Pheng-Ann Heng

Hanqun Cao, Cheng Tan, Zhangyang Gao et al.

Deep generative models have unlocked another profound realm of human creativity. By capturing and generalizing patterns within data, we have entered the epoch of all-encompassing Artificial Intelligence for General Creativity (AIGC). Notably, diffusion models, recognized as one of the paramount generative models, materialize human ideation into tangible instances across diverse domains, encompassing imagery, text, speech, biology, and healthcare. To provide advanced and comprehensive insights into diffusion, this survey comprehensively elucidates its developmental trajectory and future directions from three distinct angles: the fundamental formulation of diffusion, algorithmic enhancements, and the manifold applications of diffusion. Each layer is meticulously explored to offer a profound comprehension of its evolution. Structured and summarized approaches are presented in https://github.com/chq1155/A-Survey-on-Generative-Diffusion-Model.

Shizhan Gong, Yuan Zhong, Wenao Ma et al.

Despite that the segment anything model (SAM) achieved impressive results on general-purpose semantic segmentation with strong generalization ability on daily images, its demonstrated performance on medical image segmentation is less precise and not stable, especially when dealing with tumor segmentation tasks that involve objects of small sizes, irregular shapes, and low contrast. Notably, the original SAM architecture is designed for 2D natural images, therefore would not be able to extract the 3D spatial information from volumetric medical data effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptation method for transferring SAM from 2D to 3D for promptable medical image segmentation. Through a holistically designed scheme for architecture modification, we transfer the SAM to support volumetric inputs while retaining the majority of its pre-trained parameters for reuse. The fine-tuning process is conducted in a parameter-efficient manner, wherein most of the pre-trained parameters remain frozen, and only a few lightweight spatial adapters are introduced and tuned. Regardless of the domain gap between natural and medical data and the disparity in the spatial arrangement between 2D and 3D, the transformer trained on natural images can effectively capture the spatial patterns present in volumetric medical images with only lightweight adaptations. We conduct experiments on four open-source tumor segmentation datasets, and with a single click prompt, our model can outperform domain state-of-the-art medical image segmentation models on 3 out of 4 tasks, specifically by 8.25%, 29.87%, and 10.11% for kidney tumor, pancreas tumor, colon cancer segmentation, and achieve similar performance for liver tumor segmentation. We also compare our adaptation method with existing popular adapters, and observed significant performance improvement on most datasets.

Cheng Chen, Juzheng Miao, Dufan Wu et al.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a foundation model for general image segmentation, has demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance across numerous natural image segmentation tasks. However, SAM's performance significantly declines when applied to medical images, primarily due to the substantial disparity between natural and medical image domains. To effectively adapt SAM to medical images, it is important to incorporate critical third-dimensional information, i.e., volumetric or temporal knowledge, during fine-tuning. Simultaneously, we aim to harness SAM's pre-trained weights within its original 2D backbone to the fullest extent. In this paper, we introduce a modality-agnostic SAM adaptation framework, named as MA-SAM, that is applicable to various volumetric and video medical data. Our method roots in the parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy to update only a small portion of weight increments while preserving the majority of SAM's pre-trained weights. By injecting a series of 3D adapters into the transformer blocks of the image encoder, our method enables the pre-trained 2D backbone to extract third-dimensional information from input data. The effectiveness of our method has been comprehensively evaluated on four medical image segmentation tasks, by using 10 public datasets across CT, MRI, and surgical video data. Remarkably, without using any prompt, our method consistently outperforms various state-of-the-art 3D approaches, surpassing nnU-Net by 0.9%, 2.6%, and 9.9% in Dice for CT multi-organ segmentation, MRI prostate segmentation, and surgical scene segmentation respectively. Our model also demonstrates strong generalization, and excels in challenging tumor segmentation when prompts are used. Our code is available at: https://github.com/cchen-cc/MA-SAM.

Yueming Jin, Yang Yu, Cheng Chen et al.

Automatic surgical scene segmentation is fundamental for facilitating cognitive intelligence in the modern operating theatre. Previous works rely on conventional aggregation modules (e.g., dilated convolution, convolutional LSTM), which only make use of the local context. In this paper, we propose a novel framework STswinCL that explores the complementary intra- and inter-video relations to boost segmentation performance, by progressively capturing the global context. We firstly develop a hierarchy Transformer to capture intra-video relation that includes richer spatial and temporal cues from neighbor pixels and previous frames. A joint space-time window shift scheme is proposed to efficiently aggregate these two cues into each pixel embedding. Then, we explore inter-video relation via pixel-to-pixel contrastive learning, which well structures the global embedding space. A multi-source contrast training objective is developed to group the pixel embeddings across videos with the ground-truth guidance, which is crucial for learning the global property of the whole data. We extensively validate our approach on two public surgical video benchmarks, including EndoVis18 Challenge and CaDIS dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of our method, which consistently exceeds previous state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/YuemingJin/STswinCL.

Meirui Jiang, Hongzheng Yang, Xiaoxiao Li et al.

Despite recent progress on semi-supervised federated learning (FL) for medical image diagnosis, the problem of imbalanced class distributions among unlabeled clients is still unsolved for real-world use. In this paper, we study a practical yet challenging problem of class imbalanced semi-supervised FL (imFed-Semi), which allows all clients to have only unlabeled data while the server just has a small amount of labeled data. This imFed-Semi problem is addressed by a novel dynamic bank learning scheme, which improves client training by exploiting class proportion information. This scheme consists of two parts, i.e., the dynamic bank construction to distill various class proportions for each local client, and the sub-bank classification to impose the local model to learn different class proportions. We evaluate our approach on two public real-world medical datasets, including the intracranial hemorrhage diagnosis with 25,000 CT slices and skin lesion diagnosis with 10,015 dermoscopy images. The effectiveness of our method has been validated with significant performance improvements (7.61% and 4.69%) compared with the second-best on the accuracy, as well as comprehensive analytical studies. Code is available at https://github.com/med-air/imFedSemi.

Jialun Pei, Tao Jiang, He Tang et al.

We propose a novel approach for RGB-D salient instance segmentation using a dual-branch cross-modal feature calibration architecture called CalibNet. Our method simultaneously calibrates depth and RGB features in the kernel and mask branches to generate instance-aware kernels and mask features. CalibNet consists of three simple modules, a dynamic interactive kernel (DIK) and a weight-sharing fusion (WSF), which work together to generate effective instance-aware kernels and integrate cross-modal features. To improve the quality of depth features, we incorporate a depth similarity assessment (DSA) module prior to DIK and WSF. In addition, we further contribute a new DSIS dataset, which contains 1,940 images with elaborate instance-level annotations. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks show that CalibNet yields a promising result, i.e., 58.0% AP with 320*480 input size on the COME15K-N test set, which significantly surpasses the alternative frameworks. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/PJLallen/CalibNet.

Zhizhong Chai, Luyang Luo, Huangjing Lin et al.

Deep learning (DL)-based rib fracture detection has shown promise of playing an important role in preventing mortality and improving patient outcome. Normally, developing DL-based object detection models requires a huge amount of bounding box annotation. However, annotating medical data is time-consuming and expertise-demanding, making obtaining a large amount of fine-grained annotations extremely infeasible. This poses a pressing need {for} developing label-efficient detection models to alleviate radiologists' labeling burden. To tackle this challenge, the literature on object detection has witnessed an increase of weakly-supervised and semi-supervised approaches, yet still lacks a unified framework that leverages various forms of fully-labeled, weakly-labeled, and unlabeled data. In this paper, we present a novel omni-supervised object detection network, ORF-Netv2, to leverage as much available supervision as possible. Specifically, a multi-branch omni-supervised detection head is introduced with each branch trained with a specific type of supervision. A co-training-based dynamic label assignment strategy is then proposed to enable flexible and robust learning from the weakly-labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive evaluation was conducted for the proposed framework with three rib fracture datasets on both chest CT and X-ray. By leveraging all forms of supervision, ORF-Netv2 achieves mAPs of 34.7, 44.7, and 19.4 on the three datasets, respectively, surpassing the baseline detector which uses only box annotations by mAP gains of 3.8, 4.8, and 5.0, respectively. Furthermore, ORF-Netv2 consistently outperforms other competitive label-efficient methods over various scenarios, showing a promising framework for label-efficient fracture detection. The code is available at: https://github.com/zhizhongchai/ORF-Net.

Donghao Zhou, Jialin Li, Jinpeng Li et al.

Large-scale well-annotated datasets are of great importance for training an effective object detector. However, obtaining accurate bounding box annotations is laborious and demanding. Unfortunately, the resultant noisy bounding boxes could cause corrupt supervision signals and thus diminish detection performance. Motivated by the observation that the real ground-truth is usually situated in the aggregation region of the proposals assigned to a noisy ground-truth, we propose DIStribution-aware CalibratiOn (DISCO) to model the spatial distribution of proposals for calibrating supervision signals. In DISCO, spatial distribution modeling is performed to statistically extract the potential locations of objects. Based on the modeled distribution, three distribution-aware techniques, i.e., distribution-aware proposal augmentation (DA-Aug), distribution-aware box refinement (DA-Ref), and distribution-aware confidence estimation (DA-Est), are developed to improve classification, localization, and interpretability, respectively. Extensive experiments on large-scale noisy image datasets (i.e., Pascal VOC and MS-COCO) demonstrate that DISCO can achieve state-of-the-art detection performance, especially at high noise levels. Code is available at https://github.com/Correr-Zhou/DISCO.

Lanqing Li, Liang Zeng, Ziqi Gao et al.

The last decade has witnessed a prosperous development of computational methods and dataset curation for AI-aided drug discovery (AIDD). However, real-world pharmaceutical datasets often exhibit highly imbalanced distribution, which is overlooked by the current literature but may severely compromise the fairness and generalization of machine learning applications. Motivated by this observation, we introduce ImDrug, a comprehensive benchmark with an open-source Python library which consists of 4 imbalance settings, 11 AI-ready datasets, 54 learning tasks and 16 baseline algorithms tailored for imbalanced learning. It provides an accessible and customizable testbed for problems and solutions spanning a broad spectrum of the drug discovery pipeline such as molecular modeling, drug-target interaction and retrosynthesis. We conduct extensive empirical studies with novel evaluation metrics, to demonstrate that the existing algorithms fall short of solving medicinal and pharmaceutical challenges in the data imbalance scenario. We believe that ImDrug opens up avenues for future research and development, on real-world challenges at the intersection of AIDD and deep imbalanced learning.

Lanqing Liu, Ruize Cui, Jialun Pei et al.

Liver surface landmark detection is a fundamental prerequisite for anatomical guidance in laparoscopic liver surgery. However, it remains unreliable in practice due to two pervasive challenges: illumination attenuation in underexposed regions and the structural mismatch between pixel-wise localization and continuous curvilinear geometry. To address these limitations, we propose A2ONet, an attenuation-resilient alternating optimization network for robust liver landmark detection. To mitigate illumination attenuation, A2ONet embraces an illumination field compensation (IFC) block that adaptively enhances dark regions while preserving structural consistency. Meanwhile, we introduce a lightweight frequency-orientation selective filter (FOSF) to suppress repetitive texture interference and preserve salient curvilinear cues. Building upon these resilient representations, we design an alternating seg-curve optimization (ASCO) decoder that iteratively couples dense segmentation with explicit curve modeling, enabling mutual guidance to optimize both structural continuity and endpoint localization. Extensive evaluations on L3D-2K, L3D, and P2ILF demonstrate consistent improvements over competitive methods, establishing a more reliable foundation for intraoperative anatomy guidance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/hyperiondk115/A2ONet.

Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Longtian Qiu et al.

Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have shown promising performance in self-supervised learning for both 2D and 3D computer vision. However, existing MAE-style methods can only learn from the data of a single modality, i.e., either images or point clouds, which neglect the implicit semantic and geometric correlation between 2D and 3D. In this paper, we explore how the 2D modality can benefit 3D masked autoencoding, and propose Joint-MAE, a 2D-3D joint MAE framework for self-supervised 3D point cloud pre-training. Joint-MAE randomly masks an input 3D point cloud and its projected 2D images, and then reconstructs the masked information of the two modalities. For better cross-modal interaction, we construct our JointMAE by two hierarchical 2D-3D embedding modules, a joint encoder, and a joint decoder with modal-shared and model-specific decoders. On top of this, we further introduce two cross-modal strategies to boost the 3D representation learning, which are local-aligned attention mechanisms for 2D-3D semantic cues, and a cross-reconstruction loss for 2D-3D geometric constraints. By our pre-training paradigm, Joint-MAE achieves superior performance on multiple downstream tasks, e.g., 92.4% accuracy for linear SVM on ModelNet40 and 86.07% accuracy on the hardest split of ScanObjectNN.

Danruo Deng, Guangyong Chen, Yang Yu et al.

Uncertainty estimation is a key factor that makes deep learning reliable in practical applications. Recently proposed evidential neural networks explicitly account for different uncertainties by treating the network's outputs as evidence to parameterize the Dirichlet distribution, and achieve impressive performance in uncertainty estimation. However, for high data uncertainty samples but annotated with the one-hot label, the evidence-learning process for those mislabeled classes is over-penalized and remains hindered. To address this problem, we propose a novel method, Fisher Information-based Evidential Deep Learning ($\mathcal{I}$-EDL). In particular, we introduce Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) to measure the informativeness of evidence carried by each sample, according to which we can dynamically reweight the objective loss terms to make the network more focused on the representation learning of uncertain classes. The generalization ability of our network is further improved by optimizing the PAC-Bayesian bound. As demonstrated empirically, our proposed method consistently outperforms traditional EDL-related algorithms in multiple uncertainty estimation tasks, especially in the more challenging few-shot classification settings.

Cheng Xue, Lequan Yu, Pengfei Chen et al.

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in a wide variety of natural image and medical image computing tasks. However, these achievements indispensably rely on accurately annotated training data. If encountering some noisy-labeled images, the network training procedure would suffer from difficulties, leading to a sub-optimal classifier. This problem is even more severe in the medical image analysis field, as the annotation quality of medical images heavily relies on the expertise and experience of annotators. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative training paradigm with global and local representation learning for robust medical image classification from noisy-labeled data to combat the lack of high quality annotated medical data. Specifically, we employ the self-ensemble model with a noisy label filter to efficiently select the clean and noisy samples. Then, the clean samples are trained by a collaborative training strategy to eliminate the disturbance from imperfect labeled samples. Notably, we further design a novel global and local representation learning scheme to implicitly regularize the networks to utilize noisy samples in a self-supervised manner. We evaluated our proposed robust learning strategy on four public medical image classification datasets with three types of label noise,ie,random noise, computer-generated label noise, and inter-observer variability noise. Our method outperforms other learning from noisy label methods and we also conducted extensive experiments to analyze each component of our method.

Haoxin Yang, Xuemiao Xu, Cheng Xu et al.

Reversible face anonymization, unlike traditional face pixelization, seeks to replace sensitive identity information in facial images with synthesized alternatives, preserving privacy without sacrificing image clarity. Traditional methods, such as encoder-decoder networks, often result in significant loss of facial details due to their limited learning capacity. Additionally, relying on latent manipulation in pre-trained GANs can lead to changes in ID-irrelevant attributes, adversely affecting data utility due to GAN inversion inaccuracies. This paper introduces G\textsuperscript{2}Face, which leverages both generative and geometric priors to enhance identity manipulation, achieving high-quality reversible face anonymization without compromising data utility. We utilize a 3D face model to extract geometric information from the input face, integrating it with a pre-trained GAN-based decoder. This synergy of generative and geometric priors allows the decoder to produce realistic anonymized faces with consistent geometry. Moreover, multi-scale facial features are extracted from the original face and combined with the decoder using our novel identity-aware feature fusion blocks (IFF). This integration enables precise blending of the generated facial patterns with the original ID-irrelevant features, resulting in accurate identity manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques in face anonymization and recovery, while preserving high data utility. Code is available at https://github.com/Harxis/G2Face.

Hao Chen, Jiaze Wang, Kun Shao et al.

Trajectory prediction has been a crucial task in building a reliable autonomous driving system by anticipating possible dangers. One key issue is to generate consistent trajectory predictions without colliding. To overcome the challenge, we propose an efficient masked autoencoder for trajectory prediction (Traj-MAE) that better represents the complicated behaviors of agents in the driving environment. Specifically, our Traj-MAE employs diverse masking strategies to pre-train the trajectory encoder and map encoder, allowing for the capture of social and temporal information among agents while leveraging the effect of environment from multiple granularities. To address the catastrophic forgetting problem that arises when pre-training the network with multiple masking strategies, we introduce a continual pre-training framework, which can help Traj-MAE learn valuable and diverse information from various strategies efficiently. Our experimental results in both multi-agent and single-agent settings demonstrate that Traj-MAE achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods and significantly outperforms our baseline model.

Jiaqi Xu, Xiaowei Hu, Lei Zhu et al.

Video dehazing aims to recover haze-free frames with high visibility and contrast. This paper presents a novel framework to effectively explore the physical haze priors and aggregate temporal information. Specifically, we design a memory-based physical prior guidance module to encode the prior-related features into long-range memory. Besides, we formulate a multi-range scene radiance recovery module to capture space-time dependencies in multiple space-time ranges, which helps to effectively aggregate temporal information from adjacent frames. Moreover, we construct the first large-scale outdoor video dehazing benchmark dataset, which contains videos in various real-world scenarios. Experimental results on both synthetic and real conditions show the superiority of our proposed method.

Quande Liu, Cheng Chen, Qi Dou et al.

Domain generalization typically requires data from multiple source domains for model learning. However, such strong assumption may not always hold in practice, especially in medical field where the data sharing is highly concerned and sometimes prohibitive due to privacy issue. This paper studies the important yet challenging single domain generalization problem, in which a model is learned under the worst-case scenario with only one source domain to directly generalize to different unseen target domains. We present a novel approach to address this problem in medical image segmentation, which extracts and integrates the semantic shape prior information of segmentation that are invariant across domains and can be well-captured even from single domain data to facilitate segmentation under distribution shifts. Besides, a test-time adaptation strategy with dual-consistency regularization is further devised to promote dynamic incorporation of these shape priors under each unseen domain to improve model generalizability. Extensive experiments on two medical image segmentation tasks demonstrate the consistent improvements of our method across various unseen domains, as well as its superiority over state-of-the-art approaches in addressing domain generalization under the worst-case scenario.

Tianyu Wang, Xiaowei Hu, Pheng-Ann Heng et al.

This paper formulates a new problem, instance shadow detection, which aims to detect shadow instance and the associated object instance that cast each shadow in the input image. To approach this task, we first compile a new dataset with the masks for shadow instances, object instances, and shadow-object associations. We then design an evaluation metric for quantitative evaluation of the performance of instance shadow detection. Further, we design a single-stage detector to perform instance shadow detection in an end-to-end manner, where the bidirectional relation learning module and the deformable maskIoU head are proposed in the detector to directly learn the relation between shadow instances and object instances and to improve the accuracy of the predicted masks. Finally, we quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our method on the benchmark dataset of instance shadow detection and show the applicability of our method on light direction estimation and photo editing.

Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Xiangyang Zhu et al.

We introduce SAM2Point, a preliminary exploration adapting Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) for zero-shot and promptable 3D segmentation. SAM2Point interprets any 3D data as a series of multi-directional videos, and leverages SAM 2 for 3D-space segmentation, without further training or 2D-3D projection. Our framework supports various prompt types, including 3D points, boxes, and masks, and can generalize across diverse scenarios, such as 3D objects, indoor scenes, outdoor environments, and raw sparse LiDAR. Demonstrations on multiple 3D datasets, e.g., Objaverse, S3DIS, ScanNet, Semantic3D, and KITTI, highlight the robust generalization capabilities of SAM2Point. To our best knowledge, we present the most faithful implementation of SAM in 3D, which may serve as a starting point for future research in promptable 3D segmentation. Online Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ZiyuG/SAM2Point . Code: https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/SAM2Point .

Juzheng Miao, Cheng Chen, Keli Zhang et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved notable progress in medical image segmentation. To achieve effective SSL, a model needs to be able to efficiently learn from limited labeled data and effectively exploiting knowledge from abundant unlabeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved sample efficiency. To harness the power of foundation models for application in SSL, we propose a cross prompting consistency method with segment anything model (CPC-SAM) for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Our method employs SAM's unique prompt design and innovates a cross-prompting strategy within a dual-branch framework to automatically generate prompts and supervisions across two decoder branches, enabling effectively learning from both scarce labeled and valuable unlabeled data. We further design a novel prompt consistency regularization, to reduce the prompt position sensitivity and to enhance the output invariance under different prompts. We validate our method on two medical image segmentation tasks. The extensive experiments with different labeled-data ratios and modalities demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art SSL methods, with more than 9% Dice improvement on the breast cancer segmentation task.

Kang Li, Lequan Yu, Pheng-Ann Heng

Contemporary methods have shown promising results on cardiac image segmentation, but merely in static learning, i.e., optimizing the network once for all, ignoring potential needs for model updating. In real-world scenarios, new data continues to be gathered from multiple institutions over time and new demands keep growing to pursue more satisfying performance. The desired model should incrementally learn from each incoming dataset and progressively update with improved functionality as time goes by. As the datasets sequentially delivered from multiple sites are normally heterogenous with domain discrepancy, each updated model should not catastrophically forget previously learned domains while well generalizing to currently arrived domains or even unseen domains. In medical scenarios, this is particularly challenging as accessing or storing past data is commonly not allowed due to data privacy. To this end, we propose a novel domain-incremental learning framework to recover past domain inputs first and then regularly replay them during model optimization. Particularly, we first present a style-oriented replay module to enable structure-realistic and memory-efficient reproduction of past data, and then incorporate the replayed past data to jointly optimize the model with current data to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. During optimization, we additionally perform domain-sensitive feature whitening to suppress model's dependency on features that are sensitive to domain changes (e.g., domain-distinctive style features) to assist domain-invariant feature exploration and gradually improve the generalization performance of the network. We have extensively evaluated our approach with the M&Ms Dataset in single-domain and compound-domain incremental learning settings with improved performance over other comparison approaches.

Liansheng Wang, Jiacheng Wang, Lei Zhu et al.

Automated detecting lung infections from computed tomography (CT) data plays an important role for combating COVID-19. However, there are still some challenges for developing AI system. 1) Most current COVID-19 infection segmentation methods mainly relied on 2D CT images, which lack 3D sequential constraint. 2) Existing 3D CT segmentation methods focus on single-scale representations, which do not achieve the multiple level receptive field sizes on 3D volume. 3) The emergent breaking out of COVID-19 makes it hard to annotate sufficient CT volumes for training deep model. To address these issues, we first build a multiple dimensional-attention convolutional neural network (MDA-CNN) to aggregate multi-scale information along different dimension of input feature maps and impose supervision on multiple predictions from different CNN layers. Second, we assign this MDA-CNN as a basic network into a novel dual multi-scale mean teacher network (DM${^2}$T-Net) for semi-supervised COVID-19 lung infection segmentation on CT volumes by leveraging unlabeled data and exploring the multi-scale information. Our DM${^2}$T-Net encourages multiple predictions at different CNN layers from the student and teacher networks to be consistent for computing a multi-scale consistency loss on unlabeled data, which is then added to the supervised loss on the labeled data from multiple predictions of MDA-CNN. Third, we collect two COVID-19 segmentation datasets to evaluate our method. The experimental results show that our network consistently outperforms the compared state-of-the-art methods.

Luyang Luo, Dunyuan Xu, Hao Chen et al.

Deep learning models were frequently reported to learn from shortcuts like dataset biases. As deep learning is playing an increasingly important role in the modern healthcare system, it is of great need to combat shortcut learning in medical data as well as develop unbiased and trustworthy models. In this paper, we study the problem of developing debiased chest X-ray diagnosis models from the biased training data without knowing exactly the bias labels. We start with the observations that the imbalance of bias distribution is one of the key reasons causing shortcut learning, and the dataset biases are preferred by the model if they were easier to be learned than the intended features. Based on these observations, we proposed a novel algorithm, pseudo bias-balanced learning, which first captures and predicts per-sample bias labels via generalized cross entropy loss and then trains a debiased model using pseudo bias labels and bias-balanced softmax function. We constructed several chest X-ray datasets with various dataset bias situations and demonstrated with extensive experiments that our proposed method achieved consistent improvements over other state-of-the-art approaches.

Jialun Pei, Zhangjun Zhou, Yueming Jin et al.

High-accuracy Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) aims to pinpoint category-agnostic foreground objects from natural scenes. The main challenge for DIS involves identifying the highly accurate dominant area while rendering detailed object structure. However, directly using a general encoder-decoder architecture may result in an oversupply of high-level features and neglect the shallow spatial information necessary for partitioning meticulous structures. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel Unite-Divide-Unite Network (UDUN} that restructures and bipartitely arranges complementary features to simultaneously boost the effectiveness of trunk and structure identification. The proposed UDUN proceeds from several strengths. First, a dual-size input feeds into the shared backbone to produce more holistic and detailed features while keeping the model lightweight. Second, a simple Divide-and-Conquer Module (DCM) is proposed to decouple multiscale low- and high-level features into our structure decoder and trunk decoder to obtain structure and trunk information respectively. Moreover, we design a Trunk-Structure Aggregation module (TSA) in our union decoder that performs cascade integration for uniform high-accuracy segmentation. As a result, UDUN performs favorably against state-of-the-art competitors in all six evaluation metrics on overall DIS-TE, i.e., achieving 0.772 weighted F-measure and 977 HCE. Using 1024*1024 input, our model enables real-time inference at 65.3 fps with ResNet-18.

Jinpeng Li, Haibo Jin, Shengcai Liao et al.

This paper presents a Refinement Pyramid Transformer (RePFormer) for robust facial landmark detection. Most facial landmark detectors focus on learning representative image features. However, these CNN-based feature representations are not robust enough to handle complex real-world scenarios due to ignoring the internal structure of landmarks, as well as the relations between landmarks and context. In this work, we formulate the facial landmark detection task as refining landmark queries along pyramid memories. Specifically, a pyramid transformer head (PTH) is introduced to build both homologous relations among landmarks and heterologous relations between landmarks and cross-scale contexts. Besides, a dynamic landmark refinement (DLR) module is designed to decompose the landmark regression into an end-to-end refinement procedure, where the dynamically aggregated queries are transformed to residual coordinates predictions. Extensive experimental results on four facial landmark detection benchmarks and their various subsets demonstrate the superior performance and high robustness of our framework.

Diandian Guo, Weixin Si, Zhixi Li et al.

Pringle maneuver (PM) in laparoscopic liver resection aims to reduce blood loss and provide a clear surgical view by intermittently blocking blood inflow of the liver, whereas prolonged PM may cause ischemic injury. To comprehensively monitor this surgical procedure and provide timely warnings of ineffective and prolonged blocking, we suggest two complementary AI-assisted surgical monitoring tasks: workflow recognition and blocking effectiveness detection in liver resections. The former presents challenges in real-time capturing of short-term PM, while the latter involves the intraoperative discrimination of long-term liver ischemia states. To address these challenges, we meticulously collect a novel dataset, called PmLR50, consisting of 25,037 video frames covering various surgical phases from 50 laparoscopic liver resection procedures. Additionally, we develop an online baseline for PmLR50, termed PmNet. This model embraces Masked Temporal Encoding (MTE) and Compressed Sequence Modeling (CSM) for efficient short-term and long-term temporal information modeling, and embeds Contrastive Prototype Separation (CPS) to enhance action discrimination between similar intraoperative operations. Experimental results demonstrate that PmNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art surgical workflow recognition methods on the PmLR50 benchmark. Our research offers potential clinical applications for the laparoscopic liver surgery community. Codes are available at https://github.com/RascalGdd/PmNet.

Yidan Feng, Biqi Yang, Xianzhi Li et al.

Industrial bin picking is a challenging task that requires accurate and robust segmentation of individual object instances. Particularly, industrial objects can have irregular shapes, that is, thin and concave, whereas in bin-picking scenarios, objects are often closely packed with strong occlusion. To address these challenges, we formulate a novel part-aware instance segmentation pipeline. The key idea is to decompose industrial objects into correlated approximate convex parts and enhance the object-level segmentation with part-level segmentation. We design a part-aware network to predict part masks and part-to-part offsets, followed by a part aggregation module to assemble the recognized parts into instances. To guide the network learning, we also propose an automatic label decoupling scheme to generate ground-truth part-level labels from instance-level labels. Finally, we contribute the first instance segmentation dataset, which contains a variety of industrial objects that are thin and have non-trivial shapes. Extensive experimental results on various industrial objects demonstrate that our method can achieve the best segmentation results compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

Shaoning Li, Mingyu Li, Yusong Wang et al.

Investigating conformational landscapes of proteins is a crucial way to understand their biological functions and properties. AlphaFlow stands out as a sequence-conditioned generative model that introduces flexibility into structure prediction models by fine-tuning AlphaFold under the flow-matching framework. Despite the advantages of efficient sampling afforded by flow-matching, AlphaFlow still requires multiple runs of AlphaFold to finally generate one single conformation. Due to the heavy consumption of AlphaFold, its applicability is limited in sampling larger set of protein ensembles or the longer chains within a constrained timeframe. In this work, we propose a feature-conditioned generative model called AlphaFlow-Lit to realize efficient protein ensembles generation. In contrast to the full fine-tuning on the entire structure, we focus solely on the light-weight structure module to reconstruct the conformation. AlphaFlow-Lit performs on-par with AlphaFlow and surpasses its distilled version without pretraining, all while achieving a significant sampling acceleration of around 47 times. The advancement in efficiency showcases the potential of AlphaFlow-Lit in enabling faster and more scalable generation of protein ensembles.

Yi Wang, Jiaze Wang, Jinpeng Li et al.

Data augmentation is an effective regularization strategy for mitigating overfitting in deep neural networks, and it plays a crucial role in 3D vision tasks, where the point cloud data is relatively limited. While mixing-based augmentation has shown promise for point clouds, previous methods mix point clouds either on block level or point level, which has constrained their ability to strike a balance between generating diverse training samples and preserving the local characteristics of point clouds. Additionally, the varying importance of each part of the point clouds has not been fully considered, cause not all parts contribute equally to the classification task, and some parts may contain unimportant or redundant information. To overcome these challenges, we propose PointPatchMix, a novel approach that mixes point clouds at the patch level and integrates a patch scoring module to generate content-based targets for mixed point clouds. Our approach preserves local features at the patch level, while the patch scoring module assigns targets based on the content-based significance score from a pre-trained teacher model. We evaluate PointPatchMix on two benchmark datasets, ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN, and demonstrate significant improvements over various baselines in both synthetic and real-world datasets, as well as few-shot settings. With Point-MAE as our baseline, our model surpasses previous methods by a significant margin, achieving 86.3% accuracy on ScanObjectNN and 94.1% accuracy on ModelNet40. Furthermore, our approach shows strong generalization across multiple architectures and enhances the robustness of the baseline model.

Zhizhong Chai, Huangjing Lin, Luyang Luo et al.

Most of the existing object detection works are based on the bounding box annotation: each object has a precise annotated box. However, for rib fractures, the bounding box annotation is very labor-intensive and time-consuming because radiologists need to investigate and annotate the rib fractures on a slice-by-slice basis. Although a few studies have proposed weakly-supervised methods or semi-supervised methods, they could not handle different forms of supervision simultaneously. In this paper, we proposed a novel omni-supervised object detection network, which can exploit multiple different forms of annotated data to further improve the detection performance. Specifically, the proposed network contains an omni-supervised detection head, in which each form of annotation data corresponds to a unique classification branch. Furthermore, we proposed a dynamic label assignment strategy for different annotated forms of data to facilitate better learning for each branch. Moreover, we also design a confidence-aware classification loss to emphasize the samples with high confidence and further improve the model's performance. Extensive experiments conducted on the testing dataset show our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches consistently, demonstrating the efficacy of deep omni-supervised learning on improving rib fracture detection performance.

Runsong Zhu, Di Kang, Ka-Hei Hui et al.

Reconstructing 3D geometry from \emph{unoriented} point clouds can benefit many downstream tasks. Recent shape modeling methods mostly adopt implicit neural representation to fit a signed distance field (SDF) and optimize the network by \emph{unsigned} supervision. However, these methods occasionally have difficulty in finding the coarse shape for complicated objects, especially suffering from the ``ghost'' surfaces (\ie, fake surfaces that should not exist). To guide the network quickly fit the coarse shape, we propose to utilize the signed supervision in regions that are obviously outside the object and can be easily determined, resulting in our semi-signed supervision. To better recover high-fidelity details, a novel importance sampling based on tracked region losses and a progressive positional encoding (PE) prioritize the optimization towards underfitting and complicated regions. Specifically, we voxelize and partition the object space into \emph{sign-known} and \emph{sign-uncertain} regions, in which different supervisions are applied. Besides, we adaptively adjust the sampling rate of each voxel according to the tracked reconstruction loss, so that the network can focus more on the complicated under-fitting regions. To this end, we propose our semi-signed prioritized (SSP) neural fitting, and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that SSP achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets including the ABC subset and various challenging data. The code will be released upon the publication.

Bowen Wang, Chen Liang, Jiaze Wang et al.

Attaining the equilibrium state of a catalyst-adsorbate system is key to fundamentally assessing its effective properties, such as adsorption energy. Machine learning methods with finer supervision strategies have been applied to boost and guide the relaxation process of an atomic system and better predict its properties at the equilibrium state. In this paper, we present a novel graph neural network (GNN) supervision and prediction strategy DR-Label. The method enhances the supervision signal, reduces the multiplicity of solutions in edge representation, and encourages the model to provide node predictions that are graph structural variation robust. DR-Label first Deconstructs finer-grained equilibrium state information to the model by projecting the node-level supervision signal to each edge. Reversely, the model Reconstructs a more robust equilibrium state prediction by transforming edge-level predictions to node-level with a sphere-fitting algorithm. The DR-Label strategy was applied to three radically distinct models, each of which displayed consistent performance enhancements. Based on the DR-Label strategy, we further proposed DRFormer, which achieved a new state-of-the-art performance on the Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) dataset and the Cu-based single-atom-alloyed CO adsorption (SAA) dataset. We expect that our work will highlight crucial steps for the development of a more accurate model in equilibrium state property prediction of a catalysis system.

Donghao Zhou, Chunbin Gu, Junde Xu et al.

In biological research, fluorescence staining is a key technique to reveal the locations and morphology of subcellular structures. However, it is slow, expensive, and harmful to cells. In this paper, we model it as a deep learning task termed subcellular structure prediction (SSP), aiming to predict the 3D fluorescent images of multiple subcellular structures from a 3D transmitted-light image. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of current biotechnology, each image is partially labeled in SSP. Besides, naturally, subcellular structures vary considerably in size, which causes the multi-scale issue of SSP. To overcome these challenges, we propose Re-parameterizing Mixture-of-Diverse-Experts (RepMode), a network that dynamically organizes its parameters with task-aware priors to handle specified single-label prediction tasks. In RepMode, the Mixture-of-Diverse-Experts (MoDE) block is designed to learn the generalized parameters for all tasks, and gating re-parameterization (GatRep) is performed to generate the specialized parameters for each task, by which RepMode can maintain a compact practical topology exactly like a plain network, and meanwhile achieves a powerful theoretical topology. Comprehensive experiments show that RepMode can achieve state-of-the-art overall performance in SSP.

Yang Yu, Zixu Zhao, Yueming Jin et al.

Surgical scene segmentation is fundamentally crucial for prompting cognitive assistance in robotic surgery. However, pixel-wise annotating surgical video in a frame-by-frame manner is expensive and time consuming. To greatly reduce the labeling burden, in this work, we study semi-supervised scene segmentation from robotic surgical video, which is practically essential yet rarely explored before. We consider a clinically suitable annotation situation under the equidistant sampling. We then propose PGV-CL, a novel pseudo-label guided cross-video contrast learning method to boost scene segmentation. It effectively leverages unlabeled data for a trusty and global model regularization that produces more discriminative feature representation. Concretely, for trusty representation learning, we propose to incorporate pseudo labels to instruct the pair selection, obtaining more reliable representation pairs for pixel contrast. Moreover, we expand the representation learning space from previous image-level to cross-video, which can capture the global semantics to benefit the learning process. We extensively evaluate our method on a public robotic surgery dataset EndoVis18 and a public cataract dataset CaDIS. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, consistently outperforming the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods under different labeling ratios, and even surpassing fully supervised training on EndoVis18 with 10.1% labeling.

Yang Yu, Danruo Deng, Furui Liu et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods assume that labeled data, unlabeled data and test data are from the same distribution. Open-set semi-supervised learning (Open-set SSL) considers a more practical scenario, where unlabeled data and test data contain new categories (outliers) not observed in labeled data (inliers). Most previous works focused on outlier detection via binary classifiers, which suffer from insufficient scalability and inability to distinguish different types of uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Adaptive Negative Evidential Deep Learning (ANEDL) to tackle these limitations. Concretely, we first introduce evidential deep learning (EDL) as an outlier detector to quantify different types of uncertainty, and design different uncertainty metrics for self-training and inference. Furthermore, we propose a novel adaptive negative optimization strategy, making EDL more tailored to the unlabeled dataset containing both inliers and outliers. As demonstrated empirically, our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across four datasets.

Binzhu Xie, Shi Qiu, Sicheng Zhang et al.

Robust 3D hand reconstruction in egocentric vision is challenging due to depth ambiguity, self-occlusion, and complex hand-object interactions. Prior methods mitigate these issues by scaling training data or adding auxiliary cues, but they often struggle in unseen contexts. We present EgoHandICL, the first in-context learning (ICL) framework for 3D hand reconstruction that improves semantic alignment, visual consistency, and robustness under challenging egocentric conditions. EgoHandICL introduces complementary exemplar retrieval guided by vision-language models (VLMs), an ICL-tailored tokenizer for multimodal context, and a masked autoencoder (MAE)-based architecture trained with hand-guided geometric and perceptual objectives. Experiments on ARCTIC and EgoExo4D show consistent gains over state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate real-world generalization and improve EgoVLM hand-object interaction reasoning by using reconstructed hands as visual prompts. Code and data: https://github.com/Nicous20/EgoHandICL

Jiaqi Xu, Mengyang Wu, Xiaowei Hu et al.

This paper addresses the limitations of adverse weather image restoration approaches trained on synthetic data when applied to real-world scenarios. We formulate a semi-supervised learning framework employing vision-language models to enhance restoration performance across diverse adverse weather conditions in real-world settings. Our approach involves assessing image clearness and providing semantics using vision-language models on real data, serving as supervision signals for training restoration models. For clearness enhancement, we use real-world data, utilizing a dual-step strategy with pseudo-labels assessed by vision-language models and weather prompt learning. For semantic enhancement, we integrate real-world data by adjusting weather conditions in vision-language model descriptions while preserving semantic meaning. Additionally, we introduce an effective training strategy to bootstrap restoration performance. Our approach achieves superior results in real-world adverse weather image restoration, demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art works.

Juzheng Miao, Cheng Chen, Keli Zhang et al.

One-shot detection of anatomical landmarks is gaining significant attention for its efficiency in using minimal labeled data to produce promising results. However, the success of current methods heavily relies on the employment of extensive unlabeled data to pre-train an effective feature extractor, which limits their applicability in scenarios where a substantial amount of unlabeled data is unavailable. In this paper, we propose the first foundation model-enabled one-shot landmark detection (FM-OSD) framework for accurate landmark detection in medical images by utilizing solely a single template image without any additional unlabeled data. Specifically, we use the frozen image encoder of visual foundation models as the feature extractor, and introduce dual-branch global and local feature decoders to increase the resolution of extracted features in a coarse to fine manner. The introduced feature decoders are efficiently trained with a distance-aware similarity learning loss to incorporate domain knowledge from the single template image. Moreover, a novel bidirectional matching strategy is developed to improve both robustness and accuracy of landmark detection in the case of scattered similarity map obtained by foundation models. We validate our method on two public anatomical landmark detection datasets. By using solely a single template image, our method demonstrates significant superiority over strong state-of-the-art one-shot landmark detection methods.

Zhenghao Xing, Tianyu Wang, Xiaowei Hu et al.

Instance shadow detection, crucial for applications such as photo editing and light direction estimation, has undergone significant advancements in predicting shadow instances, object instances, and their associations. The extension of this task to videos presents challenges in annotating diverse video data and addressing complexities arising from occlusion and temporary disappearances within associations. In response to these challenges, we introduce ViShadow, a semi-supervised video instance shadow detection framework that leverages both labeled image data and unlabeled video data for training. ViShadow features a two-stage training pipeline: the first stage, utilizing labeled image data, identifies shadow and object instances through contrastive learning for cross-frame pairing. The second stage employs unlabeled videos, incorporating an associated cycle consistency loss to enhance tracking ability. A retrieval mechanism is introduced to manage temporary disappearances, ensuring tracking continuity. The SOBA-VID dataset, comprising unlabeled training videos and labeled testing videos, along with the SOAP-VID metric, is introduced for the quantitative evaluation of VISD solutions. The effectiveness of ViShadow is further demonstrated through various video-level applications such as video inpainting, instance cloning, shadow editing, and text-instructed shadow-object manipulation.

Junde Xu, Zikai Lin, Donghao Zhou et al.

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has achieved impressive representative performance with the aim of reconstructing randomly masked images. Despite the empirical success, most previous works have neglected the important fact that it is unreasonable to force the model to reconstruct something beyond recovery, such as those masked objects. In this work, we show that uniformly random masking widely used in previous works unavoidably loses some key objects and changes original semantic information, resulting in a misalignment problem and hurting the representative learning eventually. To address this issue, we augment MIM with a new masking strategy namely the DPPMask by substituting the random process with Determinantal Point Process (DPPs) to reduce the semantic change of the image after masking. Our method is simple yet effective and requires no extra learnable parameters when implemented within various frameworks. In particular, we evaluate our method on two representative MIM frameworks, MAE and iBOT. We show that DPPMask surpassed random sampling under both lower and higher masking ratios, indicating that DPPMask makes the reconstruction task more reasonable. We further test our method on the background challenge and multi-class classification tasks, showing that our method is more robust at various tasks.

Diandian Guo, Xikai Yang, Ruiyang Li et al.

Surgical Video Question Answering (VideoQA) provides a promising paradigm for dynamic intraoperative interpretation, enabling real-time decision support and context-aware retrieval in clinical environments. Nevertheless, existing approaches are predominantly restricted to images or short clips, limiting their ability to model long-range procedural dynamics and causal dependencies across extended surgical workflows. To address this challenge, we propose SurgLQA, a unified long-horizon VideoQA framework for scalable surgical reasoning. This framework incorporates Faithful Temporal Consolidation (FTC), which leverages intrinsic temporal cues to construct compact long-range representations while preserving fine-grained temporal fidelity. Further, we develop Temporally-Grounded Multi-Policy Scaling (TMS), an adaptive test-time inference paradigm that strategically adjusts policy-level reasoning capacity within temporally grounded contexts. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we restructured a long-duration colonoscopy VideoQA benchmark, Colon-LQA, and conducted extensive experiments on Colon-LQA and REAL-Colon-VQA. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves consistent performance gains in long-range reasoning with temporally grounded inference. Code link: https://github.com/RascalGdd/SurgLQA.

Biqi Yang, Weiliang Tang, Xiaojie Gao et al.

In large-scale storehouses, precise instance masks are crucial for robotic bin picking but are challenging to obtain. Existing instance segmentation methods typically rely on a tedious process of scene collection, mask annotation, and network fine-tuning for every single Stock Keeping Unit (SKU). This paper presents SKU-Patch, a new patch-guided instance segmentation solution, leveraging only a few image patches for each incoming new SKU to predict accurate and robust masks, without tedious manual effort and model re-training. Technical-wise, we design a novel transformer-based network with (i) a patch-image correlation encoder to capture multi-level image features calibrated by patch information and (ii) a patch-aware transformer decoder with parallel task heads to generate instance masks. Extensive experiments on four storehouse benchmarks manifest that SKU-Patch is able to achieve the best performance over the state-of-the-art methods. Also, SKU-Patch yields an average of nearly 100% grasping success rate on more than 50 unseen SKUs in a robot-aided auto-store logistic pipeline, showing its effectiveness and practicality.

Chen Liang, Bowen Wang, Shaogang Hao et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have drawn more and more attention from material scientists and demonstrated a high capacity to establish connections between the structure and properties. However, with only unrelaxed structures provided as input, few GNN models can predict the thermodynamic properties of relaxed configurations with an acceptable level of error. In this work, we develop a multi-task (MT) architecture based on DimeNet++ and mixture density networks to improve the performance of such task. Taking CO adsorption on Cu-based single-atom alloy catalysts as an illustration, we show that our method can reliably estimate CO adsorption energy with a mean absolute error of 0.087 eV from the initial CO adsorption structures without costly first-principles calculations. Further, compared to other state-of-the-art GNN methods, our model exhibits improved generalization ability when predicting catalytic performance of out-of-domain configurations, built with either unseen substrate surfaces or doping species. We show that the proposed MT GNN strategy can facilitate catalyst discovery.

Kexin Chen, Guangyong Chen, Junyou Li et al.

Artificial intelligence has deeply revolutionized the field of medicinal chemistry with many impressive applications, but the success of these applications requires a massive amount of training samples with high-quality annotations, which seriously limits the wide usage of data-driven methods. In this paper, we focus on the reaction yield prediction problem, which assists chemists in selecting high-yield reactions in a new chemical space only with a few experimental trials. To attack this challenge, we first put forth MetaRF, an attention-based differentiable random forest model specially designed for the few-shot yield prediction, where the attention weight of a random forest is automatically optimized by the meta-learning framework and can be quickly adapted to predict the performance of new reagents while given a few additional samples. To improve the few-shot learning performance, we further introduce a dimension-reduction based sampling method to determine valuable samples to be experimentally tested and then learned. Our methodology is evaluated on three different datasets and acquires satisfactory performance on few-shot prediction. In high-throughput experimentation (HTE) datasets, the average yield of our methodology's top 10 high-yield reactions is relatively close to the results of ideal yield selection.

Kaixiang Yang, Wenqi Shan, Xudong Li et al.

Multi-modal brain tumor segmentation typically involves four magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modalities, while incomplete modalities significantly degrade performance. Existing solutions employ explicit or implicit modality adaptation, aligning features across modalities or learning a fused feature robust to modality incompleteness. They share a common goal of encouraging each modality to express both itself and the others. However, the two expression abilities are entangled as a whole in a seamless feature space, resulting in prohibitive learning burdens. In this paper, we propose DeMoSeg to enhance the modality adaptation by Decoupling the task of representing the ego and other Modalities for robust incomplete multi-modal Segmentation. The decoupling is super lightweight by simply using two convolutions to map each modality onto four feature sub-spaces. The first sub-space expresses itself (Self-feature), while the remaining sub-spaces substitute for other modalities (Mutual-features). The Self- and Mutual-features interactively guide each other through a carefully-designed Channel-wised Sparse Self-Attention (CSSA). After that, a Radiologist-mimic Cross-modality expression Relationships (RCR) is introduced to have available modalities provide Self-feature and also `lend' their Mutual-features to compensate for the absent ones by exploiting the clinical prior knowledge. The benchmark results on BraTS2020, BraTS2018 and BraTS2015 verify the DeMoSeg's superiority thanks to the alleviated modality adaptation difficulty. Concretely, for BraTS2020, DeMoSeg increases Dice by at least 0.92%, 2.95% and 4.95% on whole tumor, tumor core and enhanced tumor regions, respectively, compared to other state-of-the-arts. Codes are at https://github.com/kk42yy/DeMoSeg

Fan Zhang, Haoxuan Li, Shengju Qian et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have revolutionized numerous research fields, including computer vision and affective computing. As a pivotal challenge in this interdisciplinary domain, facial expression recognition (FER) has evolved from separate, domain-specific models to more unified approaches. One promising avenue to unify FER tasks is converting conventional FER datasets into visual question-answering (VQA) formats, enabling the direct application of powerful generalist MLLMs for inference. However, despite the success of cutting-edge MLLMs in various tasks, their performance on FER tasks remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we provide FERBench, a systematic benchmark that incorporates 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs across four widely used FER datasets. Our results reveal that, while MLLMs exhibit good classification performance, they still face significant limitations in reasoning and interpretability. To this end, we introduce post-training strategies aimed at enhancing the facial expression reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Specifically, we curate two high-quality and large-scale datasets: UniFER-CoT-230K for cold-start initialization and UniFER-RLVR-360K for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), respectively. Building upon them, we develop a unified and interpretable FER foundation model termed UniFER-7B, which outperforms many open-sourced and closed-source generalist MLLMs (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro and Qwen2.5-VL-72B).

Ruize Cui, Jialun Pei, Haiqiao Wang et al.

In laparoscopic liver surgery, augmented reality technology enhances intraoperative anatomical guidance by overlaying 3D liver models from preoperative CT/MRI onto laparoscopic 2D views. However, existing registration methods lack explicit modeling of reliable 2D-3D geometric correspondences supported by latent evidence, leading to limited interpretability and potentially unstable alignment in clinical scenarios. In this work, we introduce Land-Reg, a correspondence-driven deformable registration framework that explicitly learns latent-grounded 2D-3D landmark correspondences as an interpretable intermediate representation to bridge cross-modal alignment. For rigid registration, Land-Reg embraces a Cross-modal Latent Alignment module to map multi-modal features into a unified latent space. Further, an Uncertainty-enhanced Overlap Landmark Detector with similarity matching is proposed to robustly estimate explicit 2D-3D landmark correspondences. For non-rigid registration, we design a novel shape-constrained supervision strategy that anchors shape deformation to matched landmarks through reprojection consistency and incorporates local-isometric regularization to alleviate inherent 2D-3D depth ambiguity, while a rendered-mask alignment enforces global shape consistency. Experimental results on the P2ILF dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method on both rigid pose estimation and non-rigid deformation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/cuiruize/Land-Reg.

Zhuoyang Liu, Jiaming Liu, Hao Chen et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong generalization, with some approaches seeking to explicitly generate linguistic reasoning traces or predict future observations prior to execution. However, explicit reasoning typically incurs non-negligible inference latency, which constrains the temporal resolution required for robotic manipulation. Moreover, such reasoning is confined to the linguistic space, imposing a representational bottleneck that struggles to faithfully capture ineffable physical attributes. To mitigate these limitations, we propose LaST$_0$, a framework that enables efficient reasoning before acting through a Latent Spatio-Temporal Chain-of-Thought (CoT), capturing fine-grained physical and robotic dynamics that are often difficult to verbalize. Specifically, we introduce a token-efficient latent CoT space that models future visual dynamics, 3D structural information, and robot proprioceptive states, and further extends these representations across time to enable temporally consistent implicit reasoning trajectories. Furthermore, LaST$_0$ adopts a dual-system architecture implemented via a Mixture-of-Transformers design, where a reasoning expert conducts low-frequency latent inference and an acting expert generates high-frequency actions conditioned on robotics-oriented latent representations. To facilitate coordination, LaST$_0$ is trained with heterogeneous operation frequencies, enabling adaptive switching during deployment. Across 10 real-world tasks spanning tabletop, mobile, and dexterous hand manipulation, LaST$_0$ improves mean success rates by 13%, 14% and 14% over prior SOTA VLA methods, respectively.

Xiaowei Hu, Zhenghao Xing, Tianyu Wang et al.

Shadows, formed by the occlusion of light, play an essential role in visual perception and directly influence scene understanding, image quality, and visual realism. This paper presents a unified survey and benchmark of deep-learning-based shadow detection, removal, and generation across images and videos. We introduce consistent taxonomies for architectures, supervision strategies, and learning paradigms; review major datasets and evaluation protocols; and re-train representative methods under standardized settings to enable fair comparison. Our benchmark reveals key findings, including inconsistencies in prior reports, strong dependence on model design and resolution, and limited cross-dataset generalization due to dataset bias. By synthesizing insights across the three tasks, we highlight shared illumination cues and priors that connect detection, removal, and generation. We further outline future directions involving unified all-in-one frameworks, semantics- and geometry-aware reasoning, shadow-based AIGC authenticity analysis, and the integration of physics-guided priors into multimodal foundation models. Corrected datasets, trained models, and evaluation tools are released to support reproducible research.

Yusong Wang, Chaoran Cheng, Shaoning Li et al.

Geometric graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for modeling molecular geometry. However, they encounter limitations in effectively capturing long-range interactions in large molecular systems. To address this challenge, we introduce Neural P$^3$M, a versatile enhancer of geometric GNNs to expand the scope of their capabilities by incorporating mesh points alongside atoms and reimaging traditional mathematical operations in a trainable manner. Neural P$^3$M exhibits flexibility across a wide range of molecular systems and demonstrates remarkable accuracy in predicting energies and forces, outperforming on benchmarks such as the MD22 dataset. It also achieves an average improvement of 22% on the OE62 dataset while integrating with various architectures.