Junyan Zhang

Junquan Huang, Haotian Wu, Yubo Gao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting achieve strong reasoning but often produce unnecessarily long explanations, increasing cost and sometimes reducing accuracy. Fair comparison of efficiency-oriented approaches is hindered by fragmented evaluation practices. We introduce EffiReason-Bench, a unified benchmark for rigorous cross-paradigm evaluation of efficient reasoning methods across three categories: Reasoning Blueprints, Dynamic Execution, and Post-hoc Refinement. To enable step-by-step evaluation, we construct verified CoT annotations for CommonsenseQA and LogiQA via a pipeline that enforces standardized reasoning structures, comprehensive option-wise analysis, and human verification. We evaluate 7 methods across 6 open-source LLMs (1B-70B) on 4 datasets spanning mathematics, commonsense, and logic, and propose the E3-Score, a principled metric inspired by economic trade-off modeling that provides smooth, stable evaluation without discontinuities or heavy reliance on heuristics. Experiments show that no single method universally dominates; optimal strategies depend on backbone scale, task complexity, and architecture.

Kang Chen, Bin Huang, Xuebin Yang et al.

Synthetic CT projection data is crucial for advancing imaging research, yet its generation remains challenging. Current image domain methods are limited as they cannot simulate the physical acquisition process or utilize the complete statistical information present in projection data, restricting their utility and fidelity. In this work, we present PRO, a projection domain synthesis foundation model for CT imaging. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that performs CT synthesis in the projection domain. Unlike previous approaches that operate in the image domain, PRO learns rich structural representations from projection data and leverages anatomical text prompts for controllable synthesis. Projection data generation models can utilize complete measurement signals and simulate the physical processes of scanning, including material attenuation characteristics, beam hardening, scattering, and projection geometry, and support research on downstream imaging tasks. Moreover, PRO functions as a foundation model, capable of generalizing across diverse downstream tasks by adjusting its generative behavior via prompt inputs. Experimental results demonstrated that incorporating our synthesized data significantly improves performance across multiple downstream tasks, including low-dose and sparse-view reconstruction. These findings underscore the versatility and scalability of PRO in data generation for various CT applications. These results highlight the potential of projection domain synthesis as a powerful tool for data augmentation and robust CT imaging. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/yqx7150/PRO.