Robotics Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Abstract:Accurately predicting immunotherapy response in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) remains a critical unmet need. Existing radiomics and deep learning-based predictive models rely primarily on pre-treatment imaging to predict categorical response outcomes, limiting their ability to capture the complex morphological and textural transformations induced by immunotherapy. This study introduces ImmunoDiff, an anatomy-aware diffusion model designed to synthesize post-treatment CT scans from baseline imaging while incorporating clinically relevant constraints. The proposed framework integrates anatomical priors, specifically lobar and vascular structures, to enhance fidelity in CT synthesis. Additionally, we introduce a novel cbi-Adapter, a conditioning module that ensures pairwise-consistent multimodal integration of imaging and clinical data embeddings, to refine the generative process. Additionally, a clinical variable conditioning mechanism is introduced, leveraging demographic data, blood-based biomarkers, and PD-L1 expression to refine the generative process. Evaluations on an in-house NSCLC cohort treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors demonstrate a 21.24% improvement in balanced accuracy for response prediction and a 0.03 increase in c-index for survival prediction. Code will be released soon.
Abstract:Humans possess a large reachable space in the 3D world, enabling interaction with objects at varying heights and distances. However, realizing such large-space reaching on humanoids is a complex whole-body control problem and requires the robot to master diverse skills simultaneously-including base positioning and reorientation, height and body posture adjustments, and end-effector pose control. Learning from scratch often leads to optimization difficulty and poor sim2real transferability. To address this challenge, we propose Real-world-Ready Skill Space (R2S2). Our approach begins with a carefully designed skill library consisting of real-world-ready primitive skills. We ensure optimal performance and robust sim2real transfer through individual skill tuning and sim2real evaluation. These skills are then ensembled into a unified latent space, serving as a structured prior that helps task execution in an efficient and sim2real transferable manner. A high-level planner, trained to sample skills from this space, enables the robot to accomplish real-world goal-reaching tasks. We demonstrate zero-shot sim2real transfer and validate R2S2 in multiple challenging goal-reaching scenarios.
Abstract:Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) poses significant challenges to existing object detection and few-shot detection models when applied across domains. In conjunction with NTIRE 2025, we organized the 1st CD-FSOD Challenge, aiming to advance the performance of current object detectors on entirely novel target domains with only limited labeled data. The challenge attracted 152 registered participants, received submissions from 42 teams, and concluded with 13 teams making valid final submissions. Participants approached the task from diverse perspectives, proposing novel models that achieved new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results under both open-source and closed-source settings. In this report, we present an overview of the 1st NTIRE 2025 CD-FSOD Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and summarizing the results submitted by the participants.
Abstract:Discovering constants of motion is meaningful in helping understand the dynamical systems, but inevitably needs proficient mathematical skills and keen analytical capabilities. With the prevalence of deep learning, methods employing neural networks, such as Constant Of Motion nETwork (COMET), are promising in handling this scientific problem. Although the COMET method can produce better predictions on dynamics by exploiting the discovered constants of motion, there is still plenty of room to sharpen it. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network architecture, built using the singular-value-decomposition (SVD) technique, and a two-phase training algorithm to improve the performance of COMET. Extensive experiments show that our approach not only retains the advantages of COMET, such as applying to non-Hamiltonian systems and indicating the number of constants of motion, but also can be more lightweight and noise-robust than COMET.
Abstract:Accurate brain tumor diagnosis relies on the assessment of multiple Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) sequences. However, in clinical practice, the acquisition of certain sequences may be affected by factors like motion artifacts or contrast agent contraindications, leading to suboptimal outcome, such as poor image quality. This can then affect image interpretation by radiologists. Synthesizing high quality MRI sequences has thus become a critical research focus. Though recent advancements in controllable generative AI have facilitated the synthesis of diagnostic quality MRI, ensuring anatomical accuracy remains a significant challenge. Preserving critical structural relationships between different anatomical regions is essential, as even minor structural or topological inconsistencies can compromise diagnostic validity. In this work, we propose BrainMRDiff, a novel topology-preserving, anatomy-guided diffusion model for synthesizing brain MRI, leveraging brain and tumor anatomies as conditioning inputs. To achieve this, we introduce two key modules: Tumor+Structure Aggregation (TSA) and Topology-Guided Anatomy Preservation (TGAP). TSA integrates diverse anatomical structures with tumor information, forming a comprehensive conditioning mechanism for the diffusion process. TGAP enforces topological consistency during reverse denoising diffusion process; both these modules ensure that the generated image respects anatomical integrity. Experimental results demonstrate that BrainMRDiff surpasses existing baselines, achieving performance improvements of 23.33% on the BraTS-AG dataset and 33.33% on the BraTS-Met dataset. Code will be made publicly available soon.
Abstract:Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) technology infers heart rate by capturing subtle color changes in facial skin using a camera, demonstrating great potential in non-contact heart rate measurement. However, measurement accuracy significantly decreases in complex scenarios such as lighting changes and head movements compared to ideal laboratory conditions. Existing deep learning models often neglect the quantification of measurement uncertainty, limiting their credibility in dynamic scenes. To address the issue of insufficient rPPG measurement reliability in complex scenarios, this paper introduces Bayesian neural networks to the rPPG field for the first time, proposing the Robust Fusion Bayesian Physiological Network (RF-BayesPhysNet), which can model both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. It leverages variational inference to balance accuracy and computational efficiency. Due to the current lack of uncertainty estimation metrics in the rPPG field, this paper also proposes a new set of methods, using Spearman correlation coefficient, prediction interval coverage, and confidence interval width, to measure the effectiveness of uncertainty estimation methods under different noise conditions. Experiments show that the model, with only double the parameters compared to traditional network models, achieves a MAE of 2.56 on the UBFC-RPPG dataset, surpassing most models. It demonstrates good uncertainty estimation capability in no-noise and low-noise conditions, providing prediction confidence and significantly enhancing robustness in real-world applications. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/AIDC-rPPG/RF-Net
Abstract:Inferring signed distance functions (SDFs) from sparse point clouds remains a challenge in surface reconstruction. The key lies in the lack of detailed geometric information in sparse point clouds, which is essential for learning a continuous field. To resolve this issue, we present a novel approach that learns a dynamic deformation network to predict SDFs in an end-to-end manner. To parameterize a continuous surface from sparse points, we propose a bijective surface parameterization (BSP) that learns the global shape from local patches. Specifically, we construct a bijective mapping for sparse points from the parametric domain to 3D local patches, integrating patches into the global surface. Meanwhile, we introduce grid deformation optimization (GDO) into the surface approximation to optimize the deformation of grid points and further refine the parametric surfaces. Experimental results on synthetic and real scanned datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://takeshie.github.io/Bijective-SDF
Abstract:Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) are vital implicit representations to represent high fidelity 3D surfaces. Current methods mainly leverage a neural network to learn an SDF from various supervisions including signed distances, 3D point clouds, or multi-view images. However, due to various reasons including the bias of neural network on low frequency content, 3D unaware sampling, sparsity in point clouds, or low resolutions of images, neural implicit representations still struggle to represent geometries with high frequency components like sharp structures, especially for the ones learned from images or point clouds. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a method to sharpen a low frequency SDF observation by recovering its high frequency components, pursuing a sharper and more complete surface. Our key idea is to learn a mapping from a low frequency observation to a full frequency coverage in a data-driven manner, leading to a prior knowledge of shape consolidation in the frequency domain, dubbed frequency consolidation priors. To better generalize a learned prior to unseen shapes, we introduce to represent frequency components as embeddings and disentangle the embedding of the low frequency component from the embedding of the full frequency component. This disentanglement allows the prior to generalize on an unseen low frequency observation by simply recovering its full frequency embedding through a test-time self-reconstruction. Our evaluations under widely used benchmarks or real scenes show that our method can recover high frequency component and produce more accurate surfaces than the latest methods. The code, data, and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/chenchao15/FCP}.
Abstract:Event-based semantic segmentation has great potential in autonomous driving and robotics due to the advantages of event cameras, such as high dynamic range, low latency, and low power cost. Unfortunately, current artificial neural network (ANN)-based segmentation methods suffer from high computational demands, the requirements for image frames, and massive energy consumption, limiting their efficiency and application on resource-constrained edge/mobile platforms. To address these problems, we introduce SLTNet, a spike-driven lightweight transformer-based network designed for event-based semantic segmentation. Specifically, SLTNet is built on efficient spike-driven convolution blocks (SCBs) to extract rich semantic features while reducing the model's parameters. Then, to enhance the long-range contextural feature interaction, we propose novel spike-driven transformer blocks (STBs) with binary mask operations. Based on these basic blocks, SLTNet employs a high-efficiency single-branch architecture while maintaining the low energy consumption of the Spiking Neural Network (SNN). Finally, extensive experiments on DDD17 and DSEC-Semantic datasets demonstrate that SLTNet outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) SNN-based methods by at least 7.30% and 3.30% mIoU, respectively, with extremely 5.48x lower energy consumption and 1.14x faster inference speed.
Abstract:Despite the significant advancements in Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) facilitated by large language models (LLMs), the latest state-of-the-art techniques are still trapped in the in-context learning of closed-source LLMs (e.g., GPT-4), which limits their applicability in open scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel RObust mUltitask Tuning and collaboration mEthod (ROUTE) to improve the comprehensive capabilities of open-source LLMs for Text2SQL, thereby providing a more practical solution. Our approach begins with multi-task supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using various synthetic training data related to SQL generation. Unlike existing SFT-based Text2SQL methods, we introduced several additional SFT tasks, including schema linking, noise correction, and continuation writing. Engaging in a variety of SQL generation tasks enhances the model's understanding of SQL syntax and improves its ability to generate high-quality SQL queries. Additionally, inspired by the collaborative modes of LLM agents, we introduce a Multitask Collaboration Prompting (MCP) strategy. This strategy leverages collaboration across several SQL-related tasks to reduce hallucinations during SQL generation, thereby maximizing the potential of enhancing Text2SQL performance through explicit multitask capabilities. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses have been performed on eight open-source LLMs and five widely-used benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our proposal outperforms the latest Text2SQL methods and yields leading performance.