Yanyuan Chen

Luru Jing, Cong Cong, Yanyuan Chen et al.

Federated learning (FL) offers a promising framework for collaborative digital pathology by enabling model training across institutions. However, real-world deployments face heterogeneity arising from diverse multiple instance learning (MIL) architectures and heterogeneous feature extractors across institutions. We propose FedHD, a novel FL framework that performs local Gaussian-mixture feature alignment tailored for WSI analysis. Instead of exchanging model parameters, each client independently distills semantically rich synthetic feature representations aligned with the distribution of real WSIs. To preserve diagnostic diversity, FedHD adopts a one-to-one distillation strategy, generating a synthetic counterpart for each real slide to avoid over-compression. During federation, a curriculum-based integration strategy progressively incorporates cross-site synthetic features into local training once performance plateaus. Furthermore, an optional interpretation module reconstructs pseudo-patches from synthetic embeddings, enhancing transparency. FedHD is architecture-agnostic, privacy-preserving, and supports personalized yet collaborative training across diverse institutions. Experiments on TCGA-IDH, CAMELYON16, and CAMELYON17 show that FedHD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art federated and distillation baselines.

Yue Huang, Yanyuan Chen, Dexuan Xu et al.

Medical problem solving demands expert knowledge and intricate reasoning. Recent studies of large language models (LLMs) attempt to ease this complexity by introducing external knowledge verification through retrieval-augmented generation or by training on reasoning datasets. However, these approaches suffer from drawbacks such as retrieval overhead and high annotation costs, and they heavily rely on substituted external assistants to reach limited performance in medical field. In this paper, we introduce MedReflect, a generalizable framework designed to inspire LLMs with a physician-like reflective thinking mode. MedReflect generates a single-pass reflection chain that includes initial hypothesis generation, self-questioning, self-answering and decision refinement. This self-verified and self-reflective nature releases large language model's latent capability in medical problem-solving without external retrieval or heavy annotation. We demonstrate that MedReflect enables cost-efficient medical dataset construction: with merely 2,000 randomly sampled training examples and a light fine-tuning, this approach achieves notable absolute accuracy improvements across a series of medical benchmarks while cutting annotation requirements. Our results provide evidence that LLMs can learn to solve specialized medical problems via self-reflection and self-improve, reducing reliance on external supervision and extensive task-specific fine-tuning data.