Risk-Routed Implicit Boundary Refinement for Robust Ultrasound Image SegmentationJingguo Qu, Xinyang Han, Xiang Wang et al.
Medical ultrasound (US) image segmentation faces significant challenges due to speckle noise, low-contrast boundaries, acoustic shadowing, and acquisition variation across operators and clinical centers. Although encoder-decoder and transformer-based networks have achieved strong performance, many methods recover boundary details through dense decoders or larger backbones, which may still produce over-smoothed contours or unstable predictions under external distribution shifts. In this article, we propose Risk-routed Implicit Boundary Refinement (RIBR), a compact segmentation framework that uses implicit neural representation as a risk-routed residual correction rather than an unconstrained full-mask predictor. RIBR combines boundary-refinement implicit residuals, risk-routed residual control, and geometry- and speckle-aware boundary regularization to refine uncertain contours while suppressing non-boundary oscillations. Evaluation on nine US datasets covering lymph nodes, breast lesions, thyroid nodules, and prostate shows that RIBR achieves the best overall macro-average and consistently reduces boundary error across grouped and organ-specific comparisons under a compact parameter budget. These findings suggest that controlled implicit residual learning is a practical strategy for resource-constrained and boundary-sensitive US segmentation. Source code is available at https://github.com/jinggqu/ribr.
Learning Semantic-Robust Change Detection via Semantic-Invariant Self-DistillationJiuhe Qu, Yingping Liang, Ying Fu
Change detection aims to identify semantic changes between remote sensing images. However, features from models are easily disturbed by non-semantic variations, such as illumination, shadows, and atmospheric changes, leading to false alarms and limited generalization in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textbf{SCDistill}, a framework for learning semantic-robust change detection via semantic-invariant self-distillation. First, to strengthen semantic consistency, we introduce a semantic-invariant self-distillation strategy that learns semantic robustness from perturbed yet semantically consistent data, empowering the change detector to extract disturbance-resistant features and achieve more reliable and accurate semantic change identification. Second, to expand paired data with non-semantic variations, we design a diffusion-based perturbation simulation pipeline that synthesizes complex environmental changes, enabling the model to explicitly learn to distinguish semantic changes from appearance-level fluctuations and reduce false alarms caused by non-semantic disturbances. These components promote robustness from data and representation perspectives, leading to synergistic performance gains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple semantic change detection benchmarks and exhibits strong generalization to binary change detection and change captioning tasks. Code is accessible at https://github.com/elecreak/SCDistill.
6.5IRJul 24
PinEqualizer: Full Funnel Content Exploration and Debiasing System at PinterestOlafur Gudmundsson, Bo Zhao, Huayi Liao et al.
In this paper, we propose a new solution for addressing the content cold-start problem in industry-scale search and recommender systems. Compared to prior approaches, we have made the following new contributions: 1) our solution spans the entire multi-stage funnel and generalizes well for both search and recommendation surfaces, 2) our solution reduces bias favoring existing content, allowing more accurate model prediction across content types and reducing short-term tradeoffs associated with high volumes of explicit content exploration, 3) our solution is evaluated with a scalable measurement framework that enables fast short-term experimentation while validating long-term impact. We have iteratively built and successfully deployed this new system at Pinterest in the past two years and observed significant improvements in fresh content exploration, overall user engagement, and content ecosystem health.
21.4CLJul 6
Most LLM Conformity Needs No Speaker: Measuring the Speaker-Free Floor in Peer-Pressure BenchmarksYibo Hu, Jiaming Qu
LLM conformity is often used to describe cases where a model changes a correct answer toward a peer or group response. We show that most of this apparent conformity survives even after the peer is removed. The reason is a confound: standard conformity prompts mix two cues at once, the presence of a speaker and the repeated wrong answer itself. Existing benchmarks vary these cues together, so they cannot tell how much of the revision actually depends on the speaker. We introduce a no-source condition: the same asserted answer with the explicit speaker removed. Across six open-weight LLMs and seven QA and reasoning datasets, this condition alone causes harmful revision in $66.5\%$ of initially correct cases, compared with $10.3\%$ under a plain re-ask. The effect also remains when the repeated answer is paraphrased and when answer options are hidden in an open-ended setting. Source framing mainly modulates this floor: expert-panel framing raises it, while minimal person labels do not reliably raise it. When models flip, they are usually confidently wrong, and simple recalibration does not recover the original answer. Source attribution still matters, but it should be measured as an increment above this speaker-free floor. The methodological lesson is that conformity benchmarks should first measure what remains after the speaker is removed; without this step, benchmarks may mistake repeated text for social influence.
23.9AIJul 15
Deep Interaction: An Efficient Human-AI Interaction Method for Large Reasoning ModelsHefeng Zhou, Jinxuan Zhang, Jiong Lou et al.
The emergence of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly enhanced the ability of large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex, multi-step tasks. However, when errors occur, current interaction approaches typically involve re-generating another response that may make mistakes again, or users laboriously flag the faulty step in follow-up turns that may get responses <You are right, I made a mistake here> followed by similar errors recurring. To address this issue, we propose an efficient human intervention mechanism for precisely correcting reasoning errors in LLMs, termed Deep Interaction. Our approach enables direct editing of the original response, allowing erroneous parts to be corrected while preserving accurate reasoning steps. We refine the edited CoT into a distilled prompt, which then steers the LLM along the corrected reasoning path. Experimental results show that our method achieves over a 25% improvement in correction success rate and reduces token usage by approximately 40% on STEM tasks reasoning compared to baseline approaches.
4.8CVJul 2
Dual-Selective Network for Domain-Incremental Change DetectionYuzhi He, Junxi Huang, Haorui Wu et al.
Domain-incremental change detection (DICD) continuously adapts models to new geographic domains while preserving prior knowledge. However, a structural mismatch exists: the label space remains fixed while domain characteristics vary drastically. Consequently, incremental models struggle to maintain stable spatial change representations across domains. Existing strategies, such as replay-based or regularization-based methods, often fail to scale to long domain sequences, leading to knowledge degradation or increased computational cost. We propose Dual-Selective Incremental Network (DSINet), a unified framework built on visual state space models. DSINet leverages Mamba's input-dependent selective mechanism through a selective spatial state unit (S3U). This unit preserves stable spatial change structures while filtering domain-specific variations during feature propagation. As a result, spatial representations remain stable across domains, preventing the accumulation of feature confusion over incremental steps. Additionally, we employ a concentration-balanced distillation (CBD) strategy to stabilize knowledge transfer across domains. It balances hardness and confidence concentration effects during incremental updates. This ensures reliable probability mass allocation and prevents over-smoothing or mode collapse during distillation. Together, these mechanisms maintain stable learning dynamics throughout incremental stages. Experimental results demonstrate that DSINet mitigates knowledge degradation across long domain sequences while maintaining the linear computational efficiency of state space models.