UniTrans: A Unified Vertical Federated Knowledge Transfer Framework for Enhancing Cross-Hospital Collaboration

Cross-hospital collaboration has the potential to address disparities in medical resources across different regions. However, strict privacy regulations prohibit the direct sharing of sensitive patient information between hospitals. Vertical federated learning (VFL) offers a novel privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm that maximizes data utility across multiple hospitals. Traditional VFL methods, however, primarily benefit patients with overlapping data, leaving vulnerable non-overlapping patients without guaranteed improvements in medical prediction services. While some knowledge transfer techniques can enhance the prediction performance for non-overlapping patients, they fall short in addressing scenarios where overlapping and non-overlapping patients belong to different domains, resulting in challenges such as feature heterogeneity and label heterogeneity. To address these issues, we propose a novel unified vertical federated knowledge transfer framework (Unitrans). Our framework consists of three key steps. First, we extract the federated representation of overlapping patients by employing an effective vertical federated representation learning method to model multi-party joint features online. Next, each hospital learns a local knowledge transfer module offline, enabling the transfer of knowledge from the federated representation of overlapping patients to the enriched representation of local non-overlapping patients in a domain-adaptive manner. Finally, hospitals utilize these enriched local representations to enhance performance across various downstream medical prediction tasks. Experiments on real-world medical datasets validate the framework's dual effectiveness in both intra-domain and cross-domain knowledge transfer. The code of \method is available at \url{https://github.com/Chung-ju/Unitrans}.

Learning Flow Fields in Attention for Controllable Person Image Generation

Controllable person image generation aims to generate a person image conditioned on reference images, allowing precise control over the person's appearance or pose. However, prior methods often distort fine-grained textural details from the reference image, despite achieving high overall image quality. We attribute these distortions to inadequate attention to corresponding regions in the reference image. To address this, we thereby propose learning flow fields in attention (Leffa), which explicitly guides the target query to attend to the correct reference key in the attention layer during training. Specifically, it is realized via a regularization loss on top of the attention map within a diffusion-based baseline. Our extensive experiments show that Leffa achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling appearance (virtual try-on) and pose (pose transfer), significantly reducing fine-grained detail distortion while maintaining high image quality. Additionally, we show that our loss is model-agnostic and can be used to improve the performance of other diffusion models.

Stain-aware Domain Alignment for Imbalance Blood Cell Classification

Blood cell identification is critical for hematological analysis as it aids physicians in diagnosing various blood-related diseases. In real-world scenarios, blood cell image datasets often present the issues of domain shift and data imbalance, posing challenges for accurate blood cell identification. To address these issues, we propose a novel blood cell classification method termed SADA via stain-aware domain alignment. The primary objective of this work is to mine domain-invariant features in the presence of domain shifts and data imbalances. To accomplish this objective, we propose a stain-based augmentation approach and a local alignment constraint to learn domain-invariant features. Furthermore, we propose a domain-invariant supervised contrastive learning strategy to capture discriminative features. We decouple the training process into two stages of domain-invariant feature learning and classification training, alleviating the problem of data imbalance. Experiment results on four public blood cell datasets and a private real dataset collected from the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University demonstrate that SADA can achieve a new state-of-the-art baseline, which is superior to the existing cutting-edge methods with a big margin. The source code can be available at the URL (\url{https://github.com/AnoK3111/SADA}).

From Machine Learning to Machine Unlearning: Complying with GDPR's Right to be Forgotten while Maintaining Business Value of Predictive Models

Recent privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR) grant data subjects the `Right to Be Forgotten' (RTBF) and mandate companies to fulfill data erasure requests from data subjects. However, companies encounter great challenges in complying with the RTBF regulations, particularly when asked to erase specific training data from their well-trained predictive models. While researchers have introduced machine unlearning methods aimed at fast data erasure, these approaches often overlook maintaining model performance (e.g., accuracy), which can lead to financial losses and non-compliance with RTBF obligations. This work develops a holistic machine learning-to-unlearning framework, called Ensemble-based iTerative Information Distillation (ETID), to achieve efficient data erasure while preserving the business value of predictive models. ETID incorporates a new ensemble learning method to build an accurate predictive model that can facilitate handling data erasure requests. ETID also introduces an innovative distillation-based unlearning method tailored to the constructed ensemble model to enable efficient and effective data erasure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ETID outperforms various state-of-the-art methods and can deliver high-quality unlearned models with efficiency. We also highlight ETID's potential as a crucial tool for fostering a legitimate and thriving market for data and predictive services.

ChemSafetyBench: Benchmarking LLM Safety on Chemistry Domain

The advancement and extensive application of large language models (LLMs) have been remarkable, including their use in scientific research assistance. However, these models often generate scientifically incorrect or unsafe responses, and in some cases, they may encourage users to engage in dangerous behavior. To address this issue in the field of chemistry, we introduce ChemSafetyBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the accuracy and safety of LLM responses. ChemSafetyBench encompasses three key tasks: querying chemical properties, assessing the legality of chemical uses, and describing synthesis methods, each requiring increasingly deeper chemical knowledge. Our dataset has more than 30K samples across various chemical materials. We incorporate handcrafted templates and advanced jailbreaking scenarios to enhance task diversity. Our automated evaluation framework thoroughly assesses the safety, accuracy, and appropriateness of LLM responses. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs reveal notable strengths and critical vulnerabilities, underscoring the need for robust safety measures. ChemSafetyBench aims to be a pivotal tool in developing safer AI technologies in chemistry. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/HaochenZhao/SafeAgent4Chem. Warning: this paper contains discussions on the synthesis of controlled chemicals using AI models.

GSEditPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting Editing with Attention-based Progressive Localization

With the emergence of large-scale Text-to-Image(T2I) models and implicit 3D representations like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), many text-driven generative editing methods based on NeRF have appeared. However, the implicit encoding of geometric and textural information poses challenges in accurately locating and controlling objects during editing. Recently, significant advancements have been made in the editing methods of 3D Gaussian Splatting, a real-time rendering technology that relies on explicit representation. However, these methods still suffer from issues including inaccurate localization and limited manipulation over editing. To tackle these challenges, we propose GSEditPro, a novel 3D scene editing framework which allows users to perform various creative and precise editing using text prompts only. Leveraging the explicit nature of the 3D Gaussian distribution, we introduce an attention-based progressive localization module to add semantic labels to each Gaussian during rendering. This enables precise localization on editing areas by classifying Gaussians based on their relevance to the editing prompts derived from cross-attention layers of the T2I model. Furthermore, we present an innovative editing optimization method based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, obtaining stable and refined editing results through the guidance of Score Distillation Sampling and pseudo ground truth. We prove the efficacy of our method through extensive experiments.

StdGEN: Semantic-Decomposed 3D Character Generation from Single Images

We present StdGEN, an innovative pipeline for generating semantically decomposed high-quality 3D characters from single images, enabling broad applications in virtual reality, gaming, and filmmaking, etc. Unlike previous methods which struggle with limited decomposability, unsatisfactory quality, and long optimization times, StdGEN features decomposability, effectiveness and efficiency; i.e., it generates intricately detailed 3D characters with separated semantic components such as the body, clothes, and hair, in three minutes. At the core of StdGEN is our proposed Semantic-aware Large Reconstruction Model (S-LRM), a transformer-based generalizable model that jointly reconstructs geometry, color and semantics from multi-view images in a feed-forward manner. A differentiable multi-layer semantic surface extraction scheme is introduced to acquire meshes from hybrid implicit fields reconstructed by our S-LRM. Additionally, a specialized efficient multi-view diffusion model and an iterative multi-layer surface refinement module are integrated into the pipeline to facilitate high-quality, decomposable 3D character generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance in 3D anime character generation, surpassing existing baselines by a significant margin in geometry, texture and decomposability. StdGEN offers ready-to-use semantic-decomposed 3D characters and enables flexible customization for a wide range of applications. Project page: https://stdgen.github.io

MarDini: Masked Autoregressive Diffusion for Video Generation at Scale

We introduce MarDini, a new family of video diffusion models that integrate the advantages of masked auto-regression (MAR) into a unified diffusion model (DM) framework. Here, MAR handles temporal planning, while DM focuses on spatial generation in an asymmetric network design: i) a MAR-based planning model containing most of the parameters generates planning signals for each masked frame using low-resolution input; ii) a lightweight generation model uses these signals to produce high-resolution frames via diffusion de-noising. MarDini's MAR enables video generation conditioned on any number of masked frames at any frame positions: a single model can handle video interpolation (e.g., masking middle frames), image-to-video generation (e.g., masking from the second frame onward), and video expansion (e.g., masking half the frames). The efficient design allocates most of the computational resources to the low-resolution planning model, making computationally expensive but important spatio-temporal attention feasible at scale. MarDini sets a new state-of-the-art for video interpolation; meanwhile, within few inference steps, it efficiently generates videos on par with those of much more expensive advanced image-to-video models.

Swarm Intelligence in Geo-Localization: A Multi-Agent Large Vision-Language Model Collaborative Framework

Visual geo-localization demands in-depth knowledge and advanced reasoning skills to associate images with real-world geographic locations precisely. In general, traditional methods based on data-matching are hindered by the impracticality of storing adequate visual records of global landmarks. Recently, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated the capability of geo-localization through Visual Question Answering (VQA), enabling a solution that does not require external geo-tagged image records. However, the performance of a single LVLM is still limited by its intrinsic knowledge and reasoning capabilities. Along this line, in this paper, we introduce a novel visual geo-localization framework called \name\ that integrates the inherent knowledge of multiple LVLM agents via inter-agent communication to achieve effective geo-localization of images. Furthermore, our framework employs a dynamic learning strategy to optimize the communication patterns among agents, reducing unnecessary discussions among agents and improving the efficiency of the framework. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we construct GeoGlobe, a novel dataset for visual geo-localization tasks. Extensive testing on the dataset demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

KAN4TSF: Are KAN and KAN-based models Effective for Time Series Forecasting?

Time series forecasting is a crucial task that predicts the future values of variables based on historical data. Time series forecasting techniques have been developing in parallel with the machine learning community, from early statistical learning methods to current deep learning methods. Although existing methods have made significant progress, they still suffer from two challenges. The mathematical theory of mainstream deep learning-based methods does not establish a clear relation between network sizes and fitting capabilities, and these methods often lack interpretability. To this end, we introduce the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) into time series forecasting research, which has better mathematical properties and interpretability. First, we propose the Reversible Mixture of KAN experts (RMoK) model, which is a KAN-based model for time series forecasting. RMoK uses a mixture-of-experts structure to assign variables to KAN experts. Then, we compare performance, integration, and speed between RMoK and various baselines on real-world datasets, and the experimental results show that RMoK achieves the best performance in most cases. And we find the relationship between temporal feature weights and data periodicity through visualization, which roughly explains RMoK's mechanism. Thus, we conclude that KAN and KAN-based models (RMoK) are effective in time series forecasting. Code is available at KAN4TSF: https://github.com/2448845600/KAN4TSF.