Kang Li

Xiaoxiao He, Chaowei Tan, Bo Liu et al.

Federated Learning has gained popularity among medical institutions since it enables collaborative training between clients (e.g., hospitals) without aggregating data. However, due to the high cost associated with creating annotations, especially for large 3D image datasets, clinical institutions do not have enough supervised data for training locally. Thus, the performance of the collaborative model is subpar under limited supervision. On the other hand, large institutions have the resources to compile data repositories with high-resolution images and labels. Therefore, individual clients can utilize the knowledge acquired in the public data repositories to mitigate the shortage of private annotated images. In this paper, we propose a federated few-shot learning method with dual knowledge distillation. This method allows joint training with limited annotations across clients without jeopardizing privacy. The supervised learning of the proposed method extracts features from limited labeled data in each client, while the unsupervised data is used to distill both feature and response-based knowledge from a national data repository to further improve the accuracy of the collaborative model and reduce the communication cost. Extensive evaluations are conducted on 3D magnetic resonance knee images from a private clinical dataset. Our proposed method shows superior performance and less training time than other semi-supervised federated learning methods. Codes and additional visualization results are available at https://github.com/hexiaoxiao-cs/fedml-knee.

Dequan Wang, Xiaosong Wang, Lilong Wang et al. · berkeley

Foundation models, often pre-trained with large-scale data, have achieved paramount success in jump-starting various vision and language applications. Recent advances further enable adapting foundation models in downstream tasks efficiently using only a few training samples, e.g., in-context learning. Yet, the application of such learning paradigms in medical image analysis remains scarce due to the shortage of publicly accessible data and benchmarks. In this paper, we aim at approaches adapting the foundation models for medical image classification and present a novel dataset and benchmark for the evaluation, i.e., examining the overall performance of accommodating the large-scale foundation models downstream on a set of diverse real-world clinical tasks. We collect five sets of medical imaging data from multiple institutes targeting a variety of real-world clinical tasks (22,349 images in total), i.e., thoracic diseases screening in X-rays, pathological lesion tissue screening, lesion detection in endoscopy images, neonatal jaundice evaluation, and diabetic retinopathy grading. Results of multiple baseline methods are demonstrated using the proposed dataset from both accuracy and cost-effective perspectives.

Xiaoxiao He, Chaowei Tan, Ligong Han et al.

Accurate 3D cardiac reconstruction from cine magnetic resonance imaging (cMRI) is crucial for improved cardiovascular disease diagnosis and understanding of the heart's motion. However, current cardiac MRI-based reconstruction technology used in clinical settings is 2D with limited through-plane resolution, resulting in low-quality reconstructed cardiac volumes. To better reconstruct 3D cardiac volumes from sparse 2D image stacks, we propose a morphology-guided diffusion model for 3D cardiac volume reconstruction, DMCVR, that synthesizes high-resolution 2D images and corresponding 3D reconstructed volumes. Our method outperforms previous approaches by conditioning the cardiac morphology on the generative model, eliminating the time-consuming iterative optimization process of the latent code, and improving generation quality. The learned latent spaces provide global semantics, local cardiac morphology and details of each 2D cMRI slice with highly interpretable value to reconstruct 3D cardiac shape. Our experiments show that DMCVR is highly effective in several aspects, such as 2D generation and 3D reconstruction performance. With DMCVR, we can produce high-resolution 3D cardiac MRI reconstructions, surpassing current techniques. Our proposed framework has great potential for improving the accuracy of cardiac disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Code can be accessed at https://github.com/hexiaoxiao-cs/DMCVR.

Shurui Gui, Hao Yuan, Jie Wang et al.

We investigate the explainability of graph neural networks (GNNs) as a step toward elucidating their working mechanisms. While most current methods focus on explaining graph nodes, edges, or features, we argue that, as the inherent functional mechanism of GNNs, message flows are more natural for performing explainability. To this end, we propose a novel method here, known as FlowX, to explain GNNs by identifying important message flows. To quantify the importance of flows, we propose to follow the philosophy of Shapley values from cooperative game theory. To tackle the complexity of computing all coalitions' marginal contributions, we propose a flow sampling scheme to compute Shapley value approximations as initial assessments of further training. We then propose an information-controlled learning algorithm to train flow scores toward diverse explanation targets: necessary or sufficient explanations. Experimental studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed FlowX and its variants lead to improved explainability of GNNs. The code is available at https://github.com/divelab/DIG.

Guotai Wang, Xiangde Luo, Ran Gu et al.

Background and Objective: Open-source deep learning toolkits are one of the driving forces for developing medical image segmentation models. Existing toolkits mainly focus on fully supervised segmentation and require full and accurate pixel-level annotations that are time-consuming and difficult to acquire for segmentation tasks, which makes learning from imperfect labels highly desired for reducing the annotation cost. We aim to develop a new deep learning toolkit to support annotation-efficient learning for medical image segmentation. Methods: Our proposed toolkit named PyMIC is a modular deep learning library for medical image segmentation tasks. In addition to basic components that support development of high-performance models for fully supervised segmentation, it contains several advanced components tailored for learning from imperfect annotations, such as loading annotated and unannounced images, loss functions for unannotated, partially or inaccurately annotated images, and training procedures for co-learning between multiple networks, etc. PyMIC supports development of semi-supervised, weakly supervised and noise-robust learning methods for medical image segmentation. Results: We present several illustrative medical image segmentation tasks based on PyMIC: (1) Achieving competitive performance on fully supervised learning; (2) Semi-supervised cardiac structure segmentation with only 10% training images annotated; (3) Weakly supervised segmentation using scribble annotations; and (4) Learning from noisy labels for chest radiograph segmentation. Conclusions: The PyMIC toolkit is easy to use and facilitates efficient development of medical image segmentation models with imperfect annotations. It is modular and flexible, which enables researchers to develop high-performance models with low annotation cost. The source code is available at: https://github.com/HiLab-git/PyMIC.

Guotai Wang, Jianghao Wu, Xiangde Luo et al.

Pretraining with large-scale 3D volumes has a potential for improving the segmentation performance on a target medical image dataset where the training images and annotations are limited. Due to the high cost of acquiring pixel-level segmentation annotations on the large-scale pretraining dataset, pretraining with unannotated images is highly desirable. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised learning strategy named Volume Fusion (VF) for pretraining 3D segmentation models. It fuses several random patches from a foreground sub-volume to a background sub-volume based on a predefined set of discrete fusion coefficients, and forces the model to predict the fusion coefficient of each voxel, which is formulated as a self-supervised segmentation task without manual annotations. Additionally, we propose a novel network architecture based on parallel convolution and transformer blocks that is suitable to be transferred to different downstream segmentation tasks with various scales of organs and lesions. The proposed model was pretrained with 110k unannotated 3D CT volumes, and experiments with different downstream segmentation targets including head and neck organs, thoracic/abdominal organs showed that our pretrained model largely outperformed training from scratch and several state-of-the-art self-supervised training methods and segmentation models. The code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/openmedlab/MIS-FM.

Junjie Shen, Ningfei Wang, Ziwen Wan et al.

Autonomous Driving (AD) systems rely on AI components to make safety and correct driving decisions. Unfortunately, today's AI algorithms are known to be generally vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, for such AI component-level vulnerabilities to be semantically impactful at the system level, it needs to address non-trivial semantic gaps both (1) from the system-level attack input spaces to those at AI component level, and (2) from AI component-level attack impacts to those at the system level. In this paper, we define such research space as semantic AI security as opposed to generic AI security. Over the past 5 years, increasingly more research works are performed to tackle such semantic AI security challenges in AD context, which has started to show an exponential growth trend. In this paper, we perform the first systematization of knowledge of such growing semantic AD AI security research space. In total, we collect and analyze 53 such papers, and systematically taxonomize them based on research aspects critical for the security field. We summarize 6 most substantial scientific gaps observed based on quantitative comparisons both vertically among existing AD AI security works and horizontally with security works from closely-related domains. With these, we are able to provide insights and potential future directions not only at the design level, but also at the research goal, methodology, and community levels. To address the most critical scientific methodology-level gap, we take the initiative to develop an open-source, uniform, and extensible system-driven evaluation platform, named PASS, for the semantic AD AI security research community. We also use our implemented platform prototype to showcase the capabilities and benefits of such a platform using representative semantic AD AI attacks.

Ran Gu, Guotai Wang, Jiangshan Lu et al.

Generalization to previously unseen images with potential domain shifts and different styles is essential for clinically applicable medical image segmentation, and the ability to disentangle domain-specific and domain-invariant features is key for achieving Domain Generalization (DG). However, existing DG methods can hardly achieve effective disentanglement to get high generalizability. To deal with this problem, we propose an efficient Contrastive Domain Disentanglement and Style Augmentation (CDDSA) framework for generalizable medical image segmentation. First, a disentangle network is proposed to decompose an image into a domain-invariant anatomical representation and a domain-specific style code, where the former is sent to a segmentation model that is not affected by the domain shift, and the disentangle network is regularized by a decoder that combines the anatomical and style codes to reconstruct the input image. Second, to achieve better disentanglement, a contrastive loss is proposed to encourage the style codes from the same domain and different domains to be compact and divergent, respectively. Thirdly, to further improve generalizability, we propose a style augmentation method based on the disentanglement representation to synthesize images in various unseen styles with shared anatomical structures. Our method was validated on a public multi-site fundus image dataset for optic cup and disc segmentation and an in-house multi-site Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Magnetic Resonance Image (NPC-MRI) dataset for nasopharynx Gross Tumor Volume (GTVnx) segmentation. Experimental results showed that the proposed CDDSA achieved remarkable generalizability across different domains, and it outperformed several state-of-the-art methods in domain-generalizable segmentation.

Kang Li, Lequan Yu, Pheng-Ann Heng

Contemporary methods have shown promising results on cardiac image segmentation, but merely in static learning, i.e., optimizing the network once for all, ignoring potential needs for model updating. In real-world scenarios, new data continues to be gathered from multiple institutions over time and new demands keep growing to pursue more satisfying performance. The desired model should incrementally learn from each incoming dataset and progressively update with improved functionality as time goes by. As the datasets sequentially delivered from multiple sites are normally heterogenous with domain discrepancy, each updated model should not catastrophically forget previously learned domains while well generalizing to currently arrived domains or even unseen domains. In medical scenarios, this is particularly challenging as accessing or storing past data is commonly not allowed due to data privacy. To this end, we propose a novel domain-incremental learning framework to recover past domain inputs first and then regularly replay them during model optimization. Particularly, we first present a style-oriented replay module to enable structure-realistic and memory-efficient reproduction of past data, and then incorporate the replayed past data to jointly optimize the model with current data to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. During optimization, we additionally perform domain-sensitive feature whitening to suppress model's dependency on features that are sensitive to domain changes (e.g., domain-distinctive style features) to assist domain-invariant feature exploration and gradually improve the generalization performance of the network. We have extensively evaluated our approach with the M&Ms Dataset in single-domain and compound-domain incremental learning settings with improved performance over other comparison approaches.

Wanjun Jia, Kang Li, Fan Yang et al.

The central challenge in robotic manipulation of deformable objects lies in aligning high-level semantic instructions with physical interaction points under complex appearance and texture variations. Due to near-infinite degrees of freedom, complex dynamics, and heterogeneous patterns, existing vision-based affordance prediction methods often suffer from boundary overflow and fragmented functional regions. To address these issues, we propose TRACER, a Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-thought with dEformable-object Refinement framework, which establishes a cross-hierarchical mapping from hierarchical semantic reasoning to appearance-robust and physically consistent functional region refinement. Specifically, a Tree-structured Affordance Chain-of-Thought (TA-CoT) is formulated to decompose high-level task intentions into hierarchical sub-task semantics, providing consistent guidance across various execution stages. To ensure spatial integrity, a Spatial-Constrained Boundary Refinement (SCBR) mechanism is introduced to suppress prediction spillover, guiding the perceptual response to converge toward authentic interaction manifolds. Furthermore, an Interactive Convergence Refinement Flow (ICRF) is developed to aggregate discrete pixels corrupted by appearance noise, significantly enhancing the spatial continuity and physical plausibility of the identified functional regions. Extensive experiments conducted on the Fine-AGDDO15 dataset and a real-world robotic platform demonstrate that TRACER significantly improves affordance grounding precision across diverse textures and patterns inherent to deformable objects. More importantly, it enhances the success rate of long-horizon tasks, effectively bridging the gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level physical execution. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Dikay1/TRACER.

Dongjie Cheng, Ziyuan Qin, Zekun Jiang et al.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) made an eye-catching debut recently and inspired many researchers to explore its potential and limitation in terms of zero-shot generalization capability. As the first promptable foundation model for segmentation tasks, it was trained on a large dataset with an unprecedented number of images and annotations. This large-scale dataset and its promptable nature endow the model with strong zero-shot generalization. Although the SAM has shown competitive performance on several datasets, we still want to investigate its zero-shot generalization on medical images. As we know, the acquisition of medical image annotation usually requires a lot of effort from professional practitioners. Therefore, if there exists a foundation model that can give high-quality mask prediction simply based on a few point prompts, this model will undoubtedly become the game changer for medical image analysis. To evaluate whether SAM has the potential to become the foundation model for medical image segmentation tasks, we collected more than 12 public medical image datasets that cover various organs and modalities. We also explore what kind of prompt can lead to the best zero-shot performance with different modalities. Furthermore, we find that a pattern shows that the perturbation of the box size will significantly change the prediction accuracy. Finally, Extensive experiments show that the predicted mask quality varied a lot among different datasets. And providing proper prompts, such as bounding boxes, to the SAM will significantly increase its performance.

Ran Gu, Jingyang Zhang, Guotai Wang et al.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for medical image segmentation, yet need plenty of manual annotations for training. Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods are promising to reduce the requirement of annotations, but their performance is still limited when the dataset size and the number of annotated images are small. Leveraging existing annotated datasets with similar anatomical structures to assist training has a potential for improving the model's performance. However, it is further challenged by the cross-anatomy domain shift due to the different appearance and even imaging modalities from the target structure. To solve this problem, we propose Contrastive Semi-supervised learning for Cross Anatomy Domain Adaptation (CS-CADA) that adapts a model to segment similar structures in a target domain, which requires only limited annotations in the target domain by leveraging a set of existing annotated images of similar structures in a source domain. We use Domain-Specific Batch Normalization (DSBN) to individually normalize feature maps for the two anatomical domains, and propose a cross-domain contrastive learning strategy to encourage extracting domain invariant features. They are integrated into a Self-Ensembling Mean-Teacher (SE-MT) framework to exploit unlabeled target domain images with a prediction consistency constraint. Extensive experiments show that our CS-CADA is able to solve the challenging cross-anatomy domain shift problem, achieving accurate segmentation of coronary arteries in X-ray images with the help of retinal vessel images and cardiac MR images with the help of fundus images, respectively, given only a small number of annotations in the target domain.

Shuwei Zhai, Guotai Wang, Xiangde Luo et al.

The success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in 3D medical image segmentation relies on massive fully annotated 3D volumes for training that are time-consuming and labor-intensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose to annotate a segmentation target with only seven points in 3D medical images, and design a two-stage weakly supervised learning framework PA-Seg. In the first stage, we employ geodesic distance transform to expand the seed points to provide more supervision signal. To further deal with unannotated image regions during training, we propose two contextual regularization strategies, i.e., multi-view Conditional Random Field (mCRF) loss and Variance Minimization (VM) loss, where the first one encourages pixels with similar features to have consistent labels, and the second one minimizes the intensity variance for the segmented foreground and background, respectively. In the second stage, we use predictions obtained by the model pre-trained in the first stage as pseudo labels. To overcome noises in the pseudo labels, we introduce a Self and Cross Monitoring (SCM) strategy, which combines self-training with Cross Knowledge Distillation (CKD) between a primary model and an auxiliary model that learn from soft labels generated by each other. Experiments on public datasets for Vestibular Schwannoma (VS) segmentation and Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) demonstrated that our model trained in the first stage outperformed existing state-of-the-art weakly supervised approaches by a large margin, and after using SCM for additional training, the model's performance was close to its fully supervised counterpart on the BraTS dataset.

Hao Fu, Guotai Wang, Wenhui Lei et al.

Accurate segmentation of Anatomical brain Barriers to Cancer spread (ABCs) plays an important role for automatic delineation of Clinical Target Volume (CTV) of brain tumors in radiotherapy. Despite that variants of U-Net are state-of-the-art segmentation models, they have limited performance when dealing with ABCs structures with various shapes and sizes, especially thin structures (e.g., the falx cerebri) that span only few slices. To deal with this problem, we propose a High and Multi-Resolution Network (HMRNet) that consists of a multi-scale feature learning branch and a high-resolution branch, which can maintain the high-resolution contextual information and extract more robust representations of anatomical structures with various scales. We further design a Bidirectional Feature Calibration (BFC) block to enable the two branches to generate spatial attention maps for mutual feature calibration. Considering the different sizes and positions of ABCs structures, our network was applied after a rough localization of each structure to obtain fine segmentation results. Experiments on the MICCAI 2020 ABCs challenge dataset showed that: 1) Our proposed two-stage segmentation strategy largely outperformed methods segmenting all the structures in just one stage; 2) The proposed HMRNet with two branches can maintain high-resolution representations and is effective to improve the performance on thin structures; 3) The proposed BFC block outperformed existing attention methods using monodirectional feature calibration. Our method won the second place of ABCs 2020 challenge and has a potential for more accurate and reasonable delineation of CTV of brain tumors.

Ziyuan Qin, Huahui Yi, Qicheng Lao et al.

The large-scale pre-trained vision language models (VLM) have shown remarkable domain transfer capability on natural images. However, it remains unknown whether this capability can also apply to the medical image domain. This paper thoroughly studies the knowledge transferability of pre-trained VLMs to the medical domain, where we show that well-designed medical prompts are the key to elicit knowledge from pre-trained VLMs. We demonstrate that by prompting with expressive attributes that are shared between domains, the VLM can carry the knowledge across domains and improve its generalization. This mechanism empowers VLMs to recognize novel objects with fewer or without image samples. Furthermore, to avoid the laborious manual designing process, we develop three approaches for automatic generation of medical prompts, which can inject expert-level medical knowledge and image-specific information into the prompts for fine-grained grounding. We conduct extensive experiments on thirteen different medical datasets across various modalities, showing that our well-designed prompts greatly improve the zero-shot performance compared to the default prompts, and our fine-tuned models surpass the supervised models by a significant margin.

Longlong Jing, Ruichi Yu, Henrik Kretzschmar et al.

Monocular image-based 3D perception has become an active research area in recent years owing to its applications in autonomous driving. Approaches to monocular 3D perception including detection and tracking, however, often yield inferior performance when compared to LiDAR-based techniques. Through systematic analysis, we identified that per-object depth estimation accuracy is a major factor bounding the performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose a multi-level fusion method that combines different representations (RGB and pseudo-LiDAR) and temporal information across multiple frames for objects (tracklets) to enhance per-object depth estimation. Our proposed fusion method achieves the state-of-the-art performance of per-object depth estimation on the Waymo Open Dataset, the KITTI detection dataset, and the KITTI MOT dataset. We further demonstrate that by simply replacing estimated depth with fusion-enhanced depth, we can achieve significant improvements in monocular 3D perception tasks, including detection and tracking.

Huahui Yi, Ziyuan Qin, Qicheng Lao et al.

Inevitable domain and task discrepancies in real-world scenarios can impair the generalization performance of the pre-trained deep models for medical data. Therefore, we audaciously propose that we should build a general-purpose medical AI system that can be seamlessly adapted to downstream domains/tasks. Since the domain/task adaption procedures usually involve additional labeling work for the target data, designing a data-efficient adaption algorithm is desired to save the cost of transferring the learned knowledge. Our recent work found that vision-language models (VLMs) are efficient learners with extraordinary cross-domain ability. Therefore, in this work, we further explore the possibility of leveraging pre-trained VLMs as medical foundation models for building general-purpose medical AI, where we thoroughly investigate three machine-learning paradigms, i.e., domain/task-specialized learning, joint learning, and continual learning, for training the VLMs and evaluate their generalization performance on cross-domain and cross-task test sets. To alleviate the catastrophic forgetting during sequential training, we employ rehearsal learning and receive a sharp boost in terms of generalization capability. In a nutshell, our empirical evidence suggests that continual learning may be a practical and efficient learning paradigm for the medical foundation model. And we hope researchers can use our empirical evidence as basement to further explore the path toward medical foundation model.

Sascha Frey, Kang Li, Peer Nagy et al.

Financial exchanges across the world use limit order books (LOBs) to process orders and match trades. For research purposes it is important to have large scale efficient simulators of LOB dynamics. LOB simulators have previously been implemented in the context of agent-based models (ABMs), reinforcement learning (RL) environments, and generative models, processing order flows from historical data sets and hand-crafted agents alike. For many applications, there is a requirement for processing multiple books, either for the calibration of ABMs or for the training of RL agents. We showcase the first GPU-enabled LOB simulator designed to process thousands of books in parallel, with a notably reduced per-message processing time. The implementation of our simulator - JAX-LOB - is based on design choices that aim to best exploit the powers of JAX without compromising on the realism of LOB-related mechanisms. We integrate JAX-LOB with other JAX packages, to provide an example of how one may address an optimal execution problem with reinforcement learning, and to share some preliminary results from end-to-end RL training on GPUs.

Shiyi Du, Xiaosong Wang, Yongyi Lu et al.

Image synthesis approaches, e.g., generative adversarial networks, have been popular as a form of data augmentation in medical image analysis tasks. It is primarily beneficial to overcome the shortage of publicly accessible data and associated quality annotations. However, the current techniques often lack control over the detailed contents in generated images, e.g., the type of disease patterns, the location of lesions, and attributes of the diagnosis. In this work, we adapt the latest advance in the generative model, i.e., the diffusion model, with the added control flow using lesion-specific visual and textual prompts for generating dermatoscopic images. We further demonstrate the advantage of our diffusion model-based framework over the classical generation models in both the image quality and boosting the segmentation performance on skin lesions. It can achieve a 9% increase in the SSIM image quality measure and an over 5% increase in Dice coefficients over the prior arts.

Qingbo Kang, Jun Gao, Kang Li et al.

Masked autoencoder (MAE) has attracted unprecedented attention and achieves remarkable performance in many vision tasks. It reconstructs random masked image patches (known as proxy task) during pretraining and learns meaningful semantic representations that can be transferred to downstream tasks. However, MAE has not been thoroughly explored in ultrasound imaging. In this work, we investigate the potential of MAE for ultrasound image recognition. Motivated by the unique property of ultrasound imaging in high noise-to-signal ratio, we propose a novel deblurring MAE approach that incorporates deblurring into the proxy task during pretraining. The addition of deblurring facilitates the pretraining to better recover the subtle details presented in the ultrasound images, thus improving the performance of the downstream classification task. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our deblurring MAE, achieving state-of-the-art performance in ultrasound image classification. Overall, our work highlights the potential of MAE for ultrasound image recognition and presents a novel approach that incorporates deblurring to further improve its effectiveness.

Jingxiong Li, Sunyi Zheng, Zhongyi Shui et al.

Karyotyping is of importance for detecting chromosomal aberrations in human disease. However, chromosomes easily appear curved in microscopic images, which prevents cytogeneticists from analyzing chromosome types. To address this issue, we propose a framework for chromosome straightening, which comprises a preliminary processing algorithm and a generative model called masked conditional variational autoencoders (MC-VAE). The processing method utilizes patch rearrangement to address the difficulty in erasing low degrees of curvature, providing reasonable preliminary results for the MC-VAE. The MC-VAE further straightens the results by leveraging chromosome patches conditioned on their curvatures to learn the mapping between banding patterns and conditions. During model training, we apply a masking strategy with a high masking ratio to train the MC-VAE with eliminated redundancy. This yields a non-trivial reconstruction task, allowing the model to effectively preserve chromosome banding patterns and structure details in the reconstructed results. Extensive experiments on three public datasets with two stain styles show that our framework surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art methods in retaining banding patterns and structure details. Compared to using real-world bent chromosomes, the use of high-quality straightened chromosomes generated by our proposed method can improve the performance of various deep learning models for chromosome classification by a large margin. Such a straightening approach has the potential to be combined with other karyotyping systems to assist cytogeneticists in chromosome analysis.

Xiaoxiao He, Chaowei Tan, Virak Tan et al.

For diagnosis of shoulder illness, it is essential to look at the morphology deviation of scapula and humerus from the medical images that are acquired from Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging. However, taking high-resolution MR images is time-consuming and costly because the reduction of the physical distance between image slices causes prolonged scanning time. Moreover, due to the lack of training images, images from various sources must be utilized, which creates the issue of high variance across the dataset. Also, there are human errors among the images due to the fact that it is hard to take the spatial relationship into consideration when labeling the 3D image in low resolution. In order to combat all obstacles stated above, we develop a fully automated algorithm for segmenting the humerus and scapula bone from coarsely scanned and low-resolution MR images and a recursive learning framework that iterative utilize the generated labels for reducing the errors among segmentations and increase our dataset set for training the next round network. In this study, 50 MR images are collected from several institutions and divided into five mutually exclusive sets for carrying five-fold cross-validation. Contours that are generated by the proposed method demonstrated a high level of accuracy when compared with ground truth and the traditional method. The proposed neural network and the recursive learning scheme improve the overall quality of the segmentation on humerus and scapula on the low-resolution dataset and reduced incorrect segmentation in the ground truth, which could have a positive impact on finding the cause of shoulder pain and patient's early relief.

Zixuan Xu, Tiancheng He, Huahui Yi et al.

Vision-language models remain susceptible to multimodal jailbreaks and over-refusal because safety hinges on both visual evidence and user intent, while many alignment pipelines supervise only the final response. To address this, we present SaFeR-ToolKit, which formalizes safety decision-making as a checkable protocol. Concretely, a planner specifies a persona, a Perception $\to$ Reasoning $\to$ Decision tool set, and a constrained transition graph, while a responder outputs a typed key-value tool trace before the final answer. To make the protocol reliably followed in practice, we train a single policy with a three-stage curriculum (SFT $\to$ DPO $\to$ GRPO), where GRPO directly supervises tool usage beyond answer-level feedback. Our contributions are two-fold: I. Dataset. The first tool-based safety reasoning dataset, comprising 31,654 examples (SFT 6k, DPO 18.6k, GRPO 6k) plus 1k held-out evaluation. II. Experiments. On Qwen2.5-VL, SaFeR-ToolKit significantly improves Safety/Helpfulness/Reasoning Rigor on 3B (29.39/45.04/4.98 $\to$ 84.40/71.13/78.87) and 7B (53.21/52.92/19.26 $\to$ 86.34/80.79/85.34), while preserving general capabilities (3B: 58.67 $\to$ 59.21; 7B: 66.39 $\to$ 66.81). Codes are available at https://github.com/Duebassx/SaFeR_ToolKit.

Zhikun Tu, Yuhe Zhang, Yiou Jia et al.

Each scanner possesses its unique characteristics and exhibits its distinct sampling error distribution. Training a network on a dataset that includes data collected from different scanners is less effective than training it on data specific to a single scanner. Therefore, we present a novel one-shot learning method allowing for edge extraction on point clouds, by learning the specific data distribution of the target point cloud, and thus achieve superior results compared to networks that were trained on general data distributions. More specifically, we present how to train a lightweight network named OSFENet (One-Shot edge Feature Extraction Network), by designing a filtered-KNN-based surface patch representation that supports a one-shot learning framework. Additionally, we introduce an RBF_DoS module, which integrates Radial Basis Function-based Descriptor of the Surface patch, highly beneficial for the edge extraction on point clouds. The advantage of the proposed OSFENet is demonstrated through comparative analyses against 7 baselines on the ABC dataset, and its practical utility is validated by results across diverse real-scanned datasets, including indoor scenes like S3DIS dataset, and outdoor scenes such as the Semantic3D dataset and UrbanBIS dataset.

Peer Nagy, Sascha Frey, Silvia Sapora et al.

Developing a generative model of realistic order flow in financial markets is a challenging open problem, with numerous applications for market participants. Addressing this, we propose the first end-to-end autoregressive generative model that generates tokenized limit order book (LOB) messages. These messages are interpreted by a Jax-LOB simulator, which updates the LOB state. To handle long sequences efficiently, the model employs simplified structured state-space layers to process sequences of order book states and tokenized messages. Using LOBSTER data of NASDAQ equity LOBs, we develop a custom tokenizer for message data, converting groups of successive digits to tokens, similar to tokenization in large language models. Out-of-sample results show promising performance in approximating the data distribution, as evidenced by low model perplexity. Furthermore, the mid-price returns calculated from the generated order flow exhibit a significant correlation with the data, indicating impressive conditional forecast performance. Due to the granularity of generated data, and the accuracy of the model, it offers new application areas for future work beyond forecasting, e.g. acting as a world model in high-frequency financial reinforcement learning applications. Overall, our results invite the use and extension of the model in the direction of autoregressive large financial models for the generation of high-frequency financial data and we commit to open-sourcing our code to facilitate future research.

Chenhao Xue, Weitao Hu, Joyraj Chakraborty et al.

Combining multiple audio features can improve the performance of music tagging, but common deep learning-based feature fusion methods often lack interpretability. To address this problem, we propose a Genetic Programming (GP) pipeline that automatically evolves composite features by mathematically combining base music features, thereby capturing synergistic interactions while preserving interpretability. This approach provides representational benefits similar to deep feature fusion without sacrificing interpretability. Experiments on the MTG-Jamendo and GTZAN datasets demonstrate consistent improvements compared to state-of-the-art systems across base feature sets at different abstraction levels. It should be noted that most of the performance gains are noticed within the first few hundred GP evaluations, indicating that effective feature combinations can be identified under modest search budgets. The top evolved expressions include linear, nonlinear, and conditional forms, with various low-complexity solutions at top performance aligned with parsimony pressure to prefer simpler expressions. Analyzing these composite features further reveals which interactions and transformations tend to be beneficial for tagging, offering insights that remain opaque in black-box deep models.

Zhi Yang, Kang Li, Haitao Gan et al.

The information diffusion performance of GCN and its variant models is limited by the adjacency matrix, which can lower their performance. Therefore, we introduce a new framework for graph convolutional networks called Hybrid Diffusion-based Graph Convolutional Network (HD-GCN) to address the limitations of information diffusion caused by the adjacency matrix. In the HD-GCN framework, we initially utilize diffusion maps to facilitate the diffusion of information among nodes that are adjacent to each other in the feature space. This allows for the diffusion of information between similar points that may not have an adjacent relationship. Next, we utilize graph convolution to further propagate information among adjacent nodes after the diffusion maps, thereby enabling the spread of information among similar nodes that are adjacent in the graph. Finally, we employ the diffusion distances obtained through the use of diffusion maps to regularize and constrain the predicted labels of training nodes. This regularization method is then applied to the HD-GCN training, resulting in a smoother classification surface. The model proposed in this paper effectively overcomes the limitations of information diffusion imposed only by the adjacency matrix. HD-GCN utilizes hybrid diffusion by combining information diffusion between neighborhood nodes in the feature space and adjacent nodes in the adjacency matrix. This method allows for more comprehensive information propagation among nodes, resulting in improved model performance. We evaluated the performance of DM-GCN on three well-known citation network datasets and the results showed that the proposed framework is more effective than several graph-based semi-supervised learning methods.

Kien X. Nguyen, Liying Zheng, Ashley L. Hawke et al.

It is necessary to analyze the whole-body kinematics (including joint locations and joint angles) to assess risks of fatal and musculoskeletal injuries in occupational tasks. Human pose estimation has gotten more attention in recent years as a method to minimize the errors in determining joint locations. However, the joint angles are not often estimated, nor is the quality of joint angle estimation assessed. In this paper, we presented an end-to-end approach on direct joint angle estimation from multi-view images. Our method leveraged the volumetric pose representation and mapped the rotation representation to a continuous space where each rotation was uniquely represented. We also presented a new kinematic dataset in the domain of residential roofing with a data processing pipeline to generate necessary annotations for the supervised training procedure on direct joint angle estimation. We achieved a mean angle error of $7.19^\circ$ on the new Roofing dataset and $8.41^\circ$ on the Human3.6M dataset, paving the way for employment of on-site kinematic analysis using multi-view images.

Yuxuan Huang, Yihang Chen, Haozheng Zhang et al.

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a new category of autonomous AI systems, referred to as Deep Research (DR) agents. These agents are designed to tackle complex, multi-turn informational research tasks by leveraging a combination of dynamic reasoning, adaptive long-horizon planning, multi-hop information retrieval, iterative tool use, and the generation of structured analytical reports. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the foundational technologies and architectural components that constitute Deep Research agents. We begin by reviewing information acquisition strategies, contrasting API-based retrieval methods with browser-based exploration. We then examine modular tool-use frameworks, including code execution, multimodal input processing, and the integration of Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to support extensibility and ecosystem development. To systematize existing approaches, we propose a taxonomy that differentiates between static and dynamic workflows, and we classify agent architectures based on planning strategies and agent composition, including single-agent and multi-agent configurations. We also provide a critical evaluation of current benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as restricted access to external knowledge, sequential execution inefficiencies, and misalignment between evaluation metrics and the practical objectives of DR agents. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising directions for future research. A curated and continuously updated repository of DR agent research is available at: {https://github.com/ai-agents-2030/awesome-deep-research-agent}.

Xi Chen, Hongru Zhou, Huahui Yi et al.

Missed and delayed diagnosis remains a major challenge in rare disease care. At the initial clinical encounters, physicians assess rare disease risk using only limited information under high uncertainty. When high-risk patients are not recognised at this stage, targeted diagnostic testing is often not initiated, resulting in missed diagnosis. Existing primary care triage processes are structurally insufficient to reliably identify patients with rare diseases at initial clinical presentation and universal screening is needed to reduce diagnostic delay. Here we present RareAlert, an early screening system which predict patient-level rare disease risk from routinely available primary-visit information. RareAlert integrates reasoning generated by ten LLMs, calibrates and weights these signals using machine learning, and distils the aligned reasoning into a single locally deployable model. To develop and evaluate RareAlert, we curated RareBench, a real-world dataset of 158,666 cases covering 33 Orphanet disease categories and more than 7,000 rare conditions, including both rare and non-rare presentations. The results showed that rare disease identification can be reconceptualised as a universal uncertainty resolution process applied to the general patient population. On an independent test set, RareAlert, a Qwen3-4B based model trained with calibrated reasoning signals, achieved an AUC of 0.917, outperforming the best machine learning ensemble and all evaluated LLMs, including GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, o3-mini, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and Qwen3-235B. These findings demonstrate the diversity in LLM medical reasoning and the effectiveness of aligning such reasoning in highly uncertain clinical tasks. By incorporating calibrated reasoning into a single model, RareAlert enables accurate, privacy-preserving, and scalable rare disease risk screening suitable for large-scale local deployment.

Pengfei Cai, Yan Song, Kang Li et al.

Sound event detection (SED) methods that leverage a large pre-trained Transformer encoder network have shown promising performance in recent DCASE challenges. However, they still rely on an RNN-based context network to model temporal dependencies, largely due to the scarcity of labeled data. In this work, we propose a pure Transformer-based SED model with masked-reconstruction based pre-training, termed MAT-SED. Specifically, a Transformer with relative positional encoding is first designed as the context network, pre-trained by the masked-reconstruction task on all available target data in a self-supervised way. Both the encoder and the context network are jointly fine-tuned in a semi-supervised manner. Furthermore, a global-local feature fusion strategy is proposed to enhance the localization capability. Evaluation of MAT-SED on DCASE2023 task4 surpasses state-of-the-art performance, achieving 0.587/0.896 PSDS1/PSDS2 respectively.

Xiaosong Wang, Xiaofan Zhang, Guotai Wang et al.

The emerging trend of advancing generalist artificial intelligence, such as GPTv4 and Gemini, has reshaped the landscape of research (academia and industry) in machine learning and many other research areas. However, domain-specific applications of such foundation models (e.g., in medicine) remain untouched or often at their very early stages. It will require an individual set of transfer learning and model adaptation techniques by further expanding and injecting these models with domain knowledge and data. The development of such technologies could be largely accelerated if the bundle of data, algorithms, and pre-trained foundation models were gathered together and open-sourced in an organized manner. In this work, we present OpenMEDLab, an open-source platform for multi-modality foundation models. It encapsulates not only solutions of pioneering attempts in prompting and fine-tuning large language and vision models for frontline clinical and bioinformatic applications but also building domain-specific foundation models with large-scale multi-modal medical data. Importantly, it opens access to a group of pre-trained foundation models for various medical image modalities, clinical text, protein engineering, etc. Inspiring and competitive results are also demonstrated for each collected approach and model in a variety of benchmarks for downstream tasks. We welcome researchers in the field of medical artificial intelligence to continuously contribute cutting-edge methods and models to OpenMEDLab, which can be accessed via https://github.com/openmedlab.

Teng Zhang, Kang Li

Adversarial training and data augmentation with noise are widely adopted techniques to enhance the performance of neural networks. This paper investigates adversarial training and data augmentation with noise in the context of regularized regression in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). We establish the limiting formula for these techniques as the attack and noise size, as well as the regularization parameter, tend to zero. Based on this limiting formula, we analyze specific scenarios and demonstrate that, without appropriate regularization, these two methods may have larger generalization error and Lipschitz constant than standard kernel regression. However, by selecting the appropriate regularization parameter, these two methods can outperform standard kernel regression and achieve smaller generalization error and Lipschitz constant. These findings support the empirical observations that adversarial training can lead to overfitting, and appropriate regularization methods, such as early stopping, can alleviate this issue.

Yuanfu Sun, Kang Li, Pengkang Guo et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for multimodal reasoning. Yet, most existing methods still rely on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to encode image-text pairs in isolation, ignoring the relational structure that real-world multimodal data naturally form. This motivates reasoning on multimodal graphs (MMGs), where each node has textual and visual attributes and edges provide structural cues. Enabling LLM-based reasoning on such heterogeneous multimodal signals while preserving graph topology introduces two key challenges: resolving weak cross-modal consistency and handling heterogeneous modality preference. To address this, we propose Mario, a unified framework that simultaneously resolves the two above challenges and enables effective LLM-based reasoning over MMGs. Mario consists of two innovative stages. Firstly, a graph-conditioned VLM design that jointly refines textual and visual features through fine-grained cross-modal contrastive learning guided by graph topology. Secondly, a modality-adaptive graph instruction tuning mechanism that organizes aligned multimodal features into graph-aware instruction views and employs a learnable router to surface, for each node and its neighborhood, the most informative modality configuration to the LLM. Extensive experiments across diverse MMG benchmarks demonstrate that Mario consistently outperforms state-of-the-art graph models in both supervised and zero-shot scenarios for node classification and link prediction. The code will be made available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/Mario.

Yuanfu Sun, Kang Li, Dongzhe Fan et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on agentic capabilities-iterative retrieval, tool use, and decision-making-to overcome the limits of static, parametric knowledge. Yet existing agentic frameworks treat external information as unstructured text and fail to leverage the topological dependencies inherent in real-world data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Agentic Graph Learning (AGL), a paradigm that reframes graph learning as an interleaved process of topology-aware navigation and LLM-based inference. Specifically, we propose AgentGL, the first reinforcement learning (RL)-driven framework for AGL. AgentGL equips an LLM agent with graph-native tools for multi-scale exploration, regulates tool usage via search-constrained thinking to balance accuracy and efficiency, and employs a graph-conditioned curriculum RL strategy to stabilize long-horizon policy learning without step-wise supervision. Across diverse Text-Attributed Graph (TAG) benchmarks and multiple LLM backbones, AgentGL substantially outperforms strong GraphLLMs and GraphRAG baselines, achieving absolute improvements of up to 17.5% in node classification and 28.4% in link prediction. These results demonstrate that AGL is a promising frontier for enabling LLMs to autonomously navigate and reason over complex relational environments. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/AgentGL.

Huahui Yi, Kun Wang, Qiankun Li et al.

Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) demonstrate impressive cross-modal reasoning but often amplify safety risks under adversarial or unsafe prompts, a phenomenon we call the \textit{Reasoning Tax}. Existing defenses mainly act at the output level and do not constrain the reasoning process, leaving models exposed to implicit risks. In this paper, we propose SaFeR-VLM, a safety-aligned reinforcement learning framework that embeds safety directly into multimodal reasoning. The framework integrates four components: (I) QI-Safe-10K, a curated dataset emphasizing safety-critical and reasoning-sensitive cases; (II) safety-aware rollout, where unsafe generations undergo reflection and correction instead of being discarded; (III) structured reward modeling with multi-dimensional weighted criteria and explicit penalties for hallucinations and contradictions; and (IV) GRPO optimization, which reinforces both safe and corrected trajectories. This unified design shifts safety from a passive safeguard to an active driver of reasoning, enabling scalable and generalizable safety-aware reasoning. SaFeR-VLM further demonstrates robustness against both explicit and implicit risks, supporting dynamic and interpretable safety decisions beyond surface-level filtering. SaFeR-VLM-3B achieves average performance $70.13$ and $78.97$ on safety and helpfulness across six benchmarks, surpassing both same-scale and $>10\times$ larger models such as Skywork-R1V3-38B, Qwen2.5VL-72B, and GLM4.5V-106B. Remarkably, SaFeR-VLM-7B benefits from its increased scale to surpass GPT-5-mini and Gemini-2.5-Flash by \num{6.47} and \num{16.76} points respectively on safety metrics, achieving this improvement without any degradation in helpfulness performance. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HarveyYi/SaFeR-VLM.

Zheng Xiong, Kang Li, Zilin Wang et al.

Built upon language and vision foundation models with strong generalization ability and trained on large-scale robotic data, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising approach to learning generalist robotic policies. However, a key drawback of existing VLAs is their extremely high inference costs. In this paper, we propose HyperVLA to address this problem. Unlike existing monolithic VLAs that activate the whole model during both training and inference, HyperVLA uses a novel hypernetwork (HN)-based architecture that activates only a small task-specific policy during inference, while still retaining the high model capacity needed to accommodate diverse multi-task behaviors during training. Successfully training an HN-based VLA is nontrivial so HyperVLA contains several key algorithm design features that improve its performance, including properly utilizing the prior knowledge from existing vision foundation models, HN normalization, and an action generation strategy. Compared to monolithic VLAs, HyperVLA achieves a similar or even higher success rate for both zero-shot generalization and few-shot adaptation, while significantly reducing inference costs. Compared to OpenVLA, a state-of-the-art VLA model, HyperVLA reduces the number of activated parameters at test time by $90\times$, and accelerates inference speed by $120\times$. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/MasterXiong/HyperVLA

Liya Wang, David Yi, Damien Jose et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) ) have demonstrated promise in boosting productivity across AI-powered tools, yet existing benchmarks like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) inadequately assess enterprise-specific task complexities. We propose a 14-task framework grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy to holistically evaluate LLM capabilities in enterprise contexts. To address challenges of noisy data and costly annotation, we develop a scalable pipeline combining LLM-as-a-Labeler, LLM-as-a-Judge, and corrective retrieval-augmented generation (CRAG), curating a robust 9,700-sample benchmark. Evaluation of six leading models shows open-source contenders like DeepSeek R1 rival proprietary models in reasoning tasks but lag in judgment-based scenarios, likely due to overthinking. Our benchmark reveals critical enterprise performance gaps and offers actionable insights for model optimization. This work provides enterprises a blueprint for tailored evaluations and advances practical LLM deployment.

Han Zhang, Xiangde Luo, Yong Chen et al.

Annotation variability remains a substantial challenge in medical image segmentation, stemming from ambiguous imaging boundaries and diverse clinical expertise. Traditional deep learning methods producing single deterministic segmentation predictions often fail to capture these annotator biases. Although recent studies have explored multi-rater segmentation, existing methods typically focus on a single perspective -- either generating a probabilistic ``gold standard'' consensus or preserving expert-specific preferences -- thus struggling to provide a more omni view. In this study, we propose DiffOSeg, a two-stage diffusion-based framework, which aims to simultaneously achieve both consensus-driven (combining all experts' opinions) and preference-driven (reflecting experts' individual assessments) segmentation. Stage I establishes population consensus through a probabilistic consensus strategy, while Stage II captures expert-specific preference via adaptive prompts. Demonstrated on two public datasets (LIDC-IDRI and NPC-170), our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across all evaluated metrics. Source code is available at https://github.com/string-ellipses/DiffOSeg .

Zekun Jiang, Wei Dai, Qu Wei et al.

Multi-channel EEG signals are commonly used for the diagnosis and assessment of diseases such as epilepsy. Currently, various EEG diagnostic algorithms based on deep learning have been developed. However, most research efforts focus solely on diagnosing and classifying current signal data but do not consider the prediction of future trends for early warning. Additionally, since multi-channel EEG can be essentially regarded as the spatio-temporal signal data received by detectors at different locations in the brain, how to construct spatio-temporal information representations of EEG signals to facilitate future trend prediction for multi-channel EEG becomes an important problem. This study proposes a multi-signal prediction algorithm based on generative diffusion models (EEG-DIF), which transforms the multi-signal forecasting task into an image completion task, allowing for comprehensive representation and learning of the spatio-temporal correlations and future developmental patterns of multi-channel EEG signals. Here, we employ a publicly available epilepsy EEG dataset to construct and validate the EEG-DIF. The results demonstrate that our method can accurately predict future trends for multi-channel EEG signals simultaneously. Furthermore, the early warning accuracy for epilepsy seizures based on the generated EEG data reaches 0.89. In general, EEG-DIF provides a novel approach for characterizing multi-channel EEG signals and an innovative early warning algorithm for epilepsy seizures, aiding in optimizing and enhancing the clinical diagnosis process. The code is available at https://github.com/JZK00/EEG-DIF.

Wenhui Lei, Xu Wei, Xiaofan Zhang et al.

Recent advancements in foundation models have shown significant potential in medical image analysis. However, there is still a gap in models specifically designed for medical image localization. To address this, we introduce MedLAM, a 3D medical foundation localization model that accurately identifies any anatomical part within the body using only a few template scans. MedLAM employs two self-supervision tasks: unified anatomical mapping (UAM) and multi-scale similarity (MSS) across a comprehensive dataset of 14,012 CT scans. Furthermore, we developed MedLSAM by integrating MedLAM with the Segment Anything Model (SAM). This innovative framework requires extreme point annotations across three directions on several templates to enable MedLAM to locate the target anatomical structure in the image, with SAM performing the segmentation. It significantly reduces the amount of manual annotation required by SAM in 3D medical imaging scenarios. We conducted extensive experiments on two 3D datasets covering 38 distinct organs. Our findings are twofold: 1) MedLAM can directly localize anatomical structures using just a few template scans, achieving performance comparable to fully supervised models; 2) MedLSAM closely matches the performance of SAM and its specialized medical adaptations with manual prompts, while minimizing the need for extensive point annotations across the entire dataset. Moreover, MedLAM has the potential to be seamlessly integrated with future 3D SAM models, paving the way for enhanced segmentation performance. Our code is public at \href{https://github.com/openmedlab/MedLSAM}

Xiaoshuang Shi, Zhenhua Guo, Kang Li et al.

Noisy labels composed of correct and corrupted ones are pervasive in practice. They might significantly deteriorate the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), because CNNs are easily overfitted on corrupted labels. To address this issue, inspired by an observation, deep neural networks might first memorize the probably correct-label data and then corrupt-label samples, we propose a novel yet simple self-paced resistance framework to resist corrupted labels, without using any clean validation data. The proposed framework first utilizes the memorization effect of CNNs to learn a curriculum, which contains confident samples and provides meaningful supervision for other training samples. Then it adopts selected confident samples and a proposed resistance loss to update model parameters; the resistance loss tends to smooth model parameters' update or attain equivalent prediction over each class, thereby resisting model overfitting on corrupted labels. Finally, we unify these two modules into a single loss function and optimize it in an alternative learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significantly superior performance of the proposed framework over recent state-of-the-art methods on noisy-label data. Source codes of the proposed method are available on https://github.com/xsshi2015/Self-paced-Resistance-Learning.

Yao Hu, Guohua Geng, Kang Li et al.

The repairing work of terracotta warriors in Emperor Qinshihuang Mausoleum Site Museum is handcrafted by experts, and the increasing amounts of unearthed pieces of terracotta warriors make the archaeologists too challenging to conduct the restoration of terracotta warriors efficiently. We hope to segment the 3D point cloud data of the terracotta warriors automatically and store the fragment data in the database to assist the archaeologists in matching the actual fragments with the ones in the database, which could result in higher repairing efficiency of terracotta warriors. Moreover, the existing 3D neural network research is mainly focusing on supervised classification, clustering, unsupervised representation, and reconstruction. There are few pieces of researches concentrating on unsupervised point cloud part segmentation. In this paper, we present SRG-Net for 3D point clouds of terracotta warriors to address these problems. Firstly, we adopt a customized seed-region-growing algorithm to segment the point cloud coarsely. Then we present a supervised segmentation and unsupervised reconstruction networks to learn the characteristics of 3D point clouds. Finally, we combine the SRG algorithm with our improved CNN(convolution neural network) using a refinement method. This pipeline is called SRG-Net, which aims at conducting segmentation tasks on the terracotta warriors. Our proposed SRG-Net is evaluated on the terracotta warrior data and ShapeNet dataset by measuring the accuracy and the latency. The experimental results show that our SRG-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyoau/SRG-Net.

Shujun Wang, Lequan Yu, Kang Li et al.

Accurate segmentation of the optic disc (OD) and cup (OC)in fundus images from different datasets is critical for glaucoma disease screening. The cross-domain discrepancy (domain shift) hinders the generalization of deep neural networks to work on different domain datasets.In this work, we present an unsupervised domain adaptation framework,called Boundary and Entropy-driven Adversarial Learning (BEAL), to improve the OD and OC segmentation performance, especially on the ambiguous boundary regions. In particular, our proposed BEAL frame-work utilizes the adversarial learning to encourage the boundary prediction and mask probability entropy map (uncertainty map) of the target domain to be similar to the source ones, generating more accurate boundaries and suppressing the high uncertainty predictions of OD and OC segmentation. We evaluate the proposed BEAL framework on two public retinal fundus image datasets (Drishti-GS and RIM-ONE-r3), and the experiment results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods. Codes will be available at https://github.com/EmmaW8/BEAL.

Rahil Mehrizi, Xi Peng, Shaoting Zhang et al.

The aim of this study is developing an automatic system for detection of gait-related health problems using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The proposed system takes a video of patients as the input and estimates their 3D body pose using a DNN based method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/rmehrizi/multi-view-pose-estimation. The resulting 3D body pose time series are then analyzed in a classifier, which classifies input gait videos into four different groups including Healthy, with Parkinsons disease, Post Stroke patient, and with orthopedic problems. The proposed system removes the requirement of complex and heavy equipment and large laboratory space, and makes the system practical for home use. Moreover, it does not need domain knowledge for feature engineering since it is capable of extracting semantic and high level features from the input data. The experimental results showed the classification accuracy of 56% to 96% for different groups. Furthermore, only 1 out of 25 healthy subjects were misclassified (False positive), and only 1 out of 70 patients were classified as a healthy subject (False negative). This study presents a starting point toward a powerful tool for automatic classification of gait disorders and can be used as a basis for future applications of Deep Learning in clinical gait analysis. Since the system uses digital cameras as the only required equipment, it can be employed in domestic environment of patients and elderly people for consistent gait monitoring and early detection of gait alterations.

Qixue Xiao, Kang Li, Deyue Zhang et al.

Advance in deep learning algorithms overshadows their security risk in software implementations. This paper discloses a set of vulnerabilities in popular deep learning frameworks including Caffe, TensorFlow, and Torch. Contrast to the small code size of deep learning models, these deep learning frameworks are complex and contain heavy dependencies on numerous open source packages. This paper considers the risks caused by these vulnerabilities by studying their impact on common deep learning applications such as voice recognition and image classifications. By exploiting these framework implementations, attackers can launch denial-of-service attacks that crash or hang a deep learning application, or control-flow hijacking attacks that cause either system compromise or recognition evasions. The goal of this paper is to draw attention on the software implementations and call for the community effort to improve the security of deep learning frameworks.

Junjie Li, Kang Li, Dewei Han et al.

AI and robotics technologies have witnessed remarkable advancements in the past decade, revolutionizing work patterns and opportunities in various domains. The application of these technologies has propelled society towards an era of symbiosis between humans and machines. To facilitate efficient communication between humans and intelligent robots, we propose the "Avatar" system, an immersive low-latency panoramic human-robot interaction platform. We have designed and tested a prototype of a rugged mobile platform integrated with edge computing units, panoramic video capture devices, power batteries, robot arms, and network communication equipment. Under favorable network conditions, we achieved a low-latency high-definition panoramic visual experience with a delay of 357ms. Operators can utilize VR headsets and controllers for real-time immersive control of robots and devices. The system enables remote control over vast physical distances, spanning campuses, provinces, countries, and even continents (New York to Shenzhen). Additionally, the system incorporates visual SLAM technology for map and trajectory recording, providing autonomous navigation capabilities. We believe that this intuitive system platform can enhance efficiency and situational experience in human-robot collaboration, and with further advancements in related technologies, it will become a versatile tool for efficient and symbiotic cooperation between AI and humans.

Jinghao Hu, Yuhe Zhang, GuoHua Geng et al.

Generating multi-frame, action-rich visual narratives without fine-tuning faces a threefold tension: action text faithfulness, subject identity fidelity, and cross-frame background continuity. We propose StoryTailor, a zero-shot pipeline that runs on a single RTX 4090 (24 GB) and produces temporally coherent, identity-preserving image sequences from a long narrative prompt, per-subject references, and grounding boxes. Three synergistic modules drive the system: Gaussian-Centered Attention (GCA) to dynamically focus on each subject core and ease grounding-box overlaps; Action-Boost Singular Value Reweighting (AB-SVR) to amplify action-related directions in the text embedding space; and Selective Forgetting Cache (SFC) that retains transferable background cues, forgets nonessential history, and selectively surfaces retained cues to build cross-scene semantic ties. Compared with baseline methods, experiments show that CLIP-T improves by up to 10-15%, with DreamSim lower than strong baselines, while CLIP-I stays in a visually acceptable, competitive range. With matched resolution and steps on a 24 GB GPU, inference is faster than FluxKontext. Qualitatively, StoryTailor delivers expressive interactions and evolving yet stable scenes.

Zekun Jiang, Dongjie Cheng, Ziyuan Qin et al.

This study presents a novel multimodal medical image zero-shot segmentation algorithm named the text-visual-prompt segment anything model (TV-SAM) without any manual annotations. The TV-SAM incorporates and integrates the large language model GPT-4, the vision language model GLIP, and the SAM to autonomously generate descriptive text prompts and visual bounding box prompts from medical images, thereby enhancing the SAM's capability for zero-shot segmentation. Comprehensive evaluations are implemented on seven public datasets encompassing eight imaging modalities to demonstrate that TV-SAM can effectively segment unseen targets across various modalities without additional training. TV-SAM significantly outperforms SAM AUTO and GSAM, closely matching the performance of SAM BBOX with gold standard bounding box prompts and surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on specific datasets such as ISIC and WBC. The study indicates that TV-SAM serves as an effective multimodal medical image zero-shot segmentation algorithm, highlighting the significant contribution of GPT-4 to zero-shot segmentation. By integrating foundational models such as GPT-4, GLIP, and SAM, the ability to address complex problems in specialized domains can be enhanced.

Yu Zhu, Kang Li, Zheng Li et al.

To continuously enhance model adaptability in surgical video scene parsing, recent studies incrementally update it to progressively learn to segment an increasing number of surgical instruments over time. However, prior works constantly overlooked the potential of positive forward knowledge transfer, i.e., how past knowledge could help learn new classes, and positive backward knowledge transfer, i.e., how learning new classes could help refine past knowledge. In this paper, we propose a self-reflection hierarchical prompt framework that unlocks the power of positive forward and backward knowledge transfer in class incremental segmentation, aiming to proficiently learn new instruments, improve existing skills of regular instruments, and avoid catastrophic forgetting of old instruments. Our framework is built on a frozen, pre-trained model that adaptively appends instrument-aware prompts for new classes throughout training episodes. To enable positive forward knowledge transfer, we organize instrument prompts into a hierarchical prompt parsing tree with the instrument-shared prompt partition as the root node, n-part-shared prompt partitions as intermediate nodes and instrument-distinct prompt partitions as leaf nodes, to expose the reusable historical knowledge for new classes to simplify their learning. Conversely, to encourage positive backward knowledge transfer, we conduct self-reflection refining on existing knowledge by directed-weighted graph propagation, examining the knowledge associations recorded in the tree to improve its representativeness without causing catastrophic forgetting. Our framework is applicable to both CNN-based models and advanced transformer-based foundation models, yielding more than 5% and 11% improvements over the competing methods on two public benchmarks respectively.