumor segmentation, grading, and radiogenomic classification, without studying inter-dependencies among these events. In this study, we propose a Glioma Multimodal MRI Analysis System (GMMAS) that utilizes a deep learning network for processing multiple events simultaneously, leveraging their inter-dependencies through an uncertainty-based multi-task learning architecture and synchronously outputting tumor region segmentation, glioma histological subtype, IDH mutation genotype, and 1p/19q chromosome disorder status. Compared with the reported single-task analysis models, GMMAS improves the precision across tumor layered diagnostic tasks. Additionally, we have employed a two-stage semi-supervised learning method, enhancing model performance by fully exploiting both labeled and unlabeled MRI samples. Further, by utilizing an adaptation module based on knowledge self-distillation and contrastive learning for cross-modal feature extraction, GMMAS exhibited robustness in situations of modality absence and revealed the differing significance of each MRI modal. Finally, based on the analysis outputs of the GMMAS, we created a visual and user-friendly platform for doctors and patients, introducing GMMAS-GPT to generate personalized prognosis evaluations and suggestions.

Bolei Chen, Shengsheng Yan, Yongzheng Cui et al.

Since a building's floorplan remains consistent over time and is inherently robust to changes in visual appearance, visual Floorplan Localization (FLoc) has received increasing attention from researchers. However, as a compact and minimalist representation of the building's layout, floorplans contain many repetitive structures (e.g., hallways and corners), thus easily result in ambiguous localization. Existing methods either pin their hopes on matching 2D structural cues in floorplans or rely on 3D geometry-constrained visual pre-trainings, ignoring the richer contextual information provided by visual images. In this paper, we suggest using broader visual scene context to empower FLoc algorithms with scene layout priors to eliminate localization uncertainty. In particular, we propose an unsupervised learning technique with clustering constraints to pre-train a room discriminator on self-collected unlabeled room images. Such a discriminator can empirically extract the hidden room type of the observed image and distinguish it from other room types. By injecting the scene context information summarized by the discriminator into an FLoc algorithm, the room style knowledge is effectively exploited to guide definite visual FLoc. We conducted sufficient comparative studies on two standard visual Floc benchmarks. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves significant improvements in robustness and accuracy.

Bolei Chen, Jiaxu Kang, Yifei Wang et al.

Vision Language Navigation (VLN) typically requires agents to navigate to specified objects or remote regions in unknown scenes by obeying linguistic commands. Such tasks require organizing historical visual observations for linguistic grounding, which is critical for long-sequence navigational decisions. However, current agents suffer from overly detailed scene representation and ambiguous vision-language alignment, which weaken their comprehension of navigation-friendly high-level scene priors and easily lead to behaviors that violate linguistic commands. To tackle these issues, we propose a navigation policy by recursively summarizing along-the-way visual perceptions, which are adaptively aligned with commands to enhance linguistic grounding. In particular, by structurally modeling historical trajectories as compact neural grids, several Recursive Visual Imagination (RVI) techniques are proposed to motivate agents to focus on the regularity of visual transitions and semantic scene layouts, instead of dealing with misleading geometric details. Then, an Adaptive Linguistic Grounding (ALG) technique is proposed to align the learned situational memories with different linguistic components purposefully. Such fine-grained semantic matching facilitates the accurate anticipation of navigation actions and progress. Our navigation policy outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the challenging VLN-CE and ObjectNav tasks, showing the superiority of our RVI and ALG techniques for VLN.

Yuanzhuo Wang, Junwen Duan, Xinyu Li et al.

Temporal medical image analysis is essential for clinical decision-making, yet existing methods either align images and text at a coarse level - causing potential semantic mismatches - or depend solely on visual information, lacking medical semantic integration. We present CheXLearner, the first end-to-end framework that unifies anatomical region detection, Riemannian manifold-based structure alignment, and fine-grained regional semantic guidance. Our proposed Med-Manifold Alignment Module (Med-MAM) leverages hyperbolic geometry to robustly align anatomical structures and capture pathologically meaningful discrepancies across temporal chest X-rays. By introducing regional progression descriptions as supervision, CheXLearner achieves enhanced cross-modal representation learning and supports dynamic low-level feature optimization. Experiments show that CheXLearner achieves 81.12% (+17.2%) average accuracy and 80.32% (+11.05%) F1-score on anatomical region progression detection - substantially outperforming state-of-the-art baselines, especially in structurally complex regions. Additionally, our model attains a 91.52% average AUC score in downstream disease classification, validating its superior feature representation.

Jiawei He, Mingyi Jia, Zhihao Jia et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (LLMs), which integrate external knowledge, have shown remarkable performance in medical domains, including clinical diagnosis. However, existing RAG methods often struggle to tailor retrieval strategies to diagnostic difficulty and input sample informativeness. This limitation leads to excessive and often unnecessary retrieval, impairing computational efficiency and increasing the risk of introducing noise that can degrade diagnostic accuracy. To address this, we propose ICA-RAG (\textbf{I}nformation \textbf{C}ompleteness Guided \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{R}etrieval-\textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{G}eneration), a novel framework for enhancing RAG reliability in disease diagnosis. ICA-RAG utilizes an adaptive control module to assess the necessity of retrieval based on the input's information completeness. By optimizing retrieval and incorporating knowledge filtering, ICA-RAG better aligns retrieval operations with clinical requirements. Experiments on three Chinese electronic medical record datasets demonstrate that ICA-RAG significantly outperforms baseline methods, highlighting its effectiveness in clinical diagnosis.

Ronghui Xu, Hao Miao, Senzhang Wang et al.

With the proliferation of mobile sensing techniques, huge amounts of time series data are generated and accumulated in various domains, fueling plenty of real-world applications. In this setting, time series anomaly detection is practically important. It endeavors to identify deviant samples from the normal sample distribution in time series. Existing approaches generally assume that all the time series is available at a central location. However, we are witnessing the decentralized collection of time series due to the deployment of various edge devices. To bridge the gap between the decentralized time series data and the centralized anomaly detection algorithms, we propose a Parameter-efficient Federated Anomaly Detection framework named PeFAD with the increasing privacy concerns. PeFAD for the first time employs the pre-trained language model (PLM) as the body of the client's local model, which can benefit from its cross-modality knowledge transfer capability. To reduce the communication overhead and local model adaptation cost, we propose a parameter-efficient federated training module such that clients only need to fine-tune small-scale parameters and transmit them to the server for update. PeFAD utilizes a novel anomaly-driven mask selection strategy to mitigate the impact of neglected anomalies during training. A knowledge distillation operation on a synthetic privacy-preserving dataset that is shared by all the clients is also proposed to address the data heterogeneity issue across clients. We conduct extensive evaluations on four real datasets, where PeFAD outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines by up to 28.74%.

Feng Shi, Frank Neumann, Jianxin Wang

The Minimum Spanning Tree problem (abbr. MSTP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem that has been extensively studied by the researchers in the field of evolutionary computing to theoretically analyze the optimization performance of evolutionary algorithms. Within the paper, we consider a constrained version of the problem named 2-Hop (1,2)-Minimum Spanning Tree problem (abbr. 2H-(1,2)-MSTP) in the context of evolutionary algorithms, which has been shown to be NP-hard. Following how evolutionary algorithms are applied to solve the MSTP, we first consider the evolutionary algorithms with search points in edge-based representation adapted to the 2H-(1,2)-MSTP (including the (1+1) EA, Global Simple Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimizer and its two variants). More specifically, we separately investigate the upper bounds on their expected time (i.e., the expected number of fitness evaluations) to obtain a $\frac{3}{2}$-approximate solution with respect to different fitness functions. Inspired by the special structure of 2-hop spanning trees, we also consider the (1+1) EA with search points in vertex-based representation that seems not so natural for the problem and give an upper bound on its expected time to obtain a $\frac{3}{2}$-approximate solution, which is better than the above mentioned ones.

Feng Shi, Frank Neumann, Jianxin Wang

Randomized search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms are frequently applied to dynamic combinatorial optimization problems. Within this paper, we present a dynamic model of the classic Weighted Vertex Cover problem and analyze the runtime performances of the well-studied algorithms Randomized Local Search and (1+1) EA adapted to it, to contribute to the theoretical understanding of evolutionary computing for problems with dynamic changes. In our investigations, we use an edge-based representation based on the dual form of the Linear Programming formulation for the problem and study the expected runtime that the adapted algorithms require to maintain a 2-approximate solution when the given weighted graph is modified by an edge-editing or weight-editing operation. Considering the weights on the vertices may be exponentially large with respect to the size of the graph, the step size adaption strategy is incorporated, with or without the 1/5-th rule that is employed to control the increasing/decreasing rate of the step size. Our results show that three of the four algorithms presented in the paper can recompute 2-approximate solutions for the studied dynamic changes in polynomial expected runtime, but the (1+1) EA with 1/5-th Rule requires pseudo-polynomial expected runtime.