From Visual Perception to Deep Empathy: An Automated Assessment Framework for House-Tree-Person Drawings Using Multimodal LLMs and Multi-Agent Collaboration

Background: The House-Tree-Person (HTP) drawing test, introduced by John Buck in 1948, remains a widely used projective technique in clinical psychology. However, it has long faced challenges such as heterogeneous scoring standards, reliance on examiners subjective experience, and a lack of a unified quantitative coding system. Results: Quantitative experiments showed that the mean semantic similarity between Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) interpretations and human expert interpretations was approximately 0.75 (standard deviation about 0.05). In structurally oriented expert data sets, this similarity rose to 0.85, indicating expert-level baseline comprehension. Qualitative analyses demonstrated that the multi-agent system, by integrating social-psychological perspectives and destigmatizing narratives, effectively corrected visual hallucinations and produced psychological reports with high ecological validity and internal coherence. Conclusions: The findings confirm the potential of multimodal large models as standardized tools for projective assessment. The proposed multi-agent framework, by dividing roles, decouples feature recognition from psychological inference and offers a new paradigm for digital mental-health services. Keywords: House-Tree-Person test; multimodal large language model; multi-agent collaboration; cosine similarity; computational psychology; artificial intelligence

PSI3D: Plug-and-Play 3D Stochastic Inference with Slice-wise Latent Diffusion Prior

Diffusion models are highly expressive image priors for Bayesian inverse problems. However, most diffusion models cannot operate on large-scale, high-dimensional data due to high training and inference costs. In this work, we introduce a Plug-and-play algorithm for 3D stochastic inference with latent diffusion prior (PSI3D) to address massive ($1024\times 1024\times 128$) volumes. Specifically, we formulate a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach to reconstruct each two-dimensional (2D) slice by sampling from a 2D latent diffusion model. To enhance inter-slice consistency, we also incorporate total variation (TV) regularization stochastically along the concatenation axis. We evaluate our performance on optical coherence tomography (OCT) super-resolution. Our method significantly improves reconstruction quality for large-scale scientific imaging compared to traditional and learning-based baselines, while providing robust and credible reconstructions.

Distillation of Discrete Diffusion by Exact Conditional Distribution Matching

Discrete diffusion models (DDMs) are a powerful class of generative models for categorical data, but they typically require many function evaluations for a single sample, making inference expensive. Existing acceleration methods either rely on approximate simulators, such as $τ$-leaping, or on distillation schemes that train new student models and auxiliary networks with proxy objectives. We propose a simple and principled distillation alternative based on \emph{conditional distribution matching}. Our key observation is that the reverse conditional distribution of clean data given a noisy state, $p_{0\mid t}(x_0 \mid x_t)$, admits a Markov decomposition through intermediate times and can be recovered from marginal density ratios and the known forward CTMC kernel. We exploit this structure to define distillation objectives that directly match conditional distributions between a pre-trained teacher and a low-NFE student, both for one-step and few-step samplers.

Blink: Dynamic Visual Token Resolution for Enhanced Multimodal Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on various vision-language tasks, yet their visual perception remains limited. Humans, in comparison, perceive complex scenes efficiently by dynamically scanning and focusing on salient regions in a sequential "blink-like" process. Motivated by this strategy, we first investigate whether MLLMs exhibit similar behavior. Our pilot analysis reveals that MLLMs naturally attend to different visual regions across layers and that selectively allocating more computation to salient tokens can enhance visual perception. Building on this insight, we propose Blink, a dynamic visual token resolution framework that emulates the human-inspired process within a single forward pass. Specifically, Blink includes two modules: saliency-guided scanning and dynamic token resolution. It first estimates the saliency of visual tokens in each layer based on the attention map, and extends important tokens through a plug-and-play token super-resolution (TokenSR) module. In the next layer, it drops the extended tokens when they lose focus. This dynamic mechanism balances broad exploration and fine-grained focus, thereby enhancing visual perception adaptively and efficiently. Extensive experiments validate Blink, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing visual perception and multimodal understanding.

PRISM: Probabilistic and Robust Inverse Solver with Measurement-Conditioned Diffusion Prior for Blind Inverse Problems

Diffusion models are now commonly used to solve inverse problems in computational imaging. However, most diffusion-based inverse solvers require complete knowledge of the forward operator to be used. In this work, we introduce a novel probabilistic and robust inverse solver with measurement-conditioned diffusion prior (PRISM) to effectively address blind inverse problems. PRISM offers a technical advancement over current methods by incorporating a powerful measurement-conditioned diffusion model into a theoretically principled posterior sampling scheme. Experiments on blind image deblurring validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating the superior performance of PRISM over state-of-the-art baselines in both image and blur kernel recovery.

Dataset and Benchmark for Enhancing Critical Retained Foreign Object Detection

Critical retained foreign objects (RFOs), including surgical instruments like sponges and needles, pose serious patient safety risks and carry significant financial and legal implications for healthcare institutions. Detecting critical RFOs using artificial intelligence remains challenging due to their rarity and the limited availability of chest X-ray datasets that specifically feature critical RFOs cases. Existing datasets only contain non-critical RFOs, like necklace or zipper, further limiting their utility for developing clinically impactful detection algorithms. To address these limitations, we introduce "Hopkins RFOs Bench", the first and largest dataset of its kind, containing 144 chest X-ray images of critical RFO cases collected over 18 years from the Johns Hopkins Health System. Using this dataset, we benchmark several state-of-the-art object detection models, highlighting the need for enhanced detection methodologies for critical RFO cases. Recognizing data scarcity challenges, we further explore image synthetic methods to bridge this gap. We evaluate two advanced synthetic image methods, DeepDRR-RFO, a physics-based method, and RoentGen-RFO, a diffusion-based method, for creating realistic radiographs featuring critical RFOs. Our comprehensive analysis identifies the strengths and limitations of each synthetic method, providing insights into effectively utilizing synthetic data to enhance model training. The Hopkins RFOs Bench and our findings significantly advance the development of reliable, generalizable AI-driven solutions for detecting critical RFOs in clinical chest X-rays.

ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning

Though reasoning-based large language models (LLMs) have excelled in mathematics and programming, their capabilities in knowledge-intensive medical question answering remain underexplored. To address this, we introduce ReasonMed, the largest medical reasoning dataset, comprising 370k high-quality examples distilled from 1.7 million initial reasoning paths generated by various LLMs. ReasonMed is constructed through a \textit{multi-agent verification and refinement process}, where we design an \textit{Error Refiner} to enhance the reasoning paths by identifying and correcting error-prone steps flagged by a verifier. Leveraging ReasonMed, we systematically investigate best practices for training medical reasoning models and find that combining detailed Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with concise answer summaries yields the most effective fine-tuning strategy. Based on this strategy, we train ReasonMed-7B, which sets a new benchmark for sub-10B models, outperforming the prior best by 4.17\% and even exceeding LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60\%.

Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding common visual elements, largely due to their large-scale datasets and advanced training strategies. However, their effectiveness in medical applications remains limited due to the inherent discrepancies between data and tasks in medical scenarios and those in the general domain. Concretely, existing medical MLLMs face the following critical limitations: (1) limited coverage of medical knowledge beyond imaging, (2) heightened susceptibility to hallucinations due to suboptimal data curation processes, (3) lack of reasoning capabilities tailored for complex medical scenarios. To address these challenges, we first propose a comprehensive data curation procedure that (1) efficiently acquires rich medical knowledge data not only from medical imaging but also from extensive medical texts and general-domain data; and (2) synthesizes accurate medical captions, visual question answering (VQA), and reasoning samples. As a result, we build a multimodal dataset enriched with extensive medical knowledge. Building on the curated data, we introduce our medical-specialized MLLM: Lingshu. Lingshu undergoes multi-stage training to embed medical expertise and enhance its task-solving capabilities progressively. Besides, we preliminarily explore the potential of applying reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards paradigm to enhance Lingshu's medical reasoning ability. Additionally, we develop MedEvalKit, a unified evaluation framework that consolidates leading multimodal and textual medical benchmarks for standardized, fair, and efficient model assessment. We evaluate the performance of Lingshu on three fundamental medical tasks, multimodal QA, text-based QA, and medical report generation. The results show that Lingshu consistently outperforms the existing open-source multimodal models on most tasks ...

Advantageous Parameter Expansion Training Makes Better Large Language Models

Although scaling up the number of trainable parameters in both pre-training and fine-tuning can effectively improve the performance of large language models, it also leads to increased computational overhead. When delving into the parameter difference, we find that a subset of parameters, termed advantageous parameters, plays a crucial role in determining model performance. Further analysis reveals that stronger models tend to possess more such parameters. In this paper, we propose Advantageous Parameter EXpansion Training (APEX), a method that progressively expands advantageous parameters into the space of disadvantageous ones, thereby increasing their proportion and enhancing training effectiveness. Further theoretical analysis from the perspective of matrix effective rank explains the performance gains of APEX. Extensive experiments on both instruction tuning and continued pre-training demonstrate that, in instruction tuning, APEX outperforms full-parameter tuning while using only 52% of the trainable parameters. In continued pre-training, APEX achieves the same perplexity level as conventional training with just 33% of the training data, and yields significant improvements on downstream tasks.

A Lightweight Hybrid Dual Channel Speech Enhancement System under Low-SNR Conditions

Although deep learning based multi-channel speech enhancement has achieved significant advancements, its practical deployment is often limited by constrained computational resources, particularly in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. In this paper, we propose a lightweight hybrid dual-channel speech enhancement system that combines independent vector analysis (IVA) with a modified version of the dual-channel grouped temporal convolutional recurrent network (GTCRN). IVA functions as a coarse estimator, providing auxiliary information for both speech and noise, while the modified GTCRN further refines the speech quality. We investigate several modifications to ensure the comprehensive utilization of both original and auxiliary information. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, achieving enhanced speech with minimal parameters and low computational complexity.