MRI Contrast Enhancement Kinetics World ModelJindi Kong, Yuting He, Cong Xia et al.
Clinical MRI contrast acquisition suffers from inefficient information yield, which presents as a mismatch between the risky and costly acquisition protocol and the fixed and sparse acquisition sequence. Applying world models to simulate the contrast enhancement kinetics in the human body enables continuous contrast-free dynamics. However, the low temporal resolution in MRI acquisition restricts the training of world models, leading to a sparsely sampled dataset. Directly training a generative model to capture the kinetics leads to two limitations: (a) Due to the absence of data on missing time, the model tends to overfit to irrelevant features, leading to content distortion. (b) Due to the lack of continuous temporal supervision, the model fails to learn the continuous kinetics law over time, causing temporal discontinuities. For the first time, we propose MRI Contrast Enhancement Kinetics World model (MRI CEKWorld) with SpatioTemporal Consistency Learning (STCL). For (a), guided by the spatial law that patient-level structures remain consistent during enhancement, we propose Latent Alignment Learning (LAL) that constructs a patient-specific template to constrain contents to align with this template. For (b), guided by the temporal law that the kinetics follow a consistent smooth trend, we propose Latent Difference Learning (LDL) which extends the unobserved intervals by interpolation and constrains smooth variations in the latent space among interpolated sequences. Extensive experiments on two datasets show our MRI CEKWorld achieves better realistic contents and kinetics. Codes will be available at https://github.com/DD0922/MRI-Contrast-Enhancement-Kinetics-World-Model.
Classroom Final Exam: An Instructor-Tested Reasoning BenchmarkChongyang Gao, Diji Yang, Shuyan Zhou et al.
We introduce \CFE{} (\textbf{C}lassroom \textbf{F}inal \textbf{E}xam), a multimodal benchmark for evaluating the reasoning capabilities of large language models across more than 20 STEM domains. \CFE{} is curated from repeatedly used, authentic university homework and exam problems, together with reference solutions provided by course instructors. \CFE{} presents a significant challenge even for frontier models: the newly released Gemini-3.1-pro-preview achieves an overall accuracy of 59.69\%, while the second-best model, Gemini-3-flash-preview, reaches 55.46\%, leaving considerable room for improvement. Beyond leaderboard results, we perform a diagnostic analysis by decomposing reference solutions into reasoning flows. We find that although frontier models can often answer intermediate sub-questions correctly, they struggle to reliably derive and maintain correct intermediate states throughout multi-step solutions. We further observe that model-generated solutions typically have more reasoning steps than those provided by the instructor, indicating suboptimal step efficiency and a higher risk of error accumulation. The data and code are available at https://github.com/Analogy-AI/CFE_Bench.
2.8CVFeb 21
Similarity-as-Evidence: Calibrating Overconfident VLMs for Interpretable and Label-Efficient Medical Active LearningZhuofan Xie, Zishan Lin, Jinliang Lin et al.
Active Learning (AL) reduces annotation costs in medical imaging by selecting only the most informative samples for labeling, but suffers from cold-start when labeled data are scarce. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) address the cold-start problem via zero-shot predictions, yet their temperature-scaled softmax outputs treat text-image similarities as deterministic scores while ignoring inherent uncertainty, leading to overconfidence. This overconfidence misleads sample selection, wasting annotation budgets on uninformative cases. To overcome these limitations, the Similarity-as-Evidence (SaE) framework calibrates text-image similarities by introducing a Similarity Evidence Head (SEH), which reinterprets the similarity vector as evidence and parameterizes a Dirichlet distribution over labels. In contrast to a standard softmax that enforces confident predictions even under weak signals, the Dirichlet formulation explicitly quantifies lack of evidence (vacuity) and conflicting evidence (dissonance), thereby mitigating overconfidence caused by rigid softmax normalization. Building on this, SaE employs a dual-factor acquisition strategy: high-vacuity samples (e.g., rare diseases) are prioritized in early rounds to ensure coverage, while high-dissonance samples (e.g., ambiguous diagnoses) are prioritized later to refine boundaries, providing clinically interpretable selection rationales. Experiments on ten public medical imaging datasets with a 20% label budget show that SaE attains state-of-the-art macro-averaged accuracy of 82.57%. On the representative BTMRI dataset, SaE also achieves superior calibration, with a negative log-likelihood (NLL) of 0.425.