POLYRAG: Integrating Polyviews into Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Medical Applications

Large language models (LLMs) have become a disruptive force in the industry, introducing unprecedented capabilities in natural language processing, logical reasoning and so on. However, the challenges of knowledge updates and hallucination issues have limited the application of LLMs in medical scenarios, where retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can offer significant assistance. Nevertheless, existing retrieve-then-read approaches generally digest the retrieved documents, without considering the timeliness, authoritativeness and commonality of retrieval. We argue that these approaches can be suboptimal, especially in real-world applications where information from different sources might conflict with each other and even information from the same source in different time scale might be different, and totally relying on this would deteriorate the performance of RAG approaches. We propose PolyRAG that carefully incorporate judges from different perspectives and finally integrate the polyviews for retrieval augmented generation in medical applications. Due to the scarcity of real-world benchmarks for evaluation, to bridge the gap we propose PolyEVAL, a benchmark consists of queries and documents collected from real-world medical scenarios (including medical policy, hospital & doctor inquiry and healthcare) with multiple tagging (e.g., timeliness, authoritativeness) on them. Extensive experiments and analysis on PolyEVAL have demonstrated the superiority of PolyRAG.

SEGA: Drivable 3D Gaussian Head Avatar from a Single Image

Creating photorealistic 3D head avatars from limited input has become increasingly important for applications in virtual reality, telepresence, and digital entertainment. While recent advances like neural rendering and 3D Gaussian splatting have enabled high-quality digital human avatar creation and animation, most methods rely on multiple images or multi-view inputs, limiting their practicality for real-world use. In this paper, we propose SEGA, a novel approach for Single-imagE-based 3D drivable Gaussian head Avatar creation that combines generalized prior models with a new hierarchical UV-space Gaussian Splatting framework. SEGA seamlessly combines priors derived from large-scale 2D datasets with 3D priors learned from multi-view, multi-expression, and multi-ID data, achieving robust generalization to unseen identities while ensuring 3D consistency across novel viewpoints and expressions. We further present a hierarchical UV-space Gaussian Splatting framework that leverages FLAME-based structural priors and employs a dual-branch architecture to disentangle dynamic and static facial components effectively. The dynamic branch encodes expression-driven fine details, while the static branch focuses on expression-invariant regions, enabling efficient parameter inference and precomputation. This design maximizes the utility of limited 3D data and achieves real-time performance for animation and rendering. Additionally, SEGA performs person-specific fine-tuning to further enhance the fidelity and realism of the generated avatars. Experiments show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generalization ability, identity preservation, and expression realism, advancing one-shot avatar creation for practical applications.

Ego4o: Egocentric Human Motion Capture and Understanding from Multi-Modal Input

This work focuses on tracking and understanding human motion using consumer wearable devices, such as VR/AR headsets, smart glasses, cellphones, and smartwatches. These devices provide diverse, multi-modal sensor inputs, including egocentric images, and 1-3 sparse IMU sensors in varied combinations. Motion descriptions can also accompany these signals. The diverse input modalities and their intermittent availability pose challenges for consistent motion capture and understanding. In this work, we present Ego4o (o for omni), a new framework for simultaneous human motion capture and understanding from multi-modal egocentric inputs. This method maintains performance with partial inputs while achieving better results when multiple modalities are combined. First, the IMU sensor inputs, the optional egocentric image, and text description of human motion are encoded into the latent space of a motion VQ-VAE. Next, the latent vectors are sent to the VQ-VAE decoder and optimized to track human motion. When motion descriptions are unavailable, the latent vectors can be input into a multi-modal LLM to generate human motion descriptions, which can further enhance motion capture accuracy. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in predicting accurate human motion and high-quality motion descriptions.

Efficient Tuning of Large Language Models for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable text comprehension and generation capabilities but often lack the ability to utilize up-to-date or domain-specific knowledge not included in their training data. To address this gap, we introduce KEDiT, an efficient method for fine-tuning LLMs for knowledge-grounded dialogue generation. KEDiT operates in two main phases: first, it employs an information bottleneck to compress retrieved knowledge into learnable parameters, retaining essential information while minimizing computational overhead. Second, a lightweight knowledge-aware adapter integrates these compressed knowledge vectors into the LLM during fine-tuning, updating less than 2\% of the model parameters. The experimental results on the Wizard of Wikipedia and a newly constructed PubMed-Dialog dataset demonstrate that KEDiT excels in generating contextually relevant and informative responses, outperforming competitive baselines in automatic, LLM-based, and human evaluations. This approach effectively combines the strengths of pretrained LLMs with the adaptability needed for incorporating dynamic knowledge, presenting a scalable solution for fields such as medicine.

ZFusion: An Effective Fuser of Camera and 4D Radar for 3D Object Perception in Autonomous Driving

Reliable 3D object perception is essential in autonomous driving. Owing to its sensing capabilities in all weather conditions, 4D radar has recently received much attention. However, compared to LiDAR, 4D radar provides much sparser point cloud. In this paper, we propose a 3D object detection method, termed ZFusion, which fuses 4D radar and vision modality. As the core of ZFusion, our proposed FP-DDCA (Feature Pyramid-Double Deformable Cross Attention) fuser complements the (sparse) radar information and (dense) vision information, effectively. Specifically, with a feature-pyramid structure, the FP-DDCA fuser packs Transformer blocks to interactively fuse multi-modal features at different scales, thus enhancing perception accuracy. In addition, we utilize the Depth-Context-Split view transformation module due to the physical properties of 4D radar. Considering that 4D radar has a much lower cost than LiDAR, ZFusion is an attractive alternative to LiDAR-based methods. In typical traffic scenarios like the VoD (View-of-Delft) dataset, experiments show that with reasonable inference speed, ZFusion achieved the state-of-the-art mAP (mean average precision) in the region of interest, while having competitive mAP in the entire area compared to the baseline methods, which demonstrates performance close to LiDAR and greatly outperforms those camera-only methods.

SelfMedHPM: Self Pre-training With Hard Patches Mining Masked Autoencoders For Medical Image Segmentation

In recent years, deep learning methods such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and transformers have made significant progress in CT multi-organ segmentation. However, CT multi-organ segmentation methods based on masked image modeling (MIM) are very limited. There are already methods using MAE for CT multi-organ segmentation task, we believe that the existing methods do not identify the most difficult areas to reconstruct. To this end, we propose a MIM self-training framework with hard patches mining masked autoencoders for CT multi-organ segmentation tasks (selfMedHPM). The method performs ViT self-pretraining on the training set of the target data and introduces an auxiliary loss predictor, which first predicts the patch loss and determines the location of the next mask. SelfMedHPM implementation is better than various competitive methods in abdominal CT multi-organ segmentation and body CT multi-organ segmentation. We have validated the performance of our method on the Multi Atlas Labeling Beyond The Cranial Vault (BTCV) dataset for abdomen mult-organ segmentation and the SinoMed Whole Body (SMWB) dataset for body multi-organ segmentation tasks.

GeoRAG: A Question-Answering Approach from a Geographical Perspective

Geographic Question Answering (GeoQA) addresses natural language queries in geographic domains to fulfill complex user demands and improve information retrieval efficiency. Traditional QA systems, however, suffer from limited comprehension, low retrieval accuracy, weak interactivity, and inadequate handling of complex tasks, hindering precise information acquisition. This study presents GeoRAG, a knowledge-enhanced QA framework integrating domain-specific fine-tuning and prompt engineering with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology to enhance geographic knowledge retrieval accuracy and user interaction. The methodology involves four components: (1) A structured geographic knowledge base constructed from 3267 corpora (research papers, monographs, and technical reports), categorized via a multi-agent approach into seven dimensions: semantic understanding, spatial location, geometric morphology, attribute characteristics, feature relationships, evolutionary processes, and operational mechanisms. This yielded 145234 classified entries and 875432 multi-dimensional QA pairs. (2) A multi-label text classifier based on BERT-Base-Chinese, trained to analyze query types through geographic dimension classification. (3) A retrieval evaluator leveraging QA pair data to assess query-document relevance, optimizing retrieval precision. (4) GeoPrompt templates engineered to dynamically integrate user queries with retrieved information, enhancing response quality through dimension-specific prompting. Comparative experiments demonstrate GeoRAG's superior performance over conventional RAG across multiple base models, validating its generalizability. This work advances geographic AI by proposing a novel paradigm for deploying large language models in domain-specific contexts, with implications for improving GeoQA systems scalability and accuracy in real-world applications.

Training-Free Text-Guided Image Editing with Visual Autoregressive Model

Text-guided image editing is an essential task that enables users to modify images through natural language descriptions. Recent advances in diffusion models and rectified flows have significantly improved editing quality, primarily relying on inversion techniques to extract structured noise from input images. However, inaccuracies in inversion can propagate errors, leading to unintended modifications and compromising fidelity. Moreover, even with perfect inversion, the entanglement between textual prompts and image features often results in global changes when only local edits are intended. To address these challenges, we propose a novel text-guided image editing framework based on VAR (Visual AutoRegressive modeling), which eliminates the need for explicit inversion while ensuring precise and controlled modifications. Our method introduces a caching mechanism that stores token indices and probability distributions from the original image, capturing the relationship between the source prompt and the image. Using this cache, we design an adaptive fine-grained masking strategy that dynamically identifies and constrains modifications to relevant regions, preventing unintended changes. A token reassembling approach further refines the editing process, enhancing diversity, fidelity, and control. Our framework operates in a training-free manner and achieves high-fidelity editing with faster inference speeds, processing a 1K resolution image in as fast as 1.2 seconds. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to, or even surpassing, existing diffusion- and rectified flow-based approaches in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The code will be released.

Style Quantization for Data-Efficient GAN Training

Under limited data setting, GANs often struggle to navigate and effectively exploit the input latent space. Consequently, images generated from adjacent variables in a sparse input latent space may exhibit significant discrepancies in realism, leading to suboptimal consistency regularization (CR) outcomes. To address this, we propose \textit{SQ-GAN}, a novel approach that enhances CR by introducing a style space quantization scheme. This method transforms the sparse, continuous input latent space into a compact, structured discrete proxy space, allowing each element to correspond to a specific real data point, thereby improving CR performance. Instead of direct quantization, we first map the input latent variables into a less entangled ``style'' space and apply quantization using a learnable codebook. This enables each quantized code to control distinct factors of variation. Additionally, we optimize the optimal transport distance to align the codebook codes with features extracted from the training data by a foundation model, embedding external knowledge into the codebook and establishing a semantically rich vocabulary that properly describes the training dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements in both discriminator robustness and generation quality with our method.

FRAME: Floor-aligned Representation for Avatar Motion from Egocentric Video

Egocentric motion capture with a head-mounted body-facing stereo camera is crucial for VR and AR applications but presents significant challenges such as heavy occlusions and limited annotated real-world data. Existing methods rely on synthetic pretraining and struggle to generate smooth and accurate predictions in real-world settings, particularly for lower limbs. Our work addresses these limitations by introducing a lightweight VR-based data collection setup with on-board, real-time 6D pose tracking. Using this setup, we collected the most extensive real-world dataset for ego-facing ego-mounted cameras to date in size and motion variability. Effectively integrating this multimodal input -- device pose and camera feeds -- is challenging due to the differing characteristics of each data source. To address this, we propose FRAME, a simple yet effective architecture that combines device pose and camera feeds for state-of-the-art body pose prediction through geometrically sound multimodal integration and can run at 300 FPS on modern hardware. Lastly, we showcase a novel training strategy to enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Our approach exploits the problem's geometric properties, yielding high-quality motion capture free from common artifacts in prior works. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations, along with extensive comparisons, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Data, code, and CAD designs will be available at https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/FRAME/