17.8CVMar 19
Mind the Rarities: Can Rare Skin Diseases Be Reliably Diagnosed via Diagnostic Reasoning?Yang Liu, Jiyao Yang, Hongjin Zhao et al.
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong performance in dermatology; however, evaluating diagnostic reasoning for rare conditions remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks focus on common diseases and assess only final accuracy, overlooking the clinical reasoning process, which is critical for complex cases. We address this gap by constructing DermCase, a long-context benchmark derived from peer-reviewed case reports. Our dataset contains 26,030 multi-modal image-text pairs and 6,354 clinically challenging cases, each annotated with comprehensive clinical information and step-by-step reasoning chains. To enable reliable evaluation, we establish DermLIP-based similarity metrics that achieve stronger alignment with dermatologists for assessing differential diagnosis quality. Benchmarking 22 leading LVLMs exposes significant deficiencies across diagnosis accuracy, differential diagnosis, and clinical reasoning. Fine-tuning experiments demonstrate that instruction tuning substantially improves performance while Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) yields minimal gains. Systematic error analysis further reveals critical limitations in current models' reasoning capabilities.
Position-Sensing Graph Neural Networks: Proactively Learning Nodes Relative PositionsZhenyue Qin, Yiqun Zhang Saeed Anwar, Dongwoo Kim et al.
Most existing graph neural networks (GNNs) learn node embeddings using the framework of message passing and aggregation. Such GNNs are incapable of learning relative positions between graph nodes within a graph. To empower GNNs with the awareness of node positions, some nodes are set as anchors. Then, using the distances from a node to the anchors, GNNs can infer relative positions between nodes. However, P-GNNs arbitrarily select anchors, leading to compromising position-awareness and feature extraction. To eliminate this compromise, we demonstrate that selecting evenly distributed and asymmetric anchors is essential. On the other hand, we show that choosing anchors that can aggregate embeddings of all the nodes within a graph is NP-complete. Therefore, devising efficient optimal algorithms in a deterministic approach is practically not feasible. To ensure position-awareness and bypass NP-completeness, we propose Position-Sensing Graph Neural Networks (PSGNNs), learning how to choose anchors in a back-propagatable fashion. Experiments verify the effectiveness of PSGNNs against state-of-the-art GNNs, substantially improving performance on various synthetic and real-world graph datasets while enjoying stable scalability. Specifically, PSGNNs on average boost AUC more than 14% for pairwise node classification and 18% for link prediction over the existing state-of-the-art position-aware methods. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ZhenyueQin/PSGNN.
Fusing Higher-order Features in Graph Neural Networks for Skeleton-based Action RecognitionZhenyue Qin, Yang Liu, Pan Ji et al.
Skeleton sequences are lightweight and compact, and thus are ideal candidates for action recognition on edge devices. Recent skeleton-based action recognition methods extract features from 3D joint coordinates as spatial-temporal cues, using these representations in a graph neural network for feature fusion to boost recognition performance. The use of first- and second-order features, i.e., joint and bone representations, has led to high accuracy. Nonetheless, many models are still confused by actions that have similar motion trajectories. To address these issues, we propose fusing higher-order features in the form of angular encoding into modern architectures to robustly capture the relationships between joints and body parts. This simple fusion with popular spatial-temporal graph neural networks achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy in two large benchmarks, including NTU60 and NTU120, while employing fewer parameters and reduced run time. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ZhenyueQin/Angular-Skeleton-Encoding.