Xin Wang

Xiangjian Hou, Chao Qin, Chang Ni et al.

Global token mixing, implemented via self-attention or state-space sequence models, has become a popular model design choice for MRI restoration. However, MRI restoration tasks differ substantially in how their degradations vary over image and k-space domains, and in the degree to which global coupling is already imposed by physics-driven data consistency terms. In this work, we ask the question whether global token mixing is actually beneficial in each individual task across three representative settings: accelerated MRI reconstruction with explicit data consistency, MRI super-resolution with k-space center cropping, and denoising of clinical carotid MRI data with spatially heteroscedastic noise. To reduce confounding factors, we establish a controlled testbed comparing a minimal local gated CNN and its large-field variant, benchmarking them directly against state-of-the-art global models under aligned training and evaluation protocols. For accelerated MRI reconstruction, the minimal unrolled gated-CNN baseline is already highly competitive compared to recent token-mixing approaches in public reconstruction benchmarks, suggesting limited additional benefits when the forward model and data-consistency steps provide strong global constraints. For super-resolution, where low-frequency k-space data are largely preserved by the controlled low-pass degradation, local gated models remain competitive, and a lightweight large-field variant yields only modest improvements. In contrast, for denoising with pronounced spatially heteroscedastic noise, token-mixing models achieve the strongest overall performance, consistent with the need to estimate spatially varying reliability. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that the utility of global token mixing in MRI restoration is task-dependent, and it should be tailored to the underlying imaging physics and degradation structure.

Li Jin, Weikai Chen, Yujie Wang et al.

Open-world promptable 3D semantic segmentation remains brittle as semantics are inferred in the input sensor coordinates. Yet, humans, in contrast, interpret parts via functional roles in a canonical space -- wings extend laterally, handles protrude to the side, and legs support from below. Psychophysical evidence shows that we mentally rotate objects into canonical frames to reveal these roles. To fill this gap, we propose \methodName{}, which attains canonical space perception by inducing a latent canonical reference frame learned directly from data. By construction, we create a unified canonical dataset through LLM-guided intra- and cross-category alignment, exposing canonical spatial regularities across 200 categories. By induction, we realize canonicality inside the model through a dual-branch architecture with canonical map anchoring and canonical box calibration, collapsing pose variation and symmetry into a stable canonical embedding. This shift from input pose space to canonical embedding yields far more stable and transferable part semantics. Experimental results show that \methodName{} establishes new state of the art in open-world promptable 3D segmentation.

Peng Yu, Xin Wang, Ning Tan

Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and control. Existing vision-based control approaches often rely on end-to-end learning, achieving shape regulation without explicit awareness of robot geometry or its interaction with the environment. Here, we introduce a shape-interpretable visual self-modeling framework for continuum robots that enables geometry-aware control. Robot shapes are encoded from multi-view planar images using a Bezier-curve representation, transforming visual observations into a compact and physically meaningful shape space that uniquely characterizes the robot's three-dimensional configuration. Based on this representation, neural ordinary differential equations are employed to self-model both shape and end-effector dynamics directly from data, enabling hybrid shape-position control without analytical models or dense body markers. The explicit geometric structure of the learned shape space allows the robot to reason about its body and surroundings, supporting environment-aware behaviors such as obstacle avoidance and self-motion while maintaining end-effector objectives. Experiments on a cable-driven continuum robot demonstrate accurate shape-position regulation and tracking, with shape errors within 1.56% of image resolution and end-effector errors within 2% of robot length, as well as robust performance in constrained environments. By elevating visual shape representations from two-dimensional observations to an interpretable three-dimensional self-model, this work establishes a principled alternative to vision-based end-to-end control and advances autonomous, geometry-aware manipulation for continuum robots.

Shan Sha, Shenglong Zhou, Xin Wang et al.

Decentralized federated learning (DFL) has emerged as a transformative server-free paradigm that enables collaborative learning over large-scale heterogeneous networks. However, it continues to face fundamental challenges, including data heterogeneity, restrictive assumptions for theoretical analysis, and degraded convergence when standard communication- or privacyenhancing techniques are applied. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper develops a novel algorithm, PaME (DFL by Partial Message Exchange). The central principle is to allow only randomly selected sparse coordinates to be exchanged between two neighbor nodes. Consequently, PaME achieves substantial reductions in communication costs while still preserving a high level of privacy, without sacrificing accuracy. Moreover, grounded in rigorous analysis, the algorithm is shown to converge at a linear rate under the gradient to be locally Lipschitz continuous and the communication matrix to be doubly stochastic. These two mild assumptions not only dispense with many restrictive conditions commonly imposed by existing DFL methods but also enables PaME to effectively address data heterogeneity. Furthermore, comprehensive numerical experiments demonstrate its superior performance compared with several representative decentralized learning algorithms.