Is Quantum Optimization Ready? An Effort Towards Neural Network Compression using Adiabatic Quantum Computing

Quantum optimization is the most mature quantum computing technology to date, providing a promising approach towards efficiently solving complex combinatorial problems. Methods such as adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) have been employed in recent years on important optimization problems across various domains. In deep learning, deep neural networks (DNN) have reached immense sizes to support new predictive capabilities. Optimization of large-scale models is critical for sustainable deployment, but becomes increasingly challenging with ever-growing model sizes and complexity. While quantum optimization is suitable for solving complex problems, its application to DNN optimization is not straightforward, requiring thorough reformulation for compatibility with commercially available quantum devices. In this work, we explore the potential of adopting AQC for fine-grained pruning-quantization of convolutional neural networks. We rework established heuristics to formulate model compression as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem, and assess the solution space offered by commercial quantum annealing devices. Through our exploratory efforts of reformulation, we demonstrate that AQC can achieve effective compression of practical DNN models. Experiments demonstrate that adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) not only outperforms classical algorithms like genetic algorithms and reinforcement learning in terms of time efficiency but also excels at identifying global optima.

An integrated language-vision foundation model for conversational diagnostics and triaging in primary eye care

Current deep learning models are mostly task specific and lack a user-friendly interface to operate. We present Meta-EyeFM, a multi-function foundation model that integrates a large language model (LLM) with vision foundation models (VFMs) for ocular disease assessment. Meta-EyeFM leverages a routing mechanism to enable accurate task-specific analysis based on text queries. Using Low Rank Adaptation, we fine-tuned our VFMs to detect ocular and systemic diseases, differentiate ocular disease severity, and identify common ocular signs. The model achieved 100% accuracy in routing fundus images to appropriate VFMs, which achieved $\ge$ 82.2% accuracy in disease detection, $\ge$ 89% in severity differentiation, $\ge$ 76% in sign identification. Meta-EyeFM was 11% to 43% more accurate than Gemini-1.5-flash and ChatGPT-4o LMMs in detecting various eye diseases and comparable to an ophthalmologist. This system offers enhanced usability and diagnostic performance, making it a valuable decision support tool for primary eye care or an online LLM for fundus evaluation.

Partially Supervised Unpaired Multi-Modal Learning for Label-Efficient Medical Image Segmentation

Unpaired Multi-Modal Learning (UMML) which leverages unpaired multi-modal data to boost model performance on each individual modality has attracted a lot of research interests in medical image analysis. However, existing UMML methods require multi-modal datasets to be fully labeled, which incurs tremendous annotation cost. In this paper, we investigate the use of partially labeled data for label-efficient unpaired multi-modal learning, which can reduce the annotation cost by up to one half. We term the new learning paradigm as Partially Supervised Unpaired Multi-Modal Learning (PSUMML) and propose a novel Decomposed partial class adaptation with snapshot Ensembled Self-Training (DEST) framework for it. Specifically, our framework consists of a compact segmentation network with modality specific normalization layers for learning with partially labeled unpaired multi-modal data. The key challenge in PSUMML lies in the complex partial class distribution discrepancy due to partial class annotation, which hinders effective knowledge transfer across modalities. We theoretically analyze this phenomenon with a decomposition theorem and propose a decomposed partial class adaptation technique to precisely align the partially labeled classes across modalities to reduce the distribution discrepancy. We further propose a snapshot ensembled self-training technique to leverage the valuable snapshot models during training to assign pseudo-labels to partially labeled pixels for self-training to boost model performance. We perform extensive experiments under different scenarios of PSUMML for two medical image segmentation tasks, namely cardiac substructure segmentation and abdominal multi-organ segmentation. Our framework outperforms existing methods significantly.

AiRacleX: Automated Detection of Price Oracle Manipulations via LLM-Driven Knowledge Mining and Prompt Generation

Decentralized finance applications depend on accurate price oracles to ensure secure transactions, yet these oracles are highly vulnerable to manipulation, enabling attackers to exploit smart contract vulnerabilities for unfair asset valuation and financial gain. Detecting such manipulations traditionally relies on the manual effort of experienced experts, presenting significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-driven framework that automates the detection of price oracle manipulations by leveraging the complementary strengths of different LLM models. Our approach begins with domain-specific knowledge extraction, where an LLM model synthesizes precise insights about price oracle vulnerabilities from top-tier academic papers, eliminating the need for profound expertise from developers or auditors. This knowledge forms the foundation for a second LLM model to generate structured, context-aware chain of thought prompts, which guide a third LLM model in accurately identifying manipulation patterns in smart contracts. We validate the framework effectiveness through experiments on 60 known vulnerabilities from 46 real-world DeFi attacks or projects spanning 2021 to 2023. The best performing combination of LLMs (Haiku-Haiku-4o-mini) identified by AiRacleX demonstrate a 2.58-times improvement in recall (0.667 vs 0.259) compared to the state-of-the-art tool GPTScan, while maintaining comparable precision. Furthermore, our framework demonstrates the feasibility of replacing commercial models with open-source alternatives, enhancing privacy and security for developers.

Semi-rPPG: Semi-Supervised Remote Physiological Measurement with Curriculum Pseudo-Labeling

Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a promising technique to monitor physiological signals such as heart rate from facial videos. However, the labeled facial videos in this research are challenging to collect. Current rPPG research is mainly based on several small public datasets collected in simple environments, which limits the generalization and scale of the AI models. Semi-supervised methods that leverage a small amount of labeled data and abundant unlabeled data can fill this gap for rPPG learning. In this study, a novel semi-supervised learning method named Semi-rPPG that combines curriculum pseudo-labeling and consistency regularization is proposed to extract intrinsic physiological features from unlabelled data without impairing the model from noises. Specifically, a curriculum pseudo-labeling strategy with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) criteria is proposed to annotate the unlabelled data while adaptively filtering out the low-quality unlabelled data. Besides, a novel consistency regularization term for quasi-periodic signals is proposed through weak and strong augmented clips. To benefit the research on semi-supervised rPPG measurement, we establish a novel semi-supervised benchmark for rPPG learning through intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluation on four public datasets. The proposed Semi-rPPG method achieves the best results compared with three classical semi-supervised methods under different protocols. Ablation studies are conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Are Traditional Deep Learning Model Approaches as Effective as a Retinal-Specific Foundation Model for Ocular and Systemic Disease Detection?

Background: RETFound, a self-supervised, retina-specific foundation model (FM), showed potential in downstream applications. However, its comparative performance with traditional deep learning (DL) models remains incompletely understood. This study aimed to evaluate RETFound against three ImageNet-pretrained supervised DL models (ResNet50, ViT-base, SwinV2) in detecting ocular and systemic diseases. Methods: We fine-tuned/trained RETFound and three DL models on full datasets, 50%, 20%, and fixed sample sizes (400, 200, 100 images, with half comprising disease cases; for each DR severity class, 100 and 50 cases were used. Fine-tuned models were tested internally using the SEED (53,090 images) and APTOS-2019 (3,672 images) datasets and externally validated on population-based (BES, CIEMS, SP2, UKBB) and open-source datasets (ODIR-5k, PAPILA, GAMMA, IDRiD, MESSIDOR-2). Model performance was compared using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and Z-tests with Bonferroni correction (P<0.05/3). Interpretation: Traditional DL models are mostly comparable to RETFound for ocular disease detection with large datasets. However, RETFound is superior in systemic disease detection with smaller datasets. These findings offer valuable insights into the respective merits and limitation of traditional models and FMs.

Look Back for More: Harnessing Historical Sequential Updates for Personalized Federated Adapter Tuning

Personalized federated learning (PFL) studies effective model personalization to address the data heterogeneity issue among clients in traditional federated learning (FL). Existing PFL approaches mainly generate personalized models by relying solely on the clients' latest updated models while ignoring their previous updates, which may result in suboptimal personalized model learning. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework termed pFedSeq, designed for personalizing adapters to fine-tune a foundation model in FL. In pFedSeq, the server maintains and trains a sequential learner, which processes a sequence of past adapter updates from clients and generates calibrations for personalized adapters. To effectively capture the cross-client and cross-step relations hidden in previous updates and generate high-performing personalized adapters, pFedSeq adopts the powerful selective state space model (SSM) as the architecture of sequential learner. Through extensive experiments on four public benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of pFedSeq over state-of-the-art PFL methods.

Diffusion-Enhanced Test-time Adaptation with Text and Image Augmentation

Existing test-time prompt tuning (TPT) methods focus on single-modality data, primarily enhancing images and using confidence ratings to filter out inaccurate images. However, while image generation models can produce visually diverse images, single-modality data enhancement techniques still fail to capture the comprehensive knowledge provided by different modalities. Additionally, we note that the performance of TPT-based methods drops significantly when the number of augmented images is limited, which is not unusual given the computational expense of generative augmentation. To address these issues, we introduce IT3A, a novel test-time adaptation method that utilizes a pre-trained generative model for multi-modal augmentation of each test sample from unknown new domains. By combining augmented data from pre-trained vision and language models, we enhance the ability of the model to adapt to unknown new test data. Additionally, to ensure that key semantics are accurately retained when generating various visual and text enhancements, we employ cosine similarity filtering between the logits of the enhanced images and text with the original test data. This process allows us to filter out some spurious augmentation and inadequate combinations. To leverage the diverse enhancements provided by the generation model across different modals, we have replaced prompt tuning with an adapter for greater flexibility in utilizing text templates. Our experiments on the test datasets with distribution shifts and domain gaps show that in a zero-shot setting, IT3A outperforms state-of-the-art test-time prompt tuning methods with a 5.50% increase in accuracy.

Class Balance Matters to Active Class-Incremental Learning

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning has shown remarkable efficacy in efficient learning new concepts with limited annotations. Nevertheless, the heuristic few-shot annotations may not always cover the most informative samples, which largely restricts the capability of incremental learner. We aim to start from a pool of large-scale unlabeled data and then annotate the most informative samples for incremental learning. Based on this premise, this paper introduces the Active Class-Incremental Learning (ACIL). The objective of ACIL is to select the most informative samples from the unlabeled pool to effectively train an incremental learner, aiming to maximize the performance of the resulting model. Note that vanilla active learning algorithms suffer from class-imbalanced distribution among annotated samples, which restricts the ability of incremental learning. To achieve both class balance and informativeness in chosen samples, we propose Class-Balanced Selection (CBS) strategy. Specifically, we first cluster the features of all unlabeled images into multiple groups. Then for each cluster, we employ greedy selection strategy to ensure that the Gaussian distribution of the sampled features closely matches the Gaussian distribution of all unlabeled features within the cluster. Our CBS can be plugged and played into those CIL methods which are based on pretrained models with prompts tunning technique. Extensive experiments under ACIL protocol across five diverse datasets demonstrate that CBS outperforms both random selection and other SOTA active learning approaches. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/1170300714/CBS.

Privacy-Preserving Federated Foundation Model for Generalist Ultrasound Artificial Intelligence

Ultrasound imaging is widely used in clinical diagnosis due to its non-invasive nature and real-time capabilities. However, conventional ultrasound diagnostics face several limitations, including high dependence on physician expertise and suboptimal image quality, which complicates interpretation and increases the likelihood of diagnostic errors. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance clinical diagnosis, particularly in detecting abnormalities across various biomedical imaging modalities. Nonetheless, current AI models for ultrasound imaging face critical challenges. First, these models often require large volumes of labeled medical data, raising concerns over patient privacy breaches. Second, most existing models are task-specific, which restricts their broader clinical utility. To overcome these challenges, we present UltraFedFM, an innovative privacy-preserving ultrasound foundation model. UltraFedFM is collaboratively pre-trained using federated learning across 16 distributed medical institutions in 9 countries, leveraging a dataset of over 1 million ultrasound images covering 19 organs and 10 ultrasound modalities. This extensive and diverse data, combined with a secure training framework, enables UltraFedFM to exhibit strong generalization and diagnostic capabilities. It achieves an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.927 for disease diagnosis and a dice similarity coefficient of 0.878 for lesion segmentation. Notably, UltraFedFM surpasses the diagnostic accuracy of mid-level ultrasonographers and matches the performance of expert-level sonographers in the joint diagnosis of 8 common systemic diseases. These findings indicate that UltraFedFM can significantly enhance clinical diagnostics while safeguarding patient privacy, marking an advancement in AI-driven ultrasound imaging for future clinical applications.