Multimodal Image Matching based on Frequency-domain Information of Local Energy Response

Complicated nonlinear intensity differences, nonlinear local geometric distortions, noises and rotation transformation are main challenges in multimodal image matching. In order to solve these problems, we propose a method based on Frequency-domain Information of Local Energy Response called FILER. The core of FILER is the local energy response model based on frequency-domain information, which can overcome the effect of nonlinear intensity differences. To improve the robustness to local nonlinear geometric distortions and noises, we design a new edge structure enhanced feature detector and convolutional feature weighted descriptor, respectively. In addition, FILER overcomes the sensitivity of the frequency-domain information to the rotation angle and achieves rotation invariance. Extensive experiments multimodal image pairs show that FILER outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms and has good robustness and universality.

A Causality-Inspired Model for Intima-Media Thickening Assessment in Ultrasound Videos

Carotid atherosclerosis represents a significant health risk, with its early diagnosis primarily dependent on ultrasound-based assessments of carotid intima-media thickening. However, during carotid ultrasound screening, significant view variations cause style shifts, impairing content cues related to thickening, such as lumen anatomy, which introduces spurious correlations that hinder assessment. Therefore, we propose a novel causal-inspired method for assessing carotid intima-media thickening in frame-wise ultrasound videos, which focuses on two aspects: eliminating spurious correlations caused by style and enhancing causal content correlations. Specifically, we introduce a novel Spurious Correlation Elimination (SCE) module to remove non-causal style effects by enforcing prediction invariance with style perturbations. Simultaneously, we propose a Causal Equivalence Consolidation (CEC) module to strengthen causal content correlation through adversarial optimization during content randomization. Simultaneously, we design a Causal Transition Augmentation (CTA) module to ensure smooth causal flow by integrating an auxiliary pathway with text prompts and connecting it through contrastive learning. The experimental results on our in-house carotid ultrasound video dataset achieved an accuracy of 86.93\%, demonstrating the superior performance of the proposed method. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/xielaobanyy/causal-imt}{https://github.com/xielaobanyy/causal-imt}.

PUGS: Zero-shot Physical Understanding with Gaussian Splatting

Current robotic systems can understand the categories and poses of objects well. But understanding physical properties like mass, friction, and hardness, in the wild, remains challenging. We propose a new method that reconstructs 3D objects using the Gaussian splatting representation and predicts various physical properties in a zero-shot manner. We propose two techniques during the reconstruction phase: a geometry-aware regularization loss function to improve the shape quality and a region-aware feature contrastive loss function to promote region affinity. Two other new techniques are designed during inference: a feature-based property propagation module and a volume integration module tailored for the Gaussian representation. Our framework is named as zero-shot physical understanding with Gaussian splatting, or PUGS. PUGS achieves new state-of-the-art results on the standard benchmark of ABO-500 mass prediction. We provide extensive quantitative ablations and qualitative visualization to demonstrate the mechanism of our designs. We show the proposed methodology can help address challenging real-world grasping tasks. Our codes, data, and models are available at https://github.com/EverNorif/PUGS

Variable-frame CNNLSTM for Breast Nodule Classification using Ultrasound Videos

The intersection of medical imaging and artificial intelligence has become an important research direction in intelligent medical treatment, particularly in the analysis of medical images using deep learning for clinical diagnosis. Despite the advances, existing keyframe classification methods lack extraction of time series features, while ultrasonic video classification based on three-dimensional convolution requires uniform frame numbers across patients, resulting in poor feature extraction efficiency and model classification performance. This study proposes a novel video classification method based on CNN and LSTM, introducing NLP's long and short sentence processing scheme into video classification for the first time. The method reduces CNN-extracted image features to 1x512 dimension, followed by sorting and compressing feature vectors for LSTM training. Specifically, feature vectors are sorted by patient video frame numbers and populated with padding value 0 to form variable batches, with invalid padding values compressed before LSTM training to conserve computing resources. Experimental results demonstrate that our variable-frame CNNLSTM method outperforms other approaches across all metrics, showing improvements of 3-6% in F1 score and 1.5% in specificity compared to keyframe methods. The variable-frame CNNLSTM also achieves better accuracy and precision than equal-frame CNNLSTM. These findings validate the effectiveness of our approach in classifying variable-frame ultrasound videos and suggest potential applications in other medical imaging modalities.

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.

Scale Propagation Network for Generalizable Depth Completion

Depth completion, inferring dense depth maps from sparse measurements, is crucial for robust 3D perception. Although deep learning based methods have made tremendous progress in this problem, these models cannot generalize well across different scenes that are unobserved in training, posing a fundamental limitation that yet to be overcome. A careful analysis of existing deep neural network architectures for depth completion, which are largely borrowing from successful backbones for image analysis tasks, reveals that a key design bottleneck actually resides in the conventional normalization layers. These normalization layers are designed, on one hand, to make training more stable, on the other hand, to build more visual invariance across scene scales. However, in depth completion, the scale is actually what we want to robustly estimate in order to better generalize to unseen scenes. To mitigate, we propose a novel scale propagation normalization (SP-Norm) method to propagate scales from input to output, and simultaneously preserve the normalization operator for easy convergence. More specifically, we rescale the input using learned features of a single-layer perceptron from the normalized input, rather than directly normalizing the input as conventional normalization layers. We then develop a new network architecture based on SP-Norm and the ConvNeXt V2 backbone. We explore the composition of various basic blocks and architectures to achieve superior performance and efficient inference for generalizable depth completion. Extensive experiments are conducted on six unseen datasets with various types of sparse depth maps, i.e., randomly sampled 0.1\%/1\%/10\% valid pixels, 4/8/16/32/64-line LiDAR points, and holes from Structured-Light. Our model consistently achieves the best accuracy with faster speed and lower memory when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

SAM-Driven Weakly Supervised Nodule Segmentation with Uncertainty-Aware Cross Teaching

Automated nodule segmentation is essential for computer-assisted diagnosis in ultrasound images. Nevertheless, most existing methods depend on precise pixel-level annotations by medical professionals, a process that is both costly and labor-intensive. Recently, segmentation foundation models like SAM have shown impressive generalizability on natural images, suggesting their potential as pseudo-labelers. However, accurate prompts remain crucial for their success in medical images. In this work, we devise a novel weakly supervised framework that effectively utilizes the segmentation foundation model to generate pseudo-labels from aspect ration annotations for automatic nodule segmentation. Specifically, we develop three types of bounding box prompts based on scalable shape priors, followed by an adaptive pseudo-label selection module to fully exploit the prediction capabilities of the foundation model for nodules. We also present a SAM-driven uncertainty-aware cross-teaching strategy. This approach integrates SAM-based uncertainty estimation and label-space perturbations into cross-teaching to mitigate the impact of pseudo-label inaccuracies on model training. Extensive experiments on two clinically collected ultrasound datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.

Seed-ASR: Understanding Diverse Speech and Contexts with LLM-based Speech Recognition

Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) model is required to accurately transcribe diverse speech signals (from different domains, languages, accents, etc) given the specific contextual information in various application scenarios. Classic end-to-end models fused with extra language models perform well, but mainly in data matching scenarios and are gradually approaching a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce Seed-ASR, a large language model (LLM) based speech recognition model. Seed-ASR is developed based on the framework of audio conditioned LLM (AcLLM), leveraging the capabilities of LLMs by inputting continuous speech representations together with contextual information into the LLM. Through stage-wise large-scale training and the elicitation of context-aware capabilities in LLM, Seed-ASR demonstrates significant improvement over end-to-end models on comprehensive evaluation sets, including multiple domains, accents/dialects and languages. Additionally, Seed-ASR can be further deployed to support specific needs in various scenarios without requiring extra language models. Compared to recently released large ASR models, Seed-ASR achieves 10%-40% reduction in word (or character, for Chinese) error rates on Chinese and English public test sets, further demonstrating its powerful performance.

Ultrasound Nodule Segmentation Using Asymmetric Learning with Simple Clinical Annotation

Recent advances in deep learning have greatly facilitated the automated segmentation of ultrasound images, which is essential for nodule morphological analysis. Nevertheless, most existing methods depend on extensive and precise annotations by domain experts, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this study, we suggest using simple aspect ratio annotations directly from ultrasound clinical diagnoses for automated nodule segmentation. Especially, an asymmetric learning framework is developed by extending the aspect ratio annotations with two types of pseudo labels, i.e., conservative labels and radical labels, to train two asymmetric segmentation networks simultaneously. Subsequently, a conservative-radical-balance strategy (CRBS) strategy is proposed to complementally combine radical and conservative labels. An inconsistency-aware dynamically mixed pseudo-labels supervision (IDMPS) module is introduced to address the challenges of over-segmentation and under-segmentation caused by the two types of labels. To further leverage the spatial prior knowledge provided by clinical annotations, we also present a novel loss function namely the clinical anatomy prior loss. Extensive experiments on two clinically collected ultrasound datasets (thyroid and breast) demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method, which can achieve comparable and even better performance than fully supervised methods using ground truth annotations.

CTC Blank Triggered Dynamic Layer-Skipping for Efficient CTC-based Speech Recognition

Deploying end-to-end speech recognition models with limited computing resources remains challenging, despite their impressive performance. Given the gradual increase in model size and the wide range of model applications, selectively executing model components for different inputs to improve the inference efficiency is of great interest. In this paper, we propose a dynamic layer-skipping method that leverages the CTC blank output from intermediate layers to trigger the skipping of the last few encoder layers for frames with high blank probabilities. Furthermore, we factorize the CTC output distribution and perform knowledge distillation on intermediate layers to reduce computation and improve recognition accuracy. Experimental results show that by utilizing the CTC blank, the encoder layer depth can be adjusted dynamically, resulting in 29% acceleration of the CTC model inference with minor performance degradation.