MCCD: A Multi-Attribute Chinese Calligraphy Character Dataset Annotated with Script Styles, Dynasties, and Calligraphers

Research on the attribute information of calligraphy, such as styles, dynasties, and calligraphers, holds significant cultural and historical value. However, the styles of Chinese calligraphy characters have evolved dramatically through different dynasties and the unique touches of calligraphers, making it highly challenging to accurately recognize these different characters and their attributes. Furthermore, existing calligraphic datasets are extremely scarce, and most provide only character-level annotations without additional attribute information. This limitation has significantly hindered the in-depth study of Chinese calligraphy. To fill this gap, we present a novel Multi-Attribute Chinese Calligraphy Character Dataset (MCCD). The dataset encompasses 7,765 categories with a total of 329,715 isolated image samples of Chinese calligraphy characters, and three additional subsets were extracted based on the attribute labeling of the three types of script styles (10 types), dynasties (15 periods) and calligraphers (142 individuals). The rich multi-attribute annotations render MCCD well-suited diverse research tasks, including calligraphic character recognition, writer identification, and evolutionary studies of Chinese characters. We establish benchmark performance through single-task and multi-task recognition experiments across MCCD and all of its subsets. The experimental results demonstrate that the complexity of the stroke structure of the calligraphic characters, and the interplay between their different attributes, leading to a substantial increase in the difficulty of accurate recognition. MCCD not only fills a void in the availability of detailed calligraphy datasets but also provides valuable resources for advancing research in Chinese calligraphy and fostering advancements in multiple fields. The dataset is available at https://github.com/SCUT-DLVCLab/MCCD.

CLI-RAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Clinically Structured and Context Aware Text Generation with LLMs

Large language models (LLMs), including zero-shot and few-shot paradigms, have shown promising capabilities in clinical text generation. However, real-world applications face two key challenges: (1) patient data is highly unstructured, heterogeneous, and scattered across multiple note types and (2) clinical notes are often long and semantically dense, making naive prompting infeasible due to context length constraints and the risk of omitting clinically relevant information. We introduce CLI-RAG (Clinically Informed Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a domain-specific framework for structured and clinically grounded text generation using LLMs. It incorporates a novel hierarchical chunking strategy that respects clinical document structure and introduces a task-specific dual-stage retrieval mechanism. The global stage identifies relevant note types using evidence-based queries, while the local stage extracts high-value content within those notes creating relevance at both document and section levels. We apply the system to generate structured progress notes for individual hospital visits using 15 clinical note types from the MIMIC-III dataset. Experiments show that it preserves temporal and semantic alignment across visits, achieving an average alignment score of 87.7%, surpassing the 80.7% baseline from real clinician-authored notes. The generated outputs also demonstrate high consistency across LLMs, reinforcing deterministic behavior essential for reproducibility, reliability, and clinical trust.

HVI-CIDNet+: Beyond Extreme Darkness for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) aims to restore vivid content and details from corrupted low-light images. However, existing standard RGB (sRGB) color space-based LLIE methods often produce color bias and brightness artifacts due to the inherent high color sensitivity. While Hue, Saturation, and Value (HSV) color space can decouple brightness and color, it introduces significant red and black noise artifacts. To address this problem, we propose a new color space for LLIE, namely Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI), defined by the HV color map and learnable intensity. The HV color map enforces small distances for the red coordinates to remove red noise artifacts, while the learnable intensity compresses the low-light regions to remove black noise artifacts. Additionally, we introduce the Color and Intensity Decoupling Network+ (HVI-CIDNet+), built upon the HVI color space, to restore damaged content and mitigate color distortion in extremely dark regions. Specifically, HVI-CIDNet+ leverages abundant contextual and degraded knowledge extracted from low-light images using pre-trained vision-language models, integrated via a novel Prior-guided Attention Block (PAB). Within the PAB, latent semantic priors can promote content restoration, while degraded representations guide precise color correction, both particularly in extremely dark regions through the meticulously designed cross-attention fusion mechanism. Furthermore, we construct a Region Refinement Block that employs convolution for information-rich regions and self-attention for information-scarce regions, ensuring accurate brightness adjustments. Comprehensive results from benchmark experiments demonstrate that the proposed HVI-CIDNet+ outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 10 datasets.

Few-shot Learning on AMS Circuits and Its Application to Parasitic Capacitance Prediction

Graph representation learning is a powerful method to extract features from graph-structured data, such as analog/mixed-signal (AMS) circuits. However, training deep learning models for AMS designs is severely limited by the scarcity of integrated circuit design data. In this work, we present CircuitGPS, a few-shot learning method for parasitic effect prediction in AMS circuits. The circuit netlist is represented as a heterogeneous graph, with the coupling capacitance modeled as a link. CircuitGPS is pre-trained on link prediction and fine-tuned on edge regression. The proposed method starts with a small-hop sampling technique that converts a link or a node into a subgraph. Then, the subgraph embeddings are learned with a hybrid graph Transformer. Additionally, CircuitGPS integrates a low-cost positional encoding that summarizes the positional and structural information of the sampled subgraph. CircuitGPS improves the accuracy of coupling existence by at least 20\% and reduces the MAE of capacitance estimation by at least 0.067 compared to existing methods. Our method demonstrates strong inherent scalability, enabling direct application to diverse AMS circuit designs through zero-shot learning. Furthermore, the ablation studies provide valuable insights into graph models for representation learning.

Cross-Modality Masked Learning for Survival Prediction in ICI Treated NSCLC Patients

Accurate prognosis of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients undergoing immunotherapy is essential for personalized treatment planning, enabling informed patient decisions, and improving both treatment outcomes and quality of life. However, the lack of large, relevant datasets and effective multi-modal feature fusion strategies pose significant challenges in this domain. To address these challenges, we present a large-scale dataset and introduce a novel framework for multi-modal feature fusion aimed at enhancing the accuracy of survival prediction. The dataset comprises 3D CT images and corresponding clinical records from NSCLC patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), along with progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) data. We further propose a cross-modality masked learning approach for medical feature fusion, consisting of two distinct branches, each tailored to its respective modality: a Slice-Depth Transformer for extracting 3D features from CT images and a graph-based Transformer for learning node features and relationships among clinical variables in tabular data. The fusion process is guided by a masked modality learning strategy, wherein the model utilizes the intact modality to reconstruct missing components. This mechanism improves the integration of modality-specific features, fostering more effective inter-modality relationships and feature interactions. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in multi-modal integration for NSCLC survival prediction, surpassing existing methods and setting a new benchmark for prognostic models in this context.

Mamba Goes HoME: Hierarchical Soft Mixture-of-Experts for 3D Medical Image Segmentation

In recent years, artificial intelligence has significantly advanced medical image segmentation. However, challenges remain, including efficient 3D medical image processing across diverse modalities and handling data variability. In this work, we introduce Hierarchical Soft Mixture-of-Experts (HoME), a two-level token-routing layer for efficient long-context modeling, specifically designed for 3D medical image segmentation. Built on the Mamba state-space model (SSM) backbone, HoME enhances sequential modeling through sparse, adaptive expert routing. The first stage employs a Soft Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) layer to partition input sequences into local groups, routing tokens to specialized per-group experts for localized feature extraction. The second stage aggregates these outputs via a global SMoE layer, enabling cross-group information fusion and global context refinement. This hierarchical design, combining local expert routing with global expert refinement improves generalizability and segmentation performance, surpassing state-of-the-art results across datasets from the three most commonly used 3D medical imaging modalities and data quality.

Subspace-based Approximate Hessian Method for Zeroth-Order Optimization

Zeroth-order optimization addresses problems where gradient information is inaccessible or impractical to compute. While most existing methods rely on first-order approximations, incorporating second-order (curvature) information can, in principle, significantly accelerate convergence. However, the high cost of function evaluations required to estimate Hessian matrices often limits practical applicability. We present the subspace-based approximate Hessian (ZO-SAH) method, a zeroth-order optimization algorithm that mitigates these costs by focusing on randomly selected two-dimensional subspaces. Within each subspace, ZO-SAH estimates the Hessian by fitting a quadratic polynomial to the objective function and extracting its second-order coefficients. To further reduce function-query costs, ZO-SAH employs a periodic subspace-switching strategy that reuses function evaluations across optimization steps. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets, including logistic regression and deep neural network training tasks, demonstrate that ZO-SAH achieves significantly faster convergence than existing zeroth-order methods.

CAST-Phys: Contactless Affective States Through Physiological signals Database

In recent years, affective computing and its applications have become a fast-growing research topic. Despite significant advancements, the lack of affective multi-modal datasets remains a major bottleneck in developing accurate emotion recognition systems. Furthermore, the use of contact-based devices during emotion elicitation often unintentionally influences the emotional experience, reducing or altering the genuine spontaneous emotional response. This limitation highlights the need for methods capable of extracting affective cues from multiple modalities without physical contact, such as remote physiological emotion recognition. To address this, we present the Contactless Affective States Through Physiological Signals Database (CAST-Phys), a novel high-quality dataset explicitly designed for multi-modal remote physiological emotion recognition using facial and physiological cues. The dataset includes diverse physiological signals, such as photoplethysmography (PPG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and respiration rate (RR), alongside high-resolution uncompressed facial video recordings, enabling the potential for remote signal recovery. Our analysis highlights the crucial role of physiological signals in realistic scenarios where facial expressions alone may not provide sufficient emotional information. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential of remote multi-modal emotion recognition by evaluating the impact of individual and fused modalities, showcasing its effectiveness in advancing contactless emotion recognition technologies.

Point3R: Streaming 3D Reconstruction with Explicit Spatial Pointer Memory

Dense 3D scene reconstruction from an ordered sequence or unordered image collections is a critical step when bringing research in computer vision into practical scenarios. Following the paradigm introduced by DUSt3R, which unifies an image pair densely into a shared coordinate system, subsequent methods maintain an implicit memory to achieve dense 3D reconstruction from more images. However, such implicit memory is limited in capacity and may suffer from information loss of earlier frames. We propose Point3R, an online framework targeting dense streaming 3D reconstruction. To be specific, we maintain an explicit spatial pointer memory directly associated with the 3D structure of the current scene. Each pointer in this memory is assigned a specific 3D position and aggregates scene information nearby in the global coordinate system into a changing spatial feature. Information extracted from the latest frame interacts explicitly with this pointer memory, enabling dense integration of the current observation into the global coordinate system. We design a 3D hierarchical position embedding to promote this interaction and design a simple yet effective fusion mechanism to ensure that our pointer memory is uniform and efficient. Our method achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on various tasks with low training costs. Code is available at: https://github.com/YkiWu/Point3R.

Embedding-Based Federated Data Sharing via Differentially Private Conditional VAEs

Deep Learning (DL) has revolutionized medical imaging, yet its adoption is constrained by data scarcity and privacy regulations, limiting access to diverse datasets. Federated Learning (FL) enables decentralized training but suffers from high communication costs and is often restricted to a single downstream task, reducing flexibility. We propose a data-sharing method via Differentially Private (DP) generative models. By adopting foundation models, we extract compact, informative embeddings, reducing redundancy and lowering computational overhead. Clients collaboratively train a Differentially Private Conditional Variational Autoencoder (DP-CVAE) to model a global, privacy-aware data distribution, supporting diverse downstream tasks. Our approach, validated across multiple feature extractors, enhances privacy, scalability, and efficiency, outperforming traditional FL classifiers while ensuring differential privacy. Additionally, DP-CVAE produces higher-fidelity embeddings than DP-CGAN while requiring $5{\times}$ fewer parameters.