Vision Hopfield Memory Networks

Recent vision and multimodal foundation backbones, such as Transformer families and state-space models like Mamba, have achieved remarkable progress, enabling unified modeling across images, text, and beyond. Despite their empirical success, these architectures remain far from the computational principles of the human brain, often demanding enormous amounts of training data while offering limited interpretability. In this work, we propose the Vision Hopfield Memory Network (V-HMN), a brain-inspired foundation backbone that integrates hierarchical memory mechanisms with iterative refinement updates. Specifically, V-HMN incorporates local Hopfield modules that provide associative memory dynamics at the image patch level, global Hopfield modules that function as episodic memory for contextual modulation, and a predictive-coding-inspired refinement rule for iterative error correction. By organizing these memory-based modules hierarchically, V-HMN captures both local and global dynamics in a unified framework. Memory retrieval exposes the relationship between inputs and stored patterns, making decisions more interpretable, while the reuse of stored patterns improves data efficiency. This brain-inspired design therefore enhances interpretability and data efficiency beyond existing self-attention- or state-space-based approaches. We conducted extensive experiments on public computer vision benchmarks, and V-HMN achieved competitive results against widely adopted backbone architectures, while offering better interpretability, higher data efficiency, and stronger biological plausibility. These findings highlight the potential of V-HMN to serve as a next-generation vision foundation model, while also providing a generalizable blueprint for multimodal backbones in domains such as text and audio, thereby bridging brain-inspired computation with large-scale machine learning.

$D^3$-RSMDE: 40$\times$ Faster and High-Fidelity Remote Sensing Monocular Depth Estimation

Real-time, high-fidelity monocular depth estimation from remote sensing imagery is crucial for numerous applications, yet existing methods face a stark trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Although using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones for dense prediction is fast, they often exhibit poor perceptual quality. Conversely, diffusion models offer high fidelity but at a prohibitive computational cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose Depth Detail Diffusion for Remote Sensing Monocular Depth Estimation ($D^3$-RSMDE), an efficient framework designed to achieve an optimal balance between speed and quality. Our framework first leverages a ViT-based module to rapidly generate a high-quality preliminary depth map construction, which serves as a structural prior, effectively replacing the time-consuming initial structure generation stage of diffusion models. Based on this prior, we propose a Progressive Linear Blending Refinement (PLBR) strategy, which uses a lightweight U-Net to refine the details in only a few iterations. The entire refinement step operates efficiently in a compact latent space supported by a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Extensive experiments demonstrate that $D^3$-RSMDE achieves a notable 11.85% reduction in the Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) perceptual metric over leading models like Marigold, while also achieving over a 40x speedup in inference and maintaining VRAM usage comparable to lightweight ViT models.

Prototype Transformer: Towards Language Model Architectures Interpretable by Design

While state-of-the-art language models (LMs) surpass the vast majority of humans in certain domains, their reasoning remains largely opaque, undermining trust in their output. Furthermore, while autoregressive LMs can output explicit reasoning, their true reasoning process is opaque, which introduces risks like deception and hallucination. In this work, we introduce the Prototype Transformer (ProtoT) -- an autoregressive LM architecture based on prototypes (parameter vectors), posed as an alternative to the standard self-attention-based transformers. ProtoT works by means of two-way communication between the input sequence and the prototypes, and we show that this leads to the prototypes automatically capturing nameable concepts (e.g. "woman") during training. They provide the potential to interpret the model's reasoning and allow for targeted edits of its behavior. Furthermore, by design, the prototypes create communication channels that aggregate contextual information at different time scales, aiding interpretability. In terms of computation scalability, ProtoT scales linearly with sequence length vs the quadratic scalability of SOTA self-attention transformers. Compared to baselines, ProtoT scales well with model and data size, and performs well on text generation and downstream tasks (GLUE). ProtoT exhibits robustness to input perturbations on par or better than some baselines, but differs from them by providing interpretable pathways showing how robustness and sensitivity arises. Reaching close to the performance of state-of-the-art architectures, ProtoT paves the way to creating well-performing autoregressive LMs interpretable by design.

ACQ: A Unified Framework for Automated Programmatic Creativity in Online Advertising

In online advertising, the demand-side platform (a.k.a. DSP) enables advertisers to create different ad creatives for real-time bidding. Intuitively, advertisers tend to create more ad creatives for a single photo to increase the probability of participating in bidding, further enhancing their ad cost. From the perspective of DSP, the following are two overlooked issues. On the one hand, the number of ad creatives cannot grow indefinitely. On the other hand, the marginal effects of ad cost diminish as the number of ad creatives increases. To this end, this paper proposes a two-stage framework named Automated Creatives Quota (ACQ) to achieve the automatic creation and deactivation of ad creatives. ACQ dynamically allocates the creative quota across multiple advertisers to maximize the revenue of the ad platform. ACQ comprises two components: a prediction module to estimate the cost of a photo under different numbers of ad creatives, and an allocation module to decide the quota for photos considering their estimated costs in the prediction module. Specifically, in the prediction module, we develop a multi-task learning model based on an unbalanced binary tree to effectively mitigate the target variable imbalance problem. In the allocation module, we formulate the quota allocation problem as a multiple-choice knapsack problem (MCKP) and develop an efficient solver to solve such large-scale problems involving tens of millions of ads. We performed extensive offline and online experiments to validate the superiority of our proposed framework, which increased cost by 9.34%.

C^2M-DoT: Cross-modal consistent multi-view medical report generation with domain transfer network

In clinical scenarios, multiple medical images with different views are usually generated simultaneously, and these images have high semantic consistency. However, most existing medical report generation methods only consider single-view data. The rich multi-view mutual information of medical images can help generate more accurate reports, however, the dependence of multi-view models on multi-view data in the inference stage severely limits their application in clinical practice. In addition, word-level optimization based on numbers ignores the semantics of reports and medical images, and the generated reports often cannot achieve good performance. Therefore, we propose a cross-modal consistent multi-view medical report generation with a domain transfer network (C^2M-DoT). Specifically, (i) a semantic-based multi-view contrastive learning medical report generation framework is adopted to utilize cross-view information to learn the semantic representation of lesions; (ii) a domain transfer network is further proposed to ensure that the multi-view report generation model can still achieve good inference performance under single-view input; (iii) meanwhile, optimization using a cross-modal consistency loss facilitates the generation of textual reports that are semantically consistent with medical images. Extensive experimental studies on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate that C^2M-DoT substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in all metrics. Ablation studies also confirmed the validity and necessity of each component in C^2M-DoT.

AMLP:Adaptive Masking Lesion Patches for Self-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Self-supervised masked image modeling has shown promising results on natural images. However, directly applying such methods to medical images remains challenging. This difficulty stems from the complexity and distinct characteristics of lesions compared to natural images, which impedes effective representation learning. Additionally, conventional high fixed masking ratios restrict reconstructing fine lesion details, limiting the scope of learnable information. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised medical image segmentation framework, Adaptive Masking Lesion Patches (AMLP). Specifically, we design a Masked Patch Selection (MPS) strategy to identify and focus learning on patches containing lesions. Lesion regions are scarce yet critical, making their precise reconstruction vital. To reduce misclassification of lesion and background patches caused by unsupervised clustering in MPS, we introduce an Attention Reconstruction Loss (ARL) to focus on hard-to-reconstruct patches likely depicting lesions. We further propose a Category Consistency Loss (CCL) to refine patch categorization based on reconstruction difficulty, strengthening distinction between lesions and background. Moreover, we develop an Adaptive Masking Ratio (AMR) strategy that gradually increases the masking ratio to expand reconstructible information and improve learning. Extensive experiments on two medical segmentation datasets demonstrate AMLP's superior performance compared to existing self-supervised approaches. The proposed strategies effectively address limitations in applying masked modeling to medical images, tailored to capturing fine lesion details vital for segmentation tasks.

MvCo-DoT:Multi-View Contrastive Domain Transfer Network for Medical Report Generation

In clinical scenarios, multiple medical images with different views are usually generated at the same time, and they have high semantic consistency. However, the existing medical report generation methods cannot exploit the rich multi-view mutual information of medical images. Therefore, in this work, we propose the first multi-view medical report generation model, called MvCo-DoT. Specifically, MvCo-DoT first propose a multi-view contrastive learning (MvCo) strategy to help the deep reinforcement learning based model utilize the consistency of multi-view inputs for better model learning. Then, to close the performance gaps of using multi-view and single-view inputs, a domain transfer network is further proposed to ensure MvCo-DoT achieve almost the same performance as multi-view inputs using only single-view inputs.Extensive experiments on the IU X-Ray public dataset show that MvCo-DoT outperforms the SOTA medical report generation baselines in all metrics.

MPS-AMS: Masked Patches Selection and Adaptive Masking Strategy Based Self-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Existing self-supervised learning methods based on contrastive learning and masked image modeling have demonstrated impressive performances. However, current masked image modeling methods are mainly utilized in natural images, and their applications in medical images are relatively lacking. Besides, their fixed high masking strategy limits the upper bound of conditional mutual information, and the gradient noise is considerable, making less the learned representation information. Motivated by these limitations, in this paper, we propose masked patches selection and adaptive masking strategy based self-supervised medical image segmentation method, named MPS-AMS. We leverage the masked patches selection strategy to choose masked patches with lesions to obtain more lesion representation information, and the adaptive masking strategy is utilized to help learn more mutual information and improve performance further. Extensive experiments on three public medical image segmentation datasets (BUSI, Hecktor, and Brats2018) show that our proposed method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised baselines.