Tony
Abstract:Data-driven operations management often relies on parameters estimated from costly human-generated labels. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems offer inexpensive auxiliary data, but introduce a new challenge: AI outputs are not direct observations of the target outcomes, but could involve high-dimensional representations with complex and unknown relationships to human labels. Conventional methods leverage AI predictions as direct proxies for true labels, which can be inefficient or unreliable when this relationship is weak or misspecified. We propose Generative Augmented Inference (GAI), a general framework that incorporates AI-generated outputs as informative features for estimating models of human-labeled outcomes. GAI uses an orthogonal moment construction that enables consistent estimation and valid inference with flexible, nonparametric relationship between LLM-generated outputs and human labels. We establish asymptotic normality and show a "safe default" property: relative to human-data-only estimators, GAI weakly improves estimation efficiency under arbitrary auxiliary signals and yields strict gains whenever the auxiliary information is predictive. Empirically, GAI outperforms benchmarks across diverse settings. In conjoint analysis with weak auxiliary signals, GAI reduces estimation error by about 50% and lowers human labeling requirements by over 75%. In retail pricing, where all methods access the same auxiliary inputs, GAI consistently outperforms alternative estimators, highlighting the value of its construction rather than differences in information. In health insurance choice, it cuts labeling requirements by over 90% while maintaining decision accuracy. Across applications, GAI improves confidence interval coverage without inflating width. Overall, GAI provides a principled and scalable approach to integrating AI-generated information.
Abstract:Long-range 3D object detection remains challenging because LiDAR observations become highly sparse and fragmented in the far field, making reliable context modeling difficult for existing detectors. To address this issue, recent state space model (SSM)-based methods have improved long-range modeling efficiency. However, their effectiveness is still limited by generic serialization strategies that fail to preserve meaningful contextual neighborhoods in sparse scenes. To address this issue, we propose RayMamba, a geometry-aware plug-and-play enhancement for voxel-based 3D detectors. RayMamba organizes sparse voxels into sector-wise ordered sequences through a ray-aligned serialization strategy, which preserves directional continuity and occlusion-related context for subsequent Mamba-based modeling. It is compatible with both LiDAR-only and multimodal detectors, while introducing only modest overhead. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 demonstrate consistent improvements across strong baselines. In particular, RayMamba achieves up to 2.49 mAP and 1.59 NDS gain in the challenging 40--50 m range on nuScenes, and further improves VoxelNeXt on Argoverse 2 from 30.3 to 31.2 mAP.
Abstract:Understanding mechanistic relationships among genes and their impacts on biological pathways is essential for elucidating disease mechanisms and advancing precision medicine. Despite the availability of extensive molecular interaction and pathway data in public databases, integrating heterogeneous knowledge sources and enabling interpretable multi-step reasoning across biological networks remain challenging. We present GIP-RAG (Gene Interaction Prediction through Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a computational framework that combines biomedical knowledge graphs with large language models (LLMs) to infer and interpret gene interactions. The framework constructs a unified gene interaction knowledge graph by integrating curated data from KEGG, WikiPathways, SIGNOR, Pathway Commons, and PubChem. Given user-specified genes, a query-driven module retrieves relevant subgraphs, which are incorporated into structured prompts to guide LLM-based stepwise reasoning. This enables identification of direct and indirect regulatory relationships and generation of mechanistic explanations supported by biological evidence. Beyond pairwise interactions, GIP-RAG includes a pathway-level functional impact module that simulates propagation of gene perturbations through signaling networks and evaluates potential pathway state changes. Evaluation across diverse biological scenarios demonstrates that the framework generates consistent, interpretable, and evidence-supported insights into gene regulatory mechanisms. Overall, GIP-RAG provides a general and interpretable approach for integrating knowledge graphs with retrieval-augmented LLMs to support mechanistic reasoning in complex molecular systems.
Abstract:Generalist pathology foundation models (PFMs), pretrained on large-scale multi-organ datasets, have demonstrated remarkable predictive capabilities across diverse clinical applications. However, their proficiency on the full spectrum of clinically essential tasks within a specific organ system remains an open question due to the lack of large-scale validation cohorts for a single organ as well as the absence of a tailored training paradigm that can effectively translate broad histomorphological knowledge into the organ-specific expertise required for specialist-level interpretation. In this study, we propose BRIGHT, the first PFM specifically designed for breast pathology, trained on approximately 210 million histopathology tiles from over 51,000 breast whole-slide images derived from a cohort of over 40,000 patients across 19 hospitals. BRIGHT employs a collaborative generalist-specialist framework to capture both universal and organ-specific features. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of PFMs on breast oncology, we curate the largest multi-institutional cohorts to date for downstream task development and evaluation, comprising over 25,000 WSIs across 10 hospitals. The validation cohorts cover the full spectrum of breast pathology across 24 distinct clinical tasks spanning diagnosis, biomarker prediction, treatment response and survival prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BRIGHT outperforms three leading generalist PFMs, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 21 of 24 internal validation tasks and in 5 of 10 external validation tasks with excellent heatmap interpretability. By evaluating on large-scale validation cohorts, this study not only demonstrates BRIGHT's clinical utility in breast oncology but also validates a collaborative generalist-specialist paradigm, providing a scalable template for developing PFMs on a specific organ system.
Abstract:We propose a Hierarchical Multi-scale Knowledge-aware Graph Network (HMKGN) that models multi-scale interactions and spatially hierarchical relationships within whole-slide images (WSIs) for cancer prognostication. Unlike conventional attention-based MIL, which ignores spatial organization, or graph-based MIL, which relies on static handcrafted graphs, HMKGN enforces a hierarchical structure with spatial locality constraints, wherein local cellular-level dynamic graphs aggregate spatially proximate patches within each region of interest (ROI) and a global slide-level dynamic graph integrates ROI-level features into WSI-level representations. Moreover, multi-scale integration at the ROI level combines coarse contextual features from broader views with fine-grained structural representations from local patch-graph aggregation. We evaluate HMKGN on four TCGA cohorts (KIRC, LGG, PAAD, and STAD; N=513, 487, 138, and 370) for survival prediction. It consistently outperforms existing MIL-based models, yielding improved concordance indices (10.85% better) and statistically significant stratification of patient survival risk (log-rank p < 0.05).
Abstract:Synthesis of diverse driving scenes serves as a crucial data augmentation technique for validating the robustness and generalizability of autonomous driving systems. Current methods aggregate high-definition (HD) maps and 3D bounding boxes as geometric conditions in diffusion models for conditional scene generation. However, implicit inter-condition dependency causes generation failures when control conditions change independently. Additionally, these methods suffer from insufficient details in both semantic and structural aspects. Specifically, brief and view-invariant captions restrict semantic contexts, resulting in weak background modeling. Meanwhile, the standard denoising loss with uniform spatial weighting neglects foreground structural details, causing visual distortions and blurriness. To address these challenges, we propose DrivePTS, which incorporates three key innovations. Firstly, our framework adopts a progressive learning strategy to mitigate inter-dependency between geometric conditions, reinforced by an explicit mutual information constraint. Secondly, a Vision-Language Model is utilized to generate multi-view hierarchical descriptions across six semantic aspects, providing fine-grained textual guidance. Thirdly, a frequency-guided structure loss is introduced to strengthen the model's sensitivity to high-frequency elements, improving foreground structural fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DrivePTS achieves state-of-the-art fidelity and controllability in generating diverse driving scenes. Notably, DrivePTS successfully generates rare scenes where prior methods fail, highlighting its strong generalization ability.
Abstract:End-to-end autonomous driving increasingly leverages self-supervised video pretraining to learn transferable planning representations. However, pretraining video world models for scene understanding has so far brought only limited improvements. This limitation is compounded by the inherent ambiguity of driving: each scene typically provides only a single human trajectory, making it difficult to learn multimodal behaviors. In this work, we propose Drive-JEPA, a framework that integrates Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) with multimodal trajectory distillation for end-to-end driving. First, we adapt V-JEPA for end-to-end driving, pretraining a ViT encoder on large-scale driving videos to produce predictive representations aligned with trajectory planning. Second, we introduce a proposal-centric planner that distills diverse simulator-generated trajectories alongside human trajectories, with a momentum-aware selection mechanism to promote stable and safe behavior. When evaluated on NAVSIM, the V-JEPA representation combined with a simple transformer-based decoder outperforms prior methods by 3 PDMS in the perception-free setting. The complete Drive-JEPA framework achieves 93.3 PDMS on v1 and 87.8 EPDMS on v2, setting a new state-of-the-art.
Abstract:Immunohistochemical (IHC) biomarker prediction benefits from multi-modal data fusion analysis. However, the simultaneous acquisition of multi-modal data, such as genomic and pathological information, is often challenging due to cost or technical limitations. To address this challenge, we propose an online distillation approach based on Multi-modal Knowledge Decomposition (MKD) to enhance IHC biomarker prediction in haematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) stained histopathology images. This method leverages paired genomic-pathology data during training while enabling inference using either pathology slides alone or both modalities. Two teacher and one student models are developed to extract modality-specific and modality-general features by minimizing the MKD loss. To maintain the internal structural relationships between samples, Similarity-preserving Knowledge Distillation (SKD) is applied. Additionally, Collaborative Learning for Online Distillation (CLOD) facilitates mutual learning between teacher and student models, encouraging diverse and complementary learning dynamics. Experiments on the TCGA-BRCA and in-house QHSU datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance in IHC biomarker prediction using uni-modal data. Our code is available at https://github.com/qiyuanzz/MICCAI2025_MKD.
Abstract:With the rapid deployment of SCADA systems, how to effectively analyze industrial signals and detect abnormal states is an urgent need for the industry. Due to the significant heterogeneity of these signals, which we summarize as the M5 problem, previous works only focus on small sub-problems and employ specialized models, failing to utilize the synergies between modalities and the powerful scaling law. However, we argue that the M5 signals can be modeled in a unified manner due to the intrinsic similarity. As a result, we propose FISHER, a Foundation model for multi-modal Industrial Signal compreHEnsive Representation. To support arbitrary sampling rates, FISHER considers the increment of sampling rate as the concatenation of sub-band information. Specifically, FISHER takes the STFT sub-band as the modeling unit and adopts a teacher student SSL framework for pre-training. We also develop the RMIS benchmark, which evaluates the representations of M5 industrial signals on multiple health management tasks. Compared with top SSL models, FISHER showcases versatile and outstanding capabilities with a general performance gain up to 5.03%, along with much more efficient scaling curves. We also investigate the scaling law on downstream tasks and derive potential avenues for future works. FISHER is now open-sourced on https://github.com/jianganbai/FISHER
Abstract:Controllable emotional voice conversion (EVC) aims to manipulate emotional expressions to increase the diversity of synthesized speech. Existing methods typically rely on predefined labels, reference audios, or prespecified factor values, often overlooking individual differences in emotion perception and expression. In this paper, we introduce PromptEVC that utilizes natural language prompts for precise and flexible emotion control. To bridge text descriptions with emotional speech, we propose emotion descriptor and prompt mapper to generate fine-grained emotion embeddings, trained jointly with reference embeddings. To enhance naturalness, we present a prosody modeling and control pipeline that adjusts the rhythm based on linguistic content and emotional cues. Additionally, a speaker encoder is incorporated to preserve identity. Experimental results demonstrate that PromptEVC outperforms state-of-the-art controllable EVC methods in emotion conversion, intensity control, mixed emotion synthesis, and prosody manipulation. Speech samples are available at https://jeremychee4.github.io/PromptEVC/.