Time-Lapse Video-Based Embryo Grading via Complementary Spatial-Temporal Pattern Mining

Artificial intelligence has recently shown promise in automated embryo selection for In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF). However, current approaches either address partial embryo evaluation lacking holistic quality assessment or target clinical outcomes inevitably confounded by extra-embryonic factors, both limiting clinical utility. To bridge this gap, we propose a new task called Video-Based Embryo Grading - the first paradigm that directly utilizes full-length time-lapse monitoring (TLM) videos to predict embryologists' overall quality assessments. To support this task, we curate a real-world clinical dataset comprising over 2,500 TLM videos, each annotated with a grading label indicating the overall quality of embryos. Grounded in clinical decision-making principles, we propose a Complementary Spatial-Temporal Pattern Mining (CoSTeM) framework that conceptually replicates embryologists' evaluation process. The CoSTeM comprises two branches: (1) a morphological branch using a Mixture of Cross-Attentive Experts layer and a Temporal Selection Block to select discriminative local structural features, and (2) a morphokinetic branch employing a Temporal Transformer to model global developmental trajectories, synergistically integrating static and dynamic determinants for grading embryos. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our design. This work provides a valuable methodological framework for AI-assisted embryo selection. The dataset and source code will be publicly available upon acceptance.

PhotoArtAgent: Intelligent Photo Retouching with Language Model-Based Artist Agents

Photo retouching is integral to photographic art, extending far beyond simple technical fixes to heighten emotional expression and narrative depth. While artists leverage expertise to create unique visual effects through deliberate adjustments, non-professional users often rely on automated tools that produce visually pleasing results but lack interpretative depth and interactive transparency. In this paper, we introduce PhotoArtAgent, an intelligent system that combines Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with advanced natural language reasoning to emulate the creative process of a professional artist. The agent performs explicit artistic analysis, plans retouching strategies, and outputs precise parameters to Lightroom through an API. It then evaluates the resulting images and iteratively refines them until the desired artistic vision is achieved. Throughout this process, PhotoArtAgent provides transparent, text-based explanations of its creative rationale, fostering meaningful interaction and user control. Experimental results show that PhotoArtAgent not only surpasses existing automated tools in user studies but also achieves results comparable to those of professional human artists.

Faster and Better LLMs via Latency-Aware Test-Time Scaling

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has proven effective in improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference. However, existing research has overlooked the efficiency of TTS from a latency-sensitive perspective. Through a latency-aware evaluation of representative TTS methods, we demonstrate that a compute-optimal TTS does not always result in the lowest latency in scenarios where latency is critical. To address this gap and achieve latency-optimal TTS, we propose two key approaches by optimizing the concurrency configurations: (1) branch-wise parallelism, which leverages multiple concurrent inference branches, and (2) sequence-wise parallelism, enabled by speculative decoding. By integrating these two approaches and allocating computational resources properly to each, our latency-optimal TTS enables a 32B model to reach 82.3% accuracy on MATH-500 within 1 minute and a smaller 3B model to achieve 72.4% within 10 seconds. Our work emphasizes the importance of latency-aware TTS and demonstrates its ability to deliver both speed and accuracy in latency-sensitive scenarios.

MoESD: Unveil Speculative Decoding's Potential for Accelerating Sparse MoE

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across many applications, with Mixture of Experts (MoE) models demonstrating great potential. Compared to traditional dense models, MoEs achieve better performance with less computation. Speculative decoding (SD) is a widely used technique to accelerate LLM inference without accuracy loss, but it has been considered efficient only for dense models. In this work, we first demonstrate that, under medium batch sizes, MoE surprisingly benefits more from SD than dense models. Furthermore, as MoE becomes sparser -- the prevailing trend in MoE designs -- the batch size range where SD acceleration is expected to be effective becomes broader. To quantitatively understand tradeoffs involved in SD, we develop a reliable modeling based on theoretical analyses. While current SD research primarily focuses on improving acceptance rates of algorithms, changes in workload and model architecture can still lead to degraded SD acceleration even with high acceptance rates. To address this limitation, we introduce a new metric 'target efficiency' that characterizes these effects, thus helping researchers identify system bottlenecks and understand SD acceleration more comprehensively. For scenarios like private serving, this work unveils a new perspective to speed up MoE inference, where existing solutions struggle. Experiments on different GPUs show up to 2.29x speedup for Qwen2-57B-A14B at medium batch sizes and validate our theoretical predictions.

Semantic-enhanced Co-attention Prompt Learning for Non-overlapping Cross-Domain Recommendation

Non-overlapping Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (NCSR) is the task that focuses on domain knowledge transfer without overlapping entities. Compared with traditional Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (CSR), NCSR poses several challenges: 1) NCSR methods often rely on explicit item IDs, overlooking semantic information among entities. 2) Existing CSR mainly relies on domain alignment for knowledge transfer, risking semantic loss during alignment. 3) Most previous studies do not consider the many-to-one characteristic, which is challenging because of the utilization of multiple source domains. Given the above challenges, we introduce the prompt learning technique for Many-to-one Non-overlapping Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (MNCSR) and propose a Text-enhanced Co-attention Prompt Learning Paradigm (TCPLP). Specifically, we capture semantic meanings by representing items through text rather than IDs, leveraging natural language universality to facilitate cross-domain knowledge transfer. Unlike prior works that need to conduct domain alignment, we directly learn transferable domain information, where two types of prompts, i.e., domain-shared and domain-specific prompts, are devised, with a co-attention-based network for prompt encoding. Then, we develop a two-stage learning strategy, i.e., pre-train & prompt-tuning paradigm, for domain knowledge pre-learning and transferring, respectively. We conduct extensive experiments on three datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our TCPLP. Our source codes have been publicly released.

Rethinking Graph Out-Of-Distribution Generalization: A Learnable Random Walk Perspective

Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization has gained increasing attentions for machine learning on graphs, as graph neural networks (GNNs) often exhibit performance degradation under distribution shifts. Existing graph OOD methods tend to follow the basic ideas of invariant risk minimization and structural causal models, interpreting the invariant knowledge across datasets under various distribution shifts as graph topology or graph spectrum. However, these interpretations may be inconsistent with real-world scenarios, as neither invariant topology nor spectrum is assured. In this paper, we advocate the learnable random walk (LRW) perspective as the instantiation of invariant knowledge, and propose LRW-OOD to realize graph OOD generalization learning. Instead of employing fixed probability transition matrix (i.e., degree-normalized adjacency matrix), we parameterize the transition matrix with an LRW-sampler and a path encoder. Furthermore, we propose the kernel density estimation (KDE)-based mutual information (MI) loss to generate random walk sequences that adhere to OOD principles. Extensive experiment demonstrates that our model can effectively enhance graph OOD generalization under various types of distribution shifts and yield a significant accuracy improvement of 3.87% over state-of-the-art graph OOD generalization baselines.

Novel Extraction of Discriminative Fine-Grained Feature to Improve Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Retinal vessel segmentation is a vital early detection method for several severe ocular diseases. Despite significant progress in retinal vessel segmentation with the advancement of Neural Networks, there are still challenges to overcome. Specifically, retinal vessel segmentation aims to predict the class label for every pixel within a fundus image, with a primary focus on intra-image discrimination, making it vital for models to extract more discriminative features. Nevertheless, existing methods primarily focus on minimizing the difference between the output from the decoder and the label, but ignore fully using feature-level fine-grained representations from the encoder. To address these issues, we propose a novel Attention U-shaped Kolmogorov-Arnold Network named AttUKAN along with a novel Label-guided Pixel-wise Contrastive Loss for retinal vessel segmentation. Specifically, we implement Attention Gates into Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks to enhance model sensitivity by suppressing irrelevant feature activations and model interpretability by non-linear modeling of KAN blocks. Additionally, we also design a novel Label-guided Pixel-wise Contrastive Loss to supervise our proposed AttUKAN to extract more discriminative features by distinguishing between foreground vessel-pixel pairs and background pairs. Experiments are conducted across four public datasets including DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1, HRF and our private dataset. AttUKAN achieves F1 scores of 82.50%, 81.14%, 81.34%, 80.21% and 80.09%, along with MIoU scores of 70.24%, 68.64%, 68.59%, 67.21% and 66.94% in the above datasets, which are the highest compared to 11 networks for retinal vessel segmentation. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our AttUKAN achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms existing retinal vessel segmentation methods. Our code will be available at https://github.com/stevezs315/AttUKAN.

Token-Level Prompt Mixture with Parameter-Free Routing for Federated Domain Generalization

Federated domain generalization (FedDG) aims to learn a globally generalizable model from decentralized clients with heterogeneous data while preserving privacy. Recent studies have introduced prompt learning to adapt vision-language models (VLMs) in FedDG by learning a single global prompt. However, such a one-prompt-fits-all learning paradigm typically leads to performance degradation on personalized samples. Although the mixture of experts (MoE) offers a promising solution for specialization, existing MoE-based methods suffer from coarse image-level expert assignment and high communication costs from parameterized routers. To address these limitations, we propose TRIP, a Token-level prompt mixture with parameter-free routing framework for FedDG, which treats multiple prompts as distinct experts. Unlike existing image-level routing designs, TRIP assigns different tokens within an image to specific experts. To ensure communication efficiency, TRIP incorporates a parameter-free routing mechanism based on token clustering and optimal transport. The instance-specific prompt is then synthesized by aggregating experts, weighted by the number of tokens assigned to each. Additionally, TRIP develops an unbiased learning strategy for prompt experts, leveraging the VLM's zero-shot generalization capability. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that TRIP achieves optimal generalization results, with communication of only 1K parameters per round. Our code is available at https://github.com/GongShuai8210/TRIP.

RSFR: A Coarse-to-Fine Reconstruction Framework for Diffusion Tensor Cardiac MRI with Semantic-Aware Refinement

Cardiac diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) offers unique insights into cardiomyocyte arrangements, bridging the gap between microscopic and macroscopic cardiac function. However, its clinical utility is limited by technical challenges, including a low signal-to-noise ratio, aliasing artefacts, and the need for accurate quantitative fidelity. To address these limitations, we introduce RSFR (Reconstruction, Segmentation, Fusion & Refinement), a novel framework for cardiac diffusion-weighted image reconstruction. RSFR employs a coarse-to-fine strategy, leveraging zero-shot semantic priors via the Segment Anything Model and a robust Vision Mamba-based reconstruction backbone. Our framework integrates semantic features effectively to mitigate artefacts and enhance fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and accurate DT parameter estimation under high undersampling rates. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the superior performance of RSFR compared to existing methods, highlighting its robustness, scalability, and potential for clinical translation in quantitative cardiac DTI.

Reason Like a Radiologist: Chain-of-Thought and Reinforcement Learning for Verifiable Report Generation

Radiology report generation is critical for efficiency but current models lack the structured reasoning of experts, hindering clinical trust and explainability by failing to link visual findings to precise anatomical locations. This paper introduces BoxMed-RL, a groundbreaking unified training framework for generating spatially verifiable and explainable radiology reports. Built on a large vision-language model, BoxMed-RL revolutionizes report generation through two integrated phases: (1) In the Pretraining Phase, we refine the model via medical concept learning, using Chain-of-Thought supervision to internalize the radiologist-like workflow, followed by spatially verifiable reinforcement, which applies reinforcement learning to align medical findings with bounding boxes. (2) In the Downstream Adapter Phase, we freeze the pretrained weights and train a downstream adapter to ensure fluent and clinically credible reports. This framework precisely mimics radiologists' workflow, compelling the model to connect high-level medical concepts with definitive anatomical evidence. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that BoxMed-RL achieves an average 7% improvement in both METEOR and ROUGE-L metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. An average 5% improvement in large language model-based metrics further underscores BoxMed-RL's robustness in generating high-quality radiology reports.