Tieliang Gong

Yuxin Dong, Tieliang Gong, Shujian Yu et al.

The Matrix-based Renyi's entropy enables us to directly measure information quantities from given data without the costly probability density estimation of underlying distributions, thus has been widely adopted in numerous statistical learning and inference tasks. However, exactly calculating this new information quantity requires access to the eigenspectrum of a semi-positive definite (SPD) matrix $A$ which grows linearly with the number of samples $n$, resulting in a $O(n^3)$ time complexity that is prohibitive for large-scale applications. To address this issue, this paper takes advantage of stochastic trace approximations for matrix-based Renyi's entropy with arbitrary $α\in R^+$ orders, lowering the complexity by converting the entropy approximation to a matrix-vector multiplication problem. Specifically, we develop random approximations for integer order $α$ cases and polynomial series approximations (Taylor and Chebyshev) for non-integer $α$ cases, leading to a $O(n^2sm)$ overall time complexity, where $s,m \ll n$ denote the number of vector queries and the polynomial order respectively. We theoretically establish statistical guarantees for all approximation algorithms and give explicit order of s and m with respect to the approximation error $\varepsilon$, showing optimal convergence rate for both parameters up to a logarithmic factor. Large-scale simulations and real-world applications validate the effectiveness of the developed approximations, demonstrating remarkable speedup with negligible loss in accuracy.

Yuxin Dong, Tieliang Gong, Shujian Yu et al.

The matrix-based Rényi's entropy allows us to directly quantify information measures from given data, without explicit estimation of the underlying probability distribution. This intriguing property makes it widely applied in statistical inference and machine learning tasks. However, this information theoretical quantity is not robust against noise in the data, and is computationally prohibitive in large-scale applications. To address these issues, we propose a novel measure of information, termed low-rank matrix-based Rényi's entropy, based on low-rank representations of infinitely divisible kernel matrices. The proposed entropy functional inherits the specialty of of the original definition to directly quantify information from data, but enjoys additional advantages including robustness and effective calculation. Specifically, our low-rank variant is more sensitive to informative perturbations induced by changes in underlying distributions, while being insensitive to uninformative ones caused by noises. Moreover, low-rank Rényi's entropy can be efficiently approximated by random projection and Lanczos iteration techniques, reducing the overall complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n^2 s)$ or even $\mathcal{O}(ns^2)$, where $n$ is the number of data samples and $s \ll n$. We conduct large-scale experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of this new information measure, demonstrating superior results compared to matrix-based Rényi's entropy in terms of both performance and computational efficiency.

Jun Chen, Hong Chen, Xue Jiang et al.

Triplet learning, i.e. learning from triplet data, has attracted much attention in computer vision tasks with an extremely large number of categories, e.g., face recognition and person re-identification. Albeit with rapid progress in designing and applying triplet learning algorithms, there is a lacking study on the theoretical understanding of their generalization performance. To fill this gap, this paper investigates the generalization guarantees of triplet learning by leveraging the stability analysis. Specifically, we establish the first general high-probability generalization bound for the triplet learning algorithm satisfying the uniform stability, and then obtain the excess risk bounds of the order $O(n^{-\frac{1}{2}} \mathrm{log}n)$ for both stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and regularized risk minimization (RRM), where $2n$ is approximately equal to the number of training samples. Moreover, an optimistic generalization bound in expectation as fast as $O(n^{-1})$ is derived for RRM in a low noise case via the on-average stability analysis. Finally, our results are applied to triplet metric learning to characterize its theoretical underpinning.

Jiahao Wang, Caixia Yan, Weizhan Zhang et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models significantly enhance the efficiency of artistic creation with high-fidelity image generation. However, in typical application scenarios like comic book production, they can neither place each subject into its expected spot nor maintain the consistent appearance of each subject across images. For these issues, we pioneer a novel task, Layout-to-Consistent-Image (L2CI) generation, which produces consistent and compositional images in accordance with the given layout conditions and text prompts. To accomplish this challenging task, we present a new formalization of dual energy guidance with optimization in a dual semantic-latent space and thus propose a training-free pipeline, SpotActor, which features a layout-conditioned backward update stage and a consistent forward sampling stage. In the backward stage, we innovate a nuanced layout energy function to mimic the attention activations with a sigmoid-like objective. While in the forward stage, we design Regional Interconnection Self-Attention (RISA) and Semantic Fusion Cross-Attention (SFCA) mechanisms that allow mutual interactions across images. To evaluate the performance, we present ActorBench, a specified benchmark with hundreds of reasonable prompt-box pairs stemming from object detection datasets. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The results prove that SpotActor fulfills the expectations of this task and showcases the potential for practical applications with superior layout alignment, subject consistency, prompt conformity and background diversity.

Xuebin Zhao, Hong Chen, Yingjie Wang et al.

Recently, the scheme of model-X knockoffs was proposed as a promising solution to address controlled feature selection under high-dimensional finite-sample settings. However, the procedure of model-X knockoffs depends heavily on the coefficient-based feature importance and only concerns the control of false discovery rate (FDR). To further improve its adaptivity and flexibility, in this paper, we propose an error-based knockoff inference method by integrating the knockoff features, the error-based feature importance statistics, and the stepdown procedure together. The proposed inference procedure does not require specifying a regression model and can handle feature selection with theoretical guarantees on controlling false discovery proportion (FDP), FDR, or k-familywise error rate (k-FWER). Empirical evaluations demonstrate the competitive performance of our approach on both simulated and real data.

Huiting Huang, Tieliang Gong, Kai He et al.

Multimodal sentiment analysis has received significant attention across diverse research domains. Despite advancements in algorithm design, existing approaches suffer from two critical limitations: insufficient learning of noise-contaminated unimodal data, leading to corrupted cross-modal interactions, and inadequate fusion of multimodal representations, resulting in discarding discriminative unimodal information while retaining multimodal redundant information. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Double Information Bottleneck (DIB) strategy to obtain a powerful, unified compact multimodal representation. Implemented within the framework of low-rank Renyi's entropy functional, DIB offers enhanced robustness against diverse noise sources and computational tractability for high-dimensional data, as compared to the conventional Shannon entropy-based methods. The DIB comprises two key modules: 1) learning a sufficient and compressed representation of individual unimodal data by maximizing the task-relevant information and discarding the superfluous information, and 2) ensuring the discriminative ability of multimodal representation through a novel attention bottleneck fusion mechanism. Consequently, DIB yields a multimodal representation that effectively filters out noisy information from unimodal data while capturing inter-modal complementarity. Extensive experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, CH-SIMS, and MVSA-Single validate the effectiveness of our method. The model achieves 47.4% accuracy under the Acc-7 metric on CMU-MOSI and 81.63% F1-score on CH-SIMS, outperforming the second-best baseline by 1.19%. Under noise, it shows only 0.36% and 0.29% performance degradation on CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI respectively.

Xuelin Zhang, Hong Chen, Yingjie Wang et al.

Semi-supervised learning with manifold regularization is a classical framework for jointly learning from both labeled and unlabeled data, where the key requirement is that the support of the unknown marginal distribution has the geometric structure of a Riemannian manifold. Typically, the Laplace-Beltrami operator-based manifold regularization can be approximated empirically by the Laplacian regularization associated with the entire training data and its corresponding graph Laplacian matrix. However, the graph Laplacian matrix depends heavily on the prespecified similarity metric and may lead to inappropriate penalties when dealing with redundant or noisy input variables. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a new \textit{Semi-Supervised Meta Additive Model (S$^2$MAM) based on a bilevel optimization scheme that automatically identifies informative variables, updates the similarity matrix, and simultaneously achieves interpretable predictions. Theoretical guarantees are provided for S$^2$MAM, including the computing convergence and the statistical generalization bound. Experimental assessments across 4 synthetic and 12 real-world datasets, with varying levels and categories of corruption, validate the robustness and interpretability of the proposed approach.

Mengfei Xia, Nan Xue, Yujun Shen et al.

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), which combines the conditional and unconditional score functions with two coefficients summing to one, serves as a practical technique for diffusion model sampling. Theoretically, however, denoising with CFG \textit{cannot} be expressed as a reciprocal diffusion process, which may consequently leave some hidden risks during use. In this work, we revisit the theory behind CFG and rigorously confirm that the improper configuration of the combination coefficients (\textit{i.e.}, the widely used summing-to-one version) brings about expectation shift of the generative distribution. To rectify this issue, we propose ReCFG with a relaxation on the guidance coefficients such that denoising with \method strictly aligns with the diffusion theory. We further show that our approach enjoys a \textbf{\textit{closed-form}} solution given the guidance strength. That way, the rectified coefficients can be readily pre-computed via traversing the observed data, leaving the sampling speed barely affected. Empirical evidence on real-world data demonstrate the compatibility of our post-hoc design with existing state-of-the-art diffusion models, including both class-conditioned ones (\textit{e.g.}, EDM2 on ImageNet) and text-conditioned ones (\textit{e.g.}, SD3 on CC12M), without any retraining. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/thuxmf/recfg}{https://github.com/thuxmf/recfg}.

King-Siong Si, Lu Sun, Weizhan Zhang et al.

Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is an indispensable post-processing step in object detection. With the continuous optimization of network models, NMS has become the ``last mile'' to enhance the efficiency of object detection. This paper systematically analyzes NMS from a graph theory perspective for the first time, revealing its intrinsic structure. Consequently, we propose two optimization methods, namely QSI-NMS and BOE-NMS. The former is a fast recursive divide-and-conquer algorithm with negligible mAP loss, and its extended version (eQSI-NMS) achieves optimal complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$. The latter, concentrating on the locality of NMS, achieves an optimization at a constant level without an mAP loss penalty. Moreover, to facilitate rapid evaluation of NMS methods for researchers, we introduce NMS-Bench, the first benchmark designed to comprehensively assess various NMS methods. Taking the YOLOv8-N model on MS COCO 2017 as the benchmark setup, our method QSI-NMS provides $6.2\times$ speed of original NMS on the benchmark, with a $0.1\%$ decrease in mAP. The optimal eQSI-NMS, with only a $0.3\%$ mAP decrease, achieves $10.7\times$ speed. Meanwhile, BOE-NMS exhibits $5.1\times$ speed with no compromise in mAP.

Huankun Sheng, Ming Li, Yixiang Wei et al.

Recent advances in object-centric representation learning have shown that slot attention-based methods can effectively decompose visual scenes into object slot representations without supervision. However, existing approaches typically process foreground and background regions indiscriminately, often resulting in background interference and suboptimal instance discovery performance on real-world data. To address this limitation, we propose Foreground-Aware Slot Attention (FASA), a two-stage framework that explicitly separates foreground from background to enable precise object discovery. In the first stage, FASA performs a coarse scene decomposition to distinguish foreground from background regions through a dual-slot competition mechanism. These slots are initialized via a clustering-based strategy, yielding well-structured representations of salient regions. In the second stage, we introduce a masked slot attention mechanism where the first slot captures the background while the remaining slots compete to represent individual foreground objects. To further address over-segmentation of foreground objects, we incorporate pseudo-mask guidance derived from a patch affinity graph constructed with self-supervised image features to guide the learning of foreground slots. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that FASA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of explicit foreground modeling and pseudo-mask guidance for robust scene decomposition and object-coherent representation. Code will be made publicly available.

Yanan Chen, Tieliang Gong, Yunjiao Zhang et al.

Continual Learning (CL) aims to enable models to sequentially learn multiple tasks without forgetting previous knowledge. Recent studies have shown that optimizing towards flatter loss minima can improve model generalization. However, existing sharpness-aware methods for CL suffer from two key limitations: (1) they treat sharpness regularization as a unified signal without distinguishing the contributions of its components. and (2) they introduce substantial computational overhead that impedes practical deployment. To address these challenges, we propose FLAD, a novel optimization framework that decomposes sharpness-aware perturbations into gradient-aligned and stochastic-noise components, and show that retaining only the noise component promotes generalization. We further introduce a lightweight scheduling scheme that enables FLAD to maintain significant performance gains even under constrained training time. FLAD can be seamlessly integrated into various CL paradigms and consistently outperforms standard and sharpness-aware optimizers in diverse experimental settings, demonstrating its effectiveness and practicality in CL.

Jiangbo Shi, Chen Li, Tieliang Gong et al.

Multiple instance learning (MIL)-based framework has become the mainstream for processing the whole slide image (WSI) with giga-pixel size and hierarchical image context in digital pathology. However, these methods heavily depend on a substantial number of bag-level labels and solely learn from the original slides, which are easily affected by variations in data distribution. Recently, vision language model (VLM)-based methods introduced the language prior by pre-training on large-scale pathological image-text pairs. However, the previous text prompt lacks the consideration of pathological prior knowledge, therefore does not substantially boost the model's performance. Moreover, the collection of such pairs and the pre-training process are very time-consuming and source-intensive.To solve the above problems, we propose a dual-scale vision-language multiple instance learning (ViLa-MIL) framework for whole slide image classification. Specifically, we propose a dual-scale visual descriptive text prompt based on the frozen large language model (LLM) to boost the performance of VLM effectively. To transfer the VLM to process WSI efficiently, for the image branch, we propose a prototype-guided patch decoder to aggregate the patch features progressively by grouping similar patches into the same prototype; for the text branch, we introduce a context-guided text decoder to enhance the text features by incorporating the multi-granular image contexts. Extensive studies on three multi-cancer and multi-center subtyping datasets demonstrate the superiority of ViLa-MIL.

Xuelin Zhang, Hong Chen, Bin Gu et al.

Stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) has been integrated into many machine learning paradigms recently, including hyperparameter optimization, meta learning, and reinforcement learning. Along with the wide range of applications, there have been numerous studies on the computational behavior of SBO. However, the generalization guarantees of SBO methods are far less understood from the lens of statistical learning theory. In this paper, we provide a systematic generalization analysis of the first-order gradient-based bilevel optimization methods. Firstly, we establish the quantitative connections between the on-average argument stability and the generalization gap of SBO methods. Then, we derive the upper bounds of on-average argument stability for single-timescale stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and two-timescale SGD, where three settings (nonconvex-nonconvex (NC-NC), convex-convex (C-C), and strongly-convex-strongly-convex (SC-SC)) are considered respectively. Experimental analysis validates our theoretical findings. Compared with the previous algorithmic stability analysis, our results do not require reinitializing the inner-level parameters at each iteration and are applicable to more general objective functions.

Jiahao Wang, Caixia Yan, Haonan Lin et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models benefit artists with high-quality image generation. Yet their stochastic nature hinders artists from creating consistent images of the same subject. Existing methods try to tackle this challenge and generate consistent content in various ways. However, they either depend on external restricted data or require expensive tuning of the diffusion model. For this issue, we propose a novel one-shot tuning paradigm, termed OneActor. It efficiently performs consistent subject generation solely driven by prompts via a learned semantic guidance to bypass the laborious backbone tuning. We lead the way to formalize the objective of consistent subject generation from a clustering perspective, and thus design a cluster-conditioned model. To mitigate the overfitting challenge shared by one-shot tuning pipelines, we augment the tuning with auxiliary samples and devise two inference strategies: semantic interpolation and cluster guidance. These techniques are later verified to significantly improve the generation quality. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms a variety of baselines with satisfactory subject consistency, superior prompt conformity as well as high image quality. Our method is capable of multi-subject generation and compatible with popular diffusion extensions. Besides, we achieve a 4 times faster tuning speed than tuning-based baselines and, if desired, avoid increasing the inference time. Furthermore, our method can be naturally utilized to pre-train a consistent subject generation network from scratch, which will implement this research task into more practical applications. (Project page: https://johnneywang.github.io/OneActor-webpage/)

Wen Wen, Tieliang Gong, Yunjiao Zhang et al.

Continual learning (CL) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for acquiring knowledge from sequential tasks while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Although many CL methods have been proposed to show impressive empirical performance, the theoretical understanding of their generalization behavior remains limited, particularly for replay-based approaches. In this paper, we establish a unified theoretical framework for replay-based CL, deriving a series of information-theoretic bounds that explicitly characterize how the memory buffer interacts with the current task to affect generalization. Specifically, our hypothesis-based bounds reveal that utilizing the limited exemplars of previous tasks alongside the current task data, rather than exhaustive replay, facilitates improved generalization while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, our prediction-based bounds yield tighter and computationally tractable upper bounds of the generalization gap through the use of low-dimensional variables. Our analysis is general and broadly applicable to a wide range of learning algorithms, exemplified by stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) as a representative method. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our derived bounds in capturing the generalization dynamics in replay-based CL settings.

Yuanhong Zhang, Muyao Yuan, Weizhan Zhang et al.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a vision foundation model, exhibits impressive zero-shot capabilities in general tasks but struggles in specialized domains. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is a promising approach to unleash the potential of SAM in novel scenarios. However, existing PEFT methods for SAM neglect the domain-invariant relations encoded in the pre-trained model. To bridge this gap, we propose InfoSAM, an information-theoretic approach that enhances SAM fine-tuning by distilling and preserving its pre-trained segmentation knowledge. Specifically, we formulate the knowledge transfer process as two novel mutual information-based objectives: (i) to compress the domain-invariant relation extracted from pre-trained SAM, excluding pseudo-invariant information as possible, and (ii) to maximize mutual information between the relational knowledge learned by the teacher (pre-trained SAM) and the student (fine-tuned model). The proposed InfoSAM establishes a robust distillation framework for PEFT of SAM. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks validate InfoSAM's effectiveness in improving SAM family's performance on real-world tasks, demonstrating its adaptability and superiority in handling specialized scenarios.

Wen Wen, Tieliang Gong, Yuxin Dong et al.

Multiview learning has drawn widespread attention for its efficacy in leveraging cross-view consensus and complementarity information to achieve a comprehensive representation of data. While multi-view learning has undergone vigorous development and achieved remarkable success, the theoretical understanding of its generalization behavior remains elusive. This paper aims to bridge this gap by developing information-theoretic generalization bounds for multi-view learning, with a particular focus on multi-view reconstruction and classification tasks. Our bounds underscore the importance of capturing both consensus and complementary information from multiple different views to achieve maximally disentangled representations. These results also indicate that applying the multi-view information bottleneck regularizer is beneficial for satisfactory generalization performance. Additionally, we derive novel data-dependent bounds under both leave-one-out and supersample settings, yielding computational tractable and tighter bounds. In the interpolating regime, we further establish the fast-rate bound for multi-view learning, exhibiting a faster convergence rate compared to conventional square-root bounds. Numerical results indicate a strong correlation between the true generalization gap and the derived bounds across various learning scenarios.

Wen Wen, Tieliang Gong, Yuxin Dong et al.

In recent years, information-theoretic generalization bounds have gained increasing attention for analyzing the generalization capabilities of meta-learning algorithms. However, existing results are confined to two-step bounds, failing to provide a sharper characterization of the meta-generalization gap that simultaneously accounts for environment-level and task-level dependencies. This paper addresses this fundamental limitation by developing a unified information-theoretic framework using a single-step derivation. The resulting meta-generalization bounds, expressed in terms of diverse information measures, exhibit substantial advantages over previous work, particularly in terms of tightness, scaling behavior associated with sampled tasks and samples per task, and computational tractability. Furthermore, through gradient covariance analysis, we provide new theoretical insights into the generalization properties of two classes of noisy and iterative meta-learning algorithms, where the meta-learner uses either the entire meta-training data (e.g., Reptile), or separate training and test data within the task (e.g., model agnostic meta-learning (MAML)). Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the derived bounds in capturing the generalization dynamics of meta-learning.

Yuxin Dong, Tieliang Gong, Hong Chen et al.

Domain generalization aims to learn invariance across multiple training domains, thereby enhancing generalization against out-of-distribution data. While gradient or representation matching algorithms have achieved remarkable success, these methods generally lack generalization guarantees or depend on strong assumptions, leaving a gap in understanding the underlying mechanism of distribution matching. In this work, we formulate domain generalization from a novel probabilistic perspective, ensuring robustness while avoiding overly conservative solutions. Through comprehensive information-theoretic analysis, we provide key insights into the roles of gradient and representation matching in promoting generalization. Our results reveal the complementary relationship between these two components, indicating that existing works focusing solely on either gradient or representation alignment are insufficient to solve the domain generalization problem. In light of these theoretical findings, we introduce IDM to simultaneously align the inter-domain gradients and representations. Integrated with the proposed PDM method for complex distribution matching, IDM achieves superior performance over various baseline methods.

Yuxin Dong, Tieliang Gong, Hong Chen et al.

Recently, information theoretic analysis has become a popular framework for understanding the generalization behavior of deep neural networks. It allows a direct analysis for stochastic gradient/Langevin descent (SGD/SGLD) learning algorithms without strong assumptions such as Lipschitz or convexity conditions. However, the current generalization error bounds within this framework are still far from optimal, while substantial improvements on these bounds are quite challenging due to the intractability of high-dimensional information quantities. To address this issue, we first propose a novel information theoretical measure: kernelized Renyi's entropy, by utilizing operator representation in Hilbert space. It inherits the properties of Shannon's entropy and can be effectively calculated via simple random sampling, while remaining independent of the input dimension. We then establish the generalization error bounds for SGD/SGLD under kernelized Renyi's entropy, where the mutual information quantities can be directly calculated, enabling evaluation of the tightness of each intermediate step. We show that our information-theoretical bounds depend on the statistics of the stochastic gradients evaluated along with the iterates, and are rigorously tighter than the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. The theoretical findings are also supported by large-scale empirical studies1.

Tieliang Gong, Yuxin Dong, Shujian Yu et al.

The recently developed matrix based Renyi's entropy enables measurement of information in data simply using the eigenspectrum of symmetric positive semi definite (PSD) matrices in reproducing kernel Hilbert space, without estimation of the underlying data distribution. This intriguing property makes the new information measurement widely adopted in multiple statistical inference and learning tasks. However, the computation of such quantity involves the trace operator on a PSD matrix $G$ to power $α$(i.e., $tr(G^α)$), with a normal complexity of nearly $O(n^3)$, which severely hampers its practical usage when the number of samples (i.e., $n$) is large. In this work, we present computationally efficient approximations to this new entropy functional that can reduce its complexity to even significantly less than $O(n^2)$. To this end, we leverage the recent progress on Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra, developing Taylor, Chebyshev and Lanczos approximations to $tr(G^α)$ for arbitrary values of $α$ by converting it into matrix-vector multiplications problem. We also establish the connection between the matrix-based Renyi's entropy and PSD matrix approximation, which enables exploiting both clustering and block low-rank structure of $G$ to further reduce the computational cost. We theoretically provide approximation accuracy guarantees and illustrate the properties of different approximations. Large-scale experimental evaluations on both synthetic and real-world data corroborate our theoretical findings, showing promising speedup with negligible loss in accuracy.

Tieliang Gong, Yuxin Dong, Hong Chen et al.

Subsampling is an important technique to tackle the computational challenges brought by big data. Many subsampling procedures fall within the framework of importance sampling, which assigns high sampling probabilities to the samples appearing to have big impacts. When the noise level is high, those sampling procedures tend to pick many outliers and thus often do not perform satisfactorily in practice. To tackle this issue, we design a new Markov subsampling strategy based on Huber criterion (HMS) to construct an informative subset from the noisy full data; the constructed subset then serves as a refined working data for efficient processing. HMS is built upon a Metropolis-Hasting procedure, where the inclusion probability of each sampling unit is determined using the Huber criterion to prevent over scoring the outliers. Under mild conditions, we show that the estimator based on the subsamples selected by HMS is statistically consistent with a sub-Gaussian deviation bound. The promising performance of HMS is demonstrated by extensive studies on large scale simulations and real data examples.

Jiangbo Shi, Chang Jia, Zeyu Gao et al.

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental task in digital pathology analysis and can be automated by deep learning-based methods. However, the development of such an automated method requires a large amount of data with precisely annotated masks which is hard to obtain. Training with weakly labeled data is a popular solution for reducing the workload of annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning-based nuclei segmentation method which follows the label correction paradigm to leverage data with noisy masks. Specifically, we design a fully conventional meta-model that can correct noisy masks using a small amount of clean meta-data. Then the corrected masks can be used to supervise the training of the segmentation model. Meanwhile, a bi-level optimization method is adopted to alternately update the parameters of the main segmentation model and the meta-model in an end-to-end way. Extensive experimental results on two nuclear segmentation datasets show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art result. It even achieves comparable performance with the model training on supervised data in some noisy settings.

Jialun Wu, Anyu Mao, Xinrui Bao et al.

Digital pathology plays a crucial role in the development of artificial intelligence in the medical field. The digital pathology platform can make the pathological resources digital and networked, and realize the permanent storage of visual data and the synchronous browsing processing without the limitation of time and space. It has been widely used in various fields of pathology. However, there is still a lack of an open and universal digital pathology platform to assist doctors in the management and analysis of digital pathological sections, as well as the management and structured description of relevant patient information. Most platforms cannot integrate image viewing, annotation and analysis, and text information management. To solve the above problems, we propose a comprehensive and extensible platform PIMIP. Our PIMIP has developed the image annotation functions based on the visualization of digital pathological sections. Our annotation functions support multi-user collaborative annotation and multi-device annotation, and realize the automation of some annotation tasks. In the annotation task, we invited a professional pathologist for guidance. We introduce a machine learning module for image analysis. The data we collected included public data from local hospitals and clinical examples. Our platform is more clinical and suitable for clinical use. In addition to image data, we also structured the management and display of text information. So our platform is comprehensive. The platform framework is built in a modular way to support users to add machine learning modules independently, which makes our platform extensible.

Jialun Wu, Yang Liu, Zeyu Gao et al.

Constructing large-scaled medical knowledge graphs can significantly boost healthcare applications for medical surveillance, bring much attention from recent research. An essential step in constructing large-scale MKG is extracting information from medical reports. Recently, information extraction techniques have been proposed and show promising performance in biomedical information extraction. However, these methods only consider limited types of entity and relation due to the noisy biomedical text data with complex entity correlations. Thus, they fail to provide enough information for constructing MKGs and restrict the downstream applications. To address this issue, we propose Biomedical Information Extraction, a hybrid neural network to extract relations from biomedical text and unstructured medical reports. Our model utilizes a multi-head attention enhanced graph convolutional network to capture the complex relations and context information while resisting the noise from the data. We evaluate our model on two major biomedical relationship extraction tasks, chemical-disease relation and chemical-protein interaction, and a cross-hospital pan-cancer pathology report corpus. The results show that our method achieves superior performance than baselines. Furthermore, we evaluate the applicability of our method under a transfer learning setting and show that BioIE achieves promising performance in processing medical text from different formats and writing styles.

Jialun Wu, Zeyu Gao, Haichuan Zhang et al.

Personalized diagnoses have not been possible due to sear amount of data pathologists have to bear during the day-to-day routine. This lead to the current generalized standards that are being continuously updated as new findings are reported. It is noticeable that these effective standards are developed based on a multi-source heterogeneous data, including whole-slide images and pathology and clinical reports. In this study, we propose a framework that combines pathological images and medical reports to generate a personalized diagnosis result for individual patient. We use nuclei-level image feature similarity and content-based deep learning method to search for a personalized group of population with similar pathological characteristics, extract structured prognostic information from descriptive pathology reports of the similar patient population, and assign importance of different prognostic factors to generate a personalized pathological diagnosis result. We use multi-source heterogeneous data from TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) database. The result demonstrate that our framework matches the performance of pathologists in the diagnosis of renal cell carcinoma. This framework is designed to be generic, thus could be applied for other types of cancer. The weights could provide insights to the known prognostic factors and further guide more precise clinical treatment protocols.

Anyu Mao, Jialun Wu, Xinrui Bao et al.

Pathological diagnosis is the gold standard for cancer diagnosis, but it is labor-intensive, in which tasks such as cell detection, classification, and counting are particularly prominent. A common solution for automating these tasks is using nucleus segmentation technology. However, it is hard to train a robust nucleus segmentation model, due to several challenging problems, the nucleus adhesion, stacking, and excessive fusion with the background. Recently, some researchers proposed a series of automatic nucleus segmentation methods based on point annotation, which can significant improve the model performance. Nevertheless, the point annotation needs to be marked by experienced pathologists. In order to take advantage of segmentation methods based on point annotation, further alleviate the manual workload, and make cancer diagnosis more efficient and accurate, it is necessary to develop an automatic nucleus detection algorithm, which can automatically and efficiently locate the position of the nucleus in the pathological image and extract valuable information for pathologists. In this paper, we propose a W-shaped network for automatic nucleus detection. Different from the traditional U-Net based method, mapping the original pathology image to the target mask directly, our proposed method split the detection task into two sub-tasks. The first sub-task maps the original pathology image to the binary mask, then the binary mask is mapped to the density mask in the second sub-task. After the task is split, the task's difficulty is significantly reduced, and the network's overall performance is improved.

Jialun Wu, Haichuan Zhang, Zeyu Gao et al.

Diagnostic pathology, which is the basis and gold standard of cancer diagnosis, provides essential information on the prognosis of the disease and vital evidence for clinical treatment. Tumor region detection, subtype and grade classification are the fundamental diagnostic indicators for renal cell carcinoma (RCC) in whole-slide images (WSIs). However, pathological diagnosis is subjective, differences in observation and diagnosis between pathologists is common in hospitals with inadequate diagnostic capacity. The main challenge for developing deep learning based RCC diagnostic system is the lack of large-scale datasets with precise annotations. In this work, we proposed a deep learning-based framework for analyzing histopathological images of patients with renal cell carcinoma, which has the potential to achieve pathologist-level accuracy in diagnosis. A deep convolutional neural network (InceptionV3) was trained on the high-quality annotated dataset of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) whole-slide histopathological image for accurate tumor area detection, classification of RCC subtypes, and ISUP grades classification of clear cell carcinoma subtypes. These results suggest that our framework can help pathologists in the detection of cancer region and classification of subtypes and grades, which could be applied to any cancer type, providing auxiliary diagnosis and promoting clinical consensus.