RealSyn: An Effective and Scalable Multimodal Interleaved Document Transformation Paradigm

After pre-training on extensive image-text pairs, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) demonstrates promising performance on a wide variety of benchmarks. However, a substantial volume of non-paired data, such as multimodal interleaved documents, remains underutilized for vision-language representation learning. To fully leverage these unpaired documents, we initially establish a Real-World Data Extraction pipeline to extract high-quality images and texts. Then we design a hierarchical retrieval method to efficiently associate each image with multiple semantically relevant realistic texts. To further enhance fine-grained visual information, we propose an image semantic augmented generation module for synthetic text production. Furthermore, we employ a semantic balance sampling strategy to improve dataset diversity, enabling better learning of long-tail concepts. Based on these innovations, we construct RealSyn, a dataset combining realistic and synthetic texts, available in three scales: 15M, 30M, and 100M. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealSyn effectively advances vision-language representation learning and exhibits strong scalability. Models pre-trained on RealSyn achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream tasks. To facilitate future research, the RealSyn dataset and pre-trained model weights are released at https://github.com/deepglint/RealSyn.

Medical Image Registration Meets Vision Foundation Model: Prototype Learning and Contour Awareness

Medical image registration is a fundamental task in medical image analysis, aiming to establish spatial correspondences between paired images. However, existing unsupervised deformable registration methods rely solely on intensity-based similarity metrics, lacking explicit anatomical knowledge, which limits their accuracy and robustness. Vision foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), can generate high-quality segmentation masks that provide explicit anatomical structure knowledge, addressing the limitations of traditional methods that depend only on intensity similarity. Based on this, we propose a novel SAM-assisted registration framework incorporating prototype learning and contour awareness. The framework includes: (1) Explicit anatomical information injection, where SAM-generated segmentation masks are used as auxiliary inputs throughout training and testing to ensure the consistency of anatomical information; (2) Prototype learning, which leverages segmentation masks to extract prototype features and aligns prototypes to optimize semantic correspondences between images; and (3) Contour-aware loss, a contour-aware loss is designed that leverages the edges of segmentation masks to improve the model's performance in fine-grained deformation fields. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple datasets, particularly in challenging scenarios with complex anatomical structures and ambiguous boundaries. Our code is available at https://github.com/HaoXu0507/IPMI25-SAM-Assisted-Registration.

Cross-View Consistency Regularisation for Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an established paradigm for transferring privileged knowledge from a cumbersome model to a lightweight and efficient one. In recent years, logit-based KD methods are quickly catching up in performance with their feature-based counterparts. However, previous research has pointed out that logit-based methods are still fundamentally limited by two major issues in their training process, namely overconfident teacher and confirmation bias. Inspired by the success of cross-view learning in fields such as semi-supervised learning, in this work we introduce within-view and cross-view regularisations to standard logit-based distillation frameworks to combat the above cruxes. We also perform confidence-based soft label mining to improve the quality of distilling signals from the teacher, which further mitigates the confirmation bias problem. Despite its apparent simplicity, the proposed Consistency-Regularisation-based Logit Distillation (CRLD) significantly boosts student learning, setting new state-of-the-art results on the standard CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet datasets across a diversity of teacher and student architectures, whilst introducing no extra network parameters. Orthogonal to on-going logit-based distillation research, our method enjoys excellent generalisation properties and, without bells and whistles, boosts the performance of various existing approaches by considerable margins.

ORID: Organ-Regional Information Driven Framework for Radiology Report Generation

The objective of Radiology Report Generation (RRG) is to automatically generate coherent textual analyses of diseases based on radiological images, thereby alleviating the workload of radiologists. Current AI-based methods for RRG primarily focus on modifications to the encoder-decoder model architecture. To advance these approaches, this paper introduces an Organ-Regional Information Driven (ORID) framework which can effectively integrate multi-modal information and reduce the influence of noise from unrelated organs. Specifically, based on the LLaVA-Med, we first construct an RRG-related instruction dataset to improve organ-regional diagnosis description ability and get the LLaVA-Med-RRG. After that, we propose an organ-based cross-modal fusion module to effectively combine the information from the organ-regional diagnosis description and radiology image. To further reduce the influence of noise from unrelated organs on the radiology report generation, we introduce an organ importance coefficient analysis module, which leverages Graph Neural Network (GNN) to examine the interconnections of the cross-modal information of each organ region. Extensive experiments an1d comparisons with state-of-the-art methods across various evaluation metrics demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.

AMNCutter: Affinity-Attention-Guided Multi-View Normalized Cutter for Unsupervised Surgical Instrument Segmentation

Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) is pivotal for robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery, assisting surgeons by identifying surgical instruments in endoscopic video frames. Recent unsupervised surgical instrument segmentation (USIS) methods primarily rely on pseudo-labels derived from low-level features such as color and optical flow, but these methods show limited effectiveness and generalizability in complex and unseen endoscopic scenarios. In this work, we propose a label-free unsupervised model featuring a novel module named Multi-View Normalized Cutter (m-NCutter). Different from previous USIS works, our model is trained using a graph-cutting loss function that leverages patch affinities for supervision, eliminating the need for pseudo-labels. The framework adaptively determines which affinities from which levels should be prioritized. Therefore, the low- and high-level features and their affinities are effectively integrated to train a label-free unsupervised model, showing superior effectiveness and generalization ability. We conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple SIS datasets to validate our approach's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, robustness, and exceptional potential as a pre-trained model. Our code is released at https://github.com/MingyuShengSMY/AMNCutter.

TractShapeNet: Efficient Multi-Shape Learning with 3D Tractography Point Clouds

Brain imaging studies have demonstrated that diffusion MRI tractography geometric shape descriptors can inform the study of the brain's white matter pathways and their relationship to brain function. In this work, we investigate the possibility of utilizing a deep learning model to compute shape measures of the brain's white matter connections. We introduce a novel framework, TractShapeNet, that leverages a point cloud representation of tractography to compute five shape measures: length, span, volume, total surface area, and irregularity. We assess the performance of the method on a large dataset including 1065 healthy young adults. Experiments for shape measure computation demonstrate that our proposed TractShapeNet outperforms other point cloud-based neural network models in both the Pearson correlation coefficient and normalized error metrics. We compare the inference runtime results with the conventional shape computation tool DSI-Studio. Our results demonstrate that a deep learning approach enables faster and more efficient shape measure computation. We also conduct experiments on two downstream language cognition prediction tasks, showing that shape measures from TractShapeNet perform similarly to those computed by DSI-Studio. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/SlicerDMRI/TractShapeNet.

The shape of the brain's connections is predictive of cognitive performance: an explainable machine learning study

The shape of the brain's white matter connections is relatively unexplored in diffusion MRI tractography analysis. While it is known that tract shape varies in populations and across the human lifespan, it is unknown if the variability in dMRI tractography-derived shape may relate to the brain's functional variability across individuals. This work explores the potential of leveraging tractography fiber cluster shape measures to predict subject-specific cognitive performance. We implement machine learning models to predict individual cognitive performance scores. We study a large-scale database from the HCP-YA study. We apply an atlas-based fiber cluster parcellation to the dMRI tractography of each individual. We compute 15 shape, microstructure, and connectivity features for each fiber cluster. Using these features as input, we train a total of 210 models to predict 7 different NIH Toolbox cognitive performance assessments. We apply an explainable AI technique, SHAP, to assess the importance of each fiber cluster for prediction. Our results demonstrate that shape measures are predictive of individual cognitive performance. The studied shape measures, such as irregularity, diameter, total surface area, volume, and branch volume, are as effective for prediction as microstructure and connectivity measures. The overall best-performing feature is a shape feature, irregularity, which describes how different a cluster's shape is from an idealized cylinder. Further interpretation using SHAP values suggest that fiber clusters with features highly predictive of cognitive ability are widespread throughout the brain, including fiber clusters from the superficial association, deep association, cerebellar, striatal, and projection pathways. This study demonstrates the strong potential of shape descriptors to enhance the study of the brain's white matter and its relationship to cognitive function.

Enhancing Advanced Visual Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Vision-Language (VL) research have sparked new benchmarks for complex visual reasoning, challenging models' advanced reasoning ability. Traditional Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well in visual perception tasks while struggling with complex reasoning scenarios. Conversely, Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate robust text reasoning capabilities; however, they lack visual acuity. To bridge this gap, we propose Complex Visual Reasoning Large Language Models (CVR-LLM), capitalizing on VLMs' visual perception proficiency and LLMs' extensive reasoning capability. Unlike recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that require a projection layer, our approach transforms images into detailed, context-aware descriptions using an iterative self-refinement loop and leverages LLMs' text knowledge for accurate predictions without extra training. We also introduce a novel multi-modal in-context learning (ICL) methodology to enhance LLMs' contextual understanding and reasoning. Additionally, we introduce Chain-of-Comparison (CoC), a step-by-step comparison technique enabling contrasting various aspects of predictions. Our CVR-LLM presents the first comprehensive study across a wide array of complex visual reasoning tasks and achieves SOTA performance among all.

Revisiting Surgical Instrument Segmentation Without Human Intervention: A Graph Partitioning View

Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) on endoscopic images stands as a long-standing and essential task in the context of computer-assisted interventions for boosting minimally invasive surgery. Given the recent surge of deep learning methodologies and their data-hungry nature, training a neural predictive model based on massive expert-curated annotations has been dominating and served as an off-the-shelf approach in the field, which could, however, impose prohibitive burden to clinicians for preparing fine-grained pixel-wise labels corresponding to the collected surgical video frames. In this work, we propose an unsupervised method by reframing the video frame segmentation as a graph partitioning problem and regarding image pixels as graph nodes, which is significantly different from the previous efforts. A self-supervised pre-trained model is firstly leveraged as a feature extractor to capture high-level semantic features. Then, Laplacian matrixs are computed from the features and are eigendecomposed for graph partitioning. On the "deep" eigenvectors, a surgical video frame is meaningfully segmented into different modules such as tools and tissues, providing distinguishable semantic information like locations, classes, and relations. The segmentation problem can then be naturally tackled by applying clustering or threshold on the eigenvectors. Extensive experiments are conducted on various datasets (e.g., EndoVis2017, EndoVis2018, UCL, etc.) for different clinical endpoints. Across all the challenging scenarios, our method demonstrates outstanding performance and robustness higher than unsupervised state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is released at https://github.com/MingyuShengSMY/GraphClusteringSIS.git.

Multimodal Causal Reasoning Benchmark: Challenging Vision Large Language Models to Infer Causal Links Between Siamese Images

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional ability in causal reasoning from textual information. However, will these causalities remain straightforward for Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) when only visual hints are provided? Motivated by this, we propose a novel Multimodal Causal Reasoning benchmark, namely MuCR, to challenge VLLMs to infer semantic cause-and-effect relationship when solely relying on visual cues such as action, appearance, clothing, and environment. Specifically, we introduce a prompt-driven image synthesis approach to create siamese images with embedded semantic causality and visual cues, which can effectively evaluate VLLMs' causal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we develop tailored metrics from multiple perspectives, including image-level match, phrase-level understanding, and sentence-level explanation, to comprehensively assess VLLMs' comprehension abilities. Our extensive experiments reveal that the current state-of-the-art VLLMs are not as skilled at multimodal causal reasoning as we might have hoped. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis to understand these models' shortcomings from different views and suggest directions for future research. We hope MuCR can serve as a valuable resource and foundational benchmark in multimodal causal reasoning research. The project is available at: https://github.com/Zhiyuan-Li-John/MuCR