LLM Sensitivity Evaluation Framework for Clinical Diagnosis

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various domains. However, for clinical diagnosis, higher expectations are required for LLM's reliability and sensitivity: thinking like physicians and remaining sensitive to key medical information that affects diagnostic reasoning, as subtle variations can lead to different diagnosis results. Yet, existing works focus mainly on investigating the sensitivity of LLMs to irrelevant context and overlook the importance of key information. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of LLMs, i.e. GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude3 and LLaMA2-7b, to key medical information by introducing different perturbation strategies. The evaluation results highlight the limitations of current LLMs in remaining sensitive to key medical information for diagnostic decision-making. The evolution of LLMs must focus on improving their reliability, enhancing their ability to be sensitive to key information, and effectively utilizing this information. These improvements will enhance human trust in LLMs and facilitate their practical application in real-world scenarios. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/chenwei23333/DiagnosisQA.

Enhancing Multi-task Learning Capability of Medical Generalist Foundation Model via Image-centric Multi-annotation Data

The emergence of medical generalist foundation models has revolutionized conventional task-specific model development paradigms, aiming to better handle multiple tasks through joint training on large-scale medical datasets. However, recent advances prioritize simple data scaling or architectural component enhancement, while neglecting to re-examine multi-task learning from a data-centric perspective. Critically, simply aggregating existing data resources leads to decentralized image-task alignment, which fails to cultivate comprehensive image understanding or align with clinical needs for multi-dimensional image interpretation. In this paper, we introduce the image-centric multi-annotation X-ray dataset (IMAX), the first attempt to enhance the multi-task learning capabilities of medical multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) from the data construction level. To be specific, IMAX is featured from the following attributes: 1) High-quality data curation. A comprehensive collection of more than 354K entries applicable to seven different medical tasks. 2) Image-centric dense annotation. Each X-ray image is associated with an average of 4.10 tasks and 7.46 training entries, ensuring multi-task representation richness per image. Compared to the general decentralized multi-annotation X-ray dataset (DMAX), IMAX consistently demonstrates significant multi-task average performance gains ranging from 3.20% to 21.05% across seven open-source state-of-the-art medical MLLMs. Moreover, we investigate differences in statistical patterns exhibited by IMAX and DMAX training processes, exploring potential correlations between optimization dynamics and multi-task performance. Finally, leveraging the core concept of IMAX data construction, we propose an optimized DMAX-based training strategy to alleviate the dilemma of obtaining high-quality IMAX data in practical scenarios.

MedM-VL: What Makes a Good Medical LVLM?

Medical image analysis is a fundamental component. As deep learning progresses, the focus has shifted from single-task applications, such as classification and segmentation, to more complex multimodal tasks, including medical visual question answering and report generation. Traditional shallow and task-specific models are increasingly limited in addressing the complexity and scalability required in clinical practice. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has driven the development of medical Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), offering a unified solution for diverse vision-language tasks. In this study, we investigate various architectural designs for medical LVLMs based on the widely adopted LLaVA framework, which follows an encoder-connector-LLM paradigm. We construct two distinct models targeting 2D and 3D modalities, respectively. These models are designed to support both general-purpose medical tasks and domain-specific fine-tuning, thereby serving as effective foundation models. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we develop a modular and extensible codebase, MedM-VL, and release two LVLM variants: MedM-VL-2D for 2D medical image analysis and MedM-VL-CT-Chest for 3D CT-based applications. The code and models are available at: https://github.com/MSIIP/MedM-VL

DF-Calib: Targetless LiDAR-Camera Calibration via Depth Flow

Precise LiDAR-camera calibration is crucial for integrating these two sensors into robotic systems to achieve robust perception. In applications like autonomous driving, online targetless calibration enables a prompt sensor misalignment correction from mechanical vibrations without extra targets. However, existing methods exhibit limitations in effectively extracting consistent features from LiDAR and camera data and fail to prioritize salient regions, compromising cross-modal alignment robustness. To address these issues, we propose DF-Calib, a LiDAR-camera calibration method that reformulates calibration as an intra-modality depth flow estimation problem. DF-Calib estimates a dense depth map from the camera image and completes the sparse LiDAR projected depth map, using a shared feature encoder to extract consistent depth-to-depth features, effectively bridging the 2D-3D cross-modal gap. Additionally, we introduce a reliability map to prioritize valid pixels and propose a perceptually weighted sparse flow loss to enhance depth flow estimation. Experimental results across multiple datasets validate its accuracy and generalization,with DF-Calib achieving a mean translation error of 0.635cm and rotation error of 0.045 degrees on the KITTI dataset.

LiDAR-enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting Mapping

This paper introduces LiGSM, a novel LiDAR-enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) mapping framework that improves the accuracy and robustness of 3D scene mapping by integrating LiDAR data. LiGSM constructs joint loss from images and LiDAR point clouds to estimate the poses and optimize their extrinsic parameters, enabling dynamic adaptation to variations in sensor alignment. Furthermore, it leverages LiDAR point clouds to initialize 3DGS, providing a denser and more reliable starting points compared to sparse SfM points. In scene rendering, the framework augments standard image-based supervision with depth maps generated from LiDAR projections, ensuring an accurate scene representation in both geometry and photometry. Experiments on public and self-collected datasets demonstrate that LiGSM outperforms comparative methods in pose tracking and scene rendering.

MKE-Coder: Multi-Axial Knowledge with Evidence Verification in ICD Coding for Chinese EMRs

The task of automatically coding the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in the medical field has been well-established and has received much attention. Automatic coding of the ICD in the medical field has been successful in English but faces challenges when dealing with Chinese electronic medical records (EMRs). The first issue lies in the difficulty of extracting disease code-related information from Chinese EMRs, primarily due to the concise writing style and specific internal structure of the EMRs. The second problem is that previous methods have failed to leverage the disease-based multi-axial knowledge and lack of association with the corresponding clinical evidence. This paper introduces a novel framework called MKE-Coder: Multi-axial Knowledge with Evidence verification in ICD coding for Chinese EMRs. Initially, we identify candidate codes for the diagnosis and categorize each of them into knowledge under four coding axes.Subsequently, we retrieve corresponding clinical evidence from the comprehensive content of EMRs and filter credible evidence through a scoring model. Finally, to ensure the validity of the candidate code, we propose an inference module based on the masked language modeling strategy. This module verifies that all the axis knowledge associated with the candidate code is supported by evidence and provides recommendations accordingly. To evaluate the performance of our framework, we conduct experiments using a large-scale Chinese EMR dataset collected from various hospitals. The experimental results demonstrate that MKE-Coder exhibits significant superiority in the task of automatic ICD coding based on Chinese EMRs. In the practical evaluation of our method within simulated real coding scenarios, it has been demonstrated that our approach significantly aids coders in enhancing both their coding accuracy and speed.

Connector-S: A Survey of Connectors in Multi-modal Large Language Models

With the rapid advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), connectors play a pivotal role in bridging diverse modalities and enhancing model performance. However, the design and evolution of connectors have not been comprehensively analyzed, leaving gaps in understanding how these components function and hindering the development of more powerful connectors. In this survey, we systematically review the current progress of connectors in MLLMs and present a structured taxonomy that categorizes connectors into atomic operations (mapping, compression, mixture of experts) and holistic designs (multi-layer, multi-encoder, multi-modal scenarios), highlighting their technical contributions and advancements. Furthermore, we discuss several promising research frontiers and challenges, including high-resolution input, dynamic compression, guide information selection, combination strategy, and interpretability. This survey is intended to serve as a foundational reference and a clear roadmap for researchers, providing valuable insights into the design and optimization of next-generation connectors to enhance the performance and adaptability of MLLMs.

MIH-TCCT: Mitigating Inconsistent Hallucinations in LLMs via Event-Driven Text-Code Cyclic Training

Recent methodologies utilizing synthetic datasets have aimed to address inconsistent hallucinations in large language models (LLMs); however,these approaches are primarily tailored to specific tasks, limiting their generalizability. Inspired by the strong performance of code-trained models in logic-intensive domains, we propose a novel framework that leverages event-based text to generate corresponding code and employs cyclic training to transfer the logical consistency of code to natural language effectively. Our method significantly reduces inconsistent hallucinations across three leading LLMs and two categories of natural language tasks while maintaining overall performance. This framework effectively alleviates hallucinations without necessitating adaptation to downstream tasks, demonstrating generality and providing new perspectives to tackle the challenge of inconsistent hallucinations.

The 1st SpeechWellness Challenge: Detecting Suicidal Risk Among Adolescents

The 1st SpeechWellness Challenge (SW1) aims to advance methods for detecting suicidal risk in adolescents using speech analysis techniques. Suicide among adolescents is a critical public health issue globally. Early detection of suicidal tendencies can lead to timely intervention and potentially save lives. Traditional methods of assessment often rely on self-reporting or clinical interviews, which may not always be accessible. The SW1 challenge addresses this gap by exploring speech as a non-invasive and readily available indicator of mental health. We release the SW1 dataset which contains speech recordings from 600 adolescents aged 10-18 years. By focusing on speech generated from natural tasks, the challenge seeks to uncover patterns and markers that correlate with suicidal risk.

Data Augmentation Techniques for Chinese Disease Name Normalization

Disease name normalization is an important task in the medical domain. It classifies disease names written in various formats into standardized names, serving as a fundamental component in smart healthcare systems for various disease-related functions. Nevertheless, the most significant obstacle to existing disease name normalization systems is the severe shortage of training data. Consequently, we present a novel data augmentation approach that includes a series of data augmentation techniques and some supporting modules to help mitigate the problem. Through extensive experimentation, we illustrate that our proposed approach exhibits significant performance improvements across various baseline models and training objectives, particularly in scenarios with limited training data