Cross-channel Perception Learning for H&E-to-IHC Virtual Staining

With the rapid development of digital pathology, virtual staining has become a key technology in multimedia medical information systems, offering new possibilities for the analysis and diagnosis of pathological images. However, existing H&E-to-IHC studies often overlook the cross-channel correlations between cell nuclei and cell membranes. To address this issue, we propose a novel Cross-Channel Perception Learning (CCPL) strategy. Specifically, CCPL first decomposes HER2 immunohistochemical staining into Hematoxylin and DAB staining channels, corresponding to cell nuclei and cell membranes, respectively. Using the pathology foundation model Gigapath's Tile Encoder, CCPL extracts dual-channel features from both the generated and real images and measures cross-channel correlations between nuclei and membranes. The features of the generated and real stained images, obtained through the Tile Encoder, are also used to calculate feature distillation loss, enhancing the model's feature extraction capabilities without increasing the inference burden. Additionally, CCPL performs statistical analysis on the focal optical density maps of both single channels to ensure consistency in staining distribution and intensity. Experimental results, based on quantitative metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, PCC, and FID, along with professional evaluations from pathologists, demonstrate that CCPL effectively preserves pathological features, generates high-quality virtual stained images, and provides robust support for automated pathological diagnosis using multimedia medical data.

A Diffusion-Driven Temporal Super-Resolution and Spatial Consistency Enhancement Framework for 4D MRI imaging

In medical imaging, 4D MRI enables dynamic 3D visualization, yet the trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution requires prolonged scan time that can compromise temporal fidelity--especially during rapid, large-amplitude motion. Traditional approaches typically rely on registration-based interpolation to generate intermediate frames. However, these methods struggle with large deformations, resulting in misregistration, artifacts, and diminished spatial consistency. To address these challenges, we propose TSSC-Net, a novel framework that generates intermediate frames while preserving spatial consistency. To improve temporal fidelity under fast motion, our diffusion-based temporal super-resolution network generates intermediate frames using the start and end frames as key references, achieving 6x temporal super-resolution in a single inference step. Additionally, we introduce a novel tri-directional Mamba-based module that leverages long-range contextual information to effectively resolve spatial inconsistencies arising from cross-slice misalignment, thereby enhancing volumetric coherence and correcting cross-slice errors. Extensive experiments were performed on the public ACDC cardiac MRI dataset and a real-world dynamic 4D knee joint dataset. The results demonstrate that TSSC-Net can generate high-resolution dynamic MRI from fast-motion data while preserving structural fidelity and spatial consistency.

LLIA -- Enabling Low-Latency Interactive Avatars: Real-Time Audio-Driven Portrait Video Generation with Diffusion Models

Diffusion-based models have gained wide adoption in the virtual human generation due to their outstanding expressiveness. However, their substantial computational requirements have constrained their deployment in real-time interactive avatar applications, where stringent speed, latency, and duration requirements are paramount. We present a novel audio-driven portrait video generation framework based on the diffusion model to address these challenges. Firstly, we propose robust variable-length video generation to reduce the minimum time required to generate the initial video clip or state transitions, which significantly enhances the user experience. Secondly, we propose a consistency model training strategy for Audio-Image-to-Video to ensure real-time performance, enabling a fast few-step generation. Model quantization and pipeline parallelism are further employed to accelerate the inference speed. To mitigate the stability loss incurred by the diffusion process and model quantization, we introduce a new inference strategy tailored for long-duration video generation. These methods ensure real-time performance and low latency while maintaining high-fidelity output. Thirdly, we incorporate class labels as a conditional input to seamlessly switch between speaking, listening, and idle states. Lastly, we design a novel mechanism for fine-grained facial expression control to exploit our model's inherent capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves low-latency, fluid, and authentic two-way communication. On an NVIDIA RTX 4090D, our model achieves a maximum of 78 FPS at a resolution of 384x384 and 45 FPS at a resolution of 512x512, with an initial video generation latency of 140 ms and 215 ms, respectively.

Truth in the Few: High-Value Data Selection for Efficient Multi-Modal Reasoning

While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in complex reasoning tasks via reinforcement learning, it is commonly believed that extensive training data is necessary for improving multi-modal reasoning ability, inevitably leading to data redundancy and substantial computational costs. However, can smaller high-value datasets match or outperform full corpora for multi-modal reasoning in MLLMs? In this work, we challenge this assumption through a key observation: meaningful multi-modal reasoning is triggered by only a sparse subset of training samples, termed cognitive samples, whereas the majority contribute marginally. Building on this insight, we propose a novel data selection paradigm termed Reasoning Activation Potential (RAP), which identifies cognitive samples by estimating each sample's potential to stimulate genuine multi-modal reasoning by two complementary estimators: 1) Causal Discrepancy Estimator (CDE) based on the potential outcome model principle, eliminates samples that overly rely on language priors by comparing outputs between multi-modal and text-only inputs; 2) Attention Confidence Estimator (ACE), which exploits token-level self-attention to discard samples dominated by irrelevant but over-emphasized tokens in intermediate reasoning stages. Moreover, we introduce a Difficulty-aware Replacement Module (DRM) to substitute trivial instances with cognitively challenging ones, thereby ensuring complexity for robust multi-modal reasoning. Experiments on six datasets show that our RAP method consistently achieves superior performance using only 9.3% of the training data, while reducing computational costs by over 43%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Leo-ssl/RAP.

Estimating the Effects of Sample Training Orders for Large Language Models without Retraining

The order of training samples plays a crucial role in large language models (LLMs), significantly impacting both their external performance and internal learning dynamics. Traditional methods for investigating this effect generally require retraining the model with various sample orders, which is computationally infeasible for LLMs. In this work, we improve traditional methods by designing a retraining-free framework. By approximating Adam optimizer updates with first- and second-order Taylor expansions and utilizing random projection methods to store intermediate checkpoints, our framework can efficiently estimate model parameters for arbitrary training sample orders. Next, we apply our framework to two downstream research problems: (1) Training curriculum design for LLMs -- we base our retraining-free framework to propose a novel curriculum learning strategy that augments curriculum proposals with estimated model performances, enabling more informed sample scheduling. (2) LLMs' memorization and generalization effect analysis -- we use our retraining-free framework to estimate how the positions of training samples influence LLMs' capacity for memorization and generalization. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our retraining-free framework in reproducing the true model performances, and further demonstrate its potential in optimizing LLM training curricula and analyzing the memorization and generalization effects of LLMs.

PromptEVC: Controllable Emotional Voice Conversion with Natural Language Prompts

Controllable emotional voice conversion (EVC) aims to manipulate emotional expressions to increase the diversity of synthesized speech. Existing methods typically rely on predefined labels, reference audios, or prespecified factor values, often overlooking individual differences in emotion perception and expression. In this paper, we introduce PromptEVC that utilizes natural language prompts for precise and flexible emotion control. To bridge text descriptions with emotional speech, we propose emotion descriptor and prompt mapper to generate fine-grained emotion embeddings, trained jointly with reference embeddings. To enhance naturalness, we present a prosody modeling and control pipeline that adjusts the rhythm based on linguistic content and emotional cues. Additionally, a speaker encoder is incorporated to preserve identity. Experimental results demonstrate that PromptEVC outperforms state-of-the-art controllable EVC methods in emotion conversion, intensity control, mixed emotion synthesis, and prosody manipulation. Speech samples are available at https://jeremychee4.github.io/PromptEVC/.

Multimodal Machine Translation with Visual Scene Graph Pruning

Multimodal machine translation (MMT) seeks to address the challenges posed by linguistic polysemy and ambiguity in translation tasks by incorporating visual information. A key bottleneck in current MMT research is the effective utilization of visual data. Previous approaches have focused on extracting global or region-level image features and using attention or gating mechanisms for multimodal information fusion. However, these methods have not adequately tackled the issue of visual information redundancy in MMT, nor have they proposed effective solutions. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach--multimodal machine translation with visual Scene Graph Pruning (PSG), which leverages language scene graph information to guide the pruning of redundant nodes in visual scene graphs, thereby reducing noise in downstream translation tasks. Through extensive comparative experiments with state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the PSG model. Our results also highlight the promising potential of visual information pruning in advancing the field of MMT.

Reshaping Representation Space to Balance the Safety and Over-rejection in Large Audio Language Models

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have extended the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling audio-based human interactions. However, recent research has revealed that LALMs remain vulnerable to harmful queries due to insufficient safety-alignment. Despite advances in defence measures for text and vision LLMs, effective safety-alignment strategies and audio-safety dataset specifically targeting LALMs are notably absent. Meanwhile defence measures based on Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) struggle to address safety improvement while avoiding over-rejection issues, significantly compromising helpfulness. In this work, we propose an unsupervised safety-fine-tuning strategy as remedy that reshapes model's representation space to enhance existing LALMs safety-alignment while balancing the risk of over-rejection. Our experiments, conducted across three generations of Qwen LALMs, demonstrate that our approach significantly improves LALMs safety under three modality input conditions (audio-text, text-only, and audio-only) while increasing over-rejection rate by only 0.88% on average. Warning: this paper contains harmful examples.

ELSPR: Evaluator LLM Training Data Self-Purification on Non-Transitive Preferences via Tournament Graph Reconstruction

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as evaluators for open-ended tasks, while previous research has emphasized biases in LLM evaluations, the issue of non-transitivity in pairwise comparisons remains unresolved: non-transitive preferences for pairwise comparisons, where evaluators prefer A over B, B over C, but C over A. Our results suggest that low-quality training data may reduce the transitivity of preferences generated by the Evaluator LLM. To address this, We propose a graph-theoretic framework to analyze and mitigate this problem by modeling pairwise preferences as tournament graphs. We quantify non-transitivity and introduce directed graph structural entropy to measure the overall clarity of preferences. Our analysis reveals significant non-transitivity in advanced Evaluator LLMs (with Qwen2.5-Max exhibiting 67.96%), as well as high entropy values (0.8095 for Qwen2.5-Max), reflecting low overall clarity of preferences. To address this issue, we designed a filtering strategy, ELSPR, to eliminate preference data that induces non-transitivity, retaining only consistent and transitive preference data for model fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned with filtered data reduce non-transitivity by 13.78% (from 64.28% to 50.50%), decrease structural entropy by 0.0879 (from 0.8113 to 0.7234), and align more closely with human evaluators (human agreement rate improves by 0.6% and Spearman correlation increases by 0.01).

MIDB: Multilingual Instruction Data Booster for Enhancing Multilingual Instruction Synthesis

Despite doubts on data quality, instruction synthesis has been widely applied into instruction tuning (IT) of LLMs as an economic and rapid alternative. Recent endeavors focus on improving data quality for synthesized instruction pairs in English and have facilitated IT of English-centric LLMs. However, data quality issues in multilingual synthesized instruction pairs are even more severe, since the common synthesizing practice is to translate English synthesized data into other languages using machine translation (MT). Besides the known content errors in these English synthesized data, multilingual synthesized instruction data are further exposed to defects introduced by MT and face insufficient localization of the target languages. In this paper, we propose MIDB, a Multilingual Instruction Data Booster to automatically address the quality issues in multilingual synthesized data. MIDB is trained on around 36.8k revision examples across 16 languages by human linguistic experts, thereby can boost the low-quality data by addressing content errors and MT defects, and improving localization in these synthesized data. Both automatic and human evaluation indicate that not only MIDB steadily improved instruction data quality in 16 languages, but also the instruction-following and cultural-understanding abilities of multilingual LLMs fine-tuned on MIDB-boosted data were significantly enhanced.