Imaging foundation model for universal enhancement of non-ideal measurement CT

Non-ideal measurement computed tomography (NICT), which sacrifices optimal imaging standards for new advantages in CT imaging, is expanding the clinical application scope of CT images. However, with the reduction of imaging standards, the image quality has also been reduced, extremely limiting the clinical acceptability. Although numerous studies have demonstrated the feasibility of deep learning for the NICT enhancement in specific scenarios, their high data cost and limited generalizability have become large obstacles. The recent research on the foundation model has brought new opportunities for building a universal NICT enhancement model - bridging the image quality degradation with minimal data cost. However, owing to the challenges in the collection of large pre-training datasets and the compatibility of data variation, no success has been reported. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale integrated Transformer AMPlifier (TAMP), the first imaging foundation model for universal NICT enhancement. It has been pre-trained on a large-scale physical-driven simulation dataset with 3.6 million NICT-ICT image pairs, and is able to directly generalize to the NICT enhancement tasks with various non-ideal settings and body regions. Via the adaptation with few data, it can further achieve professional performance in real-world specific scenarios. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed TAMP has significant potential for promoting the exploration and application of NICT and serving a wider range of medical scenarios.

TSdetector: Temporal-Spatial Self-correction Collaborative Learning for Colonoscopy Video Detection

CNN-based object detection models that strike a balance between performance and speed have been gradually used in polyp detection tasks. Nevertheless, accurately locating polyps within complex colonoscopy video scenes remains challenging since existing methods ignore two key issues: intra-sequence distribution heterogeneity and precision-confidence discrepancy. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Temporal-Spatial self-correction detector (TSdetector), which first integrates temporal-level consistency learning and spatial-level reliability learning to detect objects continuously. Technically, we first propose a global temporal-aware convolution, assembling the preceding information to dynamically guide the current convolution kernel to focus on global features between sequences. In addition, we designed a hierarchical queue integration mechanism to combine multi-temporal features through a progressive accumulation manner, fully leveraging contextual consistency information together with retaining long-sequence-dependency features. Meanwhile, at the spatial level, we advance a position-aware clustering to explore the spatial relationships among candidate boxes for recalibrating prediction confidence adaptively, thus eliminating redundant bounding boxes efficiently. The experimental results on three publicly available polyp video dataset show that TSdetector achieves the highest polyp detection rate and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code can be available at https://github.com/soleilssss/TSdetector.

Universal Medical Image Representation Learning with Compositional Decoders

Visual-language models have advanced the development of universal models, yet their application in medical imaging remains constrained by specific functional requirements and the limited data. Current general-purpose models are typically designed with task-specific branches and heads, which restricts the shared feature space and the flexibility of model. To address these challenges, we have developed a decomposed-composed universal medical imaging paradigm (UniMed) that supports tasks at all levels. To this end, we first propose a decomposed decoder that can predict two types of outputs -- pixel and semantic, based on a defined input queue. Additionally, we introduce a composed decoder that unifies the input and output spaces and standardizes task annotations across different levels into a discrete token format. The coupled design of these two components enables the model to flexibly combine tasks and mutual benefits. Moreover, our joint representation learning strategy skilfully leverages large amounts of unlabeled data and unsupervised loss, achieving efficient one-stage pretraining for more robust performance. Experimental results show that UniMed achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight datasets across all three tasks and exhibits strong zero-shot and 100-shot transferability. We will release the code and trained models upon the paper's acceptance.

Dashing for the Golden Snitch: Multi-Drone Time-Optimal Motion Planning with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Recent innovations in autonomous drones have facilitated time-optimal flight in single-drone configurations and enhanced maneuverability in multi-drone systems through the application of optimal control and learning-based methods. However, few studies have achieved time-optimal motion planning for multi-drone systems, particularly during highly agile maneuvers or in dynamic scenarios. This paper presents a decentralized policy network for time-optimal multi-drone flight using multi-agent reinforcement learning. To strike a balance between flight efficiency and collision avoidance, we introduce a soft collision penalty inspired by optimization-based methods. By customizing PPO in a centralized training, decentralized execution (CTDE) fashion, we unlock higher efficiency and stability in training, while ensuring lightweight implementation. Extensive simulations show that, despite slight performance trade-offs compared to single-drone systems, our multi-drone approach maintains near-time-optimal performance with low collision rates. Real-world experiments validate our method, with two quadrotors using the same network as simulation achieving a maximum speed of 13.65 m/s and a maximum body rate of 13.4 rad/s in a 5.5 m * 5.5 m * 2.0 m space across various tracks, relying entirely on onboard computation.

TASL-Net: Tri-Attention Selective Learning Network for Intelligent Diagnosis of Bimodal Ultrasound Video

In the intelligent diagnosis of bimodal (gray-scale and contrast-enhanced) ultrasound videos, medical domain knowledge such as the way sonographers browse videos, the particular areas they emphasize, and the features they pay special attention to, plays a decisive role in facilitating precise diagnosis. Embedding medical knowledge into the deep learning network can not only enhance performance but also boost clinical confidence and reliability of the network. However, it is an intractable challenge to automatically focus on these person- and disease-specific features in videos and to enable networks to encode bimodal information comprehensively and efficiently. This paper proposes a novel Tri-Attention Selective Learning Network (TASL-Net) to tackle this challenge and automatically embed three types of diagnostic attention of sonographers into a mutual transformer framework for intelligent diagnosis of bimodal ultrasound videos. Firstly, a time-intensity-curve-based video selector is designed to mimic the temporal attention of sonographers, thus removing a large amount of redundant information while improving computational efficiency of TASL-Net. Then, to introduce the spatial attention of the sonographers for contrast-enhanced video analysis, we propose the earliest-enhanced position detector based on structural similarity variation, on which the TASL-Net is made to focus on the differences of perfusion variation inside and outside the lesion. Finally, by proposing a mutual encoding strategy that combines convolution and transformer, TASL-Net possesses bimodal attention to structure features on gray-scale videos and to perfusion variations on contrast-enhanced videos. These modules work collaboratively and contribute to superior performance. We conduct a detailed experimental validation of TASL-Net's performance on three datasets, including lung, breast, and liver.

FlowTrack: Point-level Flow Network for 3D Single Object Tracking

3D single object tracking (SOT) is a crucial task in fields of mobile robotics and autonomous driving. Traditional motion-based approaches achieve target tracking by estimating the relative movement of target between two consecutive frames. However, they usually overlook local motion information of the target and fail to exploit historical frame information effectively. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a point-level flow method with multi-frame information for 3D SOT task, called FlowTrack. Specifically, by estimating the flow for each point in the target, our method could capture the local motion details of target, thereby improving the tracking performance. At the same time, to handle scenes with sparse points, we present a learnable target feature as the bridge to efficiently integrate target information from past frames. Moreover, we design a novel Instance Flow Head to transform dense point-level flow into instance-level motion, effectively aggregating local motion information to obtain global target motion. Finally, our method achieves competitive performance with improvements of 5.9% on the KITTI dataset and 2.9% on NuScenes. The code will be made publicly available soon.

Causal Distillation for Alleviating Performance Heterogeneity in Recommender Systems

Recommendation performance usually exhibits a long-tail distribution over users -- a small portion of head users enjoy much more accurate recommendation services than the others. We reveal two sources of this performance heterogeneity problem: the uneven distribution of historical interactions (a natural source); and the biased training of recommender models (a model source). As addressing this problem cannot sacrifice the overall performance, a wise choice is to eliminate the model bias while maintaining the natural heterogeneity. The key to debiased training lies in eliminating the effect of confounders that influence both the user's historical behaviors and the next behavior. The emerging causal recommendation methods achieve this by modeling the causal effect between user behaviors, however potentially neglect unobserved confounders (\eg, friend suggestions) that are hard to measure in practice. To address unobserved confounders, we resort to the front-door adjustment (FDA) in causal theory and propose a causal multi-teacher distillation framework (CausalD). FDA requires proper mediators in order to estimate the causal effects of historical behaviors on the next behavior. To achieve this, we equip CausalD with multiple heterogeneous recommendation models to model the mediator distribution. Then, the causal effect estimated by FDA is the expectation of recommendation prediction over the mediator distribution and the prior distribution of historical behaviors, which is technically achieved by multi-teacher ensemble. To pursue efficient inference, CausalD further distills multiple teachers into one student model to directly infer the causal effect for making recommendations.

One-Shot Safety Alignment for Large Language Models via Optimal Dualization

The growing safety concerns surrounding Large Language Models (LLMs) raise an urgent need to align them with diverse human preferences to simultaneously enhance their helpfulness and safety. A promising approach is to enforce safety constraints through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). For such constrained RLHF, common Lagrangian-based primal-dual policy optimization methods are computationally expensive and often unstable. This paper presents a dualization perspective that reduces constrained alignment to an equivalent unconstrained alignment problem. We do so by pre-optimizing a smooth and convex dual function that has a closed form. This shortcut eliminates the need for cumbersome primal-dual policy iterations, thus greatly reducing the computational burden and improving training stability. Our strategy leads to two practical algorithms in model-based and preference-based scenarios (MoCAN and PeCAN, respectively). A broad range of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.

Equivariant Imaging for Self-supervised Hyperspectral Image Inpainting

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is a key technology for earth observation, surveillance, medical imaging and diagnostics, astronomy and space exploration. The conventional technology for HSI in remote sensing applications is based on the push-broom scanning approach in which the camera records the spectral image of a stripe of the scene at a time, while the image is generated by the aggregation of measurements through time. In real-world airborne and spaceborne HSI instruments, some empty stripes would appear at certain locations, because platforms do not always maintain a constant programmed attitude, or have access to accurate digital elevation maps (DEM), and the travelling track is not necessarily aligned with the hyperspectral cameras at all times. This makes the enhancement of the acquired HS images from incomplete or corrupted observations an essential task. We introduce a novel HSI inpainting algorithm here, called Hyperspectral Equivariant Imaging (Hyper-EI). Hyper-EI is a self-supervised learning-based method which does not require training on extensive datasets or access to a pre-trained model. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art inpainting performance compared to the existing methods.

Uncertainty in Language Models: Assessment through Rank-Calibration

Language Models (LMs) have shown promising performance in natural language generation. However, as LMs often generate incorrect or hallucinated responses, it is crucial to correctly quantify their uncertainty in responding to given inputs. In addition to verbalized confidence elicited via prompting, many uncertainty measures ($e.g.$, semantic entropy and affinity-graph-based measures) have been proposed. However, these measures can differ greatly, and it is unclear how to compare them, partly because they take values over different ranges ($e.g.$, $[0,\infty)$ or $[0,1]$). In this work, we address this issue by developing a novel and practical framework, termed $Rank$-$Calibration$, to assess uncertainty and confidence measures for LMs. Our key tenet is that higher uncertainty (or lower confidence) should imply lower generation quality, on average. Rank-calibration quantifies deviations from this ideal relationship in a principled manner, without requiring ad hoc binary thresholding of the correctness score ($e.g.$, ROUGE or METEOR). The broad applicability and the granular interpretability of our methods are demonstrated empirically.