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Ke Yan

Publications and source records attributed to Ke Yan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Diagnosis by Composition: Detecting and Localizing Unseen Diseases by Composing Learned Radiological Findings

Deep models for radiological diagnosis are typically trained to predict disease labels directly from images, which limits them to diseases seen during training and makes their decisions hard to interpret in radiologists' terms. Radiology, however, proceeds from visual findings to disease through published guidelines that make this decision rule explicit, interpretable, and reproducible. We introduce diagnosis by composition (DbC), a representation learning framework that encodes this findings-first logic. DbC learns a vocabulary of radiological findings by aligning image features with the text embeddings of the findings, each finding represented as a dense map over the scan. A disease is defined by a set of required findings derived from its guidelines, and its diagnosis map is a fixed, parameter-free composition of the corresponding finding maps. Because the finding-to-disease mapping is derived from guidelines rather than learned, DbC is interpretable and auditable by design, can extend to new diseases by specifying their findings without retraining, and can diagnose unseen diseases by composing their findings. On multi-phase liver CT, DbC detects and localizes unseen diseases, rare diseases from a different institution, and an external cohort significantly better than all comparators, including models that align images with disease names. DbC also improves detection and localization in the fully supervised setting and remains superior across training-set sizes. Although demonstrated on liver CT, DbC applies wherever radiological guidelines define diseases through findings.

cs.CV↗

LiFUSE: Frequency-Spatial Unified Self-Supervised Pretraining for Liver Disease Analysis on Non-contrast CT

Given the growing global burden of liver tumors and diffuse liver diseases, non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) is increasingly used for opportunistic screening because of its low cost and favorable safety profile. However, downstream tasks such as tumor detection and fine-grained disease diagnosis remain challenging due to NCCT's inherently low tissue contrast, lack of hemodynamic enhancement, and complex anatomical background. These limitations make subtle, heterogeneous, and multifocal hepatic lesions difficult to identify. Although large-scale self-supervised pretraining can learn robust representations from unlabeled NCCT scans, conventional voxel-wise reconstruction does not fully exploit the complementary information available in NCCT. Under weak NCCT contrast, low-level intensity patterns become less informative for pathology recognition, limiting the capture of lesion-specific discriminative features. In this paper, we propose the Liver Frequency-Spatial Unified Self-Supervised Pretraining (LiFUSE). The frequency branch applies random band-stop masking and spectrum reconstruction to encourage the model to capture subtle differences between lesions and surrounding tissues, while the spatial branch performs hybrid-granularity masked volumetric reconstruction to accommodate lesions of diverse sizes and morphologies. Finally, a cross-domain consistency scheme couples the spatial and frequency branches, yielding more discriminative representations for hepatic structures and lesions. Extensive experiments on three clinically relevant tasks across internal cohorts and a public target-domain transfer setting show that LiFUSE consistently outperforms strong baselines. These results suggest that unified frequency-spatial learning can improve liver disease analysis on NCCT, highlighting its potential for large-scale screening.

cs.CV↗

Development and Performance Study of a Capillary Liquid Scintillator Neutron Detector

Capillary liquid scintillator detectors are promising for high-resolution neutron imaging, yet experimental data on their light spread mechanism and spatial performance remain limited. Here, we report a neutron detector based on a hexagonal capillary array filled with EJ-309 liquid scintillator, with an inner diameter of about 50 um and a camera readout of 9 um pixels. Laser experiments show that the FWHM of the full light spot decreases from 260 um to 90 um with a metal light absorber, confirming effective suppression of lateral light spread. Using an AmBe neutron source, an effective field of view with a 5-sigma threshold was established from background frames. For single-capillary events, the pulse height spectrum follows a Landau distribution with a most probable value of 0.133 +/- 0.001 (stat.), and the intrinsic detection efficiency is 10.07% +/- 1.26% (stat.) +/- 1.43% (syst.), corresponding to about 13.55% when normalized to the active liquid scintillator area. The point spread function core yields a radial FWHM of 12.8 um and a centroid positioning precision of approximately 5.5 um (1 sigma), while the intrinsic position resolution is limited by the capillary pitch to 54 um. Linearity is good for 1 to 2 capillaries, with deviation appearing for 2 to 3 capillaries due to additional capture of spread light. These results provide experimental basis and physical understanding for imaging applications of capillary liquid scintillator neutron detectors.

physics.ins-det↗

IVT-Guard: All-in-One Reasoning Model for AI-Generated Content Detection

The rapid proliferation of highly realistic AI-Generated Content (AIGC) necessitates robust and interpretable detection mechanisms. However, existing detectors are predominantly confined to single modalities and provide binary outputs without reasoning. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) present a promising solution, their development is constrained by the scarcity of multimodal reasoning data and the reasoning-detection optimization dilemma, where explicit reasoning supervision can compromise detection accuracy. To this end, we introduce IVT-Set, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 152K diverse image, video, and text samples equipped with multi-granularity Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning trajectories. Based on it, we propose IVT-Guard, a pioneering framework for unified and interpretable AIGC detection across image, video, and text modalities. Furthermore, to overcome the aforementioned optimization dilemma, we design a novel three-stage training paradigm: Artifact-Aware Pre-training, Artifact-to-Evidence Supervised Fine-Tuning via artifact-aware injection, and Evidence-Verdict Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IVT-Guard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance across in-domain, out-of-domain, and cross-dataset settings while delivering faithful reasoning. Code and data will be released.

cs.CV↗

Scene Graph Thinking: Reinforcing Structured Visual Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong perception and reasoning capabilities. However, most existing models focus on isolated objects and neglect structured relationships for efficient target navigation, limiting their performance on visually intensive tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce Scene Graph Thinking (SaGe), a novel paradigm that enables fine-grained and structured visual reasoning through explicit scene-graph representations. Specifically, we first introduce an automated data engine that converts flat image-text corpora into structured scene graphs, where hierarchical entities constitute the nodes and diverse visual relations define the edges. Building upon this, we construct 120K high-quality training data by sampling reasoning traces from scene graphs. Then, two-stage graph-aligned post-training paradigms are introduced, where supervised fine-tuning internalizes MLLMs with structured reasoning, and subsequent reinforcement fine-tuning proposes node-as-proxy graph rewards to consolidate efficient graph exploration. With curated data and graph-aligned training, our approach achieves significant improvements across eight multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating strong effectiveness on fine-grained perception and reasoning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zwyang6/SaGe.

cs.CV↗

Multi-modal user interface control detection using cross-attention

Detecting user interface (UI) controls from software screenshots is a critical task for automated testing, accessibility, and software analytics, yet it remains challenging due to visual ambiguities, design variability, and the lack of contextual cues in pixel-only approaches. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-modal extension of YOLOv5 that integrates GPT-generated textual descriptions of UI images into the detection pipeline through cross-attention modules. By aligning visual features with semantic information derived from text embeddings, our model enables more robust and context-aware UI control detection. We evaluate the proposed framework on a large dataset of over 16,000 annotated UI screenshots spanning 23 control classes. Extensive experiments compare three fusion strategies, i.e. element-wise addition, weighted sum, and convolutional fusion, demonstrating consistent improvements over the baseline YOLOv5 model. Among these, convolutional fusion achieved the strongest performance, with significant gains in detecting semantically complex or visually ambiguous classes. These results establish that combining visual and textual modalities can substantially enhance UI element detection, particularly in edge cases where visual information alone is insufficient. Our findings open promising opportunities for more reliable and intelligent tools in software testing, accessibility support, and UI analytics, setting the stage for future research on efficient, robust, and generalizable multi-modal detection systems.

cs.CV↗

An empirical study of LoRA-based fine-tuning of large language models for automated test case generation

Automated test case generation from natural language requirements remains a challenging problem in software engineering due to the ambiguity of requirements and the need to produce structured, executable test artifacts. Recent advances in LLMs have shown promise in addressing this task; however, their effectiveness depends on task-specific adaptation and efficient fine-tuning strategies. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study on the use of parameter-efficient fine-tuning, specifically LoRA, for requirement-based test case generation. We evaluate multiple LLM families, including open-source and proprietary models, under a unified experimental pipeline. The study systematically explores the impact of key LoRA hyperparameters, including rank, scaling factor, and dropout, on downstream performance. We propose an automated evaluation framework based on GPT-4o, which assesses generated test cases across nine quality dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that LoRA-based fine-tuning significantly improves the performance of all open-source models, with Ministral-8B achieving the best results among them. Furthermore, we show that a fine-tuned 8B open-source model can achieve performance comparable to pre-fine-tuned GPT-4.1 models, highlighting the effectiveness of parameter-efficient adaptation. While GPT-4.1 models achieve the highest overall performance, the performance gap between proprietary and open-source models is substantially reduced after fine-tuning. These findings provide important insights into model selection, fine-tuning strategies, and evaluation methods for automated test generation. In particular, they demonstrate that cost-efficient, locally deployable open-source models can serve as viable alternatives to proprietary systems when combined with well-designed fine-tuning approaches.

cs.SE↗

Predictive Regularization Against Visual Representation Degradation in Multimodal Large Language Models

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at vision-language tasks, the cost of their language-driven training on internal visual foundational competence remains unclear. In this paper, we conduct a detailed diagnostic analysis to unveil a pervasive issue: visual representation degradation in MLLMs. Specifically, we find that compared to the initial visual features, the visual representation in the middle layers of LLM exhibits both a degradation in global function and patch structure. We attribute this phenomenon to a visual sacrifice driven by the singular text-generation objective, where the model compromises its visual fidelity to optimize for answer generation. We argue that a robust MLLM requires both strong cross-modal reasoning and core visual competence, and propose Predictive Regularization (PRe) to force degraded intermediate features to predict initial visual features, thereby maintaining the inherent visual attributes of the MLLM's internal representations. Extensive experiments confirm that mitigating this visual degradation effectively boosts vision-language performance, underscoring the critical importance of fostering robust internal visual representations within MLLMs for comprehensive multimodal understanding.

cs.CV↗

PAT: Accelerating LLM Decoding via Prefix-Aware Attention with Resource Efficient Multi-Tile Kernel

LLM serving is increasingly dominated by decode attention, which is a memory-bound operation due to massive KV cache loading from global memory. Meanwhile, real-world workloads exhibit substantial, hierarchical shared prefixes across requests (e.g., system prompts, tools/templates, RAG). Existing attention implementations fail to fully exploit prefix sharing: one-query-per-CTA execution repeatedly loads shared prefix KV cache, while one-size-fits-all tiling leaves on-chip resources idle and exacerbates bubbles for uneven KV lengths. These choices amplify memory bandwidth pressure and stall memory-bound decode attention. This paper introduces PAT, a prefix-aware attention kernel implementation for LLM decoding that organizes execution with a pack-forward-merge paradigm. PAT packs queries by shared prefix to reduce repeated memory accesses, runs a customized multi-tile kernel to achieve high resource efficiency. It further applies practical multi-stream forwarding and KV splitting to reduce resource bubbles. The final merge performs online softmax with negligible overhead. We implement PAT as an off-the-shelf plugin for vLLM. Evaluation on both real-world and synthetic workloads shows that PAT reduces attention latency by 53.5% on average and TPOT by 17.0-93.1% under the same configurations against state-of-the-art attention kernels. PAT's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/flashserve/PAT.

cs.DC↗

TumorChain: Interleaved Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Traceable Clinical Tumor Analysis

Accurate tumor analysis is central to clinical radiology and precision oncology, where early detection, reliable lesion characterization, and pathology-level risk assessment guide diagnosis and treatment planning. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is particularly important in this setting because it enables step-by-step interpretation from imaging findings to clinical impressions and pathology conclusions, improving traceability and reducing diagnostic errors. Here, we target the clinical tumor analysis task and build a large-scale benchmark that operationalizes a multimodal reasoning pipeline, spanning findings, impressions, and pathology predictions. We curate TumorCoT, a large-scale dataset of 1.5M CoT-labeled VQA instructions paired with 3D CT scans, with step-aligned rationales and cross-modal alignments along the trajectory from findings to impression to pathology, enabling evaluation of both answer accuracy and reasoning consistency. We further propose TumorChain, a multimodal interleaved reasoning framework that tightly couples 3D imaging encoders, clinical text understanding, and organ-level vision-language alignment. Through cross-modal alignment and iterative interleaved causal reasoning, TumorChain grounds visual evidence, aggregates conclusions, and issues pathology predictions after multiple rounds of self-refinement, improving traceability and reducing hallucination risk. Experiments show consistent improvements over strong baselines in lesion detection, impression generation, and pathology classification, and demonstrate strong generalization on the DeepTumorVQA benchmark. These results highlight the potential of multimodal reasoning for reliable and interpretable tumor analysis in clinical practice. Detailed information about our project can be found on our project homepage at https://github.com/ZJU4HealthCare/TumorChain.

cs.CV↗

TARDis: Time Attenuated Representation Disentanglement for Incomplete Multi-Modal Tumor Segmentation and Classification

The accurate diagnosis and segmentation of tumors in contrast-enhanced Computed Tomography (CT) are fundamentally driven by the distinctive hemodynamic profiles of contrast agents over time. However, in real-world clinical practice, complete temporal dynamics are often hard to capture by strict radiation dose limits and inconsistent acquisition protocols across institutions, leading to a prevalent missing modality problem. Existing deep learning approaches typically treat missing phases as absent independent channels, ignoring the inherent temporal continuity of hemodynamics. In this work, we propose Time Attenuated Representation Disentanglement (TARDis), a novel physics-aware framework that redefines missing modalities as missing sample points on a continuous Time-Attenuation Curve. We first hypothesize that the latent feature can be disentangled into a time-invariant static component (anatomy) and a time-dependent dynamic component (perfusion). We achieve this via a dual-path architecture: a quantization-based path using a learnable embedding dictionary to extract consistent anatomical structures, and a probabilistic path using a Hemodynamic Conditional Variational Autoencoder to model dynamic enhancement conditioned on the estimated scan time. This design allows the network to infer missing hemodynamic features by sampling from the learned latent distribution. Extensive experiments on a large-scale multi-modal private abdominal CT dataset (2,282 patients) and two public datasets demonstrate that TARDis significantly outperforms state-of-the-art incomplete modality frameworks. Notably, our method maintains robust diagnostic performance even in extreme data-sparsity scenarios, highlighting its potential for reducing radiation exposure while maintaining diagnostic precision.

cs.CV↗

D2Pruner: Debiased Importance and Structural Diversity for MLLM Token Pruning

Processing long visual token sequences poses a significant computational burden on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). While token pruning offers a path to acceleration, we find that current methods, while adequate for general understanding, catastrophically fail on fine-grained localization tasks. We attribute this failure to the inherent flaws of the two prevailing strategies: importance-based methods suffer from a strong positional bias, an inherent model artifact that distracts from semantic content, while diversity-based methods exhibit structural blindness, disregarding the user's prompt and spatial redundancy. To address this, we introduce D2Pruner, a framework that rectifies these issues by uniquely combining debiased importance with a structural pruning mechanism. Our method first secures a core set of the most critical tokens as pivots based on a debiased attention score. It then performs a Maximal Independent Set (MIS) selection on the remaining tokens, which are modeled on a hybrid graph where edges signify spatial proximity and semantic similarity. This process iteratively preserves the most important and available token while removing its neighbors, ensuring that the supplementary tokens are chosen to maximize importance and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D2Pruner has exceptional efficiency and fidelity. Applied to LLaVA-1.5-7B for general understanding tasks, it reduces FLOPs by 74.2\% while retaining 99.2\% of its original performance. Furthermore, in challenging localization benchmarks with InternVL-2.5-8B, it maintains 85.7\% performance at a 90\% token reduction rate, marking a significant advancement with up to 63. 53\% improvement over existing methods.

cs.CV↗

Non-Contrast CT Esophageal Varices Grading through Clinical Prior-Enhanced Multi-Organ Analysis

Esophageal varices (EV) represent a critical complication of portal hypertension, affecting approximately 60% of cirrhosis patients with a significant bleeding risk of ~30%. While traditionally diagnosed through invasive endoscopy, non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) presents a potential non-invasive alternative that has yet to be fully utilized in clinical practice. We present Multi-Organ-COhesion Network++ (MOON++), a novel multimodal framework that enhances EV assessment through comprehensive analysis of NCCT scans. Inspired by clinical evidence correlating organ volumetric relationships with liver disease severity, MOON++ synthesizes imaging characteristics of the esophagus, liver, and spleen through multimodal learning. We evaluated our approach using 1,631 patients, those with endoscopically confirmed EV were classified into four severity grades. Validation in 239 patient cases and independent testing in 289 cases demonstrate superior performance compared to conventional single organ methods, achieving an AUC of 0.894 versus 0.803 for the severe grade EV classification (G3 versus =G2 versus <G2). We conducted a reader study involving experienced radiologists to further validate the performance of MOON++. To our knowledge, MOON++ represents the first comprehensive multi-organ NCCT analysis framework incorporating clinical knowledge priors for EV assessment, potentially offering a promising non-invasive diagnostic alternative.

cs.CV↗

MUSE: Multi-Scale Dense Self-Distillation for Nucleus Detection and Classification

Nucleus detection and classification (NDC) in histopathology analysis is a fundamental task that underpins a wide range of high-level pathology applications. However, existing methods heavily rely on labor-intensive nucleus-level annotations and struggle to fully exploit large-scale unlabeled data for learning discriminative nucleus representations. In this work, we propose MUSE (MUlti-scale denSE self-distillation), a novel self-supervised learning method tailored for NDC. At its core is NuLo (Nucleus-based Local self-distillation), a coordinate-guided mechanism that enables flexible local self-distillation based on predicted nucleus positions. By removing the need for strict spatial alignment between augmented views, NuLo allows critical cross-scale alignment, thus unlocking the capacity of models for fine-grained nucleus-level representation. To support MUSE, we design a simple yet effective encoder-decoder architecture and a large field-of-view semi-supervised fine-tuning strategy that together maximize the value of unlabeled pathology images. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate that MUSE effectively addresses the core challenges of histopathological NDC. The resulting models not only surpass state-of-the-art supervised baselines but also outperform generic pathology foundation models.

cs.CV↗

CT-GLIP: 3D Grounded Language-Image Pretraining with CT Scans and Radiology Reports for Full-Body Scenarios

3D medical vision-language (VL) pretraining has shown potential in radiology by leveraging large-scale multimodal datasets with CT-report pairs. However, existing methods primarily rely on a global VL alignment directly adapted from 2D scenarios. The entire 3D image is transformed into one global embedding, resulting in a loss of sparse but critical semantics essential for accurately aligning with the corresponding diagnosis. To address this limitation, we propose CT-GLIP, a 3D Grounded Language-Image Pretrained model that constructs fine-grained CT-report pairs to enhance \textit{grounded} cross-modal contrastive learning, effectively aligning grounded visual features with precise textual descriptions. Leveraging the grounded cross-modal alignment, CT-GLIP improves performance across diverse downstream tasks and can even identify organs and abnormalities in a zero-shot manner using natural language. CT-GLIP is trained on a multimodal CT dataset comprising 44,011 organ-level CT-report pairs from 17,702 patients, covering 104 organs. Evaluation is conducted on four downstream tasks: zero-shot organ recognition (OR), zero-shot abnormality detection (AD), tumor detection (TD), and tumor segmentation (TS). Empirical results show that it outperforms its counterparts with global VL alignment. Compared to vanilla CLIP, CT-GLIP achieves average performance improvements of 15.1% of F1 score, 1.9% of AUC, and 3.2% of DSC for zero-shot AD, TD, and TS tasks, respectively. This study highlights the significance of grounded VL alignment in enabling 3D medical VL foundation models to understand sparse representations within CT scans.

cs.CV↗

Vision-Language Models for Automated 3D PET/CT Report Generation

Positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) is essential in oncology, yet the rapid expansion of scanners has outpaced the availability of trained specialists, making automated PET/CT report generation (PETRG) increasingly important for reducing clinical workload. Compared with structural imaging (e.g., X-ray, CT, and MRI), functional PET poses distinct challenges: metabolic patterns vary with tracer physiology, and whole-body 3D contextual information is required rather than local-region interpretation. To advance PETRG, we propose PETRG-3D, an end-to-end 3D dual-branch framework that separately encodes PET and CT volumes and incorporates style-adaptive prompts to mitigate inter-hospital variability in reporting practices. We construct PETRG-Lym, a multi-center lymphoma dataset collected from four hospitals (824 reports w/ 245,509 paired PET/CT slices), and construct AutoPET-RG-Lym, a publicly accessible PETRG benchmark derived from open imaging data but equipped with new expert-written, clinically validated reports (135 cases). To assess clinical utility, we introduce PETRG-Score, a lymphoma-specific evaluation protocol that jointly measures metabolic and structural findings across curated anatomical regions. Experiments show that PETRG-3D substantially outperforms existing methods on both natural language metrics (e.g., +31.49\% ROUGE-L) and clinical efficacy metrics (e.g., +8.18\% PET-All), highlighting the benefits of volumetric dual-modality modeling and style-aware prompting. Overall, this work establishes a foundation for future PET/CT-specific models emphasizing disease-aware reasoning and clinically reliable evaluation. Codes, models, and AutoPET-RG-Lym will be released.

cs.CV↗

Extracting Events Like Code: A Multi-Agent Programming Framework for Zero-Shot Event Extraction

Zero-shot event extraction (ZSEE) remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the need for complex reasoning and domain-specific understanding. Direct prompting often yields incomplete or structurally invalid outputs--such as misclassified triggers, missing arguments, and schema violations. To address these limitations, we present Agent-Event-Coder (AEC), a novel multi-agent framework that treats event extraction like software engineering: as a structured, iterative code-generation process. AEC decomposes ZSEE into specialized subtasks--retrieval, planning, coding, and verification--each handled by a dedicated LLM agent. Event schemas are represented as executable class definitions, enabling deterministic validation and precise feedback via a verification agent. This programming-inspired approach allows for systematic disambiguation and schema enforcement through iterative refinement. By leveraging collaborative agent workflows, AEC enables LLMs to produce precise, complete, and schema-consistent extractions in zero-shot settings. Experiments across five diverse domains and six LLMs demonstrate that AEC consistently outperforms prior zero-shot baselines, showcasing the power of treating event extraction like code generation. The code and data are released on https://github.com/UESTC-GQJ/Agent-Event-Coder.

cs.CL↗

ITPP: Learning Disentangled Event Dynamics in Marked Temporal Point Processes

Marked Temporal Point Processes (MTPPs) provide a principled framework for modeling asynchronous event sequences by conditioning on the history of past events. However, most existing MTPP models rely on channel-mixing strategies that encode information from different event types into a single, fixed-size latent representation. This entanglement can obscure type-specific dynamics, leading to performance degradation and increased risk of overfitting. In this work, we introduce ITPP, a novel channel-independent architecture for MTPP modeling that decouples event type information using an encoder-decoder framework with an ODE-based backbone. Central to ITPP is a type-aware inverted self-attention mechanism, designed to explicitly model inter-channel correlations among heterogeneous event types. This architecture enhances effectiveness and robustness while reducing overfitting. Comprehensive experiments on multiple real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that ITPP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MTPP models in both predictive accuracy and generalization.

cs.LG↗