Joint Medical Image Enhancement and Segmentation with Diffusion-based Symbiotic Information InteractionYing Chen, Jinyue Li, Qiankun Li
Image quality is critical for accurate medical diagnosis. However, MRI, CT, and ultrasound images are often of low resolution and quality due to cost constraints, complicating the visualization of key anatomical structures and lesions. While such limitations are common in practice, traditional methods treat image enhancement as a separate preprocessing step, failing to fully leverage its potential synergy with image segmentation. To address this, we propose DiSIINet (Diffusion-based Symbiotic Information Interaction Network), which is built on the principle that enhancement and segmentation should mutually reinforce each other in a unified model. Based on Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM), DiSIINet integrates an enhancement branch and a segmentation branch. These branches interact through a novel Symbiotic Information Interaction (SII) module, which facilitates dynamic, feature-level information exchange via cross-attention during the reverse diffusion process. This design enables both tasks to iteratively improve each other. The DDIM backbone ensures high-quality output and efficient inference through deterministic sampling. Experiments on multi-modal medical datasets (MRI, CT, ultrasound) show that DiSIINet achieves significant performance improvements compared to sequential or independent enhancement and segmentation approaches. The code is available at: https://github.com/Reconsider80/DiSIINet.
Synergistic Perception-Reasoning Governance: Grounding Medical MLLMs with Verifiable Anatomical EvidenceRui Hao, Qiankun Li, Junyuan Mao et al.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show strong promise for clinical VQA and radiology report generation, yet inference-time hallucinations still undermine trustworthy use: models can produce fluent conclusions that conflict with imaging evidence. Existing mitigation strategies typically rely on additional training, external retrieval/knowledge bases, or multi-stage post-hoc verification, which increases cost and pipeline complexity and often generalizes poorly across models and tasks.To address this, we propose a holistic, training-free evidence-injection framework that systematically mitigates hallucinations through dual-side evidence injection. By leveraging ROI priors acquired using MedSAM in our implementation, we recalibrate the visual perception trajectory via ROI-guided activation modulation while anchoring the textual reasoning trajectory by mapping anatomical coordinates into discrete semantic tokens as verifiable external memory. Then we introduce a task-aware dynamic router to select modality-specific interventions based on task semantics, balancing perceptual grounding and linguistic fluency. We conduct systematic evaluations on 2 tasks and 5 datasets using \texttt{LLaVA-1.5-7B}, \texttt{LLaVA-Med-1.5-7B}, \texttt{Qwen3-VL-8B/32B}, and \texttt{InternVL-3.5-8B/38B}. Controlled ablations and visualizations further validate the framework, which consistently outperforms baselines across medical benchmarks, improving close-ended accuracy by up to $\sim\mathbf{6}\%\uparrow$ and reducing open-ended hallucinations by $\sim\mathbf{35}\%\downarrow$. The code has been made available on GitHub: \href{https://github.com/Henry991115/SPRG}{\textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/Henry991115/SPRG}}.
19.5NCJul 1
NeuroCogMap Reveals Cognitive Organization of Large Language ModelsZhongxiang Sun, Haolang Lu, Qiang Ma et al.
Understanding how complex cognitive functions are organized within artificial systems is central to interpreting large language models (LLMs) and relating them to biological cognition. Yet although LLMs exhibit broad cognitive-like behaviours, it remains unclear whether their internal representations form reproducible functional systems that explain behaviour, failure and links to human cognition. Here we present NeuroCogMap, a cognitive neuroscience-inspired framework that organizes internal features of LLMs into functional parcels and links them to interpretable functions, cognitive capabilities and a cognitive hierarchy. These parcels form a stable and semantically coherent organization that is partly conserved across models and functionally linked to model outputs. Within this organization, major LLM failures, including hallucination, bias, refusal failure and sycophancy, correspond to distinct disruptions in representational and behavioural-control systems, yielding internal signatures for mechanism-guided detection and targeted intervention. Beyond model behaviour, NeuroCogMap improves prediction of human cortical responses during naturalistic language comprehension, with the strongest correspondence in higher-order association cortex. At the cognitive level, its internal signatures expose latent strategies that guide refinements of classical models of human decision-making. Together, these findings establish NeuroCogMap as a system-level framework for mapping functional organization in artificial systems and for relating this organization to human cortical function and cognitive behaviour.