K. H. Qi

Kehan Qi, Saumya Gupta, Qingqiao Hu et al.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) offers excellent soft-tissue contrast without ionizing radiation, but its long acquisition time limits clinical utility. Recent methods accelerate MRI by under-sampling $k$-space and reconstructing the resulting images using deep learning. Unrolled networks have been widely used for the reconstruction task due to their efficiency, but suffer from unstable evolving caused by freely-learnable parameters in intermediate steps. In contrast, diffusion models based on stochastic differential equations offer theoretical stability in both medical and natural image tasks but are computationally expensive. In this work, we introduce flow ODEs to MRI reconstruction by theoretically proving that unrolled networks are discrete implementations of conditional probability flow ODEs. This connection provides explicit formulations for parameters and clarifies how intermediate states should evolve. Building on this insight, we propose Flow-Aligned Training (FLAT), which derives unrolled parameters from the ODE discretization and aligns intermediate reconstructions with the ideal ODE trajectory to improve stability and convergence. Experiments on three MRI datasets show that FLAT achieves high-quality reconstructions with up to $3\times$ fewer iterations than diffusion-based generative models and significantly greater stability than unrolled networks.

Qingqiao Hu, Weimin Lyu, Meilong Xu et al.

Whole Slide Image (WSI) understanding is fundamentally challenging due to its gigapixel scale and the extreme sparsity of diagnostically relevant regions. Unlike human experts who primarily rely on key areas to arrive at a diagnosis, existing slide-level multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for pathology rely on heavy slide-level encoders that process thousands of patch features in a brute-force manner, resulting in excessive computational cost. In this work, we revisit the WSI-language modeling paradigm and show that tile-level features exhibit strong global and local redundancy, whereas only a small subset of tiles are truly task-relevant. Motivated by this observation, we introduce an efficient MLLM framework, called LoC-Path, that replaces the expensive slide-level encoder with redundancy-reducing modules. We first design a Sparse Token Merger (STM) and an MAE-pretrained resampler to remove local redundancy and compress globally redundant tile tokens into a compact slide-level representation set. We then propose a Cross-Attention Routing Adapter (CARA) and a Token Importance Scorer (TIS) to integrate the compressed visual representation with the language model in a computation-efficient manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves performance comparable to existing state-of-the-art whole-slide MLLMs, while requiring significantly lower computation and memory.

Chen-Chen Fan, Peiyao Guo, Linping Zhang et al.

Given the limitations of satellite orbits and imaging conditions, multi-modal remote sensing (RS) data is crucial in enabling long-term earth observation. However, maritime surveillance remains challenging due to the complexity of multi-scale targets and the dynamic environments. To bridge this critical gap, we propose a Synchronized Multi-modal Aligned Remote sensing Targets dataset for berthed ships analysis (SMART-Ship), containing spatiotemporal registered images with fine-grained annotation for maritime targets from five modalities: visible-light, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), panchromatic, multi-spectral, and near-infrared. Specifically, our dataset consists of 1092 multi-modal image sets, covering 38,838 ships. Each image set is acquired within one week and registered to ensure spatiotemporal consistency. Ship instances in each set are annotated with polygonal location information, fine-grained categories, instance-level identifiers, and change region masks, organized hierarchically to support diverse multi-modal RS tasks. Furthermore, we define standardized benchmarks on five fundamental tasks and comprehensively compare representative methods across the dataset. Thorough experiment evaluations validate that the proposed SMART-Ship dataset could support various multi-modal RS interpretation tasks and reveal the promising directions for further exploration.