Boyuan Ma

Chuni Liu, Boyuan Ma, Xiaojuan Ban et al.

Topological consistency plays a crucial role in the task of boundary segmentation for reticular images, such as cell membrane segmentation in neuron electron microscopic images, grain boundary segmentation in material microscopic images and road segmentation in aerial images. In these fields, topological changes in segmentation results have a serious impact on the downstream tasks, which can even exceed the misalignment of the boundary itself. To enhance the topology accuracy in segmentation results, we propose the Skea-Topo Aware loss, which is a novel loss function that takes into account the shape of each object and topological significance of the pixels. It consists of two components. First, a skeleton-aware weighted loss improves the segmentation accuracy by better modeling the object geometry with skeletons. Second, a boundary rectified term effectively identifies and emphasizes topological critical pixels in the prediction errors using both foreground and background skeletons in the ground truth and predictions. Experiments prove that our method improves topological consistency by up to 7 points in VI compared to 13 state-of-art methods, based on objective and subjective assessments across three different boundary segmentation datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/clovermini/Skea_topo.

Qizheng Zhang, Changran Hu, Shubhangi Upasani et al. · stanford

Large language model (LLM) applications such as agents and domain-specific reasoning increasingly rely on context adaptation -- modifying inputs with instructions, strategies, or evidence, rather than weight updates. Prior approaches improve usability but often suffer from brevity bias, which drops domain insights for concise summaries, and from context collapse, where iterative rewriting erodes details over time. Building on the adaptive memory introduced by Dynamic Cheatsheet, we introduce ACE (Agentic Context Engineering), a framework that treats contexts as evolving playbooks that accumulate, refine, and organize strategies through a modular process of generation, reflection, and curation. ACE prevents collapse with structured, incremental updates that preserve detailed knowledge and scale with long-context models. Across agent and domain-specific benchmarks, ACE optimizes contexts both offline (e.g., system prompts) and online (e.g., agent memory), consistently outperforming strong baselines: +10.6% on agents and +8.6% on finance, while significantly reducing adaptation latency and rollout cost. Notably, ACE could adapt effectively without labeled supervision and instead by leveraging natural execution feedback. On the AppWorld leaderboard, ACE matches the top-ranked production-level agent on the overall average and surpasses it on the harder test-challenge split, despite using a smaller open-source model. These results show that comprehensive, evolving contexts enable scalable, efficient, and self-improving LLM systems with low overhead.

Han Cui, Alfredo De Goyeneche, Efrat Shimron et al.

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is essential in various Computer Vision tasks such as image deblurring and super-resolution. However, most IQA methods require reference images, which are not always available. While there are some reference-free IQA metrics, they have limitations in simulating human perception and discerning subtle image quality variations. We hypothesize that the JPEG quality factor is representatives of image quality measurement, and a well-trained neural network can learn to accurately evaluate image quality without requiring a clean reference, as it can recognize image degradation artifacts based on prior knowledge. Thus, we developed a reference-free quality evaluation network, dubbed "Quality Factor (QF) Predictor", which does not require any reference. Our QF Predictor is a lightweight, fully convolutional network comprising seven layers. The model is trained in a self-supervised manner: it receives JPEG compressed image patch with a random QF as input, is trained to accurately predict the corresponding QF. We demonstrate the versatility of the model by applying it to various tasks. First, our QF Predictor can generalize to measure the severity of various image artifacts, such as Gaussian Blur and Gaussian noise. Second, we show that the QF Predictor can be trained to predict the undersampling rate of images reconstructed from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data.

Boyuan Ma, Xiang Yin, Xiaojuan Ban et al.

Recent progress in material data mining has been driven by high-capacity models trained on large datasets. However, collecting experimental data has been extremely costly owing to the amount of human effort and expertise required. Therefore, material researchers are often reluctant to easily disclose their private data, which leads to the problem of data island, and it is difficult to collect a large amount of data to train high-quality models. In this study, a material microstructure image feature extraction algorithm FedTransfer based on data privacy protection is proposed. The core contributions are as follows: 1) the federated learning algorithm is introduced into the polycrystalline microstructure image segmentation task to make full use of different user data to carry out machine learning, break the data island and improve the model generalization ability under the condition of ensuring the privacy and security of user data; 2) A data sharing strategy based on style transfer is proposed. By sharing style information of images that is not urgent for user confidentiality, it can reduce the performance penalty caused by the distribution difference of data among different users.

Boyuan Ma, Xiang Yin, Di Wu et al.

The general aim of multi-focus image fusion is to gather focused regions of different images to generate a unique all-in-focus fused image. Deep learning based methods become the mainstream of image fusion by virtue of its powerful feature representation ability. However, most of the existing deep learning structures failed to balance fusion quality and end-to-end implementation convenience. End-to-end decoder design often leads to unrealistic result because of its non-linear mapping mechanism. On the other hand, generating an intermediate decision map achieves better quality for the fused image, but relies on the rectification with empirical post-processing parameter choices. In this work, to handle the requirements of both output image quality and comprehensive simplicity of structure implementation, we propose a cascade network to simultaneously generate decision map and fused result with an end-to-end training procedure. It avoids the dependence on empirical post-processing methods in the inference stage. To improve the fusion quality, we introduce a gradient aware loss function to preserve gradient information in output fused image. In addition, we design a decision calibration strategy to decrease the time consumption in the application of multiple images fusion. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare with 19 different state-of-the-art multi-focus image fusion structures with 6 assessment metrics. The results prove that our designed structure can generally ameliorate the output fused image quality, while implementation efficiency increases over 30\% for multiple images fusion.

Boyuan Ma, Xiaojuan Ban, Haiyou Huang et al.

In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised deep learning model to address multi-focus image fusion problem. First, we train an encoder-decoder network in unsupervised manner to acquire deep feature of input images. And then we utilize these features and spatial frequency to measure activity level and decision map. Finally, we apply some consistency verification methods to adjust the decision map and draw out fused result. The key point behind of proposed method is that only the objects within the depth-of-field (DOF) have sharp appearance in the photograph while other objects are likely to be blurred. In contrast to previous works, our method analyzes sharp appearance in deep feature instead of original image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the state-of-art fusion performance compared to existing 16 fusion methods in objective and subjective assessment.

Wei Liu, Jiahao Chen, Chuni Liu et al.

In material science, image segmentation is of great significance for quantitative analysis of microstructures. Here, we propose a novel Weighted Propagation Convolution Neural Network based on U-Net (WPU-Net) to detect boundary in poly-crystalline microscopic images. We introduce spatial consistency into network to eliminate the defects in raw microscopic image. And we customize adaptive boundary weight for each pixel in each grain, so that it leads the network to preserve grain's geometric and topological characteristics. Moreover, we provide our dataset with the goal of advancing the development of image processing in materials science. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves promising performance in both of objective and subjective assessment. In boundary detection task, it reduces the error rate by 7\%, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Boyuan Ma, Xiaoyan Wei, Chuni Liu et al.

Recent progress in material data mining has been driven by high-capacity models trained on large datasets. However, collecting experimental data (real data) has been extremely costly since the amount of human effort and expertise required. Here, we develop a novel transfer learning strategy to address small or insufficient data problem. This strategy realizes the fusion of real and simulated data, and the augmentation of training data in data mining procedure. For a specific task of image segmentation, this strategy can generate synthetic images by fusing physical mechanism of simulated images and "image style" of real images. The result shows that the model trained with the acquired synthetic images and 35% of the real images outperforms the model trained on all real images. As the time required to generate synthetic data is almost negligible, this strategy is able to reduce the time cost of real data preparation by roughly 65%.