CriDiff: Criss-cross Injection Diffusion Framework via Generative Pre-train for Prostate Segmentation

Recently, the Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM)-based methods have achieved substantial success in the field of medical image segmentation. However, most of these methods fail to enable the diffusion model to learn edge features and non-edge features effectively and to inject them efficiently into the diffusion backbone. Additionally, the domain gap between the images features and the diffusion model features poses a great challenge to prostate segmentation. In this paper, we proposed CriDiff, a two-stage feature injecting framework with a Crisscross Injection Strategy (CIS) and a Generative Pre-train (GP) approach for prostate segmentation. The CIS maximizes the use of multi-level features by efficiently harnessing the complementarity of high and low-level features. To effectively learn multi-level of edge features and non-edge features, we proposed two parallel conditioners in the CIS: the Boundary Enhance Conditioner (BEC) and the Core Enhance Conditioner (CEC), which discriminatively model the image edge regions and non-edge regions, respectively. Moreover, the GP approach eases the inconsistency between the images features and the diffusion model without adding additional parameters. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and achieve state-of-the-art performance on four evaluation metrics.

Dynamic Sparse Learning: A Novel Paradigm for Efficient Recommendation

In the realm of deep learning-based recommendation systems, the increasing computational demands, driven by the growing number of users and items, pose a significant challenge to practical deployment. This challenge is primarily twofold: reducing the model size while effectively learning user and item representations for efficient recommendations. Despite considerable advancements in model compression and architecture search, prevalent approaches face notable constraints. These include substantial additional computational costs from pre-training/re-training in model compression and an extensive search space in architecture design. Additionally, managing complexity and adhering to memory constraints is problematic, especially in scenarios with strict time or space limitations. Addressing these issues, this paper introduces a novel learning paradigm, Dynamic Sparse Learning (DSL), tailored for recommendation models. DSL innovatively trains a lightweight sparse model from scratch, periodically evaluating and dynamically adjusting each weight's significance and the model's sparsity distribution during the training. This approach ensures a consistent and minimal parameter budget throughout the full learning lifecycle, paving the way for "end-to-end" efficiency from training to inference. Our extensive experimental results underline DSL's effectiveness, significantly reducing training and inference costs while delivering comparable recommendation performance.