ARIADNE: A Perception-Reasoning Synergy Framework for Trustworthy Coronary Angiography Analysis

Conventional pixel-wise loss functions fail to enforce topological constraints in coronary vessel segmentation, producing fragmented vascular trees despite high pixel-level accuracy. We present ARIADNE, a two-stage framework coupling preference-aligned perception with RL-based diagnostic reasoning for topologically coherent stenosis detection. The perception module employs DPO to fine-tune the Sa2VA vision-language foundation model using Betti number constraints as preference signals, aligning the policy toward geometrically complete vessel structures rather than pixel-wise overlap metrics. The reasoning module formulates stenosis localization as a Markov Decision Process with an explicit rejection mechanism that autonomously defers ambiguous anatomical candidates such as bifurcations and vessel crossings, shifting from coverage maximization to reliability optimization. On 1,400 clinical angiograms, ARIADNE achieves state-of-the-art centerline Dice of 0.838, reduces false positives by 41% compared to geometric baselines. External validation on multi-center benchmarks ARCADE and XCAD confirms generalization across acquisition protocols. This represents the first application of DPO for topological alignment in medical imaging, demonstrating that preference-based learning over structural constraints mitigates topological violations while maintaining diagnostic sensitivity in interventional cardiology workflows.

Multi-View Based Audio Visual Target Speaker Extraction

Audio-Visual Target Speaker Extraction (AVTSE) aims to separate a target speaker's voice from a mixed audio signal using the corresponding visual cues. While most existing AVTSE methods rely exclusively on frontal-view videos, this limitation restricts their robustness in real-world scenarios where non-frontal views are prevalent. Such visual perspectives often contain complementary articulatory information that could enhance speech extraction. In this work, we propose Multi-View Tensor Fusion (MVTF), a novel framework that transforms multi-view learning into single-view performance gains. During the training stage, we leverage synchronized multi-perspective lip videos to learn cross-view correlations through MVTF, where pairwise outer products explicitly model multiplicative interactions between different views of input lip embeddings. At the inference stage, the system supports both single-view and multi-view inputs. Experimental results show that in the single-view inputs, our framework leverages multi-view knowledge to achieve significant performance gains, while in the multi-view mode, it further improves overall performance and enhances the robustness. Our demo, code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/MVTF-Gridnet-209C/

Multi-Modal Embedding-based Target Speaker Enhancement

Target Speaker Extraction (TSE) is a critical challenge in cocktail party scenarios. While leveraging multiple modalities, such as voice, lip, face, and expression embeddings, can enhance performance, real-world applications often suffer from intermittent modality dropout. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the interactions and robustness of various multimodal fusion strategies under varying degrees of modality dropout. We build upon a state-of-the-art audio-visual speech enhancement system and integrate four distinct speaker identity cues: lip embeddings for synchronized contextual information, a voice speaker embedding extracted via cross-attention for acoustic consistency, a static face embedding for speaker identity, and a novel dynamic expression embedding for frame-wise emotional features. We systematically evaluate different combinations of these modalities under two key training regimes: zero dropout and 80% modality dropout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while a full multimodal ensemble achieves optimal performance under ideal (zero dropout) conditions, its effectiveness diminishes significantly when test-time dropout occurs without prior exposure during training. Crucially, we show that training with a high (80%) modality dropout rate dramatically enhances model robustness, enabling the system to maintain superior performance even under severe test-time missing modalities. Our findings highlight that voice embeddings exhibit consistent robustness, while the proposed expression embedding provides valuable complementary information. This work underscores the importance of training strategies that account for real-world imperfection, moving beyond pure performance maximization to achieve practical reliability in multimodal speech enhancement systems.