ScribbleVS: Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Dynamic Competitive Pseudo Label Selection

In clinical medicine, precise image segmentation can provide substantial support to clinicians. However, achieving such precision often requires a large amount of finely annotated data, which can be costly. Scribble annotation presents a more efficient alternative, boosting labeling efficiency. However, utilizing such minimal supervision for medical image segmentation training, especially with scribble annotations, poses significant challenges. To address these challenges, we introduce ScribbleVS, a novel framework that leverages scribble annotations. We introduce a Regional Pseudo Labels Diffusion Module to expand the scope of supervision and reduce the impact of noise present in pseudo labels. Additionally, we propose a Dynamic Competitive Selection module for enhanced refinement in selecting pseudo labels. Experiments conducted on the ACDC and MSCMRseg datasets have demonstrated promising results, achieving performance levels that even exceed those of fully supervised methodologies. The codes of this study are available at https://github.com/ortonwang/ScribbleVS.

Revisiting Network Perturbation for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

In semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS), weak-to-strong consistency regularization techniques are widely utilized in recent works, typically combined with input-level and feature-level perturbations. However, the integration between weak-to-strong consistency regularization and network perturbation has been relatively rare. We note several problems with existing network perturbations in SSS that may contribute to this phenomenon. By revisiting network perturbations, we introduce a new approach for network perturbation to expand the existing weak-to-strong consistency regularization for unlabeled data. Additionally, we present a volatile learning process for labeled data, which is uncommon in existing research. Building upon previous work that includes input-level and feature-level perturbations, we present MLPMatch (Multi-Level-Perturbation Match), an easy-to-implement and efficient framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. MLPMatch has been validated on the Pascal VOC and Cityscapes datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code is available from https://github.com/LlistenL/MLPMatch.

Synergy-Guided Regional Supervision of Pseudo Labels for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised learning has received considerable attention for its potential to leverage abundant unlabeled data to enhance model robustness. Pseudo labeling is a widely used strategy in semi supervised learning. However, existing methods often suffer from noise contamination, which can undermine model performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel Synergy-Guided Regional Supervision of Pseudo Labels (SGRS-Net) framework. Built upon the mean teacher network, we employ a Mix Augmentation module to enhance the unlabeled data. By evaluating the synergy before and after augmentation, we strategically partition the pseudo labels into distinct regions. Additionally, we introduce a Region Loss Evaluation module to assess the loss across each delineated area. Extensive experiments conducted on the LA dataset have demonstrated superior performance over state-of-the-art techniques, underscoring the efficiency and practicality of our framework.

Pseudo-labeling with Keyword Refining for Few-Supervised Video Captioning

Video captioning generate a sentence that describes the video content. Existing methods always require a number of captions (\eg, 10 or 20) per video to train the model, which is quite costly. In this work, we explore the possibility of using only one or very few ground-truth sentences, and introduce a new task named few-supervised video captioning. Specifically, we propose a few-supervised video captioning framework that consists of lexically constrained pseudo-labeling module and keyword-refined captioning module. Unlike the random sampling in natural language processing that may cause invalid modifications (\ie, edit words), the former module guides the model to edit words using some actions (\eg, copy, replace, insert, and delete) by a pretrained token-level classifier, and then fine-tunes candidate sentences by a pretrained language model. Meanwhile, the former employs the repetition penalized sampling to encourage the model to yield concise pseudo-labeled sentences with less repetition, and selects the most relevant sentences upon a pretrained video-text model. Moreover, to keep semantic consistency between pseudo-labeled sentences and video content, we develop the transformer-based keyword refiner with the video-keyword gated fusion strategy to emphasize more on relevant words. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach in both few-supervised and fully-supervised scenarios. The code implementation is available at https://github.com/mlvccn/PKG_VidCap

Exploring structure diversity in atomic resolution microscopy with graph neural networks

The emergence of deep learning (DL) has provided great opportunities for the high-throughput analysis of atomic-resolution micrographs. However, the DL models trained by image patches in fixed size generally lack efficiency and flexibility when processing micrographs containing diversified atomic configurations. Herein, inspired by the similarity between the atomic structures and graphs, we describe a few-shot learning framework based on an equivariant graph neural network (EGNN) to analyze a library of atomic structures (e.g., vacancies, phases, grain boundaries, doping, etc.), showing significantly promoted robustness and three orders of magnitude reduced computing parameters compared to the image-driven DL models, which is especially evident for those aggregated vacancy lines with flexible lattice distortion. Besides, the intuitiveness of graphs enables quantitative and straightforward extraction of the atomic-scale structural features in batches, thus statistically unveiling the self-assembly dynamics of vacancy lines under electron beam irradiation. A versatile model toolkit is established by integrating EGNN sub-models for single structure recognition to process images involving varied configurations in the form of a task chain, leading to the discovery of novel doping configurations with superior electrocatalytic properties for hydrogen evolution reactions. This work provides a powerful tool to explore structure diversity in a fast, accurate, and intelligent manner.

Temporal-Enhanced Multimodal Transformer for Referring Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation

Referring multi-object tracking (RMOT) is an emerging cross-modal task that aims to locate an arbitrary number of target objects and maintain their identities referred by a language expression in a video. This intricate task involves the reasoning of linguistic and visual modalities, along with the temporal association of target objects. However, the seminal work employs only loose feature fusion and overlooks the utilization of long-term information on tracked objects. In this study, we introduce a compact Transformer-based method, termed TenRMOT. We conduct feature fusion at both encoding and decoding stages to fully exploit the advantages of Transformer architecture. Specifically, we incrementally perform cross-modal fusion layer-by-layer during the encoding phase. In the decoding phase, we utilize language-guided queries to probe memory features for accurate prediction of the desired objects. Moreover, we introduce a query update module that explicitly leverages temporal prior information of the tracked objects to enhance the consistency of their trajectories. In addition, we introduce a novel task called Referring Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation (RMOTS) and construct a new dataset named Ref-KITTI Segmentation. Our dataset consists of 18 videos with 818 expressions, and each expression averages 10.7 masks, which poses a greater challenge compared to the typical single mask in most existing referring video segmentation datasets. TenRMOT demonstrates superior performance on both the referring multi-object tracking and the segmentation tasks.

WMCodec: End-to-End Neural Speech Codec with Deep Watermarking for Authenticity Verification

Recent advances in speech spoofing necessitate stronger verification mechanisms in neural speech codecs to ensure authenticity. Current methods embed numerical watermarks before compression and extract them from reconstructed speech for verification, but face limitations such as separate training processes for the watermark and codec, and insufficient cross-modal information integration, leading to reduced watermark imperceptibility, extraction accuracy, and capacity. To address these issues, we propose WMCodec, the first neural speech codec to jointly train compression-reconstruction and watermark embedding-extraction in an end-to-end manner, optimizing both imperceptibility and extractability of the watermark. Furthermore, We design an iterative Attention Imprint Unit (AIU) for deeper feature integration of watermark and speech, reducing the impact of quantization noise on the watermark. Experimental results show WMCodec outperforms AudioSeal with Encodec in most quality metrics for watermark imperceptibility and consistently exceeds both AudioSeal with Encodec and reinforced TraceableSpeech in extraction accuracy of watermark. At bandwidth of 6 kbps with a watermark capacity of 16 bps, WMCodec maintains over 99% extraction accuracy under common attacks, demonstrating strong robustness.

DPI-TTS: Directional Patch Interaction for Fast-Converging and Style Temporal Modeling in Text-to-Speech

In recent years, speech diffusion models have advanced rapidly. Alongside the widely used U-Net architecture, transformer-based models such as the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) have also gained attention. However, current DiT speech models treat Mel spectrograms as general images, which overlooks the specific acoustic properties of speech. To address these limitations, we propose a method called Directional Patch Interaction for Text-to-Speech (DPI-TTS), which builds on DiT and achieves fast training without compromising accuracy. Notably, DPI-TTS employs a low-to-high frequency, frame-by-frame progressive inference approach that aligns more closely with acoustic properties, enhancing the naturalness of the generated speech. Additionally, we introduce a fine-grained style temporal modeling method that further improves speaker style similarity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method increases the training speed by nearly 2 times and significantly outperforms the baseline models.

Text Prompt is Not Enough: Sound Event Enhanced Prompt Adapter for Target Style Audio Generation

Current mainstream audio generation methods primarily rely on simple text prompts, often failing to capture the nuanced details necessary for multi-style audio generation. To address this limitation, the Sound Event Enhanced Prompt Adapter is proposed. Unlike traditional static global style transfer, this method extracts style embedding through cross-attention between text and reference audio for adaptive style control. Adaptive layer normalization is then utilized to enhance the model's capacity to express multiple styles. Additionally, the Sound Event Reference Style Transfer Dataset (SERST) is introduced for the proposed target style audio generation task, enabling dual-prompt audio generation using both text and audio references. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the model, achieving state-of-the-art Fr\'echet Distance of 26.94 and KL Divergence of 1.82, surpassing Tango, AudioLDM, and AudioGen. Furthermore, the generated audio shows high similarity to its corresponding audio reference. The demo, code, and dataset are publicly available.

LLM-GAN: Construct Generative Adversarial Network Through Large Language Models For Explainable Fake News Detection

Explainable fake news detection predicts the authenticity of news items with annotated explanations. Today, Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their powerful natural language understanding and explanation generation abilities. However, presenting LLMs for explainable fake news detection remains two main challenges. Firstly, fake news appears reasonable and could easily mislead LLMs, leaving them unable to understand the complex news-faking process. Secondly, utilizing LLMs for this task would generate both correct and incorrect explanations, which necessitates abundant labor in the loop. In this paper, we propose LLM-GAN, a novel framework that utilizes prompting mechanisms to enable an LLM to become Generator and Detector and for realistic fake news generation and detection. Our results demonstrate LLM-GAN's effectiveness in both prediction performance and explanation quality. We further showcase the integration of LLM-GAN to a cloud-native AI platform to provide better fake news detection service in the cloud.