Fed-NDIF: A Noise-Embedded Federated Diffusion Model For Low-Count Whole-Body PET Denoising

Low-count positron emission tomography (LCPET) imaging can reduce patients' exposure to radiation but often suffers from increased image noise and reduced lesion detectability, necessitating effective denoising techniques. Diffusion models have shown promise in LCPET denoising for recovering degraded image quality. However, training such models requires large and diverse datasets, which are challenging to obtain in the medical domain. To address data scarcity and privacy concerns, we combine diffusion models with federated learning -- a decentralized training approach where models are trained individually at different sites, and their parameters are aggregated on a central server over multiple iterations. The variation in scanner types and image noise levels within and across institutions poses additional challenges for federated learning in LCPET denoising. In this study, we propose a novel noise-embedded federated learning diffusion model (Fed-NDIF) to address these challenges, leveraging a multicenter dataset and varying count levels. Our approach incorporates liver normalized standard deviation (NSTD) noise embedding into a 2.5D diffusion model and utilizes the Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm to aggregate locally trained models into a global model, which is subsequently fine-tuned on local datasets to optimize performance and obtain personalized models. Extensive validation on datasets from the University of Bern, Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai, and Yale-New Haven Hospital demonstrates the superior performance of our method in enhancing image quality and improving lesion quantification. The Fed-NDIF model shows significant improvements in PSNR, SSIM, and NMSE of the entire 3D volume, as well as enhanced lesion detectability and quantification, compared to local diffusion models and federated UNet-based models.

Anatomically and Metabolically Informed Diffusion for Unified Denoising and Segmentation in Low-Count PET Imaging

Positron emission tomography (PET) image denoising, along with lesion and organ segmentation, are critical steps in PET-aided diagnosis. However, existing methods typically treat these tasks independently, overlooking inherent synergies between them as correlated steps in the analysis pipeline. In this work, we present the anatomically and metabolically informed diffusion (AMDiff) model, a unified framework for denoising and lesion/organ segmentation in low-count PET imaging. By integrating multi-task functionality and exploiting the mutual benefits of these tasks, AMDiff enables direct quantification of clinical metrics, such as total lesion glycolysis (TLG), from low-count inputs. The AMDiff model incorporates a semantic-informed denoiser based on diffusion strategy and a denoising-informed segmenter utilizing nnMamba architecture. The segmenter constrains denoised outputs via a lesion-organ-specific regularizer, while the denoiser enhances the segmenter by providing enriched image information through a denoising revision module. These components are connected via a warming-up mechanism to optimize multitask interactions. Experiments on multi-vendor, multi-center, and multi-noise-level datasets demonstrate the superior performance of AMDiff. For test cases below 20% of the clinical count levels from participating sites, AMDiff achieves TLG quantification biases of -26.98%, outperforming its ablated versions which yield biases of -35.85% (without the lesion-organ-specific regularizer) and -40.79% (without the denoising revision module).

A Generalizable 3D Diffusion Framework for Low-Dose and Few-View Cardiac SPECT

Myocardial perfusion imaging using SPECT is widely utilized to diagnose coronary artery diseases, but image quality can be negatively affected in low-dose and few-view acquisition settings. Although various deep learning methods have been introduced to improve image quality from low-dose or few-view SPECT data, previous approaches often fail to generalize across different acquisition settings, limiting their applicability in reality. This work introduced DiffSPECT-3D, a diffusion framework for 3D cardiac SPECT imaging that effectively adapts to different acquisition settings without requiring further network re-training or fine-tuning. Using both image and projection data, a consistency strategy is proposed to ensure that diffusion sampling at each step aligns with the low-dose/few-view projection measurements, the image data, and the scanner geometry, thus enabling generalization to different low-dose/few-view settings. Incorporating anatomical spatial information from CT and total variation constraint, we proposed a 2.5D conditional strategy to allow the DiffSPECT-3D to observe 3D contextual information from the entire image volume, addressing the 3D memory issues in diffusion model. We extensively evaluated the proposed method on 1,325 clinical 99mTc tetrofosmin stress/rest studies from 795 patients. Each study was reconstructed into 5 different low-count and 5 different few-view levels for model evaluations, ranging from 1% to 50% and from 1 view to 9 view, respectively. Validated against cardiac catheterization results and diagnostic comments from nuclear cardiologists, the presented results show the potential to achieve low-dose and few-view SPECT imaging without compromising clinical performance. Additionally, DiffSPECT-3D could be directly applied to full-dose SPECT images to further improve image quality, especially in a low-dose stress-first cardiac SPECT imaging protocol.

CRM: Retrieval Model with Controllable Condition

Recommendation systems (RecSys) are designed to connect users with relevant items from a vast pool of candidates while aligning with the business goals of the platform. A typical industrial RecSys is composed of two main stages, retrieval and ranking: (1) the retrieval stage aims at searching hundreds of item candidates satisfied user interests; (2) based on the retrieved items, the ranking stage aims at selecting the best dozen items by multiple targets estimation for each item candidate, including classification and regression targets. Compared with ranking model, the retrieval model absence of item candidate information during inference, therefore retrieval models are often trained by classification target only (e.g., click-through rate), but failed to incorporate regression target (e.g., the expected watch-time), which limit the effectiveness of retrieval. In this paper, we propose the Controllable Retrieval Model (CRM), which integrates regression information as conditional features into the two-tower retrieval paradigm. This modification enables the retrieval stage could fulfill the target gap with ranking model, enhancing the retrieval model ability to search item candidates satisfied the user interests and condition effectively. We validate the effectiveness of CRM through real-world A/B testing and demonstrate its successful deployment in Kuaishou short-video recommendation system, which serves over 400 million users.

KuaiFormer: Transformer-Based Retrieval at Kuaishou

In large-scale content recommendation systems, retrieval serves as the initial stage in the pipeline, responsible for selecting thousands of candidate items from billions of options to pass on to ranking modules. Traditionally, the dominant retrieval method has been Embedding-Based Retrieval (EBR) using a Deep Neural Network (DNN) dual-tower structure. However, applying transformer in retrieval tasks has been the focus of recent research, though real-world industrial deployment still presents significant challenges. In this paper, we introduce KuaiFormer, a novel transformer-based retrieval framework deployed in a large-scale content recommendation system. KuaiFormer fundamentally redefines the retrieval process by shifting from conventional score estimation tasks (such as click-through rate estimate) to a transformer-driven Next Action Prediction paradigm. This shift enables more effective real-time interest acquisition and multi-interest extraction, significantly enhancing retrieval performance. KuaiFormer has been successfully integrated into Kuaishou App's short-video recommendation system since May 2024, serving over 400 million daily active users and resulting in a marked increase in average daily usage time of Kuaishou users. We provide insights into both the technical and business aspects of deploying transformer in large-scale recommendation systems, addressing practical challenges encountered during industrial implementation. Our findings offer valuable guidance for engineers and researchers aiming to leverage transformer models to optimize large-scale content recommendation systems.

New Emerged Security and Privacy of Pre-trained Model: a Survey and Outlook

Thanks to the explosive growth of data and the development of computational resources, it is possible to build pre-trained models that can achieve outstanding performance on various tasks, such as neural language processing, computer vision, and more. Despite their powerful capabilities, pre-trained models have also sparked attention to the emerging security challenges associated with their real-world applications. Security and privacy issues, such as leaking privacy information and generating harmful responses, have seriously undermined users' confidence in these powerful models. Concerns are growing as model performance improves dramatically. Researchers are eager to explore the unique security and privacy issues that have emerged, their distinguishing factors, and how to defend against them. However, the current literature lacks a clear taxonomy of emerging attacks and defenses for pre-trained models, which hinders a high-level and comprehensive understanding of these questions. To fill the gap, we conduct a systematical survey on the security risks of pre-trained models, proposing a taxonomy of attack and defense methods based on the accessibility of pre-trained models' input and weights in various security test scenarios. This taxonomy categorizes attacks and defenses into No-Change, Input-Change, and Model-Change approaches. With the taxonomy analysis, we capture the unique security and privacy issues of pre-trained models, categorizing and summarizing existing security issues based on their characteristics. In addition, we offer a timely and comprehensive review of each category's strengths and limitations. Our survey concludes by highlighting potential new research opportunities in the security and privacy of pre-trained models.

Noise-aware Dynamic Image Denoising and Positron Range Correction for Rubidium-82 Cardiac PET Imaging via Self-supervision

Rb-82 is a radioactive isotope widely used for cardiac PET imaging. Despite numerous benefits of 82-Rb, there are several factors that limits its image quality and quantitative accuracy. First, the short half-life of 82-Rb results in noisy dynamic frames. Low signal-to-noise ratio would result in inaccurate and biased image quantification. Noisy dynamic frames also lead to highly noisy parametric images. The noise levels also vary substantially in different dynamic frames due to radiotracer decay and short half-life. Existing denoising methods are not applicable for this task due to the lack of paired training inputs/labels and inability to generalize across varying noise levels. Second, 82-Rb emits high-energy positrons. Compared with other tracers such as 18-F, 82-Rb travels a longer distance before annihilation, which negatively affect image spatial resolution. Here, the goal of this study is to propose a self-supervised method for simultaneous (1) noise-aware dynamic image denoising and (2) positron range correction for 82-Rb cardiac PET imaging. Tested on a series of PET scans from a cohort of normal volunteers, the proposed method produced images with superior visual quality. To demonstrate the improvement in image quantification, we compared image-derived input functions (IDIFs) with arterial input functions (AIFs) from continuous arterial blood samples. The IDIF derived from the proposed method led to lower AUC differences, decreasing from 11.09% to 7.58% on average, compared to the original dynamic frames. The proposed method also improved the quantification of myocardium blood flow (MBF), as validated against 15-O-water scans, with mean MBF differences decreased from 0.43 to 0.09, compared to the original dynamic frames. We also conducted a generalizability experiment on 37 patient scans obtained from a different country using a different scanner.

DimeRec: A Unified Framework for Enhanced Sequential Recommendation via Generative Diffusion Models

Sequential Recommendation (SR) plays a pivotal role in recommender systems by tailoring recommendations to user preferences based on their non-stationary historical interactions. Achieving high-quality performance in SR requires attention to both item representation and diversity. However, designing an SR method that simultaneously optimizes these merits remains a long-standing challenge. In this study, we address this issue by integrating recent generative Diffusion Models (DM) into SR. DM has demonstrated utility in representation learning and diverse image generation. Nevertheless, a straightforward combination of SR and DM leads to sub-optimal performance due to discrepancies in learning objectives (recommendation vs. noise reconstruction) and the respective learning spaces (non-stationary vs. stationary). To overcome this, we propose a novel framework called DimeRec (\textbf{Di}ffusion with \textbf{m}ulti-interest \textbf{e}nhanced \textbf{Rec}ommender). DimeRec synergistically combines a guidance extraction module (GEM) and a generative diffusion aggregation module (DAM). The GEM extracts crucial stationary guidance signals from the user's non-stationary interaction history, while the DAM employs a generative diffusion process conditioned on GEM's outputs to reconstruct and generate consistent recommendations. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that DimeRec significantly outperforms established baseline methods across three publicly available datasets. Furthermore, we have successfully deployed DimeRec on a large-scale short video recommendation platform, serving hundreds of millions of users. Live A/B testing confirms that our method improves both users' time spent and result diversification.

GenRC: Generative 3D Room Completion from Sparse Image Collections

Sparse RGBD scene completion is a challenging task especially when considering consistent textures and geometries throughout the entire scene. Different from existing solutions that rely on human-designed text prompts or predefined camera trajectories, we propose GenRC, an automated training-free pipeline to complete a room-scale 3D mesh with high-fidelity textures. To achieve this, we first project the sparse RGBD images to a highly incomplete 3D mesh. Instead of iteratively generating novel views to fill in the void, we utilized our proposed E-Diffusion to generate a view-consistent panoramic RGBD image which ensures global geometry and appearance consistency. Furthermore, we maintain the input-output scene stylistic consistency through textual inversion to replace human-designed text prompts. To bridge the domain gap among datasets, E-Diffusion leverages models trained on large-scale datasets to generate diverse appearances. GenRC outperforms state-of-the-art methods under most appearance and geometric metrics on ScanNet and ARKitScenes datasets, even though GenRC is not trained on these datasets nor using predefined camera trajectories. Project page: https://minfenli.github.io/GenRC

OphNet: A Large-Scale Video Benchmark for Ophthalmic Surgical Workflow Understanding

Surgical scene perception via videos are critical for advancing robotic surgery, telesurgery, and AI-assisted surgery, particularly in ophthalmology. However, the scarcity of diverse and richly annotated video datasets has hindered the development of intelligent systems for surgical workflow analysis. Existing datasets for surgical workflow analysis, which typically face challenges such as small scale, a lack of diversity in surgery and phase categories, and the absence of time-localized annotations, limit the requirements for action understanding and model generalization validation in complex and diverse real-world surgical scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce OphNet, a large-scale, expert-annotated video benchmark for ophthalmic surgical workflow understanding. OphNet features: 1) A diverse collection of 2,278 surgical videos spanning 66 types of cataract, glaucoma, and corneal surgeries, with detailed annotations for 102 unique surgical phases and 150 granular operations; 2) It offers sequential and hierarchical annotations for each surgery, phase, and operation, enabling comprehensive understanding and improved interpretability; 3) Moreover, OphNet provides time-localized annotations, facilitating temporal localization and prediction tasks within surgical workflows. With approximately 205 hours of surgical videos, OphNet is about 20 times larger than the largest existing surgical workflow analysis benchmark. Our dataset and code have been made available at: \url{https://github.com/minghu0830/OphNet-benchmark}.