Chenxi Zhang

Shiman Li, Haoran Wang, Yucong Meng et al.

Precise delineation of multiple organs or abnormal regions in the human body from medical images plays an essential role in computer-aided diagnosis, surgical simulation, image-guided interventions, and especially in radiotherapy treatment planning. Thus, it is of great significance to explore automatic segmentation approaches, among which deep learning-based approaches have evolved rapidly and witnessed remarkable progress in multi-organ segmentation. However, obtaining an appropriately sized and fine-grained annotated dataset of multiple organs is extremely hard and expensive. Such scarce annotation limits the development of high-performance multi-organ segmentation models but promotes many annotation-efficient learning paradigms. Among these, studies on transfer learning leveraging external datasets, semi-supervised learning using unannotated datasets and partially-supervised learning integrating partially-labeled datasets have led the dominant way to break such dilemma in multi-organ segmentation. We first review the traditional fully supervised method, then present a comprehensive and systematic elaboration of the 3 abovementioned learning paradigms in the context of multi-organ segmentation from both technical and methodological perspectives, and finally summarize their challenges and future trends.

Chaojie Wang, Yishi Xu, Zhong Peng et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, especially for question answering. However, in the face of problems beyond the scope of knowledge, these LLMs tend to talk nonsense with a straight face, where the potential solution could be incorporating an Information Retrieval (IR) module and generating response based on these retrieved knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel framework to assist LLMs, such as ChatGPT, to retrieve question-related structured information on the knowledge graph, and demonstrate that Knowledge-based question answering (Keqing) could be a nature Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mentor to guide the LLM to sequentially find the answer entities of a complex question through interpretable logical chains. Specifically, the workflow of Keqing will execute decomposing a complex question according to predefined templates, retrieving candidate entities on knowledge graph, reasoning answers of sub-questions, and finally generating response with reasoning paths, which greatly improves the reliability of LLM's response. The experimental results on KBQA datasets show that Keqing can achieve competitive performance and illustrate the logic of answering each question.

Chenxi Zhang, Qing Zhang, Jiayun Wu et al.

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to identify objects that blend seamlessly into their surroundings. The inherent visual complexity of camouflaged objects, including their low contrast with the background, diverse textures, and subtle appearance variations, often obscures semantic cues, making accurate segmentation highly challenging. Existing methods primarily rely on visual features, which are insufficient to handle the variability and intricacy of camouflaged objects, leading to unstable object perception and ambiguous segmentation results. To tackle these limitations, we introduce a novel task, class-guided camouflaged object detection (CGCOD), which extends traditional COD task by incorporating object-specific class knowledge to enhance detection robustness and accuracy. To facilitate this task, we present a new dataset, CamoClass, comprising real-world camouflaged objects with class annotations. Furthermore, we propose a multi-stage framework, CGNet, which incorporates a plug-and-play class prompt generator and a simple yet effective class-guided detector. This establishes a new paradigm for COD, bridging the gap between contextual understanding and class-guided detection. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our flexible framework in improving the performance of proposed and existing detectors by leveraging class-level textual information.

Zongbiao Li, Xiezhao Li, Yinghao Cui et al.

The number of parameters in large-scale language models based on transformers is gradually increasing, and the scale of computing clusters is also growing. The technology of quickly mobilizing large amounts of computing resources for parallel computing is becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we propose an automatic parallel algorithm that automatically plans the parallel strategy with maximum throughput based on model and hardware information. By decoupling the training time into computation, communication, and overlap, we established a training duration simulation model. Based on this simulation model, we prune the parallel solution space to shorten the search time required. The multi-node experiment results show that the algorithm can estimate the parallel training duration in real time with an average accuracy of 96%. In our test, the recommendation strategy provided by the algorithm is always globally optimal.

Chenxi Zhang, Jiayun Wu, Qing Zhang et al.

Camouflaged object detection (COD) primarily focuses on learning subtle yet discriminative representations from complex scenes. Existing methods predominantly follow the parametric feedforward architecture based on static visual representation modeling. However, they lack explicit mechanisms for acquiring historical context, limiting their adaptation and effectiveness in handling challenging camouflage scenes. In this paper, we propose a recall-augmented COD architecture, namely RetroMem, which dynamically modulates camouflage pattern perception and inference by integrating relevant historical knowledge into the process. Specifically, RetroMem employs a two-stage training paradigm consisting of a learning stage and a recall stage to construct, update, and utilize memory representations effectively. During the learning stage, we design a dense multi-scale adapter (DMA) to improve the pretrained encoder's capability to capture rich multi-scale visual information with very few trainable parameters, thereby providing foundational inferences. In the recall stage, we propose a dynamic memory mechanism (DMM) and an inference pattern reconstruction (IPR). These components fully leverage the latent relationships between learned knowledge and current sample context to reconstruct the inference of camouflage patterns, thereby significantly improving the model's understanding of camouflage scenes. Extensive experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate that our RetroMem significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Shiman Li, Jiayue Zhao, Shaolei Liu et al.

Deep learning-based medical image segmentation helps assist diagnosis and accelerate the treatment process while the model training usually requires large-scale dense annotation datasets. Weakly semi-supervised medical image segmentation is an essential application because it only requires a small amount of scribbles and a large number of unlabeled data to train the model, which greatly reduces the clinician's effort to fully annotate images. To handle the inadequate supervisory information challenge in weakly semi-supervised segmentation (WSSS), a SuperPixel-Propagated Pseudo-label (SP${}^3$) learning method is proposed, using the structural information contained in superpixel for supplemental information. Specifically, the annotation of scribbles is propagated to superpixels and thus obtains a dense annotation for supervised training. Since the quality of pseudo-labels is limited by the low-quality annotation, the beneficial superpixels selected by dynamic thresholding are used to refine pseudo-labels. Furthermore, aiming to alleviate the negative impact of noise in pseudo-label, superpixel-level uncertainty is incorporated to guide the pseudo-label supervision for stable learning. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tumor and organ segmentation datasets under the WSSS setting, using only 3\% of the annotation workload compared to fully supervised methods and attaining approximately 80\% Dice score. Additionally, our method outperforms eight weakly and semi-supervised methods under both weakly supervised and semi-supervised settings. Results of extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and annotation efficiency of our weakly semi-supervised segmentation, which can assist clinicians in achieving automated segmentation for organs or tumors quickly and ultimately benefit patients.

Minghong Duan, Linhao Qu, Zhiwei Yang et al.

High-quality whole-slide scanning is expensive, complex, and time-consuming, thus limiting the acquisition and utilization of high-resolution histopathology images in daily clinical work. Deep learning-based single-image super-resolution (SISR) techniques provide an effective way to solve this problem. However, the existing SISR models applied in histopathology images can only work in fixed integer scaling factors, decreasing their applicability. Though methods based on implicit neural representation (INR) have shown promising results in arbitrary-scale super-resolution (SR) of natural images, applying them directly to histopathology images is inadequate because they have unique fine-grained image textures different from natural images. Thus, we propose an Implicit Self-Texture Enhancement-based dual-branch framework (ISTE) for arbitrary-scale SR of histopathology images to address this challenge. The proposed ISTE contains a feature aggregation branch and a texture learning branch. We employ the feature aggregation branch to enhance the learning of the local details for SR images while utilizing the texture learning branch to enhance the learning of high-frequency texture details. Then, we design a two-stage texture enhancement strategy to fuse the features from the two branches to obtain the SR images. Experiments on publicly available datasets, including TMA, HistoSR, and the TCGA lung cancer datasets, demonstrate that ISTE outperforms existing fixed-scale and arbitrary-scale SR algorithms across various scaling factors. Additionally, extensive experiments have shown that the histopathology images reconstructed by the proposed ISTE are applicable to downstream pathology image analysis tasks.

Dewei Liu, Chuan He, Xin Peng et al.

Availability issues of industrial microservice systems (e.g., drop of successfully placed orders and processed transactions) directly affect the running of the business. These issues are usually caused by various types of service anomalies which propagate along service dependencies. Accurate and high-efficient root cause localization is thus a critical challenge for large-scale industrial microservice systems. Existing approaches use service dependency graph based analysis techniques to automatically locate root causes. However, these approaches are limited due to their inaccurate detection of service anomalies and inefficient traversing of service dependency graph. In this paper, we propose a high-efficient root cause localization approach for availability issues of microservice systems, called MicroHECL. Based on a dynamically constructed service call graph, MicroHECL analyzes possible anomaly propagation chains, and ranks candidate root causes based on correlation analysis. We combine machine learning and statistical methods and design customized models for the detection of different types of service anomalies (i.e., performance, reliability, traffic). To improve the efficiency, we adopt a pruning strategy to eliminate irrelevant service calls in anomaly propagation chain analysis. Experimental studies show that MicroHECL significantly outperforms two state-of-the-art baseline approaches in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. MicroHECL has been used in Alibaba and achieves a top-3 hit ratio of 68% with root cause localization time reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes.

Dechun Wang, Ning Zhang, Xinzi Sun et al.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a common and lethal disease. Globally, CRC is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in males and the second in females. For colorectal cancer, the best screening test available is the colonoscopy. During a colonoscopic procedure, a tiny camera at the tip of the endoscope generates a video of the internal mucosa of the colon. The video data are displayed on a monitor for the physician to examine the lining of the entire colon and check for colorectal polyps. Detection and removal of colorectal polyps are associated with a reduction in mortality from colorectal cancer. However, the miss rate of polyp detection during colonoscopy procedure is often high even for very experienced physicians. The reason lies in the high variation of polyp in terms of shape, size, textural, color and illumination. Though challenging, with the great advances in object detection techniques, automated polyp detection still demonstrates a great potential in reducing the false negative rate while maintaining a high precision. In this paper, we propose a novel anchor free polyp detector that can localize polyps without using predefined anchor boxes. To further strengthen the model, we leverage a Context Enhancement Module and Cosine Ground truth Projection. Our approach can respond in real time while achieving state-of-the-art performance with 99.36% precision and 96.44% recall.