Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract:Evaluating LLM agents in realistic service scenarios requires complex task dependencies, imperfect user behavior, and an evaluation that accommodates multiple valid solutions. We introduce CRAB-Bench (Constraint-based Realistic Agent Benchmark) and RUSE (Realistic User Simulation Engine) to address this gap. CRAB-Bench generates tasks via a constraint graph over multiple interdependent entities with structured distractors, requiring agents to reason carefully over thousands of misleading candidates where only a tiny fraction of solutions are valid. RUSE replaces cooperative, template-like simulators with realistic users grounded in human behavioral studies, instantiated across diverse personas and four behavioral dimensions. Experiments on four frontier LLM agents show that the best model achieves only 61% pass@1 on CRAB-Bench, and switching to RUSE causes further drops of up to 57%, concentrated in task-solving ability rather than conversational quality. Information Disclosure is the most damaging behavioral dimension, and agents interacting with RUSE are less likely to admit mistakes, instead masking errors through implicit corrections.
Abstract:Accurate 3D geometric characterization of myocardial infarction (MI) is essential for building cardiac digital twins (CDTs) to precisely simulate infarct-related electrophysiology. Late gadolinium enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (LGE MRI) is the clinical reference for locating MI, yet its reliance on contrast agents restricts use in renally impaired patients and limits longitudinal follow-ups. As an alternative, contrast-free cine MRI visualizes abnormal ventricular wall motion, which is highly indicative of the infarcted area. In this study, we propose a novel explicit geometry-motion embedded model to fully automatically reconstruct personalized, simulation-ready 3D MI geometries directly from multi-view cine MRIs. Specifically, we construct a 4D (3D + t) biventricular mesh to explicitly extract and decouple geometry-aware and motion-aware features. We further design a dual-branch module for adaptive geometry-motion fusion to capture spatiotemporal dependencies for mapping infarcted region. Furthermore, we introduce multi-scale supervision utilizing an AHA-17 segment-guided cross-attention mechanism to steer the prediction, ensuring biophysically consistent reconstruction. Experimental results on 225 cine MRIs demonstrated that the proposed 3D MI reconstruction achieved high performance with an average Dice score of 0.678 $\pm$ 0.011. In the downstream in-silico electrophysiological simulation evaluations, the results were highly consistent with the LGE-derived ground truth, highlighting the great potential of the proposed model for contrast-free scar characterization and seamless integration into CDT modeling. The code will be released publicly upon acceptance of the manuscript for publication.
Abstract:Sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) seeks a low-dimensional linear projection of predictors that preserves the conditional distribution of the response. Existing methods target this conditional distribution indirectly, via inverse moments, local forward regression, or neural ensemble regression. We propose FlowSDR, a likelihood-based framework that jointly learns the projection and the conditional density by maximizing a conditional log-likelihood, with the density parameterized by monotone rational-quadratic spline flows. The estimator is Fisher consistent under the SDR model, and its sample objective admits a population interpretation in terms of mutual information. As a complementary model within the same likelihood framework, we introduce the neural Gaussian SDR, a heteroscedastic conditional Gaussian model whose mean and variance are parameterized by shared neural-network functions of the projected predictors. In simulations spanning Gaussian errors, heavy-tailed distributions, two-component mixtures, and settings with tail behavior not captured by mean-variance structure, FlowSDR recovers the central subspace more accurately than existing SDR methods and the neural Gaussian SDR baseline. We further validate these advantages on a face-age prediction task using the UTKFace dataset.
Abstract:Despite years of methodological progress, how far AI has come in liver fibrosis staging has never been systematically evaluated under the heterogeneous, multi-center conditions that define clinical practice. To address this gap, we introduce LiFS, a large-scale dataset and benchmark derived from the MICCAI 2025 CARE-Liver challenge, comprising 610 patients across multiple centers and scanners with multi-sequence MRI. To the best of our knowledge, LiFS is the first benchmark providing complete gadoxetic acid-enhanced sequences with histopathology-confirmed annotations from diverse real-world scanners. Through systematic evaluation of 9 independently developed methods selected from 96 registered teams against in-cohort radiologist reference results, our findings address how far current AI has progressed toward clinical-level liver fibrosis staging from three complementary perspectives. First, against radiologists, the best AI methods were broadly comparable to the senior radiologist and significantly exceeded the junior radiologist in selected settings, while median AI performance generally approached junior-radiologist levels. Second, from a data perspective, cross-center heterogeneity, label imbalance, and contrast-enhanced sequence variability emerge as the dominant challenges for AI methods. Third, from a technical perspective, methodological design choices, including spatial registration, input dimensionality, multi-modal fusion strategy, and backbone architecture, appear to modulate cross-center robustness, although no single choice alone closes the gap. Overall, LiFS provides a rigorous real-world benchmark for positioning the current state of AI in liver fibrosis staging and for enabling future research on the key challenges that limit clinically reliable deployment.
Abstract:Pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs) are increasingly deployed for medical image classification. However, correcting their inevitable failure cases in dynamic clinical scenarios poses a critical challenge. Conventional fine-tuning approaches inherently suffer from catastrophic forgetting, severely degrading previously acquired diagnostic capabilities. Such instability fundamentally compromises clinical safety. Addressing this vulnerability requires an active, controllable, and reliable intervention mechanism that is both theoretically grounded and inherently interpretable. To this end, we propose X-Edit (eXact, eXplicit, and eXplainable Editing), an efficient null-space model editing framework. X-Edit transitions the editing process from iterative gradient-based optimization to a theoretically grounded, closed-form solution. Specifically, we first explicitly localize the influential layers via causal tracing governing the erroneous prediction. Subsequently, we construct an orthogonal null-space projection matrix from a curated anchor set. By geometrically constraining the exact parameter update strictly within this null space, we provide mathematical guarantees that the intervention rectifies targeted errors without perturbing established diagnostic representations. Extensive evaluations on six medical imaging benchmarks demonstrate that X-Edit comprehensively suppresses catastrophic forgetting while achieving superior edit success rates. Our code is available at https://github.com/HenryLau7/X-Edit.
Abstract:Reconstructing 4D (3D+t) cardiac geometry from sparse 2D echocardiography is highly desirable yet fundamentally challenged by geometric ambiguity and temporal discontinuity. To tackle these issues, we propose Echo4DIR, a novel test-time 4D implicit reconstruction framework. Specifically, we learn robust 3D shape priors from statistical shape models (SSMs) via a cardiac conditional SDF, constructing an Epipolar Mask Encoder module with epipolar cross attention to effectively fuse multi-view features. To bridge the synthetic-to-real domain gap, we introduce a self-supervised SDF-tailored differentiable rendering strategy for patient-specific 3D shape adaptation using uncalibrated clinical masks without requiring 3D ground truth. Crucially, the inherent continuity of implicit representation overcomes sparse observations, enabling anatomically reliable geometry at arbitrary resolutions. Furthermore, to empower our framework with physically continuous 4D extension, we introduce a Radial SDF Alignment strategy that strictly locks shape evolution to the predicted velocity field, fundamentally eliminating mesh drift. Extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real clinical datasets demonstrate that Echo4DIR achieves state-of-the-art 4D cardiac mesh reconstruction, notably yielding an impressive clinical overlap of up to 98.35% Dice and 96.75% IoU.
Abstract:Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and diffusion models have each reached remarkable maturity: MLLMs excel at reasoning over heterogeneous multimodal inputs with strong semantic grounding, while diffusion models synthesize images and videos with photorealistic fidelity. We argue that these two families can be unified through a simple division of labor: MLLMs perform semantic planning, while diffusion models render pixels from high-level semantic guidance and low-level visual features. Building on this idea, we propose Bernini, a unified framework for video generation and editing. An MLLM-based planner predicts the target semantic representation directly in the ViT embedding space, and a DiT-based renderer synthesizes pixels conditioned on this plan, augmented by text features and, for editing, source VAE features for detail preservation. Because semantics serve as the interface, the planner and renderer can be trained separately and only lightly co-trained, preserving the pretrained strengths of both components while keeping training efficient. To better handle multiple visual inputs, we introduce Segment-Aware 3D Rotary Positional Embedding (SA-3D RoPE), and further incorporate chain-of-thought reasoning in the planner to better transfer understanding into generation. Bernini achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of video generation and editing benchmarks, with the MLLM's pretrained understanding translating into strong generalization on challenging editing tasks.
Abstract:Accurate localization of myocardial infarction is essential for risk stratification. While LGE-MRI remains the gold standard, it is resource-intensive. Integrating cine MRI with ECG enables a more detailed representation of infarct properties. Existing inverse MI inference methods overlook realistic scar morphology and cardiac repolarization, reducing sensitivity to subtle ECG variations and interpretability of infarct-induced electrophysiological changes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for noninvasive MI localization using cardiac digital twins. To bridge the domain gap between simulation and reality, we introduce an anatomy-aware stochastic infarct synthesis strategy to synthesize realistic, irregular scars with border zones, mimicking ischemic transmural progression. We then construct a virtual cohort to simulate QRS-T waveforms, capturing both depolarization and repolarization dynamics. Furthermore, we design a Physiology and Anatomy Aware Network (PAA-Net) that jointly encodes 3D myocardial geometry and multi-lead ECGs to infer infarct areas with varying localizations, sizes, spatial extents, and transmuralities. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in inverse inference, achieving Dice scores of 0.7391 and 0.5503 for scar and border zone segmentation, respectively, while further enhancing the interpretability of the ECG-infarct relationship. Our code will be released upon acceptance.
Abstract:Cardiac motion over a cardiac cycle is crucial for quantifying regional function and is strongly affected by cardiovascular diseases. Since temporally dense mesh sequences are difficult to obtain in practice, we focus on leveraging the more accessible end-diastolic frame to infer a full-cycle sequence. Due to strong regional and disease-specific differences, traditional methods often oversmooth the data by relying on generative models that are optimized for global patterns. To address this problem, we propose Region-Aware and Phenotype-Adaptive Bi-Ventricular Cardiac Motion Synthesis (RePCM) for single frame Bi-ventricular mesh motion completion. In Stage I, a reconstruction network learns vertex wise motion descriptors and clustering yields a data driven functional partition, providing an explicit motion derived region structure. In Stage II, a Region-Specific Injection Module enforces masked, synchronized region exchange within a conditional VAE, preserving localized specific dynamics and restricting cross-region mixing. A Phenotype-Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts prior conditioned on ED shape uses anatomy-guided cues to model latent motion trends and capture inter-disease variability. Experiments on three datasets covering different cardiovascular diseases show consistent gains in geometric and functional metrics and improved preservation of region specific dynamics.
Abstract:How can we distinguish whether a peer review was written by a human or generated by an AI model? We argue that, in this setting, authorship should not be attributed solely from the textual features of a review, but also from the ideas, judgments, and claims it expresses. To this end, we propose Sem-Detect, an authorship detection method for peer reviews that operationalizes this principle by combining textual features with claim-level semantic analysis. Sem-Detect compares a target review against multiple AI-generated reviews of the same paper, leveraging the observation that different AI models tend to converge on similar points, while human reviewers introduce more unique and diverse ones. As a result, Sem-Detect is able to distinguish fully AI reviews from authentic human-written ones, including those that have been refined using an LLM but still reflect human judgment. Across a dataset of over 20,000 peer reviews from ICLR and NeurIPS conferences, Sem-Detect improves over the strongest baseline by 25.5% in TPR@0.1% FPR in the binary setting. Moreover, in the three-class scenario, we empirically show that LLM refinement preserves the semantic signals of human reviews, which remain distinct from the patterns exhibited by fully AI-generated text; as a result, fewer than 3.5% of LLM-refined human reviews are misclassified as AI-generated.