Wentao Li

Zuqi Huang, Mengxin Tian, Huan Liu et al.

Accurate cell counting in immunohistochemistry (IHC) images is critical for quantifying protein expression and aiding cancer diagnosis. However, the task remains challenging due to the chromogen overlap, variable biomarker staining, and diverse cellular morphologies. Regression-based counting methods offer advantages over detection-based ones in handling overlapped cells, yet rarely support end-to-end multi-class counting. Moreover, the potential of foundation models remains largely underexplored in this paradigm. To address these limitations, we propose a rank-aware agglomeration framework that selectively distills knowledge from multiple strong foundation models, leveraging their complementary representations to handle IHC heterogeneity and obtain a compact yet effective student model, CountIHC. Unlike prior task-agnostic agglomeration strategies that either treat all teachers equally or rely on feature similarity, we design a Rank-Aware Teacher Selecting (RATS) strategy that models global-to-local patch rankings to assess each teacher's inherent counting capacity and enable sample-wise teacher selection. For multi-class cell counting, we introduce a fine-tuning stage that reformulates the task as vision-language alignment. Discrete semantic anchors derived from structured text prompts encode both category and quantity information, guiding the regression of class-specific density maps and improving counting for overlapping cells. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CountIHC surpasses state-of-the-art methods across 12 IHC biomarkers and 5 tissue types, while exhibiting high agreement with pathologists' assessments. Its effectiveness on H&E-stained data further confirms the scalability of the proposed method.

Junde Liu, Danpei Zhao, Bo Yuan et al.

Significant advancements have been made in semantic image synthesis in remote sensing. However, existing methods still face formidable challenges in balancing semantic controllability and diversity. In this paper, we present a Hybrid Semantic Embedding Guided Generative Adversarial Network (HySEGGAN) for controllable and efficient remote sensing image synthesis. Specifically, HySEGGAN leverages hierarchical information from a single source. Motivated by feature description, we propose a hybrid semantic Embedding method, that coordinates fine-grained local semantic layouts to characterize the geometric structure of remote sensing objects without extra information. Besides, a Semantic Refinement Network (SRN) is introduced, incorporating a novel loss function to ensure fine-grained semantic feedback. The proposed approach mitigates semantic confusion and prevents geometric pattern collapse. Experimental results indicate that the method strikes an excellent balance between semantic controllability and diversity. Furthermore, HySEGGAN significantly improves the quality of synthesized images and achieves state-of-the-art performance as a data augmentation technique across multiple datasets for downstream tasks.