Mind the Rarities: Can Rare Skin Diseases Be Reliably Diagnosed via Diagnostic Reasoning?

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong performance in dermatology; however, evaluating diagnostic reasoning for rare conditions remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks focus on common diseases and assess only final accuracy, overlooking the clinical reasoning process, which is critical for complex cases. We address this gap by constructing DermCase, a long-context benchmark derived from peer-reviewed case reports. Our dataset contains 26,030 multi-modal image-text pairs and 6,354 clinically challenging cases, each annotated with comprehensive clinical information and step-by-step reasoning chains. To enable reliable evaluation, we establish DermLIP-based similarity metrics that achieve stronger alignment with dermatologists for assessing differential diagnosis quality. Benchmarking 22 leading LVLMs exposes significant deficiencies across diagnosis accuracy, differential diagnosis, and clinical reasoning. Fine-tuning experiments demonstrate that instruction tuning substantially improves performance while Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) yields minimal gains. Systematic error analysis further reveals critical limitations in current models' reasoning capabilities.

Not All Directions Matter: Toward Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a cornerstone of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). Yet, its efficacy is hampered by two fundamental limitations: semantic drift, by treating all update directions with equal importance, and structural incoherence, from adapting layers independently, resulting in suboptimal, uncoordinated updates. To remedy these, we propose StructLoRA, a framework that addresses both limitations through a principled, dual-component design: (1) an Information Bottleneck-guided filter that prunes task-irrelevant directions to mitigate semantic drift, and (2) a lightweight, training-only graph-based coordinator that enforces inter-layer consistency to resolve structural incoherence. Extensive experiments across large language model , vision language model, and vision model (including LLaMA, LLaVA, and ViT) demonstrate that StructLoRA consistently establishes a new state-of-the-art, outperforming not only vanilla LoRA but also advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. Notably, the benefits are particularly pronounced in challenging low-rank and low-data regimes. Crucially, since our proposed modules operate only during training, StructLoRA enhances performance with zero additional inference cost, advancing the focus of PEFT -- from mere parameter compression to a more holistic optimization of information quality and structural integrity.

Dispersion Loss Counteracts Embedding Condensation and Improves Generalization in Small Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through ever-increasing parameter counts, but scaling incurs steep computational costs. To better understand LLM scaling, we study representational differences between LLMs and their smaller counterparts, with the goal of replicating the representational qualities of larger models in the smaller models. We observe a geometric phenomenon which we term $\textbf{embedding condensation}$, where token embeddings collapse into a narrow cone-like subspace in some language models. Through systematic analyses across multiple Transformer families, we show that small models such as $\texttt{GPT2}$ and $\texttt{Qwen3-0.6B}$ exhibit severe condensation, whereas the larger models such as $\texttt{GPT2-xl}$ and $\texttt{Qwen3-32B}$ are more resistant to this phenomenon. Additional observations show that embedding condensation is not reliably mitigated by knowledge distillation from larger models. To fight against it, we formulate a dispersion loss that explicitly encourages embedding dispersion during training. Experiments demonstrate that it mitigates condensation, recovers dispersion patterns seen in larger models, and yields performance gains across 10 benchmarks. We believe this work offers a principled path toward improving smaller Transformers without additional parameters.

From Specialist to Generalist: Unlocking SAM's Learning Potential on Unlabeled Medical Images

Foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) show strong generalization, yet adapting them to medical images remains difficult due to domain shift, scarce labels, and the inability of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) to exploit unlabeled data. While conventional models like U-Net excel in semi-supervised medical learning, their potential to assist a PEFT SAM has been largely overlooked. We introduce SC-SAM, a specialist-generalist framework where U-Net provides point-based prompts and pseudo-labels to guide SAM's adaptation, while SAM serves as a powerful generalist supervisor to regularize U-Net. This reciprocal guidance forms a bidirectional co-training loop that allows both models to effectively exploit the unlabeled data. Across prostate MRI and polyp segmentation benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming other existing semi-supervised SAM variants and even medical foundation models like MedSAM, highlighting the value of specialist-generalist cooperation for label-efficient medical image segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/vnlvi2k3/SC-SAM.

A Single-Parameter Factor-Graph Image Prior

We propose a novel piecewise smooth image model with piecewise constant local parameters that are automatically adapted to each image. Technically, the model is formulated in terms of factor graphs with NUP (normal with unknown parameters) priors, and the pertinent computations amount to iterations of conjugate-gradient steps and Gaussian message passing. The proposed model and algorithms are demonstrated with applications to denoising and contrast enhancement.

Self-Supervised Visual Prompting for Cross-Domain Road Damage Detection

The deployment of automated pavement defect detection is often hindered by poor cross-domain generalization. Supervised detectors achieve strong in-domain accuracy but require costly re-annotation for new environments, while standard self-supervised methods capture generic features and remain vulnerable to domain shift. We propose \ours, a self-supervised framework that \emph{visually probes} target domains without labels. \ours introduces a Self-supervised Prompt Enhancement Module (SPEM), which derives defect-aware prompts from unlabeled target data to guide a frozen ViT backbone, and a Domain-Aware Prompt Alignment (DAPA) objective, which aligns prompt-conditioned source and target representations. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks show that \ours consistently outperforms strong supervised, self-supervised, and adaptation baselines, achieving robust zero-shot transfer, improved resilience to domain variations, and high data efficiency in few-shot adaptation. These results highlight self-supervised prompting as a practical direction for building scalable and adaptive visual inspection systems. Source code is publicly available: https://github.com/xixiaouab/PROBE/tree/main

CoT-X: An Adaptive Framework for Cross-Model Chain-of-Thought Transfer and Optimization

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs) but leads to substantial inference overhead, limiting deployment in resource-constrained settings. This paper investigates efficient CoT transfer across models of different scales and architectures through an adaptive reasoning summarization framework. The proposed method compresses reasoning traces via semantic segmentation with importance scoring, budget-aware dynamic compression, and coherence reconstruction, preserving critical reasoning steps while significantly reducing token usage. Experiments on 7{,}501 medical examination questions across 10 specialties show up to 40% higher accuracy than truncation under the same token budgets. Evaluations on 64 model pairs from eight LLMs (1.5B-32B parameters, including DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3) confirm strong cross-model transferability. Furthermore, a Gaussian Process-based Bayesian optimization module reduces evaluation cost by 84% and reveals a power-law relationship between model size and cross-domain robustness. These results demonstrate that reasoning summarization provides a practical path toward efficient CoT transfer, enabling advanced reasoning under tight computational constraints. Code will be released upon publication.

AutoSurvey2: Empowering Researchers with Next Level Automated Literature Surveys

The rapid growth of research literature, particularly in large language models (LLMs), has made producing comprehensive and current survey papers increasingly difficult. This paper introduces autosurvey2, a multi-stage pipeline that automates survey generation through retrieval-augmented synthesis and structured evaluation. The system integrates parallel section generation, iterative refinement, and real-time retrieval of recent publications to ensure both topical completeness and factual accuracy. Quality is assessed using a multi-LLM evaluation framework that measures coverage, structure, and relevance in alignment with expert review standards. Experimental results demonstrate that autosurvey2 consistently outperforms existing retrieval-based and automated baselines, achieving higher scores in structural coherence and topical relevance while maintaining strong citation fidelity. By combining retrieval, reasoning, and automated evaluation into a unified framework, autosurvey2 provides a scalable and reproducible solution for generating long-form academic surveys and contributes a solid foundation for future research on automated scholarly writing. All code and resources are available at https://github.com/annihi1ation/auto_research.

Boosting Active Learning with Knowledge Transfer

Uncertainty estimation is at the core of Active Learning (AL). Most existing methods resort to complex auxiliary models and advanced training fashions to estimate uncertainty for unlabeled data. These models need special design and hence are difficult to train especially for domain tasks, such as Cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) classification in computational biology. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method using knowledge transfer to boost uncertainty estimation in AL. Specifically, we exploit the teacher-student mode where the teacher is the task model in AL and the student is an auxiliary model that learns from the teacher. We train the two models simultaneously in each AL cycle and adopt a certain distance between the model outputs to measure uncertainty for unlabeled data. The student model is task-agnostic and does not rely on special training fashions (e.g. adversarial), making our method suitable for various tasks. More importantly, we demonstrate that data uncertainty is not tied to concrete value of task loss but closely related to the upper-bound of task loss. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the proposed method on classical computer vision tasks and cryo-ET challenges. The results demonstrate its efficacy and efficiency.

TASAM: Terrain-and-Aware Segment Anything Model for Temporal-Scale Remote Sensing Segmentation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated impressive zero-shot segmentation capabilities across natural image domains, but it struggles to generalize to the unique challenges of remote sensing data, such as complex terrain, multi-scale objects, and temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce TASAM, a terrain and temporally-aware extension of SAM designed specifically for high-resolution remote sensing image segmentation. TASAM integrates three lightweight yet effective modules: a terrain-aware adapter that injects elevation priors, a temporal prompt generator that captures land-cover changes over time, and a multi-scale fusion strategy that enhances fine-grained object delineation. Without retraining the SAM backbone, our approach achieves substantial performance gains across three remote sensing benchmarks-LoveDA, iSAID, and WHU-CD-outperforming both zero-shot SAM and task-specific models with minimal computational overhead. Our results highlight the value of domain-adaptive augmentation for foundation models and offer a scalable path toward more robust geospatial segmentation.