Shen Liu

Jincheng Yu, Haoyang Li, Yiwen Liu et al.

Purpose: To develop an interpretable and trustworthy AI framework that combines deep learning based MRI Osteoarthritis Knee Score (MOAKS) prediction with interpretable statistical modeling to study structure-pain relationships at scale using data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI). Materials and Methods: We first developed a deep learning framework to predict MOAKS features directly from knee MRIs and incorporated conformal prediction to provide prediction uncertainty quantification. This uncertainty-aware strategy enables explicit filtering of model outputs, retaining only high-confidence MOAKS predictions at the knee level. Second, we applied a longitudinal latent class mixed model (LCMM) to examine associations between key structural abnormalities and four complementary knee pain measurements. Results: Among the three MRI-defined abnormalities (i.e., bone marrow lesions (BML), cartilage loss (CART), and meniscal extrusion (ME)), our framework substantially improved the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) and some other metrics. For example, MCC increased from 0.69 to 0.91 for BML, from 0.45 to 0.80 for CART, and from 0.59 to 0.89 for ME. Using these high-confidence predictions, we expanded the sample size to 2,175 knees for the LCMM analysis. Two distinct pain trajectories were identified (rapid and stable pain progression). The estimated odds ratios (95% CI) for the rapid progression group were 1.62 (1.12-2.35) for BML, 1.83 (1.24-2.70) for CART loss, and 2.50 (1.75-3.57) for ME. Conclusion: These results highlight the importance of these structural abnormalities as risk factors for pain and functional progression in osteoarthritis.

Shen Liu, Meirong Ma, Hao Yuan et al.

Pun location is to identify the punning word (usually a word or a phrase that makes the text ambiguous) in a given short text, and pun interpretation is to find out two different meanings of the punning word. Most previous studies adopt limited word senses obtained by WSD(Word Sense Disambiguation) technique or pronunciation information in isolation to address pun location. For the task of pun interpretation, related work pays attention to various WSD algorithms. In this paper, a model called DANN (Dual-Attentive Neural Network) is proposed for pun location, effectively integrates word senses and pronunciation with context information to address two kinds of pun at the same time. Furthermore, we treat pun interpretation as a classification task and construct pungloss pairs as processing data to solve this task. Experiments on the two benchmark datasets show that our proposed methods achieve new state-of-the-art results. Our source code is available in the public code repository.

Weiping Lin, Shen Liu, Runchen Zhu et al.

Pathology foundation models (PFMs), as large-scale pre-trained models tailored for computational pathology, have significantly advanced a wide range of applications. Their ability to leverage prior knowledge from massive datasets has streamlined the development of intelligent pathology models. However, we identify several critical and interrelated ethical risks that remain underexplored, yet must be addressed to enable the safe translation of PFMs from lab to clinic. These include the potential leakage of patient-sensitive attributes, disparities in model performance across demographic and institutional subgroups, and the reliance on diagnosis-irrelevant features that undermine clinical reliability. In this study, we pioneer the quantitative analysis for ethical risks in PFMs, including privacy leakage, clinical reliability, and group fairness. Specifically, we propose an evaluation framework that systematically measures key dimensions of ethical concern: the degree to which patient-sensitive attributes can be inferred from model representations, the extent of performance disparities across demographic and institutional subgroups, and the influence of diagnostically irrelevant features on model decisions. We further investigate the underlying causes of these ethical risks in PFMs and empirically validate our findings. Then we offer insights into potential directions for mitigating such risks, aiming to inform the development of more ethically robust PFMs. This work provides the first quantitative and systematic evaluation of ethical risks in PFMs. Our findings highlight the urgent need for ethical safeguards in PFMs and offer actionable insights for building more trustworthy and clinically robust PFMs. To facilitate future research and deployment, we will release the assessment framework as an online toolkit to support the development, auditing, and deployment of ethically robust PFMs.

Xiao Kan, Cong Sun, Shen Liu et al.

Dynamic taint analysis (DTA) has been widely used in various security-relevant scenarios that need to track the runtime information flow of programs. Dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) is a prevalent technique in achieving effective dynamic taint tracking on commodity hardware and systems. However, the significant performance overhead incurred by dynamic taint analysis restricts its usage in production systems. Previous efforts on mitigating the performance penalty fall into two categories, parallelizing taint tracking from program execution and abstracting the tainting logic to a higher granularity. Both approaches have only met with limited success. In this work, we propose Sdft, an efficient approach that combines the precision of DBI-based instruction-level taint tracking and the efficiency of function-level abstract taint propagation. First, we build the library function summaries automatically with reachability analysis on the program dependency graph (PDG) to specify the control- and data dependencies between the input parameters, output parameters, and global variables of the target library. Then we derive the taint rules for the target library functions and develop taint tracking for library function that is tightly integrated into the state-of-the-art DTA framework Libdft. By applying our approach to the core C library functions of glibc, we report an average of 1.58x speed up of the tracking performance compared with Libdft64. We also validate the effectiveness of the hybrid taint tracking and the ability on detecting real-world vulnerabilities.