Kai Ren

Kai Ren, Ke Zou, Xianjie Liu et al.

Classification and segmentation are crucial in medical image analysis as they enable accurate diagnosis and disease monitoring. However, current methods often prioritize the mutual learning features and shared model parameters, while neglecting the reliability of features and performances. In this paper, we propose a novel Uncertainty-informed Mutual Learning (UML) framework for reliable and interpretable medical image analysis. Our UML introduces reliability to joint classification and segmentation tasks, leveraging mutual learning with uncertainty to improve performance. To achieve this, we first use evidential deep learning to provide image-level and pixel-wise confidences. Then, an Uncertainty Navigator Decoder is constructed for better using mutual features and generating segmentation results. Besides, an Uncertainty Instructor is proposed to screen reliable masks for classification. Overall, UML could produce confidence estimation in features and performance for each link (classification and segmentation). The experiments on the public datasets demonstrate that our UML outperforms existing methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness. Our UML has the potential to explore the development of more reliable and explainable medical image analysis models. We will release the codes for reproduction after acceptance.

Zongmin Liu, Jirui Wang, Jie Li et al.

With the expansive aging of global population, service robot with living assistance applied in indoor scenes will serve as a crucial role in the field of elderly care and health in the future. Service robots need to detect multiple targets when completing auxiliary tasks. However, indoor scenes are usually complex and there are many types of interference factors, leading to great challenges in the multiple targets detection. To overcome this technical difficulty, a novel improved Mask RCNN method for multiple targets detection in the indoor complex scenes is proposed in this paper. The improved model utilizes Mask RCNN as the network framework. On this basis, Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) with channel mechanism and space mechanism is integrated, and the influence of different background, distance, angle and interference factors are comprehensively considered. Meanwhile, in order to evaluate the detection and identification effects of the established model, a comprehensive evaluation system based on loss function and Mean Average Precision (mAP) is established. For verification, experiments on the detection and identification effects under different distances, backgrounds, angles and interference factors were conducted. The results show that designed model improves the accuracy to a higher level and has a better anti-interference ability than other methods when the detection speed was nearly the same.

Nan Zhou, Ke Zou, Kai Ren et al.

The Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) has shown remarkable performance in medical image segmentation, drawing significant attention in the field. However, its sensitivity to varying prompt types and locations poses challenges. This paper addresses these challenges by focusing on the development of reliable prompts that enhance MedSAM's accuracy. We introduce MedSAM-U, an uncertainty-guided framework designed to automatically refine multi-prompt inputs for more reliable and precise medical image segmentation. Specifically, we first train a Multi-Prompt Adapter integrated with MedSAM, creating MPA-MedSAM, to adapt to diverse multi-prompt inputs. We then employ uncertainty-guided multi-prompt to effectively estimate the uncertainties associated with the prompts and their initial segmentation results. In particular, a novel uncertainty-guided prompts adaptation technique is then applied automatically to derive reliable prompts and their corresponding segmentation outcomes. We validate MedSAM-U using datasets from multiple modalities to train a universal image segmentation model. Compared to MedSAM, experimental results on five distinct modal datasets demonstrate that the proposed MedSAM-U achieves an average performance improvement of 1.7\% to 20.5\% across uncertainty-guided prompts.

Ziliang Zhao, Bi Xue, Emma Lin et al.

Embedding tables are critical components of large-scale recommendation systems, facilitating the efficient mapping of high-cardinality categorical features into dense vector representations. However, as the volume of unique IDs expands, traditional hash-based indexing methods suffer from collisions that degrade model performance and personalization quality. We present Multi-Probe Zero Collision Hash (MPZCH), a novel indexing mechanism based on linear probing that effectively mitigates embedding collisions. With reasonable table sizing, it often eliminates these collisions entirely while maintaining production-scale efficiency. MPZCH utilizes auxiliary tensors and high-performance CUDA kernels to implement configurable probing and active eviction policies. By retiring obsolete IDs and resetting reassigned slots, MPZCH prevents the stale embedding inheritance typical of hash-based methods, ensuring new features learn effectively from scratch. Despite its collision-mitigation overhead, the system maintains training QPS and inference latency comparable to existing methods. Rigorous online experiments demonstrate that MPZCH achieves zero collisions for user embeddings and significantly improves item embedding freshness and quality. The solution has been released within the open-source TorchRec library for the broader community.

Hyeontae Sung, Hyeongchan Ham, Junyoung Park et al.

Safe motion planning in uncertain, time-varying environments is challenging because the safe region can change unpredictably across planning steps, often causing a loss of recursive feasibility. In this work, we present a Probabilistic Recursively Feasible Model Predictive Control (PRF-MPC) framework that guarantees recursive feasibility with a specified probability. We introduce properties that an ideal predictor should satisfy to ensure distributional consistency, and use these properties to derive closed-form expressions for the means and covariances of trajectories predicted at future time steps. Building on this analysis, we construct safety constraints that ensure, with high probability, that the current safe set is contained within the safe sets at future time steps, thereby probabilistically guaranteeing recursive feasibility. Simulation results on a lane-change scenario demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves recursive feasibility.

Kai Ren, Chuanping Hu

The problem of multi-object tracking is a fundamental computer vision research focus, widely used in public safety, transport, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and other regions involving artificial intelligence. Because of the complexity of natural scenes, object occlusion and semi-occlusion usually occur in fundamental tracking tasks. These can easily lead to ID switching, object loss, detect errors, and misaligned limitation boxes. These conditions have a significant impact on the precision of multi-object tracking. In this paper, we design a new multi-object tracker for the above issues that contains an object \textbf{Relative Location Mapping} (RLM) model and \textbf{Target Region Density} (TRD) model. The new tracker is more sensitive to the differences in position relationships between objects. It can introduce low-score detection frames into different regions in real-time according to the density of object regions in the video. This improves the accuracy of object tracking without consuming extensive arithmetic resources. Our study shows that the proposed model has considerably enhanced the HOTA and DF1 measurements on the MOT17 and MOT20 data sets when applied to the advanced MOT method.

Ying Wu, Hanzhong Liu, Kai Ren et al.

Interpretability plays a crucial role in the application of statistical learning to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) in complex diseases. In this study, we leverage a rule-based workflow, namely causal rule learning (CRL), to estimate and improve our understanding of HTE for atrial septal defect, addressing an overlooked question in the previous literature: what if an individual simultaneously belongs to multiple groups with different average treatment effects? The CRL process consists of three steps: rule discovery, which generates a set of causal rules with corresponding subgroup average treatment effects; rule selection, which identifies a subset of these rules to deconstruct individual-level treatment effects as a linear combination of subgroup-level effects; and rule analysis, which presents a detailed procedure for further analyzing each selected rule from multiple perspectives to identify the most promising rules for validation. Extensive simulation studies and real-world data analysis demonstrate that CRL outperforms other methods in providing interpretable estimates of HTE, especially when dealing with complex ground truth and sufficient sample sizes.

Zongmin Liu, Jirui Wang, Jie Li et al.

To better care for the elderly and disabled, it is essential for service robots to have an effective fusion method of object detection and grasp estimation. However, limited research has been observed on the combination of object detection and grasp estimation. To overcome this technical difficulty, a novel integrated method of detection-grasping for specific object based on the box coordinate matching is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the SOLOv2 instance segmentation model is improved by adding channel attention module (CAM) and spatial attention module (SAM). Then, the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and CAM are added to the generative residual convolutional neural network (GR-CNN) model to optimize grasp estimation. Furthermore, a detection-grasping integrated algorithm based on box coordinate matching (DG-BCM) is proposed to obtain the fusion model of object detection and grasp estimation. For verification, experiments on object detection and grasp estimation are conducted separately to verify the superiority of improved models. Additionally, grasping tasks for several specific objects are implemented on a simulation platform, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of DG-BCM algorithm proposed in this paper.

Zhimin Chen, Chenyu Zhao, Ka Chun Mo et al.

Modern large-scale recommendation systems rely heavily on user interaction history sequences to enhance the model performance. The advent of large language models and sequential modeling techniques, particularly transformer-like architectures, has led to significant advancements recently (e.g., HSTU, SIM, and TWIN models). While scaling to ultra-long user histories (10k to 100k items) generally improves model performance, it also creates significant challenges on latency, queries per second (QPS) and GPU cost in industry-scale recommendation systems. Existing models do not adequately address these industrial scalability issues. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage modeling framework, namely VIrtual Sequential Target Attention (VISTA), which decomposes traditional target attention from a candidate item to user history items into two distinct stages: (1) user history summarization into a few hundred tokens; followed by (2) candidate item attention to those tokens. These summarization token embeddings are then cached in storage system and then utilized as sequence features for downstream model training and inference. This novel design for scalability enables VISTA to scale to lifelong user histories (up to one million items) while keeping downstream training and inference costs fixed, which is essential in industry. Our approach achieves significant improvements in offline and online metrics and has been successfully deployed on an industry leading recommendation platform serving billions of users.

Dai Li, Kevin Course, Wei Li et al.

While scaling laws promise significant performance gains for recommender systems, efficiently deploying hyperscale models remains a major unsolved challenge. In contrast to fields where FMs are already widely adopted such as natural language processing and computer vision, progress in recommender systems is hindered by unique challenges including the need to learn from online streaming data under shifting data distributions, the need to adapt to different recommendation surfaces with a wide diversity in their downstream tasks and their input distributions, and stringent latency and computational constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose to leverage the Foundation-Expert Paradigm: a framework designed for the development and deployment of hyperscale recommendation FMs. In our approach, a central FM is trained on lifelong, cross-surface, multi-modal user data to learn generalizable knowledge. This knowledge is then efficiently transferred to various lightweight, surface-specific "expert" models via target-aware embeddings, allowing them to adapt to local data distributions and optimization goals with minimal overhead. To meet our training, inference and development needs, we built HyperCast, a production-grade infrastructure system that re-engineers training, serving, logging and iteration to power this decoupled paradigm. Our approach is now deployed at Meta serving tens of billions of user requests daily, demonstrating online metric improvements over our previous one-stage production system while improving developer velocity and maintaining infrastructure efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first successful deployment of a Foundation-Expert paradigm at this scale, offering a proven, compute-efficient, and developer-friendly blueprint to realize the promise of scaling laws in recommender systems.

Guoyao Deng, Ke Zou, Kai Ren et al.

Recently, Segmenting Anything has taken an important step towards general artificial intelligence. At the same time, its reliability and fairness have also attracted great attention, especially in the field of health care. In this study, we propose multi-box prompts triggered uncertainty estimation for SAM cues to demonstrate the reliability of segmented lesions or tissues. We estimate the distribution of SAM predictions via Monte Carlo with prior distribution parameters, which employs different prompts as formulation of test-time augmentation. Our experimental results found that multi-box prompts augmentation improve the SAM performance, and endowed each pixel with uncertainty. This provides the first paradigm for a reliable SAM.

Weicong Ding, Hanlin Tang, Jingshuo Feng et al.

Real-world recommendation systems often consist of two phases. In the first phase, multiple predictive models produce the probability of different immediate user actions. In the second phase, these predictions are aggregated according to a set of 'strategic parameters' to meet a diverse set of business goals, such as longer user engagement, higher revenue potential, or more community/network interactions. In addition to building accurate predictive models, it is also crucial to optimize this set of 'strategic parameters' so that primary goals are optimized while secondary guardrails are not hurt. In this setting with multiple and constrained goals, this paper discovers that a probabilistic strategic parameter regime can achieve better value compared to the standard regime of finding a single deterministic parameter. The new probabilistic regime is to learn the best distribution over strategic parameter choices and sample one strategic parameter from the distribution when each user visits the platform. To pursue the optimal probabilistic solution, we formulate the problem into a stochastic compositional optimization problem, in which the unbiased stochastic gradient is unavailable. Our approach is applied in a popular social network platform with hundreds of millions of daily users and achieves +0.22% lift of user engagement in a recommendation task and +1.7% lift in revenue in an advertising optimization scenario comparing to using the best deterministic parameter strategy.

Wei Zhang, Yunfeng Zhang, Ning Liu et al.

This paper studies how to improve the generalization performance and learning speed of the navigation agents trained with deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Although DRL exhibits huge potential in robot mapless navigation, DRL agents performing well in training scenarios are often found to perform poorly in unfamiliar scenarios. In this work, we propose that the representation of LiDAR readings is a key factor behind the degradation of agents' performance and present a powerful input pre-processing (IP) approach to address this issue. As this approach uses adaptively parametric reciprocal functions to pre-process LiDAR readings, we refer to this approach as IPAPRec and its normalized version as IPAPRecN. IPAPRec/IPAPRecN can highlight important short-distance values and compress the range of less-important long-distance values in laser scans, which well address the issues induced by conventional representations of laser scans. Their high performance was validated by extensive simulation and real-world experiments. The results show that our methods can substantially improve navigation agents' generalization performance and greatly reduce the training time compared to conventional methods.

Minh Tu Hoang, Brosnan Yuen, Kai Ren et al.

This paper proposes a combined network structure between convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-short term memory (LSTM) quantifier for WiFi fingerprinting indoor localization. In contrast to conventional methods that utilize only spatial data with classification models, our CNN-LSTM network extracts both space and time features of the received channel state information (CSI) from a single router. Furthermore, the proposed network builds a quantification model rather than a limited classification model as in most of the literature work, which enables the estimation of testing points that are not identical to the reference points. We analyze the instability of CSI and demonstrate a mitigation solution using a comprehensive filter and normalization scheme. The localization accuracy is investigated through extensive on-site experiments with several mobile devices including mobile phone (Nexus 5) and laptop (Intel 5300 NIC) on hundreds of testing locations. Using only a single WiFi router, our structure achieves an average localization error of 2.5~m with $\mathrm{80\%}$ of the errors under 4~m, which outperforms the other reported algorithms by approximately $\mathrm{50\%}$ under the same test environment.

Wei Zhang, Yunfeng Zhang, Ning Liu et al.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has exhibited considerable promise in the training of control agents for mapless robot navigation. However, DRL-trained agents are limited to the specific robot dimensions used during training, hindering their applicability when the robot's dimension changes for task-specific requirements. To overcome this limitation, we propose a dimension-variable robot navigation method based on DRL. Our approach involves training a meta agent in simulation and subsequently transferring the meta skill to a dimension-varied robot using a technique called dimension-variable skill transfer (DVST). During the training phase, the meta agent for the meta robot learns self-navigation skills with DRL. In the skill-transfer phase, observations from the dimension-varied robot are scaled and transferred to the meta agent, and the resulting control policy is scaled back to the dimension-varied robot. Through extensive simulated and real-world experiments, we demonstrated that the dimension-varied robots could successfully navigate in unknown and dynamic environments without any retraining. The results show that our work substantially expands the applicability of DRL-based navigation methods, enabling them to be used on robots with different dimensions without the limitation of a fixed dimension. The video of our experiments can be found in the supplementary file.