Xinyu Zhao

Qijun Liao, Jue Yang, Yiting Kang et al.

Deep reinforcement learning excels in continuous control but often requires extensive exploration, while physics-based models demand complete equations and suffer cubic complexity. This study proposes Hybrid Energy-Aware Reward Shaping (H-EARS), unifying potential-based reward shaping with energy-aware action regularization. H-EARS constrains action magnitude while balancing task-specific and energy-based potentials via functional decomposition, achieving linear complexity O(n) by capturing dominant energy components without full dynamics. We establish a theoretical foundation including: (1) functional independence for separate task/energy optimization; (2) energy-based convergence acceleration; (3) convergence guarantees under function approximation; and (4) approximate potential error bounds. Lyapunov stability connections are analyzed as heuristic guides. Experiments across baselines show improved convergence, stability, and energy efficiency. Vehicle simulations validate applicability in safety-critical domains under extreme conditions. Results confirm that integrating lightweight physics priors enhances model-free RL without complete system models, enabling transfer from lab research to industrial applications.

Xinyu Zhao, Sa Huang, Wei Pang et al.

We study the problem of registration for medical CT images from a novel perspective -- the sensitivity to degree of deformations in CT images. Although some learning-based methods have shown success in terms of average accuracy, their ability to handle regions with local large deformation (LLD) may significantly decrease compared to dealing with regions with minor deformation. This motivates our research into this issue. Two main causes of LLDs are organ motion and changes in tissue structure, with the latter often being a long-term process. In this paper, we propose a novel registration model called Cascade-Dilation Inter-Layer Differential Network (CDIDN), which exhibits both high deformation impedance capability (DIC) and accuracy. CDIDN improves its resilience to LLDs in CT images by enhancing LLDs in the displacement field (DF). It uses a feature-based progressive decomposition of LLDs, blending feature flows of different levels into a main flow in a top-down manner. It leverages Inter-Layer Differential Module (IDM) at each level to locally refine the main flow and globally smooth the feature flow, and also integrates feature velocity fields that can effectively handle feature deformations of various degrees. We assess CDIDN using lungs as representative organs with large deformation. Our findings show that IDM significantly enhances LLDs of the DF, by which improves the DIC and accuracy of the model. Compared with other outstanding learning-based methods, CDIDN exhibits the best DIC and excellent accuracy. Based on vessel enhancement and enhanced LLDs of the DF, we propose a novel method to accurately track the appearance, disappearance, enlargement, and shrinkage of pulmonary lesions, which effectively addresses detection of early lesions and peripheral lung lesions, issues of false enlargement, false shrinkage, and mutilation of lesions.

Qijie Wei, Jingyuan Yang, Bo Wang et al.

This paper addresses the emerging task of recognizing multiple retinal diseases from wide-field (WF) and ultra-wide-field (UWF) fundus images. For an effective use of existing large amount of labeled color fundus photo (CFP) data and the relatively small amount of WF and UWF data, we propose a supervised domain adaptation method named Cross-domain Collaborative Learning (CdCL). Inspired by the success of fixed-ratio based mixup in unsupervised domain adaptation, we re-purpose this strategy for the current task. Due to the intrinsic disparity between the field-of-view of CFP and WF/UWF images, a scale bias naturally exists in a mixup sample that the anatomic structure from a CFP image will be considerably larger than its WF/UWF counterpart. The CdCL method resolves the issue by Scale-bias Correction, which employs Transformers for producing scale-invariant features. As demonstrated by extensive experiments on multiple datasets covering both WF and UWF images, the proposed method compares favorably against a number of competitive baselines.