Zhen Song

Qiankun Ma, Ziyao Zhang, Haofei Wang et al.

Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal understanding capabilities, yet the redundant visual tokens incur prohibitive computational overhead and degrade inference efficiency. Prior studies typically relies on [CLS] attention or text-vision cross-attention to identify and discard redundant visual tokens. Despite promising results, such solutions are prone to introduce positional bias and, more critically, are incompatible with efficient attention kernels such as FlashAttention, limiting their practical deployment for VLM acceleration. In this paper, we step away from attention dependencies and revisit visual token compression from an information-theoretic perspective, aiming to maximally preserve visual information without any attention involvement. We present ApET, an Approximation-Error guided Token compression framework. ApET first reconstructs the original visual tokens with a small set of basis tokens via linear approximation, then leverages the approximation error to identify and drop the least informative tokens. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that ApET retains 95.2% of the original performance on image-understanding tasks and even attains 100.4% on video-understanding tasks, while compressing the token budgets by 88.9% and 87.5%, respectively. Thanks to its attention-free design, ApET seamlessly integrates with FlashAttention, enabling further inference acceleration and making VLM deployment more practical. Code is available at https://github.com/MaQianKun0/ApET.

Kesheng Chen, Wenjian Luo, Xin Lin et al.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in urban missions, and proper planning of UAV paths can improve mission efficiency while reducing the risk of potential third-party impact. Existing work has considered all efficiency and safety objectives for a single decision-maker (DM) and regarded this as a multiobjective optimization problem (MOP). However, there is usually not a single DM but two DMs, i.e., an efficiency DM and a safety DM, and the DMs are only concerned with their respective objectives. The final decision is made based on the solutions of both DMs. In this paper, for the first time, biparty multiobjective UAV path planning (BPMO-UAVPP) problems involving both efficiency and safety departments are modeled. The existing multiobjective immune algorithm with nondominated neighbor-based selection (NNIA), the hybrid evolutionary framework for the multiobjective immune algorithm (HEIA), and the adaptive immune-inspired multiobjective algorithm (AIMA) are modified for solving the BPMO-UAVPP problem, and then biparty multiobjective optimization algorithms, including the BPNNIA, BPHEIA, and BPAIMA, are proposed and comprehensively compared with traditional multiobjective evolutionary algorithms and typical multiparty multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (i.e., OptMPNDS and OptMPNDS2). The experimental results show that BPAIMA performs better than ordinary multiobjective evolutionary algorithms such as NSGA-II and multiparty multiobjective evolutionary algorithms such as OptMPNDS, OptMPNDS2, BPNNIA and BPHEIA.

Qiming He, Jing Li, Tian Guan et al.

Glomerular pathology is central to the diagnosis and prognosis of renal diseases, yet the heterogeneity of glomerular morphology and fine-grained lesion patterns remain challenging for current AI approaches. We present GloPath, an entity-centric foundation model trained on over one million glomeruli extracted from 14,049 renal biopsy specimens using multi-scale and multi-view self-supervised learning. GloPath addresses two major challenges in nephropathology: glomerular lesion assessment and clinicopathological insights discovery. For lesion assessment, GloPath was benchmarked across three independent cohorts on 52 tasks, including lesion recognition, grading, few-shot classification, and cross-modality diagnosis-outperforming state-of-the-art methods in 42 tasks (80.8%). In the large-scale real-world study, it achieved an ROC-AUC of 91.51% for lesion recognition, demonstrating strong robustness in routine clinical settings. For clinicopathological insights, GloPath systematically revealed statistically significant associations between glomerular morphological parameters and clinical indicators across 224 morphology-clinical variable pairs, demonstrating its capacity to connect tissue-level pathology with patient-level outcomes. Together, these results position GloPath as a scalable and interpretable platform for glomerular lesion assessment and clinicopathological discovery, representing a step toward clinically translatable AI in renal pathology.

Alisher Myrgyyassov, Bruce Xiao Wang, Yu Sun et al.

Manual measurement of muscle morphology from ultrasound during speech is time-consuming and limits large-scale studies. We present SMMA, a fully automated framework that combines deep-learning segmentation with skeleton-based thickness quantification to analyze geniohyoid (GH) muscle dynamics. Validation demonstrates near-human-level accuracy (Dice = 0.9037, MAE = 0.53 mm, r = 0.901). Application to Cantonese vowel production (N = 11) reveals systematic patterns: /a:/ shows significantly greater GH thickness (7.29 mm) than /i:/ (5.95 mm, p < 0.001, Cohen's d > 1.3), suggesting greater GH activation during production of /a:/ than /i:/, consistent with its role in mandibular depression. Sex differences (5-8% greater in males) reflect anatomical scaling. SMMA achieves expert-validated accuracy while eliminating the need for manual annotation, enabling scalable investigations of speech motor control and objective assessment of speech and swallowing disorders.

Hailong Shu, Yue Wang, Weiwei Song et al.

The field of meteorological forecasting has undergone a significant transformation with the integration of large models, especially those employing deep learning techniques. This paper reviews the advancements and applications of these models in weather prediction, emphasizing their role in transforming traditional forecasting methods. Models like FourCastNet, Pangu-Weather, GraphCast, ClimaX, and FengWu have made notable contributions by providing accurate, high-resolution forecasts, surpassing the capabilities of traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. These models utilize advanced neural network architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and Transformers, to process diverse meteorological data, enhancing predictive accuracy across various time scales and spatial resolutions. The paper addresses challenges in this domain, including data acquisition and computational demands, and explores future opportunities for model optimization and hardware advancements. It underscores the integration of artificial intelligence with conventional meteorological techniques, promising improved weather prediction accuracy and a significant contribution to addressing climate-related challenges. This synergy positions large models as pivotal in the evolving landscape of meteorological forecasting.

Yizhi Wang, Li Chen, Qiang Huang et al.

Cervical cancer remains a major malignancy, necessitating extensive and complex histopathological assessments and comprehensive support tools. Although deep learning shows promise, these models still lack accuracy and generalizability. General foundation models offer a broader reach but remain limited in capturing subspecialty-specific features and task adaptability. We introduce the Cervical Subspecialty Pathology (CerS-Path) diagnostic system, developed through two synergistic pretraining stages: self-supervised learning on approximately 190 million tissue patches from 140,000 slides to build a cervical-specific feature extractor, and multimodal enhancement with 2.5 million image-text pairs, followed by integration with multiple downstream diagnostic functions. Supporting eight diagnostic functions, including rare cancer classification and multimodal Q&A, CerS-Path surpasses prior foundation models in scope and clinical applicability. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate a significant advance in cervical pathology, with prospective testing on 3,173 cases across five centers maintaining 99.38% screening sensitivity and excellent generalizability, highlighting its potential for subspecialty diagnostic translation and cervical cancer screening.

Deshui Yu, Yizhi Wang, Saihui Jin et al.

Large language models (LLMs) excel on general tasks yet still hallucinate in high-barrier domains such as pathology. Prior work often relies on domain fine-tuning, which neither expands the knowledge boundary nor enforces evidence-grounded constraints. We therefore build a pathology vector database covering 28 subfields and 1.53 million paragraphs, and present YpathRAG, a pathology-oriented RAG framework with dual-channel hybrid retrieval (BGE-M3 dense retrieval coupled with vocabulary-guided sparse retrieval) and an LLM-based supportive-evidence judgment module that closes the retrieval-judgment-generation loop. We also release two evaluation benchmarks, YpathR and YpathQA-M. On YpathR, YpathRAG attains Recall@5 of 98.64%, a gain of 23 percentage points over the baseline; on YpathQA-M, a set of the 300 most challenging questions, it increases the accuracies of both general and medical LLMs by 9.0% on average and up to 15.6%. These results demonstrate improved retrieval quality and factual reliability, providing a scalable construction paradigm and interpretable evaluation for pathology-oriented RAG.

Alisher Myrgyyassov, Zhen Song, Yu Sun et al.

Ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) is a non-invasive and cost-effective tool for studying speech articulation, motor control, and related disorders. However, real-time tongue contour segmentation remains challenging due to low signal-to-noise ratios, imaging variability, and computational demands. We propose UltraUNet, a lightweight encoder-decoder architecture optimized for real-time segmentation of tongue contours in ultrasound images. UltraUNet incorporates domain-specific innovations such as lightweight Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks, Group Normalization for small-batch stability, and summation-based skip connections to reduce memory and computational overhead. It achieves 250 frames per second and integrates ultrasound-specific augmentations like denoising and blur simulation. Evaluations on 8 datasets demonstrate high accuracy and robustness, with single-dataset Dice = 0.855 and MSD = 0.993px, and cross-dataset Dice averaging 0.734 and 0.761. UltraUNet provides a fast, accurate solution for speech research, clinical diagnostics, and analysis of speech motor disorders.

Qiankun Ma, Ziyao Zhang, Chi Su et al.

Vision Mamba has emerged as a strong competitor to Vision Transformers (ViTs) due to its ability to efficiently capture long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. While token reduction, an effective compression technique in ViTs, has rarely been explored in Vision Mamba. Exploring Vision Mamba's efficiency is essential for enabling broader applications. However, we find that directly applying existing token reduction techniques for ViTs to Vision Mamba leads to significant performance degradation. This is primarily because Mamba is a sequence model without attention mechanisms, whereas most token reduction techniques for ViTs rely on attention mechanisms for importance measurement and overlook the order of compressed tokens. In this paper, we investigate a Mamba structure-aware importance score to evaluate token importance in a simple and effective manner. Building on this score, we further propose MTR, a training-free \textbf{M}amba \textbf{T}oken \textbf{R}eduction framework. Without the need for training or additional tuning parameters, our method can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-and-play component across various Mamba models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces computational workload while minimizing performance impact across various tasks and multiple backbones. Notably, MTR reduces FLOPs by approximately 40\% on the Vim-B backbone, with only a 1.6\% drop in ImageNet performance without retraining.

Peilin Cao, Ying Geng, Nan Feng et al.

As current group contribution (GC) methods are mostly proposed for a wide size-range of molecules, applying them to property prediction of small refrigerant molecules could lead to unacceptable errors. In this sense, for the design of novel refrigerants and refrigeration systems, tailoring GC-based models specifically fitted to refrigerant molecules is of great interest. In this work, databases of potential refrigerant molecules are first collected, focusing on five key properties related to the operational efficiency of refrigeration systems, namely normal boiling point, critical temperature, critical pressure, enthalpy of vaporization, and acentric factor. Based on tailored small-molecule groups, the GC method is combined with machine learning (ML) to model these performance-related properties. Following the development of GC-ML models, their performance is analyzed to highlight the potential group-to-property contributions. Additionally, the refrigerant property databases are extended internally and externally, based on which examples are presented to highlight the significance of the developed models.