Jinhong Wang

Jinhong Wang, Yi Cheng, Jintai Chen et al.

Ordinal regression refers to classifying object instances into ordinal categories. It has been widely studied in many scenarios, such as medical disease grading, movie rating, etc. Known methods focused only on learning inter-class ordinal relationships, but still incur limitations in distinguishing adjacent categories thus far. In this paper, we propose a simple sequence prediction framework for ordinal regression called Ord2Seq, which, for the first time, transforms each ordinal category label into a special label sequence and thus regards an ordinal regression task as a sequence prediction process. In this way, we decompose an ordinal regression task into a series of recursive binary classification steps, so as to subtly distinguish adjacent categories. Comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of distinguishing adjacent categories for performance improvement and our new approach exceeds state-of-the-art performances in four different scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/wjh892521292/Ord2Seq.

Yifei Sun, Yuzhi He, Junhao Jia et al.

Microaneurysms (MAs), the earliest pathognomonic signs of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), present as sub-60 $μm$ lesions in fundus images with highly variable photometric and morphological characteristics, rendering manual screening not only labor-intensive but inherently error-prone. While diffusion-based anomaly detection has emerged as a promising approach for automated MA screening, its clinical application is hindered by three fundamental limitations. First, these models often fall prey to "identity mapping", where they inadvertently replicate the input image. Second, they struggle to distinguish MAs from other anomalies, leading to high false positives. Third, their suboptimal reconstruction of normal features hampers overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose a Wavelet Diffusion Transformer framework for MA Detection (WDT-MD), which features three key innovations: a noise-encoded image conditioning mechanism to avoid "identity mapping" by perturbing image conditions during training; pseudo-normal pattern synthesis via inpainting to introduce pixel-level supervision, enabling discrimination between MAs and other anomalies; and a wavelet diffusion Transformer architecture that combines the global modeling capability of diffusion Transformers with multi-scale wavelet analysis to enhance reconstruction of normal retinal features. Comprehensive experiments on the IDRiD and e-ophtha MA datasets demonstrate that WDT-MD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both pixel-level and image-level MA detection. This advancement holds significant promise for improving early DR screening.

Jinhong Wang, Tingting Chen, Jintai Chen et al.

Automatic ophthalmic disease diagnosis on fundus images is important in clinical practice. However, due to complex fundus textures and limited annotated data, developing an effective automatic method for this problem is still challenging. In this paper, we present a self-supervised method via polar transformation based progressive contrastive learning, called PoCo, for ophthalmic disease diagnosis. Specifically, we novelly inject the polar transformation into contrastive learning to 1) promote contrastive learning pre-training to be faster and more stable and 2) naturally capture task-free and rotation-related textures, which provides insights into disease recognition on fundus images. Beneficially, simple normal translation-invariant convolution on transformed images can equivalently replace the complex rotation-invariant and sector convolution on raw images. After that, we develop a progressive contrastive learning method to efficiently utilize large unannotated images and a novel progressive hard negative sampling scheme to gradually reduce the negative sample number for efficient training and performance enhancement. Extensive experiments on three public ophthalmic disease datasets show that our PoCo achieves state-of-the-art performance with good generalization ability, validating that our method can reduce annotation efforts and provide reliable diagnosis. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/wjh892521292/PoCo}.

Sukmin Yun, Haokun Lin, Rusiru Thushara et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive success across modalities such as image, video, and audio in a variety of understanding and generation tasks. However, current MLLMs are surprisingly poor at understanding webpage screenshots and generating their corresponding HTML code. To address this problem, we propose $\texttt{Web2Code}$, a benchmark consisting of a new large-scale webpage-to-code dataset for instruction tuning and an evaluation framework for the webpage understanding and HTML code translation abilities of MLLMs. For dataset construction, we leverage pretrained LLMs to enhance existing webpage-to-code datasets as well as generate a diverse pool of new webpages rendered into images. Specifically, the inputs are webpage images and instructions, while the responses are the webpage's HTML code. We further include diverse natural language QA pairs about the webpage content in the responses to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the web content. To evaluate model performance in these tasks, we develop an evaluation framework for testing MLLMs' abilities in webpage understanding and web-to-code generation. Extensive experiments show that our proposed dataset is beneficial not only to our proposed tasks but also in the general visual domain. We hope our work will contribute to the development of general MLLMs suitable for web-based content generation and task automation. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/MBZUAI-LLM/web2code.

Chunlai Dong, Haochao Ying, Qibo Qiu et al.

Ordinal regression bridges regression and classification by assigning objects to ordered classes. While human experts rely on discriminative patch-level features for decisions, current approaches are limited by the availability of only image-level ordinal labels, overlooking fine-grained patch-level characteristics. In this paper, we propose a Dual-level Fuzzy Learning with Patch Guidance framework, named DFPG that learns precise feature-based grading boundaries from ambiguous ordinal labels, with patch-level supervision. Specifically, we propose patch-labeling and filtering strategies to enable the model to focus on patch-level features exclusively with only image-level ordinal labels available. We further design a dual-level fuzzy learning module, which leverages fuzzy logic to quantitatively capture and handle label ambiguity from both patch-wise and channel-wise perspectives. Extensive experiments on various image ordinal regression datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, further confirming its ability in distinguishing samples from difficult-to-classify categories. The code is available at https://github.com/ZJUMAI/DFPG-ord.

Jinhong Wang, Shuo Tong, Jian liu et al.

Visual rating is an essential capability of artificial intelligence (AI) for multi-dimensional quantification of visual content, primarily applied in ordinal regression (OR) tasks such as image quality assessment, facial age estimation, and medical image grading. However, current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) under-perform in such visual rating ability while also suffering the lack of relevant datasets and benchmarks. In this work, we collect and present STORM, a data collection and benchmark for Stimulating Trustworthy Ordinal Regression Ability of MLLMs for universal visual rating. STORM encompasses 14 ordinal regression datasets across five common visual rating domains, comprising 655K image-level pairs and the corresponding carefully curated VQAs. Importantly, we also propose a coarse-to-fine processing pipeline that dynamically considers label candidates and provides interpretable thoughts, providing MLLMs with a general and trustworthy ordinal thinking paradigm. This benchmark aims to evaluate the all-in-one and zero-shot performance of MLLMs in scenarios requiring understanding of the essential common ordinal relationships of rating labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and shed light on better fine-tuning strategies. The STORM dataset, benchmark, and pre-trained models are available on the following webpage to support further research in this area. Datasets and codes are released on the project page: https://storm-bench.github.io/.

Jinhong Wang, Jintai Chen, Jian Liu et al.

Ordinal regression refers to classifying object instances into ordinal categories. Ordinal regression is crucial for applications in various areas like facial age estimation, image aesthetics assessment, and even cancer staging, due to its capability to utilize ordered information effectively. More importantly, it also enhances model interpretation by considering category order, aiding the understanding of data trends and causal relationships. Despite significant recent progress, challenges remain, and further investigation of ordinal regression techniques and applications is essential to guide future research. In this survey, we present a comprehensive examination of advances and applications of ordinal regression. By introducing a systematic taxonomy, we meticulously classify the pertinent techniques and applications into three well-defined categories based on different strategies and objectives: Continuous Space Discretization, Distribution Ordering Learning, and Ambiguous Instance Delving. This categorization enables a structured exploration of diverse insights in ordinal regression problems, providing a framework for a more comprehensive understanding and evaluation of this field and its related applications. To our best knowledge, this is the first systematic survey of ordinal regression, which lays a foundation for future research in this fundamental and generic domain.

Yi Cheng, Haochao Ying, Renjun Hu et al.

Image ordinal regression has been mainly studied along the line of exploiting the order of categories. However, the issues of class imbalance and category overlap that are very common in ordinal regression were largely overlooked. As a result, the performance on minority categories is often unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called CIG based on controllable image generation to directly tackle these two issues. Our main idea is to generate extra training samples with specific labels near category boundaries, and the sample generation is biased toward the less-represented categories. To achieve controllable image generation, we seek to separate structural and categorical information of images based on structural similarity, categorical similarity, and reconstruction constraints. We evaluate the effectiveness of our new CIG approach in three different image ordinal regression scenarios. The results demonstrate that CIG can be flexibly integrated with off-the-shelf image encoders or ordinal regression models to achieve improvement, and further, the improvement is more significant for minority categories.

Yixuan Wu, Kuanlun Liao, Jintai Chen et al.

Computer-aided medical image segmentation has been applied widely in diagnosis and treatment to obtain clinically useful information of shapes and volumes of target organs and tissues. In the past several years, convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods (e.g., U-Net) have dominated this area, but still suffered from inadequate long-range information capturing. Hence, recent work presented computer vision Transformer variants for medical image segmentation tasks and obtained promising performances. Such Transformers model long-range dependency by computing pair-wise patch relations. However, they incur prohibitive computational costs, especially on 3D medical images (e.g., CT and MRI). In this paper, we propose a new method called Dilated Transformer, which conducts self-attention for pair-wise patch relations captured alternately in local and global scopes. Inspired by dilated convolution kernels, we conduct the global self-attention in a dilated manner, enlarging receptive fields without increasing the patches involved and thus reducing computational costs. Based on this design of Dilated Transformer, we construct a U-shaped encoder-decoder hierarchical architecture called D-Former for 3D medical image segmentation. Experiments on the Synapse and ACDC datasets show that our D-Former model, trained from scratch, outperforms various competitive CNN-based or Transformer-based segmentation models at a low computational cost without time-consuming per-training process.