Abstract:Point cloud completion is inherently ill-posed due to severe sparsity and ambiguity in partial observations. Existing multi-view methods alleviate this by incorporating 2D semantics, but often rely on learned attention and fixed fusion, which lack geometric consistency and adaptability. We propose ProjFormer, a cross-modal framework that enforces geometry-consistent 2D-3D interaction through explicit projection and adaptive feature routing. A Projective Guided View Attention module aligns 3D points with multi-view features via deterministic projection, enabling efficient and geometrically consistent aggregation. Building on this, a geometry-aware routing network performs point-wise adaptive fusion of structural and observation-driven features for progressive refinement. Experiments show that, under a lightweight design, ProjFormer delivers competitive performance with improved structural completeness.
Abstract:Virtual cells employ machine learning models to simulate and predict cellular behaviors, serving as a critical computational framework for investigating health and disease. Injecting causal graphs into virtual cells can improve the interpretability, but such graphs are usually not available in real-world applications. Recently, many methods have been proposed to construct causal graphs from data, which group genes based on their similarities to form concepts and extract their causal relationships. However, since this automatic process is unsupervised, the causal graphs usually contain errors. In this paper, we propose a human-guided causal knowledge injection method for virtual cells. We developed a gene-similarity-aware causal graph visualization supported by a hybrid optimization algorithm to help explore both the causal relationships between concepts and the similarities between genes. Based on the exploration, we further developed a counterfactual analysis strategy supported by a counterfactual visualization and a causal path visualization to help validate and refine causal graphs. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through two real-world case studies, the extraction of scientifically meaningful causal insights, and positive feedback from domain experts.
Abstract:A large number of infants with congenital anomalies are born each year globally, especially in areas with underdeveloped medical resources. Currently, fetal ultrasound screening is the most common modality for early pregnancy anatomy detection. This modality can detect anomalies earlier and provide opportune treatment advice. However, the lack of an ultrasound dataset on early fetal gestation has slowed down the development of automated assisted diagnosis. In this work, we present a benchmark dataset for Fetal Ultrasound Screening in Early Pregnancy to facilitate intelligent ultrasound examination and assisted diagnosis called FUSEP. Our dataset consists of two ultrasound views recommended by the international guideline, i.e., Crown-rump Length (CRL) and Nuchal Translucency (NT) views in three hospitals, totaling 4,017 ultrasound images, with 45,820 box-level expert-level annotations. Our dataset and baseline present the following three contributions: 1) Our medical experts annotated a total of 14 key anatomical structures in two views using a box-level format; 2) Our data is collected extensively from different sonographers, devices, scanning angles, hospitals, etc; 3) We report the performance of the semi-supervised learning, fully supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), and source-free UDA in ultrasound images multi-object detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available dataset and benchmark for fetal early pregnancy ultrasound screening. We believe that FUSEP and benchmark can contribute to the medical community in the development of multiple tasks such as standard plane recognition, quality control on ultrasound images, automated assisted diagnostics in early fetal pregnancy, medical multi-object detection, domain adaptation for object detection, etc.
Abstract:Inferring complete 3D geometry and semantics from onboard images remains challenging because occlusions and restricted fields of view leave large scene regions underconstrained. Although satellite imagery provides wide-area context, appearance cues alone offer limited structural guidance and may be unreliable because of spatial or temporal discrepancies. We present GeoScene, a geospatially guided framework that jointly uses satellite imagery and structured OpenStreetMap cues as soft priors for 3D semantic scene completion. GeoScene learns complementary voxel-wise reliability weights for onboard observations and geospatial guidance, and uses them to control feature refinement in observed and unobserved regions. This design preserves local visual evidence while exploiting large-scale road and building structure beyond onboard visibility. Experiments on SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 demonstrate that GeoScene consistently improves both geometric and semantic completion under the geospatial-prior-assisted setting, with the most pronounced benefits for large-scale static and geospatially structured classes.
Abstract:The growing ability of large language models and vision language models to jointly interpret and reason over images and text is reshaping medical agents, moving them from task specific predictors toward autonomous systems that perceive, reason, plan, remember, and act in clinical environments. This work departs from the capability first perspective of existing literature and instead begins from clinical deployment, asking what tasks, contamination resistant benchmarks, and interactive training environments are required before medical agents can be trusted in practice. Medical agents are formalized as sequential decision making systems under partial observability, together with a three level autonomy taxonomy spanning assisted, cooperative, and fully autonomous operation. The field is organized along a unified scaling spine consisting of framework scaling, capability scaling, and environment scaling. Within this framework, clinical environment scaling, the integration of tools, data, and clinical gyms, is identified as the most actionable yet underexplored direction for agents operating in PACS, EHR, and FHIR ecosystems. Clinical self evolution, where agents improve through interaction with their environments rather than parameter scaling alone, is further positioned as a key research frontier, drawing insights from self improving agents, agent gyms, and test time compute scaling. Applications across radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, and hospital workflows are examined together with deployment challenges including hallucination, cascading failures, and fairness. By consolidating more than 300 references, with particular emphasis on advances from 2025 to 2026, this work provides a roadmap toward trustworthy, self improving medical imaging systems for real clinical practice.
Abstract:Reliable quality control (QC) of ultrasound images is essential for both real-time acquisition guidance and retrospective clinical audit, yet existing approaches rely heavily on per-plane annotations, or employ pseudo-labeling prone to systematic bias under spatial deformations inherent in clinical acquisition. We present STRIQ, a registration-driven framework that recasts annotation-free US plane quality control as a subspace-guided consistency measurement problem. Specifically, STRIQ introduces a Latent Registration Aligner (LRA) to establish hierarchical feature space correspondences between query images and variance-driven anchors, which are autonomously distilled from unlabeled data via a variance spectrum criterion to serve as structurally stable prototypes. To further disambiguate anatomical planes and mitigate negative knowledge transfer, we propose an Orthogonal Knowledge Subspace (OKS) module. The OKS decomposes plane-specific representations into mutually orthogonal subspaces, enabling fine-grained expert collaboration while preventing inter-plane interference, ensuring that the quality metric is grounded in principled subspace proximity. Extensive experiments on the in-house US4QA and public CAMUS datasets demonstrate that STRIQ achieves state-of-the-art correlation with clinical quality scores, establishing a new paradigm for annotation-free, real-time reliable ultrasound quality control. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhcz328/STRIQ.
Abstract:Self-supervised pre-training paradigm has gained increasing prominence for learning transferable representations in medical imaging, yet existing methods for ultrasound (US) images operate at the image or frame level, overlooking the anatomical context for clinical-aligned representation learning. In this work, we propose an anatomy-anchored ultrasound self-supervision framework ANAUS that shifts representation learning from generic visual regions to clinically meaningful anatomical structures. Utilizing a learnable latent prompt engine alongside a one-time domain adaptation on existing public image--mask pairs, we empower the LP-SAM module to achieve annotation-free anatomy delineation at scale. Building upon this anatomical grounding, we propose a dual-policy self-supervised learning paradigm consisting of inter-view semantics-aware anatomy-separating alignment and contextual core-region prediction to enhance representation learning. Specifically, the former enforces feature invariance within identical anatomical regions while promoting discriminability across distinct structures; the latter compels the model to reconstruct corrupted regions, thereby capturing fine-grained structural details. Extensive evaluations on six public datasets demonstrate that \ours{} consistently outstrips current state-of-the-art methods while maintaining the computational efficiency essential for clinical deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/zhcz328/ANAUS.
Abstract:During the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs), the autoregressive decoding phase on heterogeneous NPU platforms (e.g., Ascend 910B) faces severe memory-bound challenges. This study reveals the ``Model Scaling Paradox'' caused by the static deployment of single-sized models. It also points out the kernel synchronization overhead of fine-grained speculative decoding \cite{leviathan2023fast, chen2023speculative} under NPU computational graph compilation, and the severe limitations of purely relying on micro-level acceleration algorithms like Prompt LookUp Decoding (PLD)
Abstract:The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is not a proper distance metric and does not satisfy the triangle inequality, posing theoretical challenges in certain practical applications. Existing work has demonstrated that KL divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions follows a relaxed triangle inequality. Given any three multivariate Gaussian distributions $\mathcal{N}_1, \mathcal{N}_2$, and $\mathcal{N}_3$, if $KL(\mathcal{N}_1, \mathcal{N}_2)\leq ε_1$ and $KL(\mathcal{N}_2, \mathcal{N}_3)\leq ε_2$, then $KL(\mathcal{N}_1, \mathcal{N}_3)< 3ε_1+3ε_2+2\sqrt{ε_1ε_2}+o(ε_1)+o(ε_2)$. However, the supremum of $KL(\mathcal{N}_1, \mathcal{N}_3)$ is still unknown. In this paper, we investigate the relaxed triangle inequality for the KL divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions and give the supremum of $KL(\mathcal{N}_1, \mathcal{N}_3)$ as well as the conditions when the supremum can be attained. When $ε_1$ and $ε_2$ are small, the supremum is $ε_1+ε_2+\sqrt{ε_1ε_2}+o(ε_1)+o(ε_2)$. Finally, we demonstrate several applications of our results in out-of-distribution detection with flow-based generative models and safe reinforcement learning.
Abstract:3D LiDAR scene completion from point clouds is a fundamental component of perception systems in autonomous vehicles. Previous methods have predominantly employed diffusion models for high-fidelity reconstruction. However, their multi-step iterative sampling incurs significant computational overhead, limiting its real-time applicability. To address this, we propose LiNeXt-a lightweight, non-diffusion network optimized for rapid and accurate point cloud completion. Specifically, LiNeXt first applies the Noise-to-Coarse (N2C) Module to denoise the input noisy point cloud in a single pass, thereby obviating the multi-step iterative sampling of diffusion-based methods. The Refine Module then takes the coarse point cloud and its intermediate features from the N2C Module to perform more precise refinement, further enhancing structural completeness. Furthermore, we observe that LiDAR point clouds exhibit a distance-dependent spatial distribution, being densely sampled at proximal ranges and sparsely sampled at distal ranges. Accordingly, we propose the Distance-aware Selected Repeat strategy to generate a more uniformly distributed noisy point cloud. On the SemanticKITTI dataset, LiNeXt achieves a 199.8x speedup in inference, reduces Chamfer Distance by 50.7%, and uses only 6.1% of the parameters compared with LiDiff. These results demonstrate the superior efficiency and effectiveness of LiNeXt for real-time scene completion.