SUNY at Buffalo
Abstract:Numerous 3D assets are discarded due to low texture resolution, while current super-resolution models ignore texture maps and focus on natural images. An efficient and generalizable texture super-resolution model can revitalize a large corpus of aging yet valuable assets across industries such as film and video games. We present Texture++, a novel framework for texture super-resolution, which enhances the low-resolution textures of assets to produce high-resolution, high-quality results. Specifically, we reformulate the task of super-resolution in UV space into performing it across multiple rendered views and merging the outputs. Firstly, to achieve more complete and continuous textures in the view space, we propose an adaptive view selection strategy to integrate textures dispersed across UV texture patches. Furthermore, we introduce a quadtree-based texture region organization method for combining super-resolved textures from different viewpoints, providing masks to distinguish regions that require improvement. Finally, we design a diffusion-based super-resolution model that enhances the texture resolution for specified masked regions, seamlessly integrating with surrounding regions. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our approach yields textures with substantially improved detail and coherence over existing methods.
Abstract:Recently, a line of works can generate impressive 3D objects from a single image, but they are limited by restricted representation resolution, making them unsuitable for 3D scene generation. In this work, we introduce HIVE-3D, a novel method for high-quality 3D scene generation based on hierarchical voxel enhancement framework. Specifically, given a single scene image as input, we first produce a coarse initial scene, then introduce image segmentation and attention-based retrieval to align 2D image components with 3D scene components. Subsequently, we organize these scene relations into a hierarchical component tree, where nodes closer to the leaves denote finer-grained components. Finally, we propose a voxel super-resolution model that generates refined voxels for the target instance while maintaining strong consistency with the coarse voxels. Equipped with this model, we perform coarse-to-fine hierarchical super-resolution on images and voxels for each component, producing a high-resolution and high-quality 3D scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Abstract:Foundation models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning transferable representations from large scale biomedical data, yet existing approaches for physiological waveforms primarily optimize reconstruction or forecasting objectives that do not explicitly preserve clinically meaningful waveform morphology. Electrocardiograms (ECGs) and pulse oximetry (SpO2) waveforms encode rich cardiovascular and hemodynamic information through their morphological structure. In this work, we introduce MorphologyFM, a multimodal foundation model pretrained on paired ECG and SpO2 waveforms from the MIMIC critical care database using a morphology aware self supervised learning objective. MorphologyFM combines morphology guided masking, cross modal representation learning, and contrastive latent alignment to learn representations that capture clinically relevant physiological structure without requiring manual annotations. We evaluate MorphologyFM across multiple downstream prediction tasks, including arrhythmia classification, hypoxemia prediction, mortality prediction, and length of stay estimation, demonstrating consistent improvements over representative self supervised learning methods, including Masked Autoencoders (MAE), contrastive learning, Barlow Twins, and Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). Furthermore, we show that jointly modeling ECG and SpO2 waveforms produces more transferable representations than single modality pretraining. Our results establish waveform morphology as a powerful inductive bias for self supervised physiological representation learning and introduce MorphologyFM as a general purpose foundation model for continuous physiological monitoring.
Abstract:Representation learning in electronic health records (EHR) has largely followed paradigms inherited from natural language processing, relying on sequence modeling and reconstruction based objectives that treat clinical labels as ground truth. However, real world clinical supervision is inherently weak, arising from heterogeneous, noisy, and institution specific labeling processes such as billing codes, heuristic phenotypes, and incomplete annotations. In this work, we propose WISTERIA, a weakly supervised representation learning framework that models labels as stochastic observations of an underlying latent clinical state. Instead of optimizing against a single supervision signal, WISTERIA constructs multiple weak supervision operators and learns representations by enforcing consistency across their induced label distributions. This multi view formulation induces an implicit denoising mechanism, allowing the model to recover clinically meaningful structure by reconciling disagreement between noisy labelers. We further incorporate ontology aware regularization in the label space to impose semantic structure over supervision signals. Empirically, WISTERIA improves predictive performance across standard EHR benchmarks, demonstrates strong robustness to label noise, and exhibits superior cross institutional generalization compared to sequence based pretraining objectives. These results suggest that explicitly modeling the supervision process rather than treating labels as fixed targets provides a more appropriate inductive bias for learning robust and clinically meaningful representations from EHR data.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing how researchers in materials science and chemistry discover, organize, and act on scientific knowledge. This paper analyzes a broad set of community-developed LLM applications in an effort to identify emerging patterns in how these systems can be used across the scientific research lifecycle. We organize the projects into two complementary categories: Knowledge Infrastructure, systems that structure, retrieve, synthesize, and validate scientific information; and Action Systems, systems that execute, coordinate, or automate scientific work across computational and experimental environments. The submissions reveal a shift from single-purpose LLM tools toward integrated, multi-agent workflows that combine retrieval, reasoning, tool use, and domain-specific validation. Prominent themes include retrieval-augmented generation as grounding infrastructure, persistent structured knowledge representations, multimodal and multilingual scientific inputs, and early progress toward laboratory-integrated closed-loop systems. Together, these results suggest that LLMs are evolving from general-purpose assistants into composable infrastructure for scientific reasoning and action. This work provides a community snapshot of that transition and a practical taxonomy for understanding emerging LLM-enabled workflows in materials science and chemistry.
Abstract:Healthcare foundation models have largely followed paradigms from natural language processing and computer vision, emphasizing large scale pretraining and deterministic representations over heterogeneous clinical data. However, clinical observations are inherently incomplete, reflecting sparse, irregular, and modality dependent measurements of an underlying physiologic state. In this work, we propose a framework for uncertainty aware foundation modeling that represents each patient not as a point embedding, but as a distribution over plausible latent states. By learning set valued representations and enforcing consistency across partial views of the same patient, the model captures what is invariantly inferable while explicitly encoding epistemic uncertainty. We integrate this formulation with multimodal encoders and scalable self supervised objectives, combining reconstruction, contrastive alignment, and distributional regularization. Across diverse clinical tasks, our approach improves predictive performance, robustness under missing data, and uncertainty calibration relative to strong baselines. These results suggest that modeling what is not observed rather than only what is constitutes a critical inductive bias for healthcare foundation models.
Abstract:Surgical procedures are inherently complex and risky, requiring extensive expertise and constant focus to well navigate evolving intraoperative scenes. Computer-assisted systems such as surgical visual question answering (VQA) offer promises for education and intraoperative support. Current surgical VQA research largely focuses on static frame analysis, overlooking rich temporal semantics. Surgical video question answering is further challenged by low visual contrast, its highly knowledge-driven nature, diverse analytical needs spanning scattered temporal windows, and the hierarchy from basic perception to high-level intraoperative assessment. To address these challenges, we propose SurgTEMP, a multimodal LLM framework featuring (i) a query-guided token selection module that builds hierarchical visual memory (spatial and temporal memory banks) and (ii) a Surgical Competency Progression (SCP) training scheme. Together, these components enable effective modeling of variable-length surgical videos while preserving procedure-relevant cues and temporal coherence, and better support diverse downstream assessment tasks. To support model development, we introduce CholeVidQA-32K, a surgical video question answering dataset comprising 32K open-ended QA pairs and 3,855 video segments (approximately 128 h total) from laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The dataset is organized into a three-level hierarchy -- Perception, Assessment, and Reasoning -- spanning 11 tasks from instrument/action/anatomy perception to Critical View of Safety (CVS), intraoperative difficulty, skill proficiency, and adverse event assessment. In comprehensive evaluations against state-of-the-art open-source multimodal and video LLMs (fine-tuned and zero-shot), SurgTEMP achieves substantial performance improvements, advancing the state of video-based surgical VQA.
Abstract:Foundation models in healthcare have largely adopted self supervised pretraining objectives inherited from natural language processing and computer vision, emphasizing reconstruction and large scale representation learning prior to downstream adaptation. We revisit this paradigm in outcome centric clinical prediction settings and argue that, when high quality supervision is available, direct outcome alignment may provide a stronger inductive bias than generative pretraining. We propose a supervised deep learning framework that explicitly shapes representation geometry by maximizing inter class separation relative to within class variance, thereby concentrating model capacity along clinically meaningful axes. Across multiple longitudinal electronic health record tasks, including mortality and readmission prediction, our approach consistently outperforms masked, autoregressive, and contrastive pretraining baselines under matched model capacity. The proposed method improves discrimination, calibration, and sample efficiency, while simplifying the training pipeline to a single stage optimization. These findings suggest that in low entropy, outcome driven healthcare domains, supervision can act as the statistically optimal driver of representation learning, challenging the assumption that large scale self supervised pretraining is a prerequisite for strong clinical performance.
Abstract:Deep learning models for medical data are typically trained using task specific objectives that encourage representations to collapse onto a small number of discriminative directions. While effective for individual prediction problems, this paradigm underutilizes the rich structure of clinical data and limits the transferability, stability, and interpretability of learned features. In this work, we propose dense feature learning, a representation centric framework that explicitly shapes the linear structure of medical embeddings. Our approach operates directly on embedding matrices, encouraging spectral balance, subspace consistency, and feature orthogonality through objectives defined entirely in terms of linear algebraic properties. Without relying on labels or generative reconstruction, dense feature learning produces representations with higher effective rank, improved conditioning, and greater stability across time. Empirical evaluations across longitudinal EHR data, clinical text, and multimodal patient representations demonstrate consistent improvements in downstream linear performance, robustness, and subspace alignment compared to supervised and self supervised baselines. These results suggest that learning to span clinical variation may be as important as learning to predict clinical outcomes, and position representation geometry as a first class objective in medical AI.
Abstract:Foundation models trained on electronic health records show strong performance on many clinical prediction tasks but are limited by sparse and irregular documentation. Wearable devices provide dense continuous physiological signals but lack semantic grounding. Existing methods usually model these data sources separately or combine them through late fusion. We propose a multimodal foundation model that jointly represents electronic health records and wearable data as a continuous time latent process. The model uses modality specific encoders and a shared temporal backbone pretrained with self supervised and cross modal objectives. This design produces representations that are temporally coherent and clinically grounded. Across forecasting physiological and risk modeling tasks the model outperforms strong electronic health record only and wearable only baselines especially at long horizons and under missing data. These results show that joint electronic health record and wearable pretraining yields more faithful representations of longitudinal health.