Abstract:Deep-sea cold seep stage assessment has traditionally relied on costly, high-risk manned submersible operations and visual surveys of macrofauna. Although microbial communities provide a promising and more cost-effective alternative, reliable inference remains challenging because the available deep-sea dataset is extremely small ($n = 13$) relative to the microbial feature dimension ($p = 26$), making purely data-driven models highly prone to overfitting. To address this, we propose a knowledge-enhanced classification framework that incorporates an ecological knowledge graph as a structural prior. By fusing macro-microbe coupling and microbial co-occurrence patterns, the framework internalizes established ecological logic into a \underline{\textbf{G}}raph-\underline{\textbf{R}}egularized \underline{\textbf{M}}ultinomial \underline{\textbf{L}}ogistic \underline{\textbf{R}}egression (GRMLR) model, effectively constraining the feature space through a manifold penalty to ensure biologically consistent classification. Importantly, the framework removes the need for macrofauna observations at inference time: macro-microbe associations are used only to guide training, whereas prediction relies solely on microbial abundance profiles. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms standard baselines, highlighting its potential as a robust and scalable framework for deep-sea ecological assessment.
Abstract:Pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas (PPGLs) are rare neuroendocrine tumors, of which 15-25% develop metastatic disease with 5-year survival rates reported as low as 34%. PPGL may indicate hereditary syndromes requiring stricter, syndrome-specific treatment and surveillance, but clinicians often fail to recognize these associations in routine care. Clinical practice uses GAPP score for PPGL grading, but several limitations remain for PPGL diagnosis: (1) GAPP scoring demands a high workload for clinician because it requires the manual evaluation of six independent components; (2) key components such as cellularity and Ki-67 are often evaluated with subjective criteria; (3) several clinically relevant metastatic risk factors are not captured by GAPP, such as SDHB mutations, which have been associated with reported metastatic rates of 35-75%. Agent-driven diagnostic systems appear promising, but most lack traceable reasoning for decision-making and do not incorporate domain-specific knowledge such as PPGL genotype information. To address these limitations, we present PPGL-Swarm, an agentic PPGL diagnostic system that generates a comprehensive report, including automated GAPP scoring (with quantified cellularity and Ki-67), genotype risk alerts, and multimodal report with integrated evidence. The system provides an auditable reasoning trail by decomposing diagnosis into micro-tasks, each assigned to a specialized agent. The gene and table agents use knowledge enhancement to better interpret genotype and laboratory findings, and during training we use reinforcement learning to refine tool selection and task assignment.
Abstract:The Mariana Trench and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau exhibit significant similarities in geological origins and microbial metabolic functions. Given that deep-sea biological sampling faces prohibitive costs, recognizing structurally homologous terrestrial analogs of the Mariana Trench on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is of great significance. Yet, no existing model adequately addresses cross-domain topographic similarity retrieval, either neglecting geographical knowledge or sacrificing computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we present \underline{\textbf{G}}eography-knowledge \underline{\textbf{E}}nhanced \underline{\textbf{A}}nalog \underline{\textbf{R}}ecognition (\textbf{GEAR}) Framework, a three-stage pipeline designed to efficiently retrieve analogs from 2.5 million square kilometers of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau: (1) Skeleton guided Screening and Clipping: Recognition of candidate valleys and initial screening based on size and linear morphological criteria. (2) Physics aware Filtering: The Topographic Waveform Comparator (TWC) and Morphological Texture Module (MTM) evaluate the waveform and texture and filter out inconsistent candidate valleys. (3) Graph based Fine Recognition: We design a \underline{\textbf{M}}orphology-integrated \underline{\textbf{S}}iamese \underline{\textbf{G}}raph \underline{\textbf{N}}etwork (\textbf{MSG-Net}) based on geomorphological metrics. Correspondingly, we release an expert-annotated topographic similarity dataset targeting tectonic collision zones. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of every stage. Besides, MSG-Net achieved an F1-Score 1.38 percentage points higher than the SOTA baseline. Using features extracted by MSG-Net, we discovered a significant correlation with biological data, providing evidence for future biological analysis.




Abstract:Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) augmented with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are increasingly employed in medical AI to enhance factual grounding through external clinical image-text retrieval. However, this reliance creates a significant attack surface. We propose MedThreatRAG, a novel multimodal poisoning framework that systematically probes vulnerabilities in medical RAG systems by injecting adversarial image-text pairs. A key innovation of our approach is the construction of a simulated semi-open attack environment, mimicking real-world medical systems that permit periodic knowledge base updates via user or pipeline contributions. Within this setting, we introduce and emphasize Cross-Modal Conflict Injection (CMCI), which embeds subtle semantic contradictions between medical images and their paired reports. These mismatches degrade retrieval and generation by disrupting cross-modal alignment while remaining sufficiently plausible to evade conventional filters. While basic textual and visual attacks are included for completeness, CMCI demonstrates the most severe degradation. Evaluations on IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR QA tasks show that MedThreatRAG reduces answer F1 scores by up to 27.66% and lowers LLaVA-Med-1.5 F1 rates to as low as 51.36%. Our findings expose fundamental security gaps in clinical RAG systems and highlight the urgent need for threat-aware design and robust multimodal consistency checks. Finally, we conclude with a concise set of guidelines to inform the safe development of future multimodal medical RAG systems.




Abstract:Temporal motion modeling has always been a key component in multiple object tracking (MOT) which can ensure smooth trajectory movement and provide accurate positional information to enhance association precision. However, current motion models struggle to be both efficient and effective across different application scenarios. To this end, we propose TrackSSM inspired by the recently popular state space models (SSM), a unified encoder-decoder motion framework that uses data-dependent state space model to perform temporal motion of trajectories. Specifically, we propose Flow-SSM, a module that utilizes the position and motion information from historical trajectories to guide the temporal state transition of object bounding boxes. Based on Flow-SSM, we design a flow decoder. It is composed of a cascaded motion decoding module employing Flow-SSM, which can use the encoded flow information to complete the temporal position prediction of trajectories. Additionally, we propose a Step-by-Step Linear (S$^2$L) training strategy. By performing linear interpolation between the positions of the object in the previous frame and the current frame, we construct the pseudo labels of step-by-step linear training, ensuring that the trajectory flow information can better guide the object bounding box in completing temporal transitions. TrackSSM utilizes a simple Mamba-Block to build a motion encoder for historical trajectories, forming a temporal motion model with an encoder-decoder structure in conjunction with the flow decoder. TrackSSM is applicable to various tracking scenarios and achieves excellent tracking performance across multiple benchmarks, further extending the potential of SSM-like temporal motion models in multi-object tracking tasks.
Abstract:Exploring robust and efficient association methods has always been an important issue in multiple-object tracking (MOT). Although existing tracking methods have achieved impressive performance, congestion and frequent occlusions still pose challenging problems in multi-object tracking. We reveal that performing sparse decomposition on dense scenes is a crucial step to enhance the performance of associating occluded targets. To this end, we propose a pseudo-depth estimation method for obtaining the relative depth of targets from 2D images. Secondly, we design a depth cascading matching (DCM) algorithm, which can use the obtained depth information to convert a dense target set into multiple sparse target subsets and perform data association on these sparse target subsets in order from near to far. By integrating the pseudo-depth method and the DCM strategy into the data association process, we propose a new tracker, called SparseTrack. SparseTrack provides a new perspective for solving the challenging crowded scene MOT problem. Only using IoU matching, SparseTrack achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on the MOT17 and MOT20 benchmarks. Code and models are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/hustvl/SparseTrack}.