Junmei Wang

Jiayun Jin, Haolong Chai, Xueying Huang et al.

Ultrasound imaging is widely used in clinical diagnostics due to its real-time capability and radiation-free nature. However, existing vision-language pre-training models, such as CLIP, are primarily designed for other modalities, and are difficult to directly apply to ultrasound data, which exhibit heterogeneous anatomical structures and diverse diagnostic attributes. To bridge this gap, we construct US-365K, a large-scale ultrasound image-text dataset containing 365k paired samples across 52 anatomical categories. We establish Ultrasonographic Diagnostic Taxonomy (UDT) containing two hierarchical knowledge frameworks. Ultrasonographic Hierarchical Anatomical Taxonomy standardizes anatomical organization, and Ultrasonographic Diagnostic Attribute Framework formalizes nine diagnostic dimensions, including body system, organ, diagnosis, shape, margins, echogenicity, internal characteristics, posterior acoustic phenomena, and vascularity. Building upon these foundations, we propose Ultrasound-CLIP, a semantic-aware contrastive learning framework that introduces semantic soft labels and semantic loss to refine sample discrimination. Moreover, we construct a heterogeneous graph modality derived from UDAF's textual representations, enabling structured reasoning over lesion-attribute relations. Extensive experiments with patient-level data splitting demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on classification and retrieval benchmarks, while also delivering strong generalization to zero-shot, linear probing, and fine-tuning tasks.

Jiajia Wang, Jimmy X. Huang, Xinhui Tu et al.

Recent years have witnessed a substantial increase in the use of deep learning to solve various natural language processing (NLP) problems. Early deep learning models were constrained by their sequential or unidirectional nature, such that they struggled to capture the contextual relationships across text inputs. The introduction of bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) leads to a robust encoder for the transformer model that can understand the broader context and deliver state-of-the-art performance across various NLP tasks. This has inspired researchers and practitioners to apply BERT to practical problems, such as information retrieval (IR). A survey that focuses on a comprehensive analysis of prevalent approaches that apply pretrained transformer encoders like BERT to IR can thus be useful for academia and the industry. In light of this, we revisit a variety of BERT-based methods in this survey, cover a wide range of techniques of IR, and group them into six high-level categories: (i) handling long documents, (ii) integrating semantic information, (iii) balancing effectiveness and efficiency, (iv) predicting the weights of terms, (v) query expansion, and (vi) document expansion. We also provide links to resources, including datasets and toolkits, for BERT-based IR systems. A key highlight of our survey is the comparison between BERT's encoder-based models and the latest generative Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, which rely on decoders. Despite the popularity of LLMs, we find that for specific tasks, finely tuned BERT encoders still outperform, and at a lower deployment cost. Finally, we summarize the comprehensive outcomes of the survey and suggest directions for future research in the area.

Zhentao Zhan, Xiaoliang Xu, Jingjing Wang et al.

Graph Similarity Computation (GSC) is a fundamental graph related task where Graph Edit Distance (GED) serves as a prevalent metric. GED is determined by an optimal alignment between a pair of graphs that partitions each into aligned (zero-cost) and unaligned (cost-incurring) substructures. Due to NP-hard nature of exact GED computation, GED approximations based on Graph Neural Network(GNN) have emerged. Existing GNN-based GED approaches typically learn node embeddings for each graph and then aggregate pairwise node similarities to estimate the final similarity. Despite their effectiveness, we identify a mismatch between this prevalent node-centric matching paradigm and the core principles of GED. This discrepancy leads to two critical limitations: (1) a failure to capture the global structural correspondence for optimal alignment, and (2) a misattribution of edit costs driven by spurious node level signals. To address these limitations, we propose GCGSim, a GED-consistent graph similarity learning framework centering on graph-level matching and substructure-level edit costs. Specifically, we make three core technical contributions. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that GCGSim achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our comprehensive analyses further validate that the framework effectively learns disentangled and semantically meaningful substructure representations.