Structure Causal Models and LLMs Integration in Medical Visual Question Answering

Medical Visual Question Answering (MedVQA) aims to answer medical questions according to medical images. However, the complexity of medical data leads to confounders that are difficult to observe, so bias between images and questions is inevitable. Such cross-modal bias makes it challenging to infer medically meaningful answers. In this work, we propose a causal inference framework for the MedVQA task, which effectively eliminates the relative confounding effect between the image and the question to ensure the precision of the question-answering (QA) session. We are the first to introduce a novel causal graph structure that represents the interaction between visual and textual elements, explicitly capturing how different questions influence visual features. During optimization, we apply the mutual information to discover spurious correlations and propose a multi-variable resampling front-door adjustment method to eliminate the relative confounding effect, which aims to align features based on their true causal relevance to the question-answering task. In addition, we also introduce a prompt strategy that combines multiple prompt forms to improve the model's ability to understand complex medical data and answer accurately. Extensive experiments on three MedVQA datasets demonstrate that 1) our method significantly improves the accuracy of MedVQA, and 2) our method achieves true causal correlations in the face of complex medical data.

FreeInsert: Disentangled Text-Guided Object Insertion in 3D Gaussian Scene without Spatial Priors

Text-driven object insertion in 3D scenes is an emerging task that enables intuitive scene editing through natural language. However, existing 2D editing-based methods often rely on spatial priors such as 2D masks or 3D bounding boxes, and they struggle to ensure consistency of the inserted object. These limitations hinder flexibility and scalability in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose FreeInsert, a novel framework that leverages foundation models including MLLMs, LGMs, and diffusion models to disentangle object generation from spatial placement. This enables unsupervised and flexible object insertion in 3D scenes without spatial priors. FreeInsert starts with an MLLM-based parser that extracts structured semantics, including object types, spatial relationships, and attachment regions, from user instructions. These semantics guide both the reconstruction of the inserted object for 3D consistency and the learning of its degrees of freedom. We leverage the spatial reasoning capabilities of MLLMs to initialize object pose and scale. A hierarchical, spatially aware refinement stage further integrates spatial semantics and MLLM-inferred priors to enhance placement. Finally, the appearance of the object is improved using the inserted-object image to enhance visual fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that FreeInsert achieves semantically coherent, spatially precise, and visually realistic 3D insertions without relying on spatial priors, offering a user-friendly and flexible editing experience.

Dual-Branch Residual Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Hyperspectral Image Classification with Refined Prototype

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are effective for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, but their 3D convolutional structures introduce high computational costs and limited generalization in few-shot scenarios. Domain shifts caused by sensor differences and environmental variations further hinder cross-dataset adaptability. Metric-based few-shot learning (FSL) prototype networks mitigate this problem, yet their performance is sensitive to prototype quality, especially with limited samples. To overcome these challenges, a dual-branch residual network that integrates spatial and spectral features via parallel branches is proposed in this letter. Additionally, more robust refined prototypes are obtained through a regulation term. Furthermore, a kernel probability matching strategy aligns source and target domain features, alleviating domain shift. Experiments on four publicly available HSI datasets illustrate that the proposal achieves superior performance compared to other methods.

Automatically Generating Rules of Malicious Software Packages via Large Language Model

Today's security tools predominantly rely on predefined rules crafted by experts, making them poorly adapted to the emergence of software supply chain attacks. To tackle this limitation, we propose a novel tool, RuleLLM, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate rule generation for OSS ecosystems. RuleLLM extracts metadata and code snippets from malware as its input, producing YARA and Semgrep rules that can be directly deployed in software development. Specifically, the rule generation task involves three subtasks: crafting rules, refining rules, and aligning rules. To validate RuleLLM's effectiveness, we implemented a prototype system and conducted experiments on the dataset of 1,633 malicious packages. The results are promising that RuleLLM generated 763 rules (452 YARA and 311 Semgrep) with a precision of 85.2\% and a recall of 91.8\%, outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) tools and scored-based approaches. We further analyzed generated rules and proposed a rule taxonomy: 11 categories and 38 subcategories.

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. This challenge received a wide range of impressive solutions, which are developed and evaluated using our collected real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset. Unlike existing deraining datasets, our Raindrop Clarity dataset is more diverse and challenging in degradation types and contents, which includes day raindrop-focused, day background-focused, night raindrop-focused, and night background-focused degradations. This dataset is divided into three subsets for competition: 14,139 images for training, 240 images for validation, and 731 images for testing. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for the task of removing raindrops under varying lighting and focus conditions. There are a total of 361 participants in the competition, and 32 teams submitting valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset. The project can be found at https://lixinustc.github.io/CVPR-NTIRE2025-RainDrop-Competition.github.io/.

Personalized News Recommendation with Multi-granularity Candidate-aware User Modeling

Matching candidate news with user interests is crucial for personalized news recommendations. Most existing methods can represent a user's reading interests through a single profile based on clicked news, which may not fully capture the diversity of user interests. Although some approaches incorporate candidate news or topic information, they remain insufficient because they neglect the multi-granularity relatedness between candidate news and user interests. To address this, this study proposed a multi-granularity candidate-aware user modeling framework that integrated user interest features across various levels of granularity. It consisted of two main components: candidate news encoding and user modeling. A news textual information extractor and a knowledge-enhanced entity information extractor can capture candidate news features, and word-level, entity-level, and news-level candidate-aware mechanisms can provide a comprehensive representation of user interests. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrated that the proposed model could significantly outperform baseline models.

Pangu Ultra: Pushing the Limits of Dense Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs

We present Pangu Ultra, a Large Language Model (LLM) with 135 billion parameters and dense Transformer modules trained on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Although the field of LLM has been witnessing unprecedented advances in pushing the scale and capability of LLM in recent years, training such a large-scale model still involves significant optimization and system challenges. To stabilize the training process, we propose depth-scaled sandwich normalization, which effectively eliminates loss spikes during the training process of deep models. We pre-train our model on 13.2 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens and further enhance its reasoning capabilities during post-training. To perform such large-scale training efficiently, we utilize 8,192 Ascend NPUs with a series of system optimizations. Evaluations on multiple diverse benchmarks indicate that Pangu Ultra significantly advances the state-of-the-art capabilities of dense LLMs such as Llama 405B and Mistral Large 2, and even achieves competitive results with DeepSeek-R1, whose sparse model structure contains much more parameters. Our exploration demonstrates that Ascend NPUs are capable of efficiently and effectively training dense models with more than 100 billion parameters. Our model and system will be available for our commercial customers.

Industrial-Grade Sensor Simulation via Gaussian Splatting: A Modular Framework for Scalable Editing and Full-Stack Validation

Sensor simulation is pivotal for scalable validation of autonomous driving systems, yet existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based methods face applicability and efficiency challenges in industrial workflows. This paper introduces a Gaussian Splatting (GS) based system to address these challenges: We first break down sensor simulator components and analyze the possible advantages of GS over NeRF. Then in practice, we refactor three crucial components through GS, to leverage its explicit scene representation and real-time rendering: (1) choosing the 2D neural Gaussian representation for physics-compliant scene and sensor modeling, (2) proposing a scene editing pipeline to leverage Gaussian primitives library for data augmentation, and (3) coupling a controllable diffusion model for scene expansion and harmonization. We implement this framework on a proprietary autonomous driving dataset supporting cameras and LiDAR sensors. We demonstrate through ablation studies that our approach reduces frame-wise simulation latency, achieves better geometric and photometric consistency, and enables interpretable explicit scene editing and expansion. Furthermore, we showcase how integrating such a GS-based sensor simulator with traffic and dynamic simulators enables full-stack testing of end-to-end autonomy algorithms. Our work provides both algorithmic insights and practical validation, establishing GS as a cornerstone for industrial-grade sensor simulation.

CoStoDet-DDPM: Collaborative Training of Stochastic and Deterministic Models Improves Surgical Workflow Anticipation and Recognition

Anticipating and recognizing surgical workflows are critical for intelligent surgical assistance systems. However, existing methods rely on deterministic decision-making, struggling to generalize across the large anatomical and procedural variations inherent in real-world surgeries.In this paper, we introduce an innovative framework that incorporates stochastic modeling through a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) into conventional deterministic learning for surgical workflow analysis. At the heart of our approach is a collaborative co-training paradigm: the DDPM branch captures procedural uncertainties to enrich feature representations, while the task branch focuses on predicting surgical phases and instrument usage.Theoretically, we demonstrate that this mutual refinement mechanism benefits both branches: the DDPM reduces prediction errors in uncertain scenarios, and the task branch directs the DDPM toward clinically meaningful representations. Notably, the DDPM branch is discarded during inference, enabling real-time predictions without sacrificing accuracy.Experiments on the Cholec80 dataset show that for the anticipation task, our method achieves a 16% reduction in eMAE compared to state-of-the-art approaches, and for phase recognition, it improves the Jaccard score by 1.0%. Additionally, on the AutoLaparo dataset, our method achieves a 1.5% improvement in the Jaccard score for phase recognition, while also exhibiting robust generalization to patient-specific variations. Our code and weight are available at https://github.com/kk42yy/CoStoDet-DDPM.

Large-scale Regional Traffic Signal Control Based on Single-Agent Reinforcement Learning

In the context of global urbanization and motorization, traffic congestion has become a significant issue, severely affecting the quality of life, environment, and economy. This paper puts forward a single-agent reinforcement learning (RL)-based regional traffic signal control (TSC) model. Different from multi - agent systems, this model can coordinate traffic signals across a large area, with the goals of alleviating regional traffic congestion and minimizing the total travel time. The TSC environment is precisely defined through specific state space, action space, and reward functions. The state space consists of the current congestion state, which is represented by the queue lengths of each link, and the current signal phase scheme of intersections. The action space is designed to select an intersection first and then adjust its phase split. Two reward functions are meticulously crafted. One focuses on alleviating congestion and the other aims to minimize the total travel time while considering the congestion level. The experiments are carried out with the SUMO traffic simulation software. The performance of the TSC model is evaluated by comparing it with a base case where no signal-timing adjustments are made. The results show that the model can effectively control congestion. For example, the queuing length is significantly reduced in the scenarios tested. Moreover, when the reward is set to both alleviate congestion and minimize the total travel time, the average travel time is remarkably decreased, which indicates that the model can effectively improve traffic conditions. This research provides a new approach for large-scale regional traffic signal control and offers valuable insights for future urban traffic management.