Lihua Zhang

Shuailin Xue, Jun Wan, Lihua Zhang et al.

Accurate detection of cancer tissue regions (CTR) enables deeper analysis of the tumor microenvironment and offers crucial insights into treatment response. Traditional CTR detection methods, which typically rely on the rich cellular morphology in histology images, are susceptible to a high rate of false positives due to morphological similarities across different tissue regions. The groundbreaking advances in spatial transcriptomics (ST) provide detailed cellular phenotypes and spatial localization information, offering new opportunities for more accurate cancer region detection. However, current methods are unable to effectively integrate histology images with ST data, especially in the context of cross-sample and cross-platform/batch settings for accomplishing the CTR detection. To address this challenge, we propose SpaCRD, a transfer learning-based method that deeply integrates histology images and ST data to enable reliable CTR detection across diverse samples, platforms, and batches. Once trained on source data, SpaCRD can be readily generalized to accurately detect cancerous regions across samples from different platforms and batches. The core of SpaCRD is a category-regularized variational reconstruction-guided bidirectional cross-attention fusion network, which enables the model to adaptively capture latent co-expression patterns between histological features and gene expression from multiple perspectives. Extensive benchmark analysis on 23 matched histology-ST datasets spanning various disease types, platforms, and batches demonstrates that SpaCRD consistently outperforms existing eight state-of-the-art methods in CTR detection.

Wei Xue, Mingcheng Li, Xuecheng Wu et al.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to accurately perceive complex visual environments and reason over navigation instructions and histories. However, existing methods passively process redundant visual inputs and treat all historical contexts indiscriminately, resulting in inefficient perception and unfocused reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{ProFocus}, a training-free progressive framework that unifies \underline{Pro}active Perception and \underline{Focus}ed Reasoning through collaboration between large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). For proactive perception, ProFocus transforms panoramic observations into structured ego-centric semantic maps, enabling the orchestration agent to identify missing visual information needed for reliable decision-making, and to generate targeted visual queries with corresponding focus regions that guide the perception agent to acquire the required observations. For focused reasoning, we propose Branch-Diverse Monte Carlo Tree Search (BD-MCTS) to identify top-$k$ high-value waypoints from extensive historical candidates. The decision agent focuses reasoning on the historical contexts associated with these waypoints, rather than considering all historical waypoints equally. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of ProFocus, achieving state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot methods on R2R and REVERIE benchmarks.