Improving Medical Visual Representation Learning with Pathological-level Cross-Modal Alignment and Correlation Exploration

Learning medical visual representations from image-report pairs through joint learning has garnered increasing research attention due to its potential to alleviate the data scarcity problem in the medical domain. The primary challenges stem from the lengthy reports that feature complex discourse relations and semantic pathologies. Previous works have predominantly focused on instance-wise or token-wise cross-modal alignment, often neglecting the importance of pathological-level consistency. This paper presents a novel framework PLACE that promotes the Pathological-Level Alignment and enriches the fine-grained details via Correlation Exploration without additional human annotations. Specifically, we propose a novel pathological-level cross-modal alignment (PCMA) approach to maximize the consistency of pathology observations from both images and reports. To facilitate this, a Visual Pathology Observation Extractor is introduced to extract visual pathological observation representations from localized tokens. The PCMA module operates independently of any external disease annotations, enhancing the generalizability and robustness of our methods. Furthermore, we design a proxy task that enforces the model to identify correlations among image patches, thereby enriching the fine-grained details crucial for various downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream tasks, including classification, image-to-text retrieval, semantic segmentation, object detection and report generation.

TableRAG: A Retrieval Augmented Generation Framework for Heterogeneous Document Reasoning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated considerable effectiveness in open-domain question answering. However, when applied to heterogeneous documents, comprising both textual and tabular components, existing RAG approaches exhibit critical limitations. The prevailing practice of flattening tables and chunking strategies disrupts the intrinsic tabular structure, leads to information loss, and undermines the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in multi-hop, global queries. To address these challenges, we propose TableRAG, an hybrid framework that unifies textual understanding and complex manipulations over tabular data. TableRAG iteratively operates in four steps: context-sensitive query decomposition, text retrieval, SQL programming and execution, and compositional intermediate answer generation. We also develop HeteQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-hop heterogeneous reasoning capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that TableRAG consistently outperforms existing baselines on both public datasets and our HeteQA, establishing a new state-of-the-art for heterogeneous document question answering. We release TableRAG at https://github.com/yxh-y/TableRAG/tree/main.

X2C: A Dataset Featuring Nuanced Facial Expressions for Realistic Humanoid Imitation

The ability to imitate realistic facial expressions is essential for humanoid robots engaged in affective human-robot communication. However, the lack of datasets containing diverse humanoid facial expressions with proper annotations hinders progress in realistic humanoid facial expression imitation. To address these challenges, we introduce X2C (Anything to Control), a dataset featuring nuanced facial expressions for realistic humanoid imitation. With X2C, we contribute: 1) a high-quality, high-diversity, large-scale dataset comprising 100,000 (image, control value) pairs. Each image depicts a humanoid robot displaying a diverse range of facial expressions, annotated with 30 control values representing the ground-truth expression configuration; 2) X2CNet, a novel human-to-humanoid facial expression imitation framework that learns the correspondence between nuanced humanoid expressions and their underlying control values from X2C. It enables facial expression imitation in the wild for different human performers, providing a baseline for the imitation task, showcasing the potential value of our dataset; 3) real-world demonstrations on a physical humanoid robot, highlighting its capability to advance realistic humanoid facial expression imitation. Code and Data: https://lipzh5.github.io/X2CNet/

LGD: Leveraging Generative Descriptions for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation

Zero-shot referring image segmentation aims to locate and segment the target region based on a referring expression, with the primary challenge of aligning and matching semantics across visual and textual modalities without training. Previous works address this challenge by utilizing Vision-Language Models and mask proposal networks for region-text matching. However, this paradigm may lead to incorrect target localization due to the inherent ambiguity and diversity of free-form referring expressions. To alleviate this issue, we present LGD (Leveraging Generative Descriptions), a framework that utilizes the advanced language generation capabilities of Multi-Modal Large Language Models to enhance region-text matching performance in Vision-Language Models. Specifically, we first design two kinds of prompts, the attribute prompt and the surrounding prompt, to guide the Multi-Modal Large Language Models in generating descriptions related to the crucial attributes of the referent object and the details of surrounding objects, referred to as attribute description and surrounding description, respectively. Secondly, three visual-text matching scores are introduced to evaluate the similarity between instance-level visual features and textual features, which determines the mask most associated with the referring expression. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg, with maximum improvements of 9.97% in oIoU and 11.29% in mIoU compared to previous methods.

Visual and Semantic Prompt Collaboration for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Generalized zero-shot learning aims to recognize both seen and unseen classes with the help of semantic information that is shared among different classes. It inevitably requires consistent visual-semantic alignment. Existing approaches fine-tune the visual backbone by seen-class data to obtain semantic-related visual features, which may cause overfitting on seen classes with a limited number of training images. This paper proposes a novel visual and semantic prompt collaboration framework, which utilizes prompt tuning techniques for efficient feature adaptation. Specifically, we design a visual prompt to integrate the visual information for discriminative feature learning and a semantic prompt to integrate the semantic formation for visualsemantic alignment. To achieve effective prompt information integration, we further design a weak prompt fusion mechanism for the shallow layers and a strong prompt fusion mechanism for the deep layers in the network. Through the collaboration of visual and semantic prompts, we can obtain discriminative semantic-related features for generalized zero-shot image recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently achieves favorable performance in both conventional zero-shot learning and generalized zero-shot learning benchmarks compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Unveiling the Potential of Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation with Planning

Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (MRAG) systems, while promising for enhancing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), often rely on rigid, single-step retrieval methods. This limitation hinders their ability to effectively address real-world scenarios that demand adaptive information acquisition and query refinement. To overcome this, we introduce the novel task of Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation Planning (MRAG Planning), focusing on optimizing MLLM performance while minimizing computational overhead. We present CogPlanner, a versatile framework inspired by human cognitive processes. CogPlanner iteratively refines queries and selects retrieval strategies, enabling both parallel and sequential modeling approaches. To rigorously evaluate MRAG Planning, we introduce CogBench, a new benchmark specifically designed for this task. CogBench facilitates the integration of lightweight CogPlanner with resource-efficient MLLMs. Our experimental findings demonstrate that CogPlanner surpasses existing MRAG baselines, achieving significant improvements in both accuracy and efficiency with minimal computational overhead.

Explainable CTR Prediction via LLM Reasoning

Recommendation Systems have become integral to modern user experiences, but lack transparency in their decision-making processes. Existing explainable recommendation methods are hindered by reliance on a post-hoc paradigm, wherein explanation generators are trained independently of the underlying recommender models. This paradigm necessitates substantial human effort in data construction and raises concerns about explanation reliability. In this paper, we present ExpCTR, a novel framework that integrates large language model based explanation generation directly into the CTR prediction process. Inspired by recent advances in reinforcement learning, we employ two carefully designed reward mechanisms, LC alignment, which ensures explanations reflect user intentions, and IC alignment, which maintains consistency with traditional ID-based CTR models. Our approach incorporates an efficient training paradigm with LoRA and a three-stage iterative process. ExpCTR circumvents the need for extensive explanation datasets while fostering synergy between CTR prediction and explanation generation. Experimental results demonstrate that ExpCTR significantly enhances both recommendation accuracy and interpretability across three real-world datasets.

See What You Seek: Semantic Contextual Integration for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification

Cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to match individuals across multiple surveillance cameras despite variations in clothing. Existing methods typically focus on mitigating the effects of clothing changes or enhancing ID-relevant features but often struggle to capture complex semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt learning framework, Semantic Contextual Integration (SCI), for CC-ReID, which leverages the visual-text representation capabilities of CLIP to minimize the impact of clothing changes and enhance ID-relevant features. Specifically, we introduce Semantic Separation Enhancement (SSE) module, which uses dual learnable text tokens to separately capture confounding and clothing-related semantic information, effectively isolating ID-relevant features from distracting clothing semantics. Additionally, we develop a Semantic-Guided Interaction Module (SIM) that uses orthogonalized text features to guide visual representations, sharpening the model's focus on distinctive ID characteristics. This integration enhances the model's discriminative power and enriches the visual context with high-dimensional semantic insights. Extensive experiments on three CC-ReID datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. The code will be released at github.

Break the ID-Language Barrier: An Adaption Framework for Sequential Recommendation

The recent breakthrough of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing has sparked exploration in recommendation systems, however, their limited domain-specific knowledge remains a critical bottleneck. Specifically, LLMs lack key pieces of information crucial for sequential recommendations, such as user behavior patterns. To address this critical gap, we propose IDLE-Adapter, a novel framework that integrates pre-trained ID embeddings, rich in domain-specific knowledge, into LLMs to improve recommendation accuracy. IDLE-Adapter acts as a bridge, transforming sparse user-item interaction data into dense, LLM-compatible representations through a Pre-trained ID Sequential Model, Dimensionality Alignment, Layer-wise Embedding Refinement, and Layer-wise Distribution Alignment. Furthermore, IDLE-Adapter demonstrates remarkable flexibility by seamlessly integrating ID embeddings from diverse ID-based sequential models and LLM architectures. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate the superiority of IDLE-Adapter, achieving over 10\% and 20\% improvements in HitRate@5 and NDCG@5 metrics, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Distribution alignment based transfer fusion frameworks on quantum devices for seeking quantum advantages

The scarcity of labelled data is specifically an urgent challenge in the field of quantum machine learning (QML). Two transfer fusion frameworks are proposed in this paper to predict the labels of a target domain data by aligning its distribution to a different but related labelled source domain on quantum devices. The frameworks fuses the quantum data from two different, but related domains through a quantum information infusion channel. The predicting tasks in the target domain can be achieved with quantum advantages by post-processing quantum measurement results. One framework, the quantum basic linear algebra subroutines (QBLAS) based implementation, can theoretically achieve the procedure of transfer fusion with quadratic speedup on a universal quantum computer. In addition, the other framework, a hardware-scalable architecture, is implemented on the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices through a variational hybrid quantum-classical procedure. Numerical experiments on the synthetic and handwritten digits datasets demonstrate that the variatioinal transfer fusion (TF) framework can reach state-of-the-art (SOTA) quantum DA method performance.