Dandan Li

Zhifang Deng, Xiaohong Huang, Dandan Li et al.

With the increasingly strengthened data privacy act and the difficult data centralization, Federated Learning (FL) has become an effective solution to collaboratively train the model while preserving each client's privacy. FedAvg is a standard aggregation algorithm that makes the proportion of dataset size of each client as aggregation weight. However, it can't deal with non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d) data well because of its fixed aggregation weights and the neglect of data distribution. In this paper, we propose an aggregation strategy that can effectively deal with non-i.i.d dataset, namely FedGraph, which can adjust the aggregation weights adaptively according to the training condition of local models in whole training process. The FedGraph takes three factors into account from coarse to fine: the proportion of each local dataset size, the topology factor of model graphs, and the model weights. We calculate the gravitational force between local models by transforming the local models into topology graphs. The FedGraph can explore the internal correlation between local models better through the weighted combination of the proportion each local dataset, topology structure, and model weights. The proposed FedGraph has been applied to the MICCAI Federated Tumor Segmentation Challenge 2021 (FeTS) datasets, and the validation results show that our method surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 2.76 mean Dice Similarity Score. The source code will be available at Github.

Wenhao Liu, Zhenyi Lu, Xinyu Hu et al.

High-quality math datasets are crucial for advancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing datasets often suffer from three key issues: outdated and insufficient challenging content, neglecting human-like reasoning, and limited reliability due to single-LLM generation. To address these, we introduce STORM-BORN, an ultra-challenging dataset of mathematical derivations sourced from cutting-edge academic papers, which includes dense human-like approximations and heuristic cues. To ensure the reliability and quality, we propose a novel human-in-the-loop, multi-agent data generation framework, integrating reasoning-dense filters, multi-agent collaboration, and human mathematicians' evaluations. We curated a set of 2,000 synthetic samples and deliberately selected the 100 most difficult problems. Even most advanced models like GPT-o1 solved fewer than 5% of them. Fine-tuning on STORM-BORN boosts accuracy by 7.84% (LLaMA3-8B) and 9.12% (Qwen2.5-7B). As AI approaches mathematician-level reasoning, STORM-BORN provides both a high-difficulty benchmark and a human-like reasoning training resource. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/lwhere/STORM-BORN.

Xiaohong Huang, Zhifang Deng, Dandan Li et al.

The CNN-based methods have achieved impressive results in medical image segmentation, but they failed to capture the long-range dependencies due to the inherent locality of the convolution operation. Transformer-based methods are recently popular in vision tasks because of their capacity for long-range dependencies and promising performance. However, it lacks in modeling local context. In this paper, taking medical image segmentation as an example, we present MISSFormer, an effective and powerful Medical Image Segmentation tranSFormer. MISSFormer is a hierarchical encoder-decoder network with two appealing designs: 1) A feed-forward network is redesigned with the proposed Enhanced Transformer Block, which enhances the long-range dependencies and supplements the local context, making the feature more discriminative. 2) We proposed Enhanced Transformer Context Bridge, different from previous methods of modeling only global information, the proposed context bridge with the enhanced transformer block extracts the long-range dependencies and local context of multi-scale features generated by our hierarchical transformer encoder. Driven by these two designs, the MISSFormer shows a solid capacity to capture more discriminative dependencies and context in medical image segmentation. The experiments on multi-organ and cardiac segmentation tasks demonstrate the superiority, effectiveness and robustness of our MISSFormer, the experimental results of MISSFormer trained from scratch even outperform state-of-the-art methods pre-trained on ImageNet. The core designs can be generalized to other visual segmentation tasks. The code has been released on Github: https://github.com/ZhifangDeng/MISSFormer

Xinrui Huang, Fan Xiao, Dongming He et al.

Oral and maxillofacial radiology plays a vital role in dental healthcare, but radiographic image interpretation is limited by a shortage of trained professionals. While AI approaches have shown promise, existing dental AI systems are restricted by their single-modality focus, task-specific design, and reliance on costly labeled data, hindering their generalization across diverse clinical scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce DentVFM, the first family of vision foundation models (VFMs) designed for dentistry. DentVFM generates task-agnostic visual representations for a wide range of dental applications and uses self-supervised learning on DentVista, a large curated dental imaging dataset with approximately 1.6 million multi-modal radiographic images from various medical centers. DentVFM includes 2D and 3D variants based on the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture. To address gaps in dental intelligence assessment and benchmarks, we introduce DentBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering eight dental subspecialties, more diseases, imaging modalities, and a wide geographical distribution. DentVFM shows impressive generalist intelligence, demonstrating robust generalization to diverse dental tasks, such as disease diagnosis, treatment analysis, biomarker identification, and anatomical landmark detection and segmentation. Experimental results indicate DentVFM significantly outperforms supervised, self-supervised, and weakly supervised baselines, offering superior generalization, label efficiency, and scalability. Additionally, DentVFM enables cross-modality diagnostics, providing more reliable results than experienced dentists in situations where conventional imaging is unavailable. DentVFM sets a new paradigm for dental AI, offering a scalable, adaptable, and label-efficient model to improve intelligent dental healthcare and address critical gaps in global oral healthcare.

Ying Zhuansun, Dandan Li, Xiaohong Huang et al.

Federated learning can train models without directly providing local data to the server. However, the frequent updating of the local model brings the problem of large communication overhead. Recently, scholars have achieved the communication efficiency of federated learning mainly by model compression. But they ignore two problems: 1) network state of each client changes dynamically; 2) network state among clients is not the same. The clients with poor bandwidth update local model slowly, which leads to low efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose a communication-efficient federated learning algorithm with adaptive compression under dynamic bandwidth (called AdapComFL). Concretely, each client performs bandwidth awareness and bandwidth prediction. Then, each client adaptively compresses its local model via the improved sketch mechanism based on his predicted bandwidth. Further, the server aggregates sketched models with different sizes received. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the experiments are based on real bandwidth data which are collected from the network topology we build, and benchmark datasets which are obtained from open repositories. We show the performance of AdapComFL algorithm, and compare it with existing algorithms. The experimental results show that our AdapComFL achieves more efficient communication as well as competitive accuracy compared to existing algorithms.

Yuan Zhou, Dandan Li, Shuwei Huo et al.

The choice of activation function in deep networks has a significant effect on the training dynamics and task performance. At present, the most effective and widely-used activation function is ReLU. However, because of the non-zero mean, negative missing and unbounded output, ReLU is at a potential disadvantage during optimization. To this end, we introduce a novel activation function to manage to overcome the above three challenges. The proposed nonlinearity, namely "Soft-Root-Sign" (SRS), is smooth, non-monotonic, and bounded. Notably, the bounded property of SRS distinguishes itself from most state-of-the-art activation functions. In contrast to ReLU, SRS can adaptively adjust the output by a pair of independent trainable parameters to capture negative information and provide zero-mean property, which leading not only to better generalization performance, but also to faster learning speed. It also avoids and rectifies the output distribution to be scattered in the non-negative real number space, making it more compatible with batch normalization (BN) and less sensitive to initialization. In experiments, we evaluated SRS on deep networks applied to a variety of tasks, including image classification, machine translation and generative modelling. Our SRS matches or exceeds models with ReLU and other state-of-the-art nonlinearities, showing that the proposed activation function is generalized and can achieve high performance across tasks. Ablation study further verified the compatibility with BN and self-adaptability for different initialization.

Dandan Li, Yuan Zhou, Shuwei Huo et al.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are inherently suffering from massively redundant computation (FLOPs) due to the dense connection pattern between feature maps and convolution kernels. Recent research has investigated the sparse relationship between channels, however, they ignored the spatial relationship within a channel. In this paper, we present a novel convolutional operator, namely comb convolution, to exploit the intra-channel sparse relationship among neurons. The proposed convolutional operator eliminates nearly 50% of connections by inserting uniform mappings into standard convolutions and removing about half of spatial connections in convolutional layer. Notably, our work is orthogonal and complementary to existing methods that reduce channel-wise redundancy. Thus, it has great potential to further increase efficiency through integrating the comb convolution to existing architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that by simply replacing standard convolutions with comb convolutions on state-of-the-art CNN architectures (e.g., VGGNets, Xception and SE-Net), we can achieve 50% FLOPs reduction while still maintaining the accuracy.

Qijun Zhu, Dandan Li, Dik Lun Lee

As the web expands in data volume and in geographical distribution, centralized search methods become inefficient, leading to increasing interest in cooperative information retrieval, e.g., federated text retrieval (FTR). Different from existing centralized information retrieval (IR) methods, in which search is done on a logically centralized document collection, FTR is composed of a number of peers, each of which is a complete search engine by itself. To process a query, FTR requires firstly the identification of promising peers that host the relevant documents and secondly the retrieval of the most relevant documents from the selected peers. Most of the existing methods only apply traditional IR techniques that treat each text collection as a single large document and utilize term matching to rank the collections. In this paper, we formalize the problem and identify the properties of FTR, and analyze the feasibility of extending LSI with clustering to adapt to FTR, based on which a novel approach called Cluster-based Distributed Latent Semantic Indexing (C-DLSI) is proposed. C-DLSI distinguishes the topics of a peer with clustering, captures the local LSI spaces within the clusters, and consider the relations among these LSI spaces, thus providing more precise characterization of the peer. Accordingly, novel descriptors of the peers and a compatible local text retrieval are proposed. The experimental results show that C-DLSI outperforms existing methods.

Douglas Summers-Stay, Peter Sutor, Dandan Li

Representing meaning in the form of high dimensional vectors is a common and powerful tool in biologically inspired architectures. While the meaning of a set of concepts can be summarized by taking a (possibly weighted) sum of their associated vectors, this has generally been treated as a one-way operation. In this paper we show how a technique built to aid sparse vector decomposition allows in many cases the exact recovery of the inputs and weights to such a sum, allowing a single vector to represent an entire set of vectors from a dictionary. We characterize the number of vectors that can be recovered under various conditions, and explore several ways such a tool can be used for vector-based reasoning.

Kai Zhao, Wei Shen, Shanghua Gao et al.

In natural images, the scales (thickness) of object skeletons may dramatically vary among objects and object parts, making object skeleton detection a challenging problem. We present a new convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture by introducing a novel hierarchical feature integration mechanism, named Hi-Fi, to address the skeleton detection problem. The proposed CNN-based approach has a powerful multi-scale feature integration ability that intrinsically captures high-level semantics from deeper layers as well as low-level details from shallower layers. % By hierarchically integrating different CNN feature levels with bidirectional guidance, our approach (1) enables mutual refinement across features of different levels, and (2) possesses the strong ability to capture both rich object context and high-resolution details. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of effectively fusing features from very different scales, as evidenced by a considerable performance improvement on several benchmarks.