OptiModNet: A UNet-Transformer Hybrid with Grouped-Query and Channel Attention for Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation

Precise segmentation of the optic disc and cup is critical for the early detection and diagnosis of glaucoma. However, achieving consistently high performance across datasets while maintaining low computational requirements remains a significant challenge. In glaucoma detection, low-computation methods are crucial for enabling rapid, large-scale screening and facilitating deployment in resource-limited clinical environments. While deep learning models such as UNets, Vision Transformers (ViTs), and Diffusion models have demonstrated strong segmentation performance but these methods often come with substantial computational overhead. UNets are efficient at capturing local features but are limited in modeling global contextual information. Conversely, ViTs excel at long-range dependency modeling but are computationally intensive. Hybrid architectures, such as UNetR, which combine transformer-based encoders with UNet-style decoders, have shown improved performance but while incurring additional complexity. Considering these, in this work, we propose OptiModNet, a light weight novel hybrid architecture tailored for optic disc and cup segmentation. The model integrates diverse attention mechanisms at multiple stages of the network to enhance both local and global feature representation. We include an Aggregated Pyramid Loss that supervises predictions at multiple decoder depths, to promote better gradient flow and structural consistency. We evaluate OptiModNet on the REFUGE2 dataset for both optic disc and cup segmentation tasks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, exceeding existing approaches by over 2.5\%, while maintaining high efficiency with only 3.73 GFLOPs and 1.93M parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/SG1947/OptiModNet.

PRISMA: Preference-Reinforced Self-Training Approach for Interpretable Emotionally Intelligent Negotiation Dialogues

Emotion plays a pivotal role in shaping negotiation outcomes, influencing trust, cooperation, and long-term relationships. Developing negotiation dialog systems that can recognize and respond strategically to emotions is, therefore, essential to create more effective human-centered interactions. Beyond generating emotionally appropriate responses, interpretability - understanding how a system generates a particular emotion-aware response, is critical for fostering reliability and building rapport. Driven by these aspects, in this work, we introduce PRISMA, an interpretable emotionally intelligent negotiation dialogue system targeting two application domains, viz. job interviews and resource allocation. To enable interpretability, we propose an Emotion-aware Negotiation Strategy-informed Chain-of-Thought (ENS-CoT) reasoning mechanism, which mimics human negotiation by perceiving, understanding, using, and managing emotions. Leveraging ENS-CoT, we curate two new datasets: JobNego (for job interview negotiation) and ResNego (for resource allocation negotiation). We then leverage these datasets to develop PRISMA by augmenting self-training with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), guiding agents toward more accurate, interpretable, and emotionally appropriate negotiation responses. Automatic and human evaluation on JobNego and ResNego datasets demonstrate that PRISMA substantially enhances interpretability and generates appropriate emotion-aware responses, while improving overall negotiation effectiveness.

Weakly Supervised Detection of Pheochromocytomas and Paragangliomas in CT

Pheochromocytomas and Paragangliomas (PPGLs) are rare adrenal and extra-adrenal tumors which have the potential to metastasize. For the management of patients with PPGLs, CT is the preferred modality of choice for precise localization and estimation of their progression. However, due to the myriad variations in size, morphology, and appearance of the tumors in different anatomical regions, radiologists are posed with the challenge of accurate detection of PPGLs. Since clinicians also need to routinely measure their size and track their changes over time across patient visits, manual demarcation of PPGLs is quite a time-consuming and cumbersome process. To ameliorate the manual effort spent for this task, we propose an automated method to detect PPGLs in CT studies via a proxy segmentation task. As only weak annotations for PPGLs in the form of prospectively marked 2D bounding boxes on an axial slice were available, we extended these 2D boxes into weak 3D annotations and trained a 3D full-resolution nnUNet model to directly segment PPGLs. We evaluated our approach on a dataset consisting of chest-abdomen-pelvis CTs of 255 patients with confirmed PPGLs. We obtained a precision of 70% and sensitivity of 64.1% with our proposed approach when tested on 53 CT studies. Our findings highlight the promising nature of detecting PPGLs via segmentation, and furthers the state-of-the-art in this exciting yet challenging area of rare cancer management.