Quasi-Clique Discovery via Energy Diffusion

Discovering quasi-cliques -- subgraphs with edge density no less than a given threshold -- is a fundamental task in graph mining, with broad applications in social networks, bioinformatics, and e-commerce. Existing heuristics often rely on greedy rules, similarity measures, or metaheuristic search, but struggle to maintain both efficiency and solution consistency across diverse graphs. This paper introduces EDQC, a novel quasi-clique discovery algorithm inspired by energy diffusion. Instead of explicitly enumerating candidate subgraphs, EDQC performs stochastic energy diffusion from source vertices, naturally concentrating energy within structurally cohesive regions. The approach enables efficient dense subgraph discovery without exhaustive search or dataset-specific tuning. Experimental results on 30 real-world datasets demonstrate that EDQC consistently discovers larger quasi-cliques than state-of-the-art baselines on the majority of datasets, while also yielding lower variance in solution quality. To the best of our knowledge, EDQC is the first method to incorporate energy diffusion into quasi-clique discovery.

Common and Rare Fundus Diseases Identification Using Vision-Language Foundation Model with Knowledge of Over 400 Diseases

The current retinal artificial intelligence models were trained using data with a limited category of diseases and limited knowledge. In this paper, we present a retinal vision-language foundation model (RetiZero) with knowledge of over 400 fundus diseases. Specifically, we collected 341,896 fundus images paired with text descriptions from 29 publicly available datasets, 180 ophthalmic books, and online resources, encompassing over 400 fundus diseases across multiple countries and ethnicities. RetiZero achieved outstanding performance across various downstream tasks, including zero-shot retinal disease recognition, image-to-image retrieval, internal domain and cross-domain retinal disease classification, and few-shot fine-tuning. Specially, in the zero-shot scenario, RetiZero achieved a Top5 score of 0.8430 and 0.7561 on 15 and 52 fundus diseases respectively. In the image-retrieval task, RetiZero achieved a Top5 score of 0.9500 and 0.8860 on 15 and 52 retinal diseases respectively. Furthermore, clinical evaluations by ophthalmology experts from different countries demonstrate that RetiZero can achieve performance comparable to experienced ophthalmologists using zero-shot and image retrieval methods without requiring model retraining. These capabilities of retinal disease identification strengthen our RetiZero foundation model in clinical implementation.