Zhongyu Li

Xingyue Zhao, Peiqi Li, Xiangde Luo et al.

Automated nodule segmentation is essential for computer-assisted diagnosis in ultrasound images. Nevertheless, most existing methods depend on precise pixel-level annotations by medical professionals, a process that is both costly and labor-intensive. Recently, segmentation foundation models like SAM have shown impressive generalizability on natural images, suggesting their potential as pseudo-labelers. However, accurate prompts remain crucial for their success in medical images. In this work, we devise a novel weakly supervised framework that effectively utilizes the segmentation foundation model to generate pseudo-labels from aspect ration annotations for automatic nodule segmentation. Specifically, we develop three types of bounding box prompts based on scalable shape priors, followed by an adaptive pseudo-label selection module to fully exploit the prediction capabilities of the foundation model for nodules. We also present a SAM-driven uncertainty-aware cross-teaching strategy. This approach integrates SAM-based uncertainty estimation and label-space perturbations into cross-teaching to mitigate the impact of pseudo-label inaccuracies on model training. Extensive experiments on two clinically collected ultrasound datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.

Peng Liu, Bin Kong, Zhongyu Li et al.

Recently, deep neural networks have demonstrated comparable and even better performance with board-certified ophthalmologists in well-annotated datasets. However, the diversity of retinal imaging devices poses a significant challenge: domain shift, which leads to performance degradation when applying the deep learning models to new testing domains. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework, called Collaborative Feature Ensembling Adaptation (CFEA), to effectively overcome this challenge. Our proposed CFEA is an interactive paradigm which presents an exquisite of collaborative adaptation through both adversarial learning and ensembling weights. In particular, we simultaneously achieve domain-invariance and maintain an exponential moving average of the historical predictions, which achieves a better prediction for the unlabeled data, via ensembling weights during training. Without annotating any sample from the target domain, multiple adversarial losses in encoder and decoder layers guide the extraction of domain-invariant features to confuse the domain classifier and meanwhile benefit the ensembling of smoothing weights. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our CFEA model can overcome performance degradation and outperform the state-of-the-art methods in segmenting retinal optic disc and cup from fundus images. \textit{Code is available at \url{https://github.com/cswin/AWC}}.

Zixuan Chen, Xialin He, Yen-Jen Wang et al.

Reinforcement learning combined with sim-to-real transfer offers a general framework for developing locomotion controllers for legged robots. To facilitate successful deployment in the real world, smoothing techniques, such as low-pass filters and smoothness rewards, are often employed to develop policies with smooth behaviors. However, because these techniques are non-differentiable and usually require tedious tuning of a large set of hyperparameters, they tend to require extensive manual tuning for each robotic platform. To address this challenge and establish a general technique for enforcing smooth behaviors, we propose a simple and effective method that imposes a Lipschitz constraint on a learned policy, which we refer to as Lipschitz-Constrained Policies (LCP). We show that the Lipschitz constraint can be implemented in the form of a gradient penalty, which provides a differentiable objective that can be easily incorporated with automatic differentiation frameworks. We demonstrate that LCP effectively replaces the need for smoothing rewards or low-pass filters and can be easily integrated into training frameworks for many distinct humanoid robots. We extensively evaluate LCP in both simulation and real-world humanoid robots, producing smooth and robust locomotion controllers. All simulation and deployment code, along with complete checkpoints, is available on our project page: https://lipschitz-constrained-policy.github.io.

Xingyue Zhao, Zhongyu Li, Xiangde Luo et al.

Recent advances in deep learning have greatly facilitated the automated segmentation of ultrasound images, which is essential for nodule morphological analysis. Nevertheless, most existing methods depend on extensive and precise annotations by domain experts, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this study, we suggest using simple aspect ratio annotations directly from ultrasound clinical diagnoses for automated nodule segmentation. Especially, an asymmetric learning framework is developed by extending the aspect ratio annotations with two types of pseudo labels, i.e., conservative labels and radical labels, to train two asymmetric segmentation networks simultaneously. Subsequently, a conservative-radical-balance strategy (CRBS) strategy is proposed to complementally combine radical and conservative labels. An inconsistency-aware dynamically mixed pseudo-labels supervision (IDMPS) module is introduced to address the challenges of over-segmentation and under-segmentation caused by the two types of labels. To further leverage the spatial prior knowledge provided by clinical annotations, we also present a novel loss function namely the clinical anatomy prior loss. Extensive experiments on two clinically collected ultrasound datasets (thyroid and breast) demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method, which can achieve comparable and even better performance than fully supervised methods using ground truth annotations.

Xiangxiang Cui, Zhongyu Li, Xiayue Fan et al.

The intersection of medical imaging and artificial intelligence has become an important research direction in intelligent medical treatment, particularly in the analysis of medical images using deep learning for clinical diagnosis. Despite the advances, existing keyframe classification methods lack extraction of time series features, while ultrasonic video classification based on three-dimensional convolution requires uniform frame numbers across patients, resulting in poor feature extraction efficiency and model classification performance. This study proposes a novel video classification method based on CNN and LSTM, introducing NLP's long and short sentence processing scheme into video classification for the first time. The method reduces CNN-extracted image features to 1x512 dimension, followed by sorting and compressing feature vectors for LSTM training. Specifically, feature vectors are sorted by patient video frame numbers and populated with padding value 0 to form variable batches, with invalid padding values compressed before LSTM training to conserve computing resources. Experimental results demonstrate that our variable-frame CNNLSTM method outperforms other approaches across all metrics, showing improvements of 3-6% in F1 score and 1.5% in specificity compared to keyframe methods. The variable-frame CNNLSTM also achieves better accuracy and precision than equal-frame CNNLSTM. These findings validate the effectiveness of our approach in classifying variable-frame ultrasound videos and suggest potential applications in other medical imaging modalities.

Jihua Zhu, Di Wang, Jiaxi Mu et al.

The normal distributions transform (NDT) is an effective paradigm for the point set registration. This method is originally designed for pair-wise registration and it will suffer from great challenges when applied to multi-view registration. Under the NDT framework, this paper proposes a novel multi-view registration method, named 3D multi-view registration based on the normal distributions transform (3DMNDT), which integrates the K-means clustering and Lie algebra solver to achieve multi-view registration. More specifically, the multi-view registration is cast into the problem of maximum likelihood estimation. Then, the K-means algorithm is utilized to divide all data points into different clusters, where a normal distribution is computed to locally models the probability of measuring a data point in each cluster. Subsequently, the registration problem is formulated by the NDT-based likelihood function. To maximize this likelihood function, the Lie algebra solver is developed to sequentially optimize each rigid transformation. The proposed method alternately implements data point clustering, NDT computing, and likelihood maximization until desired registration results are obtained. Experimental results tested on benchmark data sets illustrate that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance for multi-view registration.

Yanlin Ma, Jihua Zhu, Zhongyu Li et al.

Recently, Expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm has been introduced as an effective means to solve multi-view registration problem. Most of the previous methods assume that each data point is drawn from the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), which is difficult to deal with the noise with heavy-tail or outliers. Accordingly, this paper proposed an effective registration method based on Student's t Mixture Model (StMM). More specially, we assume that each data point is drawn from one unique StMM, where its nearest neighbors (NNs) in other point sets are regarded as the t-distribution centroids with equal covariances, membership probabilities, and fixed degrees of freedom. Based on this assumption, the multi-view registration problem is formulated into the maximization of the likelihood function including all rigid transformations. Subsequently, the EM algorithm is utilized to optimize rigid transformations as well as the only t-distribution covariance for multi-view registration. Since only a few model parameters require to be optimized, the proposed method is more likely to obtain the desired registration results. Besides, all t-distribution centroids can be obtained by the NN search method, it is very efficient to achieve multi-view registration. What's more, the t-distribution takes the noise with heavy-tail into consideration, which makes the proposed method be inherently robust to noises and outliers. Experimental results tested on benchmark data sets illustrate its superior performance on robustness and accuracy over state-of-the-art methods.

Qinghai Zheng, Jihua Zhu, Yuanyuan Ma et al.

This study investigates the problem of multi-view subspace clustering, the goal of which is to explore the underlying grouping structure of data collected from different fields or measurements. Since data do not always comply with the linear subspace models in many real-world applications, most existing multi-view subspace clustering methods that based on the shallow linear subspace models may fail in practice. Furthermore, underlying graph information of multi-view data is always ignored in most existing multi-view subspace clustering methods. To address aforementioned limitations, we proposed the novel multi-view subspace clustering networks with local and global graph information, termed MSCNLG, in this paper. Specifically, autoencoder networks are employed on multiple views to achieve latent smooth representations that are suitable for the linear assumption. Simultaneously, by integrating fused multi-view graph information into self-expressive layers, the proposed MSCNLG obtains the common shared multi-view subspace representation, which can be used to get clustering results by employing the standard spectral clustering algorithm. As an end-to-end trainable framework, the proposed method fully investigates the valuable information of multiple views. Comprehensive experiments on six benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed MSCNLG.

Dou Xu, Chang Cai, Chaowei Fang et al.

Annotating histopathological images is a time-consuming andlabor-intensive process, which requires broad-certificated pathologistscarefully examining large-scale whole-slide images from cells to tissues.Recent frontiers of transfer learning techniques have been widely investi-gated for image understanding tasks with limited annotations. However,when applied for the analytics of histology images, few of them can effec-tively avoid the performance degradation caused by the domain discrep-ancy between the source training dataset and the target dataset, suchas different tissues, staining appearances, and imaging devices. To thisend, we present a novel method for the unsupervised domain adaptationin histopathological image analysis, based on a backbone for embeddinginput images into a feature space, and a graph neural layer for propa-gating the supervision signals of images with labels. The graph model isset up by connecting every image with its close neighbors in the embed-ded feature space. Then graph neural network is employed to synthesizenew feature representation from every image. During the training stage,target samples with confident inferences are dynamically allocated withpseudo labels. The cross-entropy loss function is used to constrain thepredictions of source samples with manually marked labels and targetsamples with pseudo labels. Furthermore, the maximum mean diversityis adopted to facilitate the extraction of domain-invariant feature repre-sentations, and contrastive learning is exploited to enhance the categorydiscrimination of learned features. In experiments of the unsupervised do-main adaptation for histopathological image classification, our methodachieves state-of-the-art performance on four public datasets

Xinyuan Liu, Jihua Zhu, Qinghai Zheng et al.

Label distribution learning (LDL) is an interpretable and general learning paradigm that has been applied in many real-world applications. In contrast to the simple logical vector in single-label learning (SLL) and multi-label learning (MLL), LDL assigns labels with a description degree to each instance. In practice, two challenges exist in LDL, namely, how to address the dimensional gap problem during the learning process of LDL and how to exactly recover label distributions from existing logical labels, i.e., Label Enhancement (LE). For most existing LDL and LE algorithms, the fact that the dimension of the input matrix is much higher than that of the output one is alway ignored and it typically leads to the dimensional reduction owing to the unidirectional projection. The valuable information hidden in the feature space is lost during the mapping process. To this end, this study considers bidirectional projections function which can be applied in LE and LDL problems simultaneously. More specifically, this novel loss function not only considers the mapping errors generated from the projection of the input space into the output one but also accounts for the reconstruction errors generated from the projection of the output space back to the input one. This loss function aims to potentially reconstruct the input data from the output data. Therefore, it is expected to obtain more accurate results. Finally, experiments on several real-world datasets are carried out to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method for both LE and LDL.

Qinghai Zheng, Jihua Zhu, Haoyu Tang et al.

Recently, label distribution learning (LDL) has drawn much attention in machine learning, where LDL model is learned from labelel instances. Different from single-label and multi-label annotations, label distributions describe the instance by multiple labels with different intensities and accommodate to more general scenes. Since most existing machine learning datasets merely provide logical labels, label distributions are unavailable in many real-world applications. To handle this problem, we propose two novel label enhancement methods, i.e., Label Enhancement with Sample Correlations (LESC) and generalized Label Enhancement with Sample Correlations (gLESC). More specifically, LESC employs a low-rank representation of samples in the feature space, and gLESC leverages a tensor multi-rank minimization to further investigate the sample correlations in both the feature space and label space. Benefitting from the sample correlations, the proposed methods can boost the performance of label enhancement. Extensive experiments on 14 benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our methods.

Xinsheng Wang, Shanmin Pang, Jihua Zhu et al.

Zero-shot learning, which aims to recognize new categories that are not included in the training set, has gained popularity owing to its potential ability in the real-word applications. Zero-shot learning models rely on learning an embedding space, where both semantic descriptions of classes and visual features of instances can be embedded for nearest neighbor search. Recently, most of the existing works consider the visual space formulated by deep visual features as an ideal choice of the embedding space. However, the discrete distribution of instances in the visual space makes the data structure unremarkable. We argue that optimizing the visual space is crucial as it allows semantic vectors to be embedded into the visual space more effectively. In this work, we propose two strategies to accomplish this purpose. One is the visual prototype based method, which learns a visual prototype for each visual class, so that, in the visual space, a class can be represented by a prototype feature instead of a series of discrete visual features. The other is to optimize the visual feature structure in an intermediate embedding space, and in this method we successfully devise a multilayer perceptron framework based algorithm that is able to learn the common intermediate embedding space and meanwhile to make the visual data structure more distinctive. Through extensive experimental evaluation on four benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that optimizing visual space is beneficial for zero-shot learning. Besides, the proposed prototype based method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance.

Qinghai Zheng, Jihua Zhu, Zhiqiang Tian et al.

Multi-view clustering is an important and fundamental problem. Many multi-view subspace clustering methods have been proposed, and most of them assume that all views share a same coefficient matrix. However, the underlying information of multi-view data are not fully exploited under this assumption, since the coefficient matrices of different views should have the same clustering properties rather than be uniform among multiple views. To this end, this paper proposes a novel Constrained Bilinear Factorization Multi-view Subspace Clustering (CBF-MSC) method. Specifically, the bilinear factorization with an orthonormality constraint and a low-rank constraint is imposed for all coefficient matrices to make them have the same trace-norm instead of being equivalent, so as to explore the consensus information of multi-view data more fully. Finally, an Augmented Lagrangian Multiplier (ALM) based algorithm is designed to optimize the objective function. Comprehensive experiments tested on nine benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed approach compared with several state-of-the-arts.

Qinghai Zheng, Jihua Zhu, Zhongyu Li et al.

Multi-view clustering is a learning paradigm based on multi-view data. Since statistic properties of different views are diverse, even incompatible, few approaches implement multi-view clustering based on the concatenated features straightforward. However, feature concatenation is a natural way to combine multi-view data. To this end, this paper proposes a novel multi-view subspace clustering approach dubbed Feature Concatenation Multi-view Subspace Clustering (FCMSC), which boosts the clustering performance by exploring the consensus information of multi-view data. Specifically, multi-view data are concatenated into a joint representation firstly, then, $l_{2,1}$-norm is integrated into the objective function to deal with the sample-specific and cluster-specific corruptions of multiple views. Moreover, a graph regularized FCMSC is also proposed in this paper to explore both the consensus information and complementary information of multi-view data for clustering. It is noteworthy that the obtained coefficient matrix is not derived by simply applying the Low-Rank Representation (LRR) to concatenated features directly. Finally, an effective algorithm based on the Augmented Lagrangian Multiplier (ALM) is designed to optimize the objective functions. Comprehensive experiments on six real-world datasets illustrate the superiority of the proposed methods over several state-of-the-art approaches for multi-view clustering.

Jihua Zhu, Siyu Xu, Zutao Jiang et al.

This paper proposes a global approach for the multi-view registration of unordered range scans. As the basis of multi-view registration, pair-wise registration is very pivotal. Therefore, we first select a good descriptor and accelerate its correspondence propagation for the pair-wise registration. Then, we design an effective rule to judge the reliability of pair-wise registration results. Subsequently, we propose a model augmentation method, which can utilize reliable results of pair-wise registration to augment the model shape. Finally, multi-view registration can be accomplished by operating the pair-wise registration and judgment, and model augmentation alternately. Experimental results on public available data sets show, that this approach can automatically achieve the multi-view registration of unordered range scans with good accuracy and effectiveness.

Zutao Jiang, Jihua Zhu, Georgios D. Evangelidis et al.

Generally, there are three main factors that determine the practical usability of registration, i.e., accuracy, robustness, and efficiency. In real-time applications, efficiency and robustness are more important. To promote these two abilities, we cast the multi-view registration into a clustering task. All the centroids are uniformly sampled from the initially aligned point sets involved in the multi-view registration, which makes it rather efficient and effective for the clustering. Then, each point is assigned to a single cluster and each cluster centroid is updated accordingly. Subsequently, the shape comprised by all cluster centroids is used to sequentially estimate the rigid transformation for each point set. For accuracy and stability, clustering and transformation estimation are alternately and iteratively applied to all point sets. We tested our proposed approach on several benchmark datasets and compared it with state-of-the-art approaches. Experimental results validate its efficiency and robustness for the registration of multi-view point sets.

Congcong Jin, Jihua Zhu, Yaochen Li et al.

For the registration of partially overlapping point clouds, this paper proposes an effective approach based on both the hard and soft assignments. Given two initially posed clouds, it firstly establishes the forward correspondence for each point in the data shape and calculates the value of binary variable, which can indicate whether this point correspondence is located in the overlapping areas or not. Then, it establishes the bilateral correspondence and computes bidirectional distances for each point in the overlapping areas. Based on the ratio of bidirectional distances, the exponential function is selected and utilized to calculate the probability value, which can indicate the reliability of the point correspondence. Subsequently, both the values of hard and soft assignments are embedded into the proposed objective function for registration of partially overlapping point clouds and a novel variant of ICP algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal rigid transformation. The proposed approach can achieve good registration of point clouds, even when their overlap percentage is low. Experimental results tested on public data sets illustrate its superiority over previous approaches on accuracy and robustness.

Rui Guo, Jihua Zhu, Yaochen Li et al.

Multi-view registration is a fundamental but challenging problem in 3D reconstruction and robot vision. Although the original motion averaging algorithm has been introduced as an effective means to solve the multi-view registration problem, it does not consider the reliability and accuracy of each relative motion. Accordingly, this paper proposes a novel motion averaging algorithm for multi-view registration. Firstly, it utilizes the pair-wise registration algorithm to estimate the relative motion and overlapping percentage of each scan pair with a certain degree of overlap. With the overlapping percentage available, it views the overlapping percentage as the corresponding weight of each scan pair and proposes the weight motion averaging algorithm, which can pay more attention to reliable and accurate relative motions. By treating each relative motion distinctively, more accurate registration can be achieved by applying the weighted motion averaging to multi-view range scans. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach compared with the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, robustness and efficiency.