Describe Anything Model for Visual Question Answering on Text-rich Images

Recent progress has been made in region-aware vision-language modeling, particularly with the emergence of the Describe Anything Model (DAM). DAM is capable of generating detailed descriptions of any specific image areas or objects without the need for additional localized image-text alignment supervision. We hypothesize that such region-level descriptive capability is beneficial for the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA), especially in challenging scenarios involving images with dense text. In such settings, the fine-grained extraction of textual information is crucial to producing correct answers. Motivated by this, we introduce DAM-QA, a framework with a tailored evaluation protocol, developed to investigate and harness the region-aware capabilities from DAM for the text-rich VQA problem that requires reasoning over text-based information within images. DAM-QA incorporates a mechanism that aggregates answers from multiple regional views of image content, enabling more effective identification of evidence that may be tied to text-related elements. Experiments on six VQA benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms the baseline DAM, with a notable 7+ point gain on DocVQA. DAM-QA also achieves the best overall performance among region-aware models with fewer parameters, significantly narrowing the gap with strong generalist VLMs. These results highlight the potential of DAM-like models for text-rich and broader VQA tasks when paired with efficient usage and integration strategies. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Linvyl/DAM-QA.git.

Visual Instance-aware Prompt Tuning

Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) has emerged as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning paradigm for vision transformers, with conventional approaches utilizing dataset-level prompts that remain the same across all input instances. We observe that this strategy results in sub-optimal performance due to high variance in downstream datasets. To address this challenge, we propose Visual Instance-aware Prompt Tuning (ViaPT), which generates instance-aware prompts based on each individual input and fuses them with dataset-level prompts, leveraging Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to retain important prompting information. Moreover, we reveal that VPT-Deep and VPT-Shallow represent two corner cases based on a conceptual understanding, in which they fail to effectively capture instance-specific information, while random dimension reduction on prompts only yields performance between the two extremes. Instead, ViaPT overcomes these limitations by balancing dataset-level and instance-level knowledge, while reducing the amount of learnable parameters compared to VPT-Deep. Extensive experiments across 34 diverse datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, establishing a new paradigm for analyzing and optimizing visual prompts for vision transformers.

Predicting ICU In-Hospital Mortality Using Adaptive Transformer Layer Fusion

Early identification of high-risk ICU patients is crucial for directing limited medical resources. We introduce ALFIA (Adaptive Layer Fusion with Intelligent Attention), a modular, attention-based architecture that jointly trains LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) adapters and an adaptive layer-weighting mechanism to fuse multi-layer semantic features from a BERT backbone. Trained on our rigorous cw-24 (CriticalWindow-24) benchmark, ALFIA surpasses state-of-the-art tabular classifiers in AUPRC while preserving a balanced precision-recall profile. The embeddings produced by ALFIA's fusion module, capturing both fine-grained clinical cues and high-level concepts, enable seamless pairing with GBDTs (CatBoost/LightGBM) as ALFIA-boost, and deep neuro networks as ALFIA-nn, yielding additional performance gains. Our experiments confirm ALFIA's superior early-warning performance, by operating directly on routine clinical text, it furnishes clinicians with a convenient yet robust tool for risk stratification and timely intervention in critical-care settings.

CryoCCD: Conditional Cycle-consistent Diffusion with Biophysical Modeling for Cryo-EM Synthesis

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) offers near-atomic resolution imaging of macromolecules, but developing robust models for downstream analysis is hindered by the scarcity of high-quality annotated data. While synthetic data generation has emerged as a potential solution, existing methods often fail to capture both the structural diversity of biological specimens and the complex, spatially varying noise inherent in cryo-EM imaging. To overcome these limitations, we propose CryoCCD, a synthesis framework that integrates biophysical modeling with generative techniques. Specifically, CryoCCD produces multi-scale cryo-EM micrographs that reflect realistic biophysical variability through compositional heterogeneity, cellular context, and physics-informed imaging. To generate realistic noise, we employ a conditional diffusion model, enhanced by cycle consistency to preserve structural fidelity and mask-aware contrastive learning to capture spatially adaptive noise patterns. Extensive experiments show that CryoCCD generates structurally accurate micrographs and enhances performance in downstream tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in both particle picking and reconstruction.

SaSi: A Self-augmented and Self-interpreted Deep Learning Approach for Few-shot Cryo-ET Particle Detection

Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) has emerged as a powerful technique for imaging macromolecular complexes in their near-native states. However, the localization of 3D particles in cellular environments still presents a significant challenge due to low signal-to-noise ratios and missing wedge artifacts. Deep learning approaches have shown great potential, but they need huge amounts of data, which can be a challenge in cryo-ET scenarios where labeled data is often scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel Self-augmented and Self-interpreted (SaSi) deep learning approach towards few-shot particle detection in 3D cryo-ET images. Our method builds upon self-augmentation techniques to further boost data utilization and introduces a self-interpreted segmentation strategy for alleviating dependency on labeled data, hence improving generalization and robustness. As demonstrated by experiments conducted on both simulated and real-world cryo-ET datasets, the SaSi approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for particle localization. This research increases understanding of how to detect particles with very few labels in cryo-ET and thus sets a new benchmark for few-shot learning in structural biology.

Beyond Editing Pairs: Fine-Grained Instructional Image Editing via Multi-Scale Learnable Regions

Current text-driven image editing methods typically follow one of two directions: relying on large-scale, high-quality editing pair datasets to improve editing precision and diversity, or exploring alternative dataset-free techniques. However, constructing large-scale editing datasets requires carefully designed pipelines, is time-consuming, and often results in unrealistic samples or unwanted artifacts. Meanwhile, dataset-free methods may suffer from limited instruction comprehension and restricted editing capabilities. Faced with these challenges, the present work develops a novel paradigm for instruction-driven image editing that leverages widely available and enormous text-image pairs, instead of relying on editing pair datasets. Our approach introduces a multi-scale learnable region to localize and guide the editing process. By treating the alignment between images and their textual descriptions as supervision and learning to generate task-specific editing regions, our method achieves high-fidelity, precise, and instruction-consistent image editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach attains state-of-the-art performance across various tasks and benchmarks, while exhibiting strong adaptability to various types of generative models.

AutoMiSeg: Automatic Medical Image Segmentation via Test-Time Adaptation of Foundation Models

Medical image segmentation is vital for clinical diagnosis, yet current deep learning methods often demand extensive expert effort, i.e., either through annotating large training datasets or providing prompts at inference time for each new case. This paper introduces a zero-shot and automatic segmentation pipeline that combines off-the-shelf vision-language and segmentation foundation models. Given a medical image and a task definition (e.g., "segment the optic disc in an eye fundus image"), our method uses a grounding model to generate an initial bounding box, followed by a visual prompt boosting module that enhance the prompts, which are then processed by a promptable segmentation model to produce the final mask. To address the challenges of domain gap and result verification, we introduce a test-time adaptation framework featuring a set of learnable adaptors that align the medical inputs with foundation model representations. Its hyperparameters are optimized via Bayesian Optimization, guided by a proxy validation model without requiring ground-truth labels. Our pipeline offers an annotation-efficient and scalable solution for zero-shot medical image segmentation across diverse tasks. Our pipeline is evaluated on seven diverse medical imaging datasets and shows promising results. By proper decomposition and test-time adaptation, our fully automatic pipeline performs competitively with weakly-prompted interactive foundation models.

MoRE-Brain: Routed Mixture of Experts for Interpretable and Generalizable Cross-Subject fMRI Visual Decoding

Decoding visual experiences from fMRI offers a powerful avenue to understand human perception and develop advanced brain-computer interfaces. However, current progress often prioritizes maximizing reconstruction fidelity while overlooking interpretability, an essential aspect for deriving neuroscientific insight. To address this gap, we propose MoRE-Brain, a neuro-inspired framework designed for high-fidelity, adaptable, and interpretable visual reconstruction. MoRE-Brain uniquely employs a hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts architecture where distinct experts process fMRI signals from functionally related voxel groups, mimicking specialized brain networks. The experts are first trained to encode fMRI into the frozen CLIP space. A finetuned diffusion model then synthesizes images, guided by expert outputs through a novel dual-stage routing mechanism that dynamically weighs expert contributions across the diffusion process. MoRE-Brain offers three main advancements: First, it introduces a novel Mixture-of-Experts architecture grounded in brain network principles for neuro-decoding. Second, it achieves efficient cross-subject generalization by sharing core expert networks while adapting only subject-specific routers. Third, it provides enhanced mechanistic insight, as the explicit routing reveals precisely how different modeled brain regions shape the semantic and spatial attributes of the reconstructed image. Extensive experiments validate MoRE-Brain's high reconstruction fidelity, with bottleneck analyses further demonstrating its effective utilization of fMRI signals, distinguishing genuine neural decoding from over-reliance on generative priors. Consequently, MoRE-Brain marks a substantial advance towards more generalizable and interpretable fMRI-based visual decoding. Code will be publicly available soon: https://github.com/yuxiangwei0808/MoRE-Brain.

Describe Anything in Medical Images

Localized image captioning has made significant progress with models like the Describe Anything Model (DAM), which can generate detailed region-specific descriptions without explicit region-text supervision. However, such capabilities have yet to be widely applied to specialized domains like medical imaging, where diagnostic interpretation relies on subtle regional findings rather than global understanding. To mitigate this gap, we propose MedDAM, the first comprehensive framework leveraging large vision-language models for region-specific captioning in medical images. MedDAM employs medical expert-designed prompts tailored to specific imaging modalities and establishes a robust evaluation benchmark comprising a customized assessment protocol, data pre-processing pipeline, and specialized QA template library. This benchmark evaluates both MedDAM and other adaptable large vision-language models, focusing on clinical factuality through attribute-level verification tasks, thereby circumventing the absence of ground-truth region-caption pairs in medical datasets. Extensive experiments on the VinDr-CXR, LIDC-IDRI, and SkinCon datasets demonstrate MedDAM's superiority over leading peers (including GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, LLaMA-3.2 Vision, Qwen2.5-VL, GPT-4Rol, and OMG-LLaVA) in the task, revealing the importance of region-level semantic alignment in medical image understanding and establishing MedDAM as a promising foundation for clinical vision-language integration.

Mitigating Image Captioning Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models

Hallucinations in vision-language models (VLMs) hinder reliability and real-world applicability, usually stemming from distribution shifts between pretraining data and test samples. Existing solutions, such as retraining or fine-tuning on additional data, demand significant computational resources and labor-intensive data collection, while ensemble-based methods incur additional costs by introducing auxiliary VLMs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel test-time adaptation framework using reinforcement learning to mitigate hallucinations during inference without retraining or any auxiliary VLMs. By updating only the learnable parameters in the layer normalization of the language model (approximately 0.003% of the model parameters), our method reduces distribution shifts between test samples and pretraining samples. A CLIP-based hallucination evaluation model is proposed to provide dual rewards to VLMs. Experimental results demonstrate a 15.4% and 17.3% reduction in hallucination rates on LLaVA and InstructBLIP, respectively. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with a 68.3% improvement in hallucination mitigation, demonstrating its effectiveness.