Yifei Zhang

Xiangru Li, Yifei Zhang, Liang Zhao

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a powerful foundation model that introduced revolutionary advancements in natural image segmentation. However, its performance remains sub-optimal when delineating the intricate structure of biomedical images, where multiple organs and tissues intertwine in a single image. In this study, we introduce a novel fine-tuning framework that leverages SAM's ability to bundle and process multiple prompts per image and seeks to improve SAM's performance in medical images. We first curated a medical image dataset that consists of CT scans of lesions in various organs, each with two annotations for organs and lesions respectively. Then, we fine-tuned SAM's mask decoder within our framework by batching both bounding boxes generated from ground truth masks as reference. The batched prompt strategy we introduced not only addresses the inherent complexity and ambiguity often found in medical images but also substantially enhances performance metrics when applied onto a wide range of segmentation tasks.

Qichao Wang, Ziqiao Meng, Wenqian Cui et al.

Inspired by the impressive capabilities of GPT-4o, there is growing interest in enabling speech language models (SLMs) to engage in natural, fluid spoken interactions with humans. Recent advancements have led to the development of several SLMs that demonstrate promising results in this area. However, current approaches have yet to fully exploit dual-channel speech data, which inherently captures the structure and dynamics of human conversation. In this work, we systematically explore the use of dual-channel speech data in the context of modern large language models, and introduce a novel generative modeling paradigm, Next-Token-Pair Prediction (NTPP), to enable speaker-independent dual-channel spoken dialogue learning using decoder-only architectures for the first time. We evaluate our approach on standard benchmarks, and empirical results show that our proposed method, NTPP, significantly improves the conversational abilities of SLMs in terms of turn-taking prediction, response coherence, and naturalness. Moreover, compared to existing methods, NTPP achieves substantially lower inference latency, highlighting its practical efficiency for real-time applications.

Hung-Chieh Fang, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Irwin King et al.

Federated Unsupervised Learning (FUL) aims to learn expressive representations in federated and self-supervised settings. The quality of representations learned in FUL is usually determined by uniformity, a measure of how uniformly representations are distributed in the embedding space. However, existing solutions perform well in achieving intra-client (local) uniformity for local models while failing to achieve inter-client (global) uniformity after aggregation due to non-IID data distributions and the decentralized nature of FUL. To address this issue, we propose Soft Separation and Distillation (SSD), a novel approach that preserves inter-client uniformity by encouraging client representations to spread toward different directions. This design reduces interference during client model aggregation, thereby improving global uniformity while preserving local representation expressiveness. We further enhance this effect by introducing a projector distillation module to address the discrepancy between loss optimization and representation quality. We evaluate SSD in both cross-silo and cross-device federated settings, demonstrating consistent improvements in representation quality and task performance across various training scenarios. Our results highlight the importance of inter-client uniformity in FUL and establish SSD as an effective solution to this challenge. Project page: https://ssd-uniformity.github.io/

Conghao Xiong, Zhengrui Guo, Zhe Xu et al.

Deep learning has advanced computational pathology but expert annotations remain scarce. Few-shot learning mitigates annotation burdens yet suffers from overfitting and discriminative feature mischaracterization. In addition, the current few-shot multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches leverage pretrained vision-language models to alleviate these issues, but at the cost of complex preprocessing and high computational cost. We propose a Squeeze-and-Recalibrate (SR) block, a drop-in replacement for linear layers in MIL models to address these challenges. The SR block comprises two core components: a pair of low-rank trainable matrices (squeeze pathway, SP) that reduces parameter count and imposes a bottleneck to prevent spurious feature learning, and a frozen random recalibration matrix that preserves geometric structure, diversifies feature directions, and redefines the optimization objective for the SP. We provide theoretical guarantees that the SR block can approximate any linear mapping to arbitrary precision, thereby ensuring that the performance of a standard MIL model serves as a lower bound for its SR-enhanced counterpart. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SR-MIL models consistently outperform prior methods while requiring significantly fewer parameters and no architectural changes.