Xin Wei

Xujun Li, Xin Wei, Jing Jiang et al.

Breast cancer is a significant threat to human health. Contrastive learning has emerged as an effective method to extract critical lesion features from mammograms, thereby offering a potent tool for breast cancer screening and analysis. A crucial aspect of contrastive learning involves negative sampling, where the selection of appropriate hard negative samples is essential for driving representations to retain detailed information about lesions. In contrastive learning, it is often assumed that features can sufficiently capture semantic content, and that each minibatch inherently includes ideal hard negative samples. However, the characteristics of breast lumps challenge these assumptions. In response, we introduce ManiNeg, a novel approach that leverages manifestations as proxies to mine hard negative samples. Manifestations, which refer to the observable symptoms or signs of a disease, provide a knowledge-driven and robust basis for choosing hard negative samples. This approach benefits from its invariance to model optimization, facilitating efficient sampling. To support ManiNeg and future research endeavors, we developed the MVKL dataset, which includes multi-view mammograms, corresponding reports, meticulously annotated manifestations, and pathologically confirmed benign-malignant outcomes. We evaluate ManiNeg on the benign and malignant classification task. Our results demonstrate that ManiNeg not only improves representation in both unimodal and multimodal contexts but also shows generalization across datasets. The MVKL dataset and our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/wxwxwwxxx/ManiNeg.

Chen Shen, Chunfeng Lian, Wanqing Zhang et al.

Forensic pathology is critical in determining the cause and manner of death through post-mortem examinations, both macroscopic and microscopic. The field, however, grapples with issues such as outcome variability, laborious processes, and a scarcity of trained professionals. This paper presents SongCi, an innovative visual-language model (VLM) designed specifically for forensic pathology. SongCi utilizes advanced prototypical cross-modal self-supervised contrastive learning to enhance the accuracy, efficiency, and generalizability of forensic analyses. It was pre-trained and evaluated on a comprehensive multi-center dataset, which includes over 16 million high-resolution image patches, 2,228 vision-language pairs of post-mortem whole slide images (WSIs), and corresponding gross key findings, along with 471 distinct diagnostic outcomes. Our findings indicate that SongCi surpasses existing multi-modal AI models in many forensic pathology tasks, performs comparably to experienced forensic pathologists and significantly better than less experienced ones, and provides detailed multi-modal explainability, offering critical assistance in forensic investigations. To the best of our knowledge, SongCi is the first VLM specifically developed for forensic pathological analysis and the first large-vocabulary computational pathology (CPath) model that directly processes gigapixel WSIs in forensic science.

Peng Xu, Shengwu Xiong, Jiajun Zhang et al.

This paper reviews the MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning. We aim to bring together different approaches in multimodal machine learning and LLMs via a large benchmark. We hope it better allows researchers to follow the state-of-the-art in this very dynamic area. Meanwhile, a growing number of testbeds have boosted the evolution of general-purpose large language models. Thus, this year's MARS2 focuses on real-world and specialized scenarios to broaden the multimodal reasoning applications of MLLMs. Our organizing team released two tailored datasets Lens and AdsQA as test sets, which support general reasoning in 12 daily scenarios and domain-specific reasoning in advertisement videos, respectively. We evaluated 40+ baselines that include both generalist MLLMs and task-specific models, and opened up three competition tracks, i.e., Visual Grounding in Real-world Scenarios (VG-RS), Visual Question Answering with Spatial Awareness (VQA-SA), and Visual Reasoning in Creative Advertisement Videos (VR-Ads). Finally, 76 teams from the renowned academic and industrial institutions have registered and 40+ valid submissions (out of 1200+) have been included in our ranking lists. Our datasets, code sets (40+ baselines and 15+ participants' methods), and rankings are publicly available on the MARS2 workshop website and our GitHub organization page https://github.com/mars2workshop/, where our updates and announcements of upcoming events will be continuously provided.