Siqi Liu

Ian Gemp, Thomas Anthony, Yoram Bachrach et al. · deepmind

The Game Theory & Multi-Agent team at DeepMind studies several aspects of multi-agent learning ranging from computing approximations to fundamental concepts in game theory to simulating social dilemmas in rich spatial environments and training 3-d humanoids in difficult team coordination tasks. A signature aim of our group is to use the resources and expertise made available to us at DeepMind in deep reinforcement learning to explore multi-agent systems in complex environments and use these benchmarks to advance our understanding. Here, we summarise the recent work of our team and present a taxonomy that we feel highlights many important open challenges in multi-agent research.

Xinyi Yu, Guanbin Li, Wei Lou et al.

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental but challenging task in the quantitative analysis of histopathology images. Although fully-supervised deep learning-based methods have made significant progress, a large number of labeled images are required to achieve great segmentation performance. Considering that manually labeling all nuclei instances for a dataset is inefficient, obtaining a large-scale human-annotated dataset is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, augmenting a dataset with only a few labeled images to improve the segmentation performance is of significant research and application value. In this paper, we introduce the first diffusion-based augmentation method for nuclei segmentation. The idea is to synthesize a large number of labeled images to facilitate training the segmentation model. To achieve this, we propose a two-step strategy. In the first step, we train an unconditional diffusion model to synthesize the Nuclei Structure that is defined as the representation of pixel-level semantic and distance transform. Each synthetic nuclei structure will serve as a constraint on histopathology image synthesis and is further post-processed to be an instance map. In the second step, we train a conditioned diffusion model to synthesize histopathology images based on nuclei structures. The synthetic histopathology images paired with synthetic instance maps will be added to the real dataset for training the segmentation model. The experimental results show that by augmenting 10% labeled real dataset with synthetic samples, one can achieve comparable segmentation results with the fully-supervised baseline. The code is released in: https://github.com/lhaof/Nudiff

Eugene Vorontsov, Alican Bozkurt, Adam Casson et al.

The use of artificial intelligence to enable precision medicine and decision support systems through the analysis of pathology images has the potential to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Such applications will depend on models' abilities to capture the diverse patterns observed in pathology images. To address this challenge, we present Virchow, a foundation model for computational pathology. Using self-supervised learning empowered by the DINOv2 algorithm, Virchow is a vision transformer model with 632 million parameters trained on 1.5 million hematoxylin and eosin stained whole slide images from diverse tissue and specimen types, which is orders of magnitude more data than previous works. The Virchow model enables the development of a pan-cancer detection system with 0.949 overall specimen-level AUC across 17 different cancer types, while also achieving 0.937 AUC on 7 rare cancer types. The Virchow model sets the state-of-the-art on the internal and external image tile level benchmarks and slide level biomarker prediction tasks. The gains in performance highlight the importance of training on massive pathology image datasets, suggesting scaling up the data and network architecture can improve the accuracy for many high-impact computational pathology applications where limited amounts of training data are available.

Siqi Liu, Marc Lanctot, Luke Marris et al.

Learning to play optimally against any mixture over a diverse set of strategies is of important practical interests in competitive games. In this paper, we propose simplex-NeuPL that satisfies two desiderata simultaneously: i) learning a population of strategically diverse basis policies, represented by a single conditional network; ii) using the same network, learn best-responses to any mixture over the simplex of basis policies. We show that the resulting conditional policies incorporate prior information about their opponents effectively, enabling near optimal returns against arbitrary mixture policies in a game with tractable best-responses. We verify that such policies behave Bayes-optimally under uncertainty and offer insights in using this flexibility at test time. Finally, we offer evidence that learning best-responses to any mixture policies is an effective auxiliary task for strategic exploration, which, by itself, can lead to more performant populations.

Bobak Shahriari, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Arunkumar Byravan et al.

Actor-critic algorithms that make use of distributional policy evaluation have frequently been shown to outperform their non-distributional counterparts on many challenging control tasks. Examples of this behavior include the D4PG and DMPO algorithms as compared to DDPG and MPO, respectively [Barth-Maron et al., 2018; Hoffman et al., 2020]. However, both agents rely on the C51 critic for value estimation.One major drawback of the C51 approach is its requirement of prior knowledge about the minimum andmaximum values a policy can attain as well as the number of bins used, which fixes the resolution ofthe distributional estimate. While the DeepMind control suite of tasks utilizes standardized rewards and episode lengths, thus enabling the entire suite to be solved with a single setting of these hyperparameters, this is often not the case. This paper revisits a natural alternative that removes this requirement, namelya mixture of Gaussians, and a simple sample-based loss function to train it in an off-policy regime. We empirically evaluate its performance on a broad range of continuous control tasks and demonstrate that it eliminates the need for these distributional hyperparameters and achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of challenging tasks (e.g. the humanoid, dog, quadruped, and manipulator domains). Finallywe provide an implementation in the Acme agent repository.

Luke Marris, Ian Gemp, Thomas Anthony et al.

Solution concepts such as Nash Equilibria, Correlated Equilibria, and Coarse Correlated Equilibria are useful components for many multiagent machine learning algorithms. Unfortunately, solving a normal-form game could take prohibitive or non-deterministic time to converge, and could fail. We introduce the Neural Equilibrium Solver which utilizes a special equivariant neural network architecture to approximately solve the space of all games of fixed shape, buying speed and determinism. We define a flexible equilibrium selection framework, that is capable of uniquely selecting an equilibrium that minimizes relative entropy, or maximizes welfare. The network is trained without needing to generate any supervised training data. We show remarkable zero-shot generalization to larger games. We argue that such a network is a powerful component for many possible multiagent algorithms.

Jiri Gesi, Siqi Liu, Jiawei Li et al.

As Deep learning (DL) systems continuously evolve and grow, assuring their quality becomes an important yet challenging task. Compared to non-DL systems, DL systems have more complex team compositions and heavier data dependency. These inherent characteristics would potentially cause DL systems to be more vulnerable to bugs and, in the long run, to maintenance issues. Code smells are empirically tested as efficient indicators of non-DL systems. Therefore, we took a step forward into identifying code smells, and understanding their impact on maintenance in this comprehensive study. This is the first study on investigating code smells in the context of DL software systems, which helps researchers and practitioners to get a first look at what kind of maintenance modification made and what code smells developers have been dealing with. Our paper has three major contributions. First, we comprehensively investigated the maintenance modifications that have been made by DL developers via studying the evolution of DL systems, and we identified nine frequently occurred maintenance-related modification categories in DL systems. Second, we summarized five code smells in DL systems. Third, we validated the prevalence, and the impact of our newly identified code smells through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative analysis. We found that our newly identified code smells are prevalent and impactful on the maintenance of DL systems from the developer's perspective.

Wei Lou, Xinyi Yu, Chenyu Liu et al.

Cell segmentation for multi-modal microscopy images remains a challenge due to the complex textures, patterns, and cell shapes in these images. To tackle the problem, we first develop an automatic cell classification pipeline to label the microscopy images based on their low-level image characteristics, and then train a classification model based on the category labels. Afterward, we train a separate segmentation model for each category using the images in the corresponding category. Besides, we further deploy two types of segmentation models to segment cells with roundish and irregular shapes respectively. Moreover, an efficient and powerful backbone model is utilized to enhance the efficiency of our segmentation model. Evaluated on the Tuning Set of NeurIPS 2022 Cell Segmentation Challenge, our method achieves an F1-score of 0.8795 and the running time for all cases is within the time tolerance.

Yong-Lu Li, Yue Xu, Xinyu Xu et al.

Understanding objects is a central building block of artificial intelligence, especially for embodied AI. Even though object recognition excels with deep learning, current machines still struggle to learn higher-level knowledge, e.g., what attributes an object has, and what can we do with an object. In this work, we propose a challenging Object Concept Learning (OCL) task to push the envelope of object understanding. It requires machines to reason out object affordances and simultaneously give the reason: what attributes make an object possesses these affordances. To support OCL, we build a densely annotated knowledge base including extensive labels for three levels of object concept (category, attribute, affordance), and the causal relations of three levels. By analyzing the causal structure of OCL, we present a baseline, Object Concept Reasoning Network (OCRN). It leverages causal intervention and concept instantiation to infer the three levels following their causal relations. In experiments, OCRN effectively infers the object knowledge while following the causalities well. Our data and code are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/ocl.

Ailin Huang, Ang Li, Aobo Kong et al.

We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.

Eric Zimmermann, Eugene Vorontsov, Julian Viret et al.

Foundation models are rapidly being developed for computational pathology applications. However, it remains an open question which factors are most important for downstream performance with data scale and diversity, model size, and training algorithm all playing a role. In this work, we propose algorithmic modifications, tailored for pathology, and we present the result of scaling both data and model size, surpassing previous studies in both dimensions. We introduce three new models: Virchow2, a 632 million parameter vision transformer, Virchow2G, a 1.9 billion parameter vision transformer, and Virchow2G Mini, a 22 million parameter distillation of Virchow2G, each trained with 3.1 million histopathology whole slide images, with diverse tissues, originating institutions, and stains. We achieve state of the art performance on 12 tile-level tasks, as compared to the top performing competing models. Our results suggest that data diversity and domain-specific methods can outperform models that only scale in the number of parameters, but, on average, performance benefits from the combination of domain-specific methods, data scale, and model scale.

Guoqing Ma, Haoyang Huang, Kun Yan et al.

We present Step-Video-T2V, a state-of-the-art text-to-video pre-trained model with 30B parameters and the ability to generate videos up to 204 frames in length. A deep compression Variational Autoencoder, Video-VAE, is designed for video generation tasks, achieving 16x16 spatial and 8x temporal compression ratios, while maintaining exceptional video reconstruction quality. User prompts are encoded using two bilingual text encoders to handle both English and Chinese. A DiT with 3D full attention is trained using Flow Matching and is employed to denoise input noise into latent frames. A video-based DPO approach, Video-DPO, is applied to reduce artifacts and improve the visual quality of the generated videos. We also detail our training strategies and share key observations and insights. Step-Video-T2V's performance is evaluated on a novel video generation benchmark, Step-Video-T2V-Eval, demonstrating its state-of-the-art text-to-video quality when compared with both open-source and commercial engines. Additionally, we discuss the limitations of current diffusion-based model paradigm and outline future directions for video foundation models. We make both Step-Video-T2V and Step-Video-T2V-Eval available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Video-T2V. The online version can be accessed from https://yuewen.cn/videos as well. Our goal is to accelerate the innovation of video foundation models and empower video content creators.

Ailin Huang, Boyong Wu, Bruce Wang et al.

Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

Boyong Wu, Chao Yan, Chen Hu et al.

This paper presents Step-Audio 2, an end-to-end multi-modal large language model designed for industry-strength audio understanding and speech conversation. By integrating a latent audio encoder and reasoning-centric reinforcement learning (RL), Step-Audio 2 achieves promising performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and audio understanding. To facilitate genuine end-to-end speech conversation, Step-Audio 2 incorporates the generation of discrete audio tokens into language modeling, significantly enhancing its responsiveness to paralinguistic information such as speaking styles and emotions. To effectively leverage the rich textual and acoustic knowledge in real-world data, Step-Audio 2 integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and is able to call external tools such as web search to mitigate hallucination and audio search to switch timbres. Trained on millions of hours of speech and audio data, Step-Audio 2 delivers intelligence and expressiveness across diverse conversational scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that Step-Audio 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on various audio understanding and conversational benchmarks compared to other open-source and commercial solutions. Please visit https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio2 for more information.

Yi Kan Wang, Ludmila Tydlitatova, Jeremy D. Kunz et al.

Molecular assays are standard of care for detecting genomic alterations in cancer prognosis and therapy selection but are costly, tissue-destructive and time-consuming. Artificial intelligence (AI) applied to routine hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained whole slide images (WSIs) offers a fast and economical alternative for screening molecular biomarkers. We introduce OmniScreen, a high-throughput AI-based system leveraging Virchow2 embeddings extracted from 60,529 cancer patients with paired 489-gene MSK-IMPACT targeted biomarker panel and WSIs. Unlike conventional approaches that train separate models for each biomarker, OmniScreen employs a unified model to predict a broad range of clinically relevant biomarkers across cancers, including low-prevalence targets impractical to model individually. OmniScreen reliably identifies therapeutic targets and shared phenotypic features across common and rare tumors. We investigate the biomarker prediction probabilities and accuracies of OmniScreen in relation to tumor area, cohort size, histologic subtype alignment, and pathway-level morphological patterns. These findings underscore the potential of OmniScreen for routine clinical screening.

Siqi Liu, Andreas Lehrmann

Deep learning has shown impressive results in a variety of time series forecasting tasks, where modeling the conditional distribution of the future given the past is the essence. However, when this conditional distribution is non-stationary, it poses challenges for these models to learn consistently and to predict accurately. In this work, we propose a new method to model non-stationary conditional distributions over time by clearly decoupling stationary conditional distribution modeling from non-stationary dynamics modeling. Our method is based on a Bayesian dynamic model that can adapt to conditional distribution changes and a deep conditional distribution model that handles multivariate time series using a factorized output space. Our experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our model can adapt to non-stationary time series better than state-of-the-art deep learning solutions.

Siqi Liu, Xinyang Li, Bochao Zou et al.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, there is increasing interest in their ability to infer human mental states and demonstrate a human-like Theory of Mind (ToM). Most existing ToM evaluations, however, are centered on text-based inputs, while scenarios relying solely on visual information receive far less attention. This leaves a gap, since real-world human-AI interaction typically requires multimodal understanding. In addition, many current methods regard the model as a black box and rarely probe how its internal attention behaves in multiple-choice question answering (QA). The impact of LLM hallucinations on such tasks is also underexplored from an interpretability perspective. To address these issues, we introduce VisionToM, a vision-oriented intervention framework designed to strengthen task-aware reasoning. The core idea is to compute intervention vectors that align visual representations with the correct semantic targets, thereby steering the model's attention through different layers of visual features. This guidance reduces the model's reliance on spurious linguistic priors, leading to more reliable multimodal language model (MLLM) outputs and better QA performance. Experiments on the EgoToM benchmark-an egocentric, real-world video dataset for ToM with three multiple-choice QA settings-demonstrate that our method substantially improves the ToM abilities of MLLMs. Furthermore, results on an additional open-ended generation task show that VisionToM enables MLLMs to produce free-form explanations that more accurately capture agents' mental states, pushing machine-human collaboration toward greater alignment.

Zhonghao Shi, Allison O'Connell, Zongjian Li et al.

As artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in our society and global economy, AI education and literacy have become necessary components in college and K-12 education to prepare students for an AI-powered society. However, current AI curricula have not yet been made accessible and engaging enough for students and schools from all socio-economic backgrounds with different educational goals. In this work, we developed an open-source learning module for college and high school students, which allows students to build their own robot companion from the ground up. This open platform can be used to provide hands-on experience and introductory knowledge about various aspects of AI, including robotics, machine learning (ML), software engineering, and mechanical engineering. Because of the social and personal nature of a socially assistive robot companion, this module also puts a special emphasis on human-centered AI, enabling students to develop a better understanding of human-AI interaction and AI ethics through hands-on learning activities. With open-source documentation, assembling manuals and affordable materials, students from different socio-economic backgrounds can personalize their learning experience based on their individual educational goals. To evaluate the student-perceived quality of our module, we conducted a usability testing workshop with 15 college students recruited from a minority-serving institution. Our results indicate that our AI module is effective, easy-to-follow, and engaging, and it increases student interest in studying AI/ML and robotics in the future. We hope that this work will contribute toward accessible and engaging AI education in human-AI interaction for college and high school students.

Gheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann et al. · amazon-science, baidu

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.

Siqi Liu, Yong-Lu Li, Zhou Fang et al.

Embedding Human and Articulated Object Interaction (HAOI) in 3D is an important direction for a deeper human activity understanding. Different from previous works that use parametric and CAD models to represent humans and objects, in this work, we propose a novel 3D geometric primitive-based language to encode both humans and objects. Given our new paradigm, humans and objects are all compositions of primitives instead of heterogeneous entities. Thus, mutual information learning may be achieved between the limited 3D data of humans and different object categories. Moreover, considering the simplicity of the expression and the richness of the information it contains, we choose the superquadric as the primitive representation. To explore an effective embedding of HAOI for the machine, we build a new benchmark on 3D HAOI consisting of primitives together with their images and propose a task requiring machines to recover 3D HAOI using primitives from images. Moreover, we propose a baseline of single-view 3D reconstruction on HAOI. We believe this primitive-based 3D HAOI representation would pave the way for 3D HAOI studies. Our code and data are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/p3haoi.

Chunyu Li, Xindi Zheng, Siqi Liu

Entity linking (EL) for biomedical text is typically benchmarked on English-only corpora with flat mentions, leaving the more realistic scenario of nested and multilingual mentions largely unexplored. We present our system for the BioNNE 2025 Multilingual Biomedical Nested Named Entity Linking shared task (English & Russian), closing this gap with a lightweight pipeline that keeps the original EL model intact and modifies only three task-aligned components: Two-stage retrieval-ranking. We leverage the same base encoder model in both stages: the retrieval stage uses the original pre-trained model, while the ranking stage applies domain-specific fine-tuning. Boundary cues. In the ranking stage, we wrap each mention with learnable [Ms] / [Me] tags, providing the encoder with an explicit, language-agnostic span before robustness to overlap and nesting. Dataset augmentation. We also automatically expand the ranking training corpus with three complementary data sources, enhancing coverage without extra manual annotation. On the BioNNE 2025 leaderboard, our two stage system, bilingual bert (BIBERT-Pipe), ranks third in the multilingual track, demonstrating the effectiveness and competitiveness of these minimal yet principled modifications. Code are publicly available at https://github.com/Kaggle-Competitions-Code/BioNNE-L.

Lianze Shan, Jitao Zhao, Dongxiao He et al.

Recent advances in generic large models, such as GPT and DeepSeek, have motivated the introduction of universality to graph pre-training, aiming to learn rich and generalizable knowledge across diverse domains using graph representations to improve performance in various downstream applications. However, most existing methods face challenges in learning effective knowledge from generic graphs, primarily due to simplistic data alignment and limited training guidance. The issue of simplistic data alignment arises from the use of a straightforward unification for highly diverse graph data, which fails to align semantics and misleads pre-training models. The problem with limited training guidance lies in the arbitrary application of in-domain pre-training paradigms to cross-domain scenarios. While it is effective in enhancing discriminative representation in one data space, it struggles to capture effective knowledge from many graphs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Latent sEmantic Distribution Alignment (LEDA) model for universal graph pre-training. Specifically, we first introduce a dimension projection unit to adaptively align diverse domain features into a shared semantic space with minimal information loss. Furthermore, we design a variational semantic inference module to obtain the shared latent distribution. The distribution is then adopted to guide the domain projection, aligning it with shared semantics across domains and ensuring cross-domain semantic learning. LEDA exhibits strong performance across a broad range of graphs and downstream tasks. Remarkably, in few-shot cross-domain settings, it significantly outperforms in-domain baselines and advanced universal pre-training models.

Eric Zimmermann, Julian Viret, Michal Zelechowski et al.

In recent years, a standard computational pathology workflow has emerged where whole slide images are cropped into tiles, these tiles are processed using a foundation model, and task-specific models are built using the resulting representations. At least 15 different foundation models have been proposed, and the vast majority are trained exclusively with tiles using the 20$\times$ magnification. However, it is well known that certain histologic features can only be discerned with larger context windows and requires a pathologist to zoom in and out when analyzing a whole slide image. Furthermore, creating 224$\times$224 pixel crops at 20$\times$ leads to a large number of tiles per slide, which can be gigapixel in size. To more accurately capture multi-resolution features and investigate the possibility of reducing the number of representations per slide, we propose a region-level mixing encoder. Our approach jointly fuses image tile representations of a mixed magnification foundation model using a masked embedding modeling pretraining step. We explore a design space for pretraining the proposed mixed-magnification region aggregators and evaluate our models on transfer to biomarker prediction tasks representing various cancer types. Results demonstrate cancer dependent improvements in predictive performance, highlighting the importance of spatial context and understanding.

Haiyang Wang, Guangyu Zhou, Siqi Liu et al.

Motivation: Predicting Drug-Target Interaction (DTI) is a well-studied topic in bioinformatics due to its relevance in the fields of proteomics and pharmaceutical research. Although many machine learning methods have been successfully applied in this task, few of them aim at leveraging the inherent heterogeneous graph structure in the DTI network to address the challenge. For better learning and interpreting the DTI topological structure and the similarity, it is desirable to have methods specifically for predicting interactions from the graph structure. Results: We present an end-to-end framework, DTI-GAT (Drug-Target Interaction prediction with Graph Attention networks) for DTI predictions. DTI-GAT incorporates a deep neural network architecture that operates on graph-structured data with the attention mechanism, which leverages both the interaction patterns and the features of drug and protein sequences. DTI-GAT facilitates the interpretation of the DTI topological structure by assigning different attention weights to each node with the self-attention mechanism. Experimental evaluations show that DTI-GAT outperforms various state-of-the-art systems on the binary DTI prediction problem. Moreover, the independent study results further demonstrate that our model can be generalized better than other conventional methods. Availability: The source code and all datasets are available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/DTI-GRAPH

Yi Zhou, Guillermo Gallego, Xiuyuan Lu et al.

Identifying independently moving objects is an essential task for dynamic scene understanding. However, traditional cameras used in dynamic scenes may suffer from motion blur or exposure artifacts due to their sampling principle. By contrast, event-based cameras are novel bio-inspired sensors that offer advantages to overcome such limitations. They report pixelwise intensity changes asynchronously, which enables them to acquire visual information at exactly the same rate as the scene dynamics. We develop a method to identify independently moving objects acquired with an event-based camera, i.e., to solve the event-based motion segmentation problem. We cast the problem as an energy minimization one involving the fitting of multiple motion models. We jointly solve two subproblems, namely event cluster assignment (labeling) and motion model fitting, in an iterative manner by exploiting the structure of the input event data in the form of a spatio-temporal graph. Experiments on available datasets demonstrate the versatility of the method in scenes with different motion patterns and number of moving objects. The evaluation shows state-of-the-art results without having to predetermine the number of expected moving objects. We release the software and dataset under an open source licence to foster research in the emerging topic of event-based motion segmentation.

Yuval Tassa, Saran Tunyasuvunakool, Alistair Muldal et al.

The dm_control software package is a collection of Python libraries and task suites for reinforcement learning agents in an articulated-body simulation. A MuJoCo wrapper provides convenient bindings to functions and data structures. The PyMJCF and Composer libraries enable procedural model manipulation and task authoring. The Control Suite is a fixed set of tasks with standardised structure, intended to serve as performance benchmarks. The Locomotion framework provides high-level abstractions and examples of locomotion tasks. A set of configurable manipulation tasks with a robot arm and snap-together bricks is also included. dm_control is publicly available at https://www.github.com/deepmind/dm_control

George Shaikovski, Adam Casson, Kristen Severson et al.

Foundation models in computational pathology promise to unlock the development of new clinical decision support systems and models for precision medicine. However, there is a mismatch between most clinical analysis, which is defined at the level of one or more whole slide images, and foundation models to date, which process the thousands of image tiles contained in a whole slide image separately. The requirement to train a network to aggregate information across a large number of tiles in multiple whole slide images limits these models' impact. In this work, we present a slide-level foundation model for H&E-stained histopathology, PRISM, that builds on Virchow tile embeddings and leverages clinical report text for pre-training. Using the tile embeddings, PRISM produces slide-level embeddings with the ability to generate clinical reports, resulting in several modes of use. Using text prompts, PRISM achieves zero-shot cancer detection and sub-typing performance approaching and surpassing that of a supervised aggregator model. Using the slide embeddings with linear classifiers, PRISM surpasses supervised aggregator models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that fine-tuning of the PRISM slide encoder yields label-efficient training for biomarker prediction, a task that typically suffers from low availability of training data; an aggregator initialized with PRISM and trained on as little as 10% of the training data can outperform a supervised baseline that uses all of the data.

StepFun, Bin Wang, Bojun Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) face low hardware efficiency during decoding, especially for long-context reasoning tasks. This paper introduces Step-3, a 321B-parameter VLM with hardware-aware model-system co-design optimized for minimizing decoding costs. Step-3 innovates in two key dimensions: (1) A novel Multi-Matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) mechanism that significantly reduces both KV cache size and computation while maintaining high attention expressiveness, and (2) Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD), a distributed inference system that decouples attention and Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers into specialized subsystems. This co-design achieves unprecedented cost efficiency: Step-3 significantly reduces theoretical decoding costs compared with models like DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B, with the gains widening at longer context. Step-3 achieves low cost while activating 38B parameters per token (more than DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B), demonstrating that hardware-aligned attention arithmetic intensity, MoE sparsity, and AFD are critical to cost-effectiveness. We perform a head-to-head comparison with DeepSeek-V3 in its favorable scenarios. Our implementation on Hopper GPUs achieves a decoding throughput of up to 4,039 tokens per second per GPU under 50ms TPOT SLA (4K context, FP8, no MTP). It is higher than DeepSeek-V3's 2,324 in the same setup and sets a new Pareto frontier for LLM decoding.

Zhonghao Shi, Han Chen, Anna-Maria Velentza et al.

Mindfulness-based therapies have been shown to be effective in improving mental health, and technology-based methods have the potential to expand the accessibility of these therapies. To enable real-time personalized content generation for mindfulness practice in these methods, high-quality computer-synthesized text-to-speech (TTS) voices are needed to provide verbal guidance and respond to user performance and preferences. However, the user-perceived quality of state-of-the-art TTS voices has not yet been evaluated for administering mindfulness meditation, which requires emotional expressiveness. In addition, work has not yet been done to study the effect of physical embodiment and personalization on the user-perceived quality of TTS voices for mindfulness. To that end, we designed a two-phase human subject study. In Phase 1, an online Mechanical Turk between-subject study (N=471) evaluated 3 (feminine, masculine, child-like) state-of-the-art TTS voices with 2 (feminine, masculine) human therapists' voices in 3 different physical embodiment settings (no agent, conversational agent, socially assistive robot) with remote participants. Building on findings from Phase 1, in Phase 2, an in-person within-subject study (N=94), we used a novel framework we developed for personalizing TTS voices based on user preferences, and evaluated user-perceived quality compared to best-rated non-personalized voices from Phase 1. We found that the best-rated human voice was perceived better than all TTS voices; the emotional expressiveness and naturalness of TTS voices were poorly rated, while users were satisfied with the clarity of TTS voices. Surprisingly, by allowing users to fine-tune TTS voice features, the user-personalized TTS voices could perform almost as well as human voices, suggesting user personalization could be a simple and very effective tool to improve user-perceived quality of TTS voice.

Siqi Liu, Maoyu Wang, Bo Dai et al.

Retargeting motion between characters with different skeleton structures is a fundamental challenge in computer animation. When source and target characters have vastly different bone arrangements, maintaining the original motion's semantics and quality becomes increasingly difficult. We present PALUM, a novel approach that learns common motion representations across diverse skeleton topologies by partitioning joints into semantic body parts and applying attention mechanisms to capture spatio-temporal relationships. Our method transfers motion to target skeletons by leveraging these skeleton-agnostic representations alongside target-specific structural information. To ensure robust learning and preserve motion fidelity, we introduce a cycle consistency mechanism that maintains semantic coherence throughout the retargeting process. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance in handling diverse skeletal structures while maintaining motion realism and semantic fidelity, even when generalizing to previously unseen skeleton-motion combinations. We will make our implementation publicly available to support future research.

Ailin Huang, Bingxin Li, Bruce Wang et al.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have significantly advanced intelligent human-computer interaction, yet their reliance on text-based outputs limits their ability to generate natural speech responses directly, hindering seamless audio interactions. To address this, we introduce Step-Audio-AQAA, a fully end-to-end LALM designed for Audio Query-Audio Answer (AQAA) tasks. The model integrates a dual-codebook audio tokenizer for linguistic and semantic feature extraction, a 130-billion-parameter backbone LLM and a neural vocoder for high-fidelity speech synthesis. Our post-training approach employs interleaved token-output of text and audio to enhance semantic coherence and combines Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with model merge to improve performance. Evaluations on the StepEval-Audio-360 benchmark demonstrate that Step-Audio-AQAA excels especially in speech control, outperforming the state-of-art LALMs in key areas. This work contributes a promising solution for end-to-end LALMs and highlights the critical role of token-based vocoder in enhancing overall performance for AQAA tasks.

Yanhui Chen, Baoyao Yang, Siqi Liu et al.

SAM3 advances open-vocabulary semantic segmentation by introducing a prompt-driven mask generation paradigm. However, in multi-class open-vocabulary scenarios, masks generated independently from different category prompts lack a unified and inter-class comparable evidence scale, often resulting in overlapping coverage and unstable competition. Moreover, synonymous expressions of the same concept tend to activate inconsistent semantic and spatial evidence, leading to intra-class drift that exacerbates inter-class conflicts and compromises overall inference stability. To address these issues, we propose CoCo-SAM3 (Concept-Conflict SAM3), which explicitly decouples inference into intra-class enhancement and inter-class competition. Our method first aligns and aggregates evidence from synonymous prompts to strengthen concept consistency. It then performs inter-class competition on a unified comparable scale, enabling direct pixel-wise comparisons among all candidate classes. This mechanism stabilizes multi-class inference and effectively mitigates inter-class conflicts. Without requiring any additional training, CoCo-SAM3 achieves consistent improvements across eight open-vocabulary semantic segmentation benchmarks.

Siqi Liu, Luke Marris, Marc Lanctot et al.

We study computationally efficient methods for finding equilibria in n-player general-sum games, specifically ones that afford complex visuomotor skills. We show how existing methods would struggle in this setting, either computationally or in theory. We then introduce NeuPL-JPSRO, a neural population learning algorithm that benefits from transfer learning of skills and converges to a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE) of the game. We show empirical convergence in a suite of OpenSpiel games, validated rigorously by exact game solvers. We then deploy NeuPL-JPSRO to complex domains, where our approach enables adaptive coordination in a MuJoCo control domain and skill transfer in capture-the-flag. Our work shows that equilibrium convergent population learning can be implemented at scale and in generality, paving the way towards solving real-world games between heterogeneous players with mixed motives.

Siqi Liu, Ian Gemp, Luke Marris et al.

Evaluation has traditionally focused on ranking candidates for a specific skill. Modern generalist models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), decidedly outpace this paradigm. Open-ended evaluation systems, where candidate models are compared on user-submitted prompts, have emerged as a popular solution. Despite their many advantages, we show that the current Elo-based rating systems can be susceptible to and even reinforce biases in data, intentional or accidental, due to their sensitivity to redundancies. To address this issue, we propose evaluation as a 3-player game, and introduce novel game-theoretic solution concepts to ensure robustness to redundancy. We show that our method leads to intuitive ratings and provide insights into the competitive landscape of LLM development.

Eugene Vorontsov, George Shaikovski, Adam Casson et al.

Recent rapid progress in the field of computational pathology has been enabled by foundation models. These models are beginning to move beyond encoding image patches towards whole-slide understanding but their clinical utility remains limited. In this work, we present PRISM2, a multimodal slide-level foundation model trained on data from 700,000 diagnostic specimen-report pairs, the largest vision (2.3 million whole slide images) and language (14M question-answer pairs) histopathology dataset to date. By learning through clinical-dialogue supervision, PRISM2 aligns histomorphologic features with the language of diagnostic reasoning, producing slide-level representations that support both direct diagnostic question-answering and transferable embeddings for downstream tasks. Without additional training, PRISM2 matches or exceeds the cancer-detection performance of clinical-grade products. This is observed without loss of generality on other tasks, where PRISM2 achieves top performance. Finally, using survival prediction as the example, we show that task-specific finetuning with a large dataset can outperform task-specific models, further improving performance. These results demonstrate how language-supervised pretraining provides a scalable, clinically grounded signal for learning generalizable pathology representations, bridging human diagnostic reasoning and foundation-model performance.

Eric Zimmermann, Neil Tenenholtz, James Hall et al.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a key technique for training networks that can generalize well to diverse tasks without task-specific supervision. This property makes SSL desirable for computational pathology, the study of digitized images of tissues, as there are many target applications and often limited labeled training samples. However, SSL algorithms and models have been primarily developed in the field of natural images and whether their performance can be improved by adaptation to particular domains remains an open question. In this work, we present an investigation of modifications to SSL for pathology data, specifically focusing on the DINOv2 algorithm. We propose alternative augmentations, regularization functions, and position encodings motivated by the characteristics of pathology images. We evaluate the impact of these changes on several benchmarks to demonstrate the value of tailored approaches.

Luke Marris, Siqi Liu, Ian Gemp et al.

Many real-world multi-agent or multi-task evaluation scenarios can be naturally modelled as normal-form games due to inherent strategic (adversarial, cooperative, and mixed motive) interactions. These strategic interactions may be agentic (e.g. players trying to win), fundamental (e.g. cost vs quality), or complementary (e.g. niche finding and specialization). In such a formulation, it is the strategies (actions, policies, agents, models, tasks, prompts, etc.) that are rated. However, the rating problem is complicated by redundancy and complexity of N-player strategic interactions. Repeated or similar strategies can distort ratings for those that counter or complement them. Previous work proposed ``clone invariant'' ratings to handle such redundancies, but this was limited to two-player zero-sum (i.e. strictly competitive) interactions. This work introduces the first N-player general-sum clone invariant rating, called deviation ratings, based on coarse correlated equilibria. The rating is explored on several domains including LLMs evaluation.

Ian Gemp, Andreas Haupt, Luke Marris et al.

Behavioral diversity, expert imitation, fairness, safety goals and others give rise to preferences in sequential decision making domains that do not decompose additively across time. We introduce the class of convex Markov games that allow general convex preferences over occupancy measures. Despite infinite time horizon and strictly higher generality than Markov games, pure strategy Nash equilibria exist. Furthermore, equilibria can be approximated empirically by performing gradient descent on an upper bound of exploitability. Our experiments reveal novel solutions to classic repeated normal-form games, find fair solutions in a repeated asymmetric coordination game, and prioritize safe long-term behavior in a robot warehouse environment. In the prisoner's dilemma, our algorithm leverages transient imitation to find a policy profile that deviates from observed human play only slightly, yet achieves higher per-player utility while also being three orders of magnitude less exploitable.

Ye Yuan, Mohammad Amin Shabani, Siqi Liu

Query-focused table summarization requires generating natural language summaries of tabular data conditioned on a user query, enabling users to access insights beyond fact retrieval. Existing approaches face key limitations: table-to-text models require costly fine-tuning and struggle with complex reasoning, prompt-based LLM methods suffer from token-limit and efficiency issues while exposing sensitive data, and prior agentic pipelines often rely on decomposition, planning, or manual templates that lack robustness and scalability. To mitigate these issues, we introduce an agentic workflow, FACTS, a Fast, Accurate, and Privacy-Compliant Table Summarization approach via Offline Template Generation. FACTS produces offline templates, consisting of SQL queries and Jinja2 templates, which can be rendered into natural language summaries and are reusable across multiple tables sharing the same schema. It enables fast summarization through reusable offline templates, accurate outputs with executable SQL queries, and privacy compliance by sending only table schemas to LLMs. Evaluations on widely-used benchmarks show that FACTS consistently outperforms baseline methods, establishing it as a practical solution for real-world query-focused table summarization.

Ye Yuan, Mohammad Amin Shabani, Siqi Liu

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems rely on retrieving relevant evidence from a corpus to support downstream generation. The common practice of splitting a long document into multiple shorter passages enables finer-grained and targeted information retrieval. However, it also introduces challenges when a correct retrieval would require inference across passages, such as resolving coreference, disambiguating entities, and aggregating evidence scattered across multiple sources. Many state-of-the-art (SOTA) reranking methods, despite utilizing powerful large pretrained language models with potentially high inference costs, still neglect the aforementioned challenges. Therefore, we propose Embedding-Based Context-Aware Reranker (EBCAR), a lightweight reranking framework operating directly on embeddings of retrieved passages with enhanced cross-passage understandings through the structural information of the passages and a hybrid attention mechanism, which captures both high-level interactions across documents and low-level relationships within each document. We evaluate EBCAR against SOTA rerankers on the ConTEB benchmark, demonstrating its effectiveness for information retrieval requiring cross-passage inference and its advantages in both accuracy and efficiency.

Xuhao Shan, Ruiquan Ge, Jikui Liu et al.

In the field of multimodal medical data analysis, leveraging diverse types of data and understanding their hidden relationships continues to be a research focus. The main challenges lie in effectively modeling the complex interactions between heterogeneous data modalities with distinct characteristics while capturing both local and global dependencies across modalities. To address these challenges, this paper presents a two-stage multimodal prognosis model, GraphMMP, which is based on graph neural networks. The proposed model constructs feature graphs using mutual information and features a global fusion module built on Mamba, which significantly boosts prognosis performance. Empirical results show that GraphMMP surpasses existing methods on datasets related to liver prognosis and the METABRIC study, demonstrating its effectiveness in multimodal medical prognosis tasks.

Zhijun Tu, Hanting Chen, Siqi Liu et al.

1-bit LLM quantization offers significant advantages in reducing storage and computational costs. However, existing methods typically train 1-bit LLMs from scratch, failing to fully leverage pre-trained models. This results in high training costs and notable accuracy degradation. We identify that the large gap between full precision and 1-bit representations makes direct adaptation difficult. In this paper, we introduce a consistent progressive training for both forward and backward, smoothly converting the floating-point weights into the binarized ones. Additionally, we incorporate binary-aware initialization and dual-scaling compensation to reduce the difficulty of progressive training and improve the performance. Experimental results on LLMs of various sizes demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches. Our results show that high-performance 1-bit LLMs can be achieved using pre-trained models, eliminating the need for expensive training from scratch.

Siqi Liu, Guangrong Dai, Dechao Li

This preliminary study investigates the usefulness of sentence-level Quality Estimation (QE) in English-Chinese Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE), focusing on its impact on post-editing speed and student translators' perceptions. It also explores the interaction effects between QE and MT quality, as well as between QE and translation expertise. The findings reveal that QE significantly reduces post-editing time. The examined interaction effects were not significant, suggesting that QE consistently improves MTPE efficiency across medium- and high-quality MT outputs and among student translators with varying levels of expertise. In addition to indicating potentially problematic segments, QE serves multiple functions in MTPE, such as validating translators' evaluations of MT quality and enabling them to double-check translation outputs. However, interview data suggest that inaccurate QE may hinder post-editing processes. This research provides new insights into the strengths and limitations of QE, facilitating its more effective integration into MTPE workflows to enhance translators' productivity.

Xinyang Li, Siqi Liu, Bochao Zou et al.

As large language models evolve, there is growing anticipation that they will emulate human-like Theory of Mind (ToM) to assist with routine tasks. However, existing methods for evaluating machine ToM focus primarily on unimodal models and largely treat these models as black boxes, lacking an interpretative exploration of their internal mechanisms. In response, this study adopts an approach based on internal mechanisms to provide an interpretability-driven assessment of ToM in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, we first construct a multimodal ToM test dataset, GridToM, which incorporates diverse belief testing tasks and perceptual information from multiple perspectives. Next, our analysis shows that attention heads in multimodal large models can distinguish cognitive information across perspectives, providing evidence of ToM capabilities. Furthermore, we present a lightweight, training-free approach that significantly enhances the model's exhibited ToM by adjusting in the direction of the attention head.

Somjit Nath, Yik Chau Lui, Siqi Liu

Event sequence data record the occurrences of events in continuous time. Event sequence forecasting based on temporal point processes (TPPs) has been extensively studied, but outlier or anomaly detection, especially without any supervision from humans, is still underexplored. In this work, we develop, to the best our knowledge, the first unsupervised outlier detection approach to detecting abnormal events. Our novel unsupervised outlier detection framework is based on ideas from generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL). We train a 'generator' that corrects outliers in the data with a 'discriminator' that learns to discriminate the corrected data from the real data, which may contain outliers. A key insight is that if the generator made a mistake in the correction, it would generate anomalies that are different from the anomalies in the real data, so it serves as data augmentation for the discriminator learning. Different from typical GAN-based outlier detection approaches, our method employs the generator to detect outliers in an online manner. The experimental results show that our method can detect event outliers more accurately than the state-of-the-art approaches.

Ian Gemp, Roma Patel, Yoram Bachrach et al.

Mathematical models of interactions among rational agents have long been studied in game theory. However these interactions are often over a small set of discrete game actions which is very different from how humans communicate in natural language. To bridge this gap, we introduce a framework that allows equilibrium solvers to work over the space of natural language dialogue generated by large language models (LLMs). Specifically, by modelling the players, strategies and payoffs in a "game" of dialogue, we create a binding from natural language interactions to the conventional symbolic logic of game theory. Given this binding, we can ask existing game-theoretic algorithms to provide us with strategic solutions (e.g., what string an LLM should generate to maximize payoff in the face of strategic partners or opponents), giving us predictors of stable, rational conversational strategies. We focus on three domains that require different negotiation strategies: scheduling meetings, trading fruit and debate, and evaluate an LLM's generated language when guided by solvers. We see that LLMs that follow game-theory solvers result in dialogue generations that are less exploitable than the control (no guidance from solvers), and the language generated results in higher rewards, in all negotiation domains. We discuss future implications of this work, and how game-theoretic solvers that can leverage the expressivity of natural language can open up a new avenue of guiding language research.

Siqi Liu, Weixi Feng, Tsu-jui Fu et al.

Making image retrieval methods practical for real-world search applications requires significant progress in dataset scales, entity comprehension, and multimodal information fusion. In this work, we introduce \textbf{E}ntity-\textbf{D}riven \textbf{I}mage \textbf{S}earch (EDIS), a challenging dataset for cross-modal image search in the news domain. EDIS consists of 1 million web images from actual search engine results and curated datasets, with each image paired with a textual description. Unlike datasets that assume a small set of single-modality candidates, EDIS reflects real-world web image search scenarios by including a million multimodal image-text pairs as candidates. EDIS encourages the development of retrieval models that simultaneously address cross-modal information fusion and matching. To achieve accurate ranking results, a model must: 1) understand named entities and events from text queries, 2) ground entities onto images or text descriptions, and 3) effectively fuse textual and visual representations. Our experimental results show that EDIS challenges state-of-the-art methods with dense entities and a large-scale candidate set. The ablation study also proves that fusing textual features with visual features is critical in improving retrieval results.

Siqi Liu, Luke Marris, Daniel Hennes et al.

Learning in strategy games (e.g. StarCraft, poker) requires the discovery of diverse policies. This is often achieved by iteratively training new policies against existing ones, growing a policy population that is robust to exploit. This iterative approach suffers from two issues in real-world games: a) under finite budget, approximate best-response operators at each iteration needs truncating, resulting in under-trained good-responses populating the population; b) repeated learning of basic skills at each iteration is wasteful and becomes intractable in the presence of increasingly strong opponents. In this work, we propose Neural Population Learning (NeuPL) as a solution to both issues. NeuPL offers convergence guarantees to a population of best-responses under mild assumptions. By representing a population of policies within a single conditional model, NeuPL enables transfer learning across policies. Empirically, we show the generality, improved performance and efficiency of NeuPL across several test domains. Most interestingly, we show that novel strategies become more accessible, not less, as the neural population expands.

Marta Garnelo, Wojciech Marian Czarnecki, Siqi Liu et al.

Strategic diversity is often essential in games: in multi-player games, for example, evaluating a player against a diverse set of strategies will yield a more accurate estimate of its performance. Furthermore, in games with non-transitivities diversity allows a player to cover several winning strategies. However, despite the significance of strategic diversity, training agents that exhibit diverse behaviour remains a challenge. In this paper we study how to construct diverse populations of agents by carefully structuring how individuals within a population interact. Our approach is based on interaction graphs, which control the flow of information between agents during training and can encourage agents to specialise on different strategies, leading to improved overall performance. We provide evidence for the importance of diversity in multi-agent training and analyse the effect of applying different interaction graphs on the training trajectories, diversity and performance of populations in a range of games. This is an extended version of the long abstract published at AAMAS.

Heng Wang, Chaoyi Zhang, Jianhui Yu et al.

Automatic 3D neuron reconstruction is critical for analysing the morphology and functionality of neurons in brain circuit activities. However, the performance of existing tracing algorithms is hinged by the low image quality. Recently, a series of deep learning based segmentation methods have been proposed to improve the quality of raw 3D optical image stacks by removing noises and restoring neuronal structures from low-contrast background. Due to the variety of neuron morphology and the lack of large neuron datasets, most of current neuron segmentation models rely on introducing complex and specially-designed submodules to a base architecture with the aim of encoding better feature representations. Though successful, extra burden would be put on computation during inference. Therefore, rather than modifying the base network, we shift our focus to the dataset itself. The encoder-decoder backbone used in most neuron segmentation models attends only intra-volume voxel points to learn structural features of neurons but neglect the shared intrinsic semantic features of voxels belonging to the same category among different volumes, which is also important for expressive representation learning. Hence, to better utilise the scarce dataset, we propose to explicitly exploit such intrinsic features of voxels through a novel voxel-level cross-volume representation learning paradigm on the basis of an encoder-decoder segmentation model. Our method introduces no extra cost during inference. Evaluated on 42 3D neuron images from BigNeuron project, our proposed method is demonstrated to improve the learning ability of the original segmentation model and further enhancing the reconstruction performance.