Universal Incremental Learning: Mitigating Confusion from Inter- and Intra-task Distribution Randomness

Incremental learning (IL) aims to overcome catastrophic forgetting of previous tasks while learning new ones. Existing IL methods make strong assumptions that the incoming task type will either only increases new classes or domains (i.e. Class IL, Domain IL), or increase by a static scale in a class- and domain-agnostic manner (i.e. Versatile IL (VIL)), which greatly limit their applicability in the unpredictable and dynamic wild. In this work, we investigate $\textbf{Universal Incremental Learning (UIL)}$, where a model neither knows which new classes or domains will increase along sequential tasks, nor the scale of the increments within each task. This uncertainty prevents the model from confidently learning knowledge from all task distributions and symmetrically focusing on the diverse knowledge within each task distribution. Consequently, UIL presents a more general and realistic IL scenario, making the model face confusion arising from inter-task and intra-task distribution randomness. To $\textbf{Mi}$tigate both $\textbf{Co}$nfusion, we propose a simple yet effective framework for UIL, named $\textbf{MiCo}$. At the inter-task distribution level, we employ a multi-objective learning scheme to enforce accurate and deterministic predictions, and its effectiveness is further enhanced by a direction recalibration module that reduces conflicting gradients. Moreover, at the intra-task distribution level, we introduce a magnitude recalibration module to alleviate asymmetrical optimization towards imbalanced class distribution. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods in both the UIL scenario and the VIL scenario. Our code will be available at $\href{https://github.com/rolsheng/UIL}{here}$.

MM-Retinal V2: Transfer an Elite Knowledge Spark into Fundus Vision-Language Pretraining

Vision-language pretraining (VLP) has been investigated to generalize across diverse downstream tasks for fundus image analysis. Although recent methods showcase promising achievements, they significantly rely on large-scale private image-text data but pay less attention to the pretraining manner, which limits their further advancements. In this work, we introduce MM-Retinal V2, a high-quality image-text paired dataset comprising CFP, FFA, and OCT image modalities. Then, we propose a novel fundus vision-language pretraining model, namely KeepFIT V2, which is pretrained by integrating knowledge from the elite data spark into categorical public datasets. Specifically, a preliminary textual pretraining is adopted to equip the text encoder with primarily ophthalmic textual knowledge. Moreover, a hybrid image-text knowledge injection module is designed for knowledge transfer, which is essentially based on a combination of global semantic concepts from contrastive learning and local appearance details from generative learning. Extensive experiments across zero-shot, few-shot, and linear probing settings highlight the generalization and transferability of KeepFIT V2, delivering performance competitive to state-of-the-art fundus VLP models trained on large-scale private image-text datasets. Our dataset and model are publicly available via https://github.com/lxirich/MM-Retinal.

Self-adaptive vision-language model for 3D segmentation of pulmonary artery and vein

Accurate segmentation of pulmonary structures iscrucial in clinical diagnosis, disease study, and treatment planning. Significant progress has been made in deep learning-based segmentation techniques, but most require much labeled data for training. Consequently, developing precise segmentation methods that demand fewer labeled datasets is paramount in medical image analysis. The emergence of pre-trained vision-language foundation models, such as CLIP, recently opened the door for universal computer vision tasks. Exploiting the generalization ability of these pre-trained foundation models on downstream tasks, such as segmentation, leads to unexpected performance with a relatively small amount of labeled data. However, exploring these models for pulmonary artery-vein segmentation is still limited. This paper proposes a novel framework called Language-guided self-adaptive Cross-Attention Fusion Framework. Our method adopts pre-trained CLIP as a strong feature extractor for generating the segmentation of 3D CT scans, while adaptively aggregating the cross-modality of text and image representations. We propose a s pecially designed adapter module to fine-tune pre-trained CLIP with a self-adaptive learning strategy to effectively fuse the two modalities of embeddings. We extensively validate our method on a local dataset, which is the largest pulmonary artery-vein CT dataset to date and consists of 718 labeled data in total. The experiments show that our method outperformed other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our data and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Self-Calibrated Dual Contrasting for Annotation-Efficient Bacteria Raman Spectroscopy Clustering and Classification

Raman scattering is based on molecular vibration spectroscopy and provides a powerful technology for pathogenic bacteria diagnosis using the unique molecular fingerprint information of a substance. The integration of deep learning technology has significantly improved the efficiency and accuracy of intelligent Raman spectroscopy (RS) recognition. However, the current RS recognition methods based on deep neural networks still require the annotation of a large amount of spectral data, which is labor-intensive. This paper presents a novel annotation-efficient Self-Calibrated Dual Contrasting (SCDC) method for RS recognition that operates effectively with few or no annotation. Our core motivation is to represent the spectrum from two different perspectives in two distinct subspaces: embedding and category. The embedding perspective captures instance-level information, while the category perspective reflects category-level information. Accordingly, we have implemented a dual contrastive learning approach from two perspectives to obtain discriminative representations, which are applicable for Raman spectroscopy recognition under both unsupervised and semi-supervised learning conditions. Furthermore, a self-calibration mechanism is proposed to enhance robustness. Validation of the identification task on three large-scale bacterial Raman spectroscopy datasets demonstrates that our SCDC method achieves robust recognition performance with very few (5$\%$ or 10$\%$) or no annotations, highlighting the potential of the proposed method for biospectral identification in annotation-efficient clinical scenarios.

Enhancing Large-scale UAV Route Planing with Global and Local Features via Reinforcement Graph Fusion

Numerous remarkable advancements have been made in accuracy, speed, and parallelism for solving the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Route Planing (UAVRP). However, existing UAVRP solvers face challenges when attempting to scale effectively and efficiently for larger instances. In this paper, we present a generalization framework that enables current UAVRP solvers to robustly extend their capabilities to larger instances, accommodating up to 10,000 points, using widely recognized test sets. The UAVRP under a large number of patrol points is a typical large-scale TSP problem.Our proposed framework comprises three distinct steps. Firstly, we employ Delaunay triangulation to extract subgraphs from large instances while preserving global features. Secondly, we utilize an embedded TSP solver to obtain sub-results, followed by graph fusion. Finally, we implement a decoding strategy customizable to the user's requirements, resulting in high-quality solutions, complemented by a warming-up process for the heatmap. To demonstrate the flexibility of our approach, we integrate two representative TSP solvers into our framework and conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis against existing algorithms using large TSP benchmark datasets. The results unequivocally demonstrate that our framework efficiently scales existing TSP solvers to handle large instances and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, since our proposed framework does not necessitate additional training or fine-tuning, we believe that its generality can significantly advance research on end-to-end UAVRP solvers, enabling the application of a broader range of methods to real-world scenarios.

Learnable Prompting SAM-induced Knowledge Distillation for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

The limited availability of labeled data has driven advancements in semi-supervised learning for medical image segmentation. Modern large-scale models tailored for general segmentation, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have revealed robust generalization capabilities. However, applying these models directly to medical image segmentation still exposes performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a learnable prompting SAM-induced Knowledge distillation framework (KnowSAM) for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Firstly, we propose a Multi-view Co-training (MC) strategy that employs two distinct sub-networks to employ a co-teaching paradigm, resulting in more robust outcomes. Secondly, we present a Learnable Prompt Strategy (LPS) to dynamically produce dense prompts and integrate an adapter to fine-tune SAM specifically for medical image segmentation tasks. Moreover, we propose SAM-induced Knowledge Distillation (SKD) to transfer useful knowledge from SAM to two sub-networks, enabling them to learn from SAM's predictions and alleviate the effects of incorrect pseudo-labels during training. Notably, the predictions generated by our subnets are used to produce mask prompts for SAM, facilitating effective inter-module information exchange. Extensive experimental results on various medical segmentation tasks demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised segmentation approaches. Crucially, our SAM distillation framework can be seamlessly integrated into other semi-supervised segmentation methods to enhance performance. The code will be released upon acceptance of this manuscript at: https://github.com/taozh2017/KnowSAM

Bridging the User-side Knowledge Gap in Knowledge-aware Recommendations with Large Language Models

In recent years, knowledge graphs have been integrated into recommender systems as item-side auxiliary information, enhancing recommendation accuracy. However, constructing and integrating structural user-side knowledge remains a significant challenge due to the improper granularity and inherent scarcity of user-side features. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential to bridge this gap by leveraging their human behavior understanding and extensive real-world knowledge. Nevertheless, integrating LLM-generated information into recommender systems presents challenges, including the risk of noisy information and the need for additional knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based user-side knowledge inference method alongside a carefully designed recommendation framework to address these challenges. Our approach employs LLMs to infer user interests based on historical behaviors, integrating this user-side information with item-side and collaborative data to construct a hybrid structure: the Collaborative Interest Knowledge Graph (CIKG). Furthermore, we propose a CIKG-based recommendation framework that includes a user interest reconstruction module and a cross-domain contrastive learning module to mitigate potential noise and facilitate knowledge transfer. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of our method. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to competitive baselines, particularly for users with sparse interactions.

CALA: A Class-Aware Logit Adapter for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) defines a practical but challenging task where models are required to continuously learn novel concepts with only a few training samples. Due to data scarcity, existing FSCIL methods resort to training a backbone with abundant base data and then keeping it frozen afterward. However, the above operation often causes the backbone to overfit to base classes while overlooking the novel ones, leading to severe confusion between them. To address this issue, we propose Class-Aware Logit Adapter (CALA). Our method involves a lightweight adapter that learns to rectify biased predictions through a pseudo-incremental learning paradigm. In the real FSCIL process, we use the learned adapter to dynamically generate robust balancing factors. These factors can adjust confused novel instances back to their true label space based on their similarity to base classes. Specifically, when confusion is more likely to occur in novel instances that closely resemble base classes, greater rectification is required. Notably, CALA operates on the classifier level, preserving the original feature space, thus it can be flexibly plugged into most of the existing FSCIL works for improved performance. Experiments on three benchmark datasets consistently validate the effectiveness and flexibility of CALA. Codes will be available upon acceptance.

Bringing Multimodality to Amazon Visual Search System

Image to image matching has been well studied in the computer vision community. Previous studies mainly focus on training a deep metric learning model matching visual patterns between the query image and gallery images. In this study, we show that pure image-to-image matching suffers from false positives caused by matching to local visual patterns. To alleviate this issue, we propose to leverage recent advances in vision-language pretraining research. Specifically, we introduce additional image-text alignment losses into deep metric learning, which serve as constraints to the image-to-image matching loss. With additional alignments between the text (e.g., product title) and image pairs, the model can learn concepts from both modalities explicitly, which avoids matching low-level visual features. We progressively develop two variants, a 3-tower and a 4-tower model, where the latter takes one more short text query input. Through extensive experiments, we show that this change leads to a substantial improvement to the image to image matching problem. We further leveraged this model for multimodal search, which takes both image and reformulation text queries to improve search quality. Both offline and online experiments show strong improvements on the main metrics. Specifically, we see 4.95% relative improvement on image matching click through rate with the 3-tower model and 1.13% further improvement from the 4-tower model.

DiffRaman: A Conditional Latent Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Bacterial Raman Spectroscopy Identification Under Limited Data Conditions

Raman spectroscopy has attracted significant attention in various biochemical detection fields, especially in the rapid identification of pathogenic bacteria. The integration of this technology with deep learning to facilitate automated bacterial Raman spectroscopy diagnosis has emerged as a key focus in recent research. However, the diagnostic performance of existing deep learning methods largely depends on a sufficient dataset, and in scenarios where there is a limited availability of Raman spectroscopy data, it is inadequate to fully optimize the numerous parameters of deep neural networks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a data generation method utilizing deep generative models to expand the data volume and enhance the recognition accuracy of bacterial Raman spectra. Specifically, we introduce DiffRaman, a conditional latent denoising diffusion probability model for Raman spectra generation. Experimental results demonstrate that synthetic bacterial Raman spectra generated by DiffRaman can effectively emulate real experimental spectra, thereby enhancing the performance of diagnostic models, especially under conditions of limited data. Furthermore, compared to existing generative models, the proposed DiffRaman offers improvements in both generation quality and computational efficiency. Our DiffRaman approach offers a well-suited solution for automated bacteria Raman spectroscopy diagnosis in data-scarce scenarios, offering new insights into alleviating the labor of spectroscopic measurements and enhancing rare bacteria identification.