Point Tracking in Surgery--The 2024 Surgical Tattoos in Infrared (STIR) Challenge

Understanding tissue motion in surgery is crucial to enable applications in downstream tasks such as segmentation, 3D reconstruction, virtual tissue landmarking, autonomous probe-based scanning, and subtask autonomy. Labeled data are essential to enabling algorithms in these downstream tasks since they allow us to quantify and train algorithms. This paper introduces a point tracking challenge to address this, wherein participants can submit their algorithms for quantification. The submitted algorithms are evaluated using a dataset named surgical tattoos in infrared (STIR), with the challenge aptly named the STIR Challenge 2024. The STIR Challenge 2024 comprises two quantitative components: accuracy and efficiency. The accuracy component tests the accuracy of algorithms on in vivo and ex vivo sequences. The efficiency component tests the latency of algorithm inference. The challenge was conducted as a part of MICCAI EndoVis 2024. In this challenge, we had 8 total teams, with 4 teams submitting before and 4 submitting after challenge day. This paper details the STIR Challenge 2024, which serves to move the field towards more accurate and efficient algorithms for spatial understanding in surgery. In this paper we summarize the design, submissions, and results from the challenge. The challenge dataset is available here: https://zenodo.org/records/14803158 , and the code for baseline models and metric calculation is available here: https://github.com/athaddius/STIRMetrics

EndoLRMGS: Complete Endoscopic Scene Reconstruction combining Large Reconstruction Modelling and Gaussian Splatting

Complete reconstruction of surgical scenes is crucial for robot-assisted surgery (RAS). Deep depth estimation is promising but existing works struggle with depth discontinuities, resulting in noisy predictions at object boundaries and do not achieve complete reconstruction omitting occluded surfaces. To address these issues we propose EndoLRMGS, that combines Large Reconstruction Modelling (LRM) and Gaussian Splatting (GS), for complete surgical scene reconstruction. GS reconstructs deformable tissues and LRM generates 3D models for surgical tools while position and scale are subsequently optimized by introducing orthogonal perspective joint projection optimization (OPjPO) to enhance accuracy. In experiments on four surgical videos from three public datasets, our method improves the Intersection-over-union (IoU) of tool 3D models in 2D projections by>40%. Additionally, EndoLRMGS improves the PSNR of the tools projection from 3.82% to 11.07%. Tissue rendering quality also improves, with PSNR increasing from 0.46% to 49.87%, and SSIM from 1.53% to 29.21% across all test videos.

3D Acetabular Surface Reconstruction from 2D Pre-operative X-ray Images using SRVF Elastic Registration and Deformation Graph

Accurate and reliable selection of the appropriate acetabular cup size is crucial for restoring joint biomechanics in total hip arthroplasty (THA). This paper proposes a novel framework that integrates square-root velocity function (SRVF)-based elastic shape registration technique with an embedded deformation (ED) graph approach to reconstruct the 3D articular surface of the acetabulum by fusing multiple views of 2D pre-operative pelvic X-ray images and a hemispherical surface model. The SRVF-based elastic registration establishes 2D-3D correspondences between the parametric hemispherical model and X-ray images, and the ED framework incorporates the SRVF-derived correspondences as constraints to optimize the 3D acetabular surface reconstruction using nonlinear least-squares optimization. Validations using both simulation and real patient datasets are performed to demonstrate the robustness and the potential clinical value of the proposed algorithm. The reconstruction result can assist surgeons in selecting the correct acetabular cup on the first attempt in primary THA, minimising the need for revision surgery.

Text-Driven Diffusion Model for Sign Language Production

We introduce the hfut-lmc team's solution to the SLRTP Sign Production Challenge. The challenge aims to generate semantically aligned sign language pose sequences from text inputs. To this end, we propose a Text-driven Diffusion Model (TDM) framework. During the training phase, TDM utilizes an encoder to encode text sequences and incorporates them into the diffusion model as conditional input to generate sign pose sequences. To guarantee the high quality and accuracy of the generated pose sequences, we utilize two key loss functions. The joint loss function L_{joint} is used to precisely measure and minimize the differences between the joint positions of the generated pose sequences and those of the ground truth. Similarly, the bone orientation loss function L_{bone} is instrumental in ensuring that the orientation of the bones in the generated poses aligns with the actual, correct orientations. In the inference stage, the TDM framework takes on a different yet equally important task. It starts with noisy sequences and, under the strict constraints of the text conditions, gradually refines and generates semantically consistent sign language pose sequences. Our carefully designed framework performs well on the sign language production task, and our solution achieves a BLEU-1 score of 20.17, placing second in the challenge.

DOEI: Dual Optimization of Embedding Information for Attention-Enhanced Class Activation Maps

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) typically utilizes limited semantic annotations to obtain initial Class Activation Maps (CAMs). However, due to the inadequate coupling between class activation responses and semantic information in high-dimensional space, the CAM is prone to object co-occurrence or under-activation, resulting in inferior recognition accuracy. To tackle this issue, we propose DOEI, Dual Optimization of Embedding Information, a novel approach that reconstructs embedding representations through semantic-aware attention weight matrices to optimize the expression capability of embedding information. Specifically, DOEI amplifies tokens with high confidence and suppresses those with low confidence during the class-to-patch interaction. This alignment of activation responses with semantic information strengthens the propagation and decoupling of target features, enabling the generated embeddings to more accurately represent target features in high-level semantic space. In addition, we propose a hybrid-feature alignment module in DOEI that combines RGB values, embedding-guided features, and self-attention weights to increase the reliability of candidate tokens. Comprehensive experiments show that DOEI is an effective plug-and-play module that empowers state-of-the-art visual transformer-based WSSS models to significantly improve the quality of CAMs and segmentation performance on popular benchmarks, including PASCAL VOC (+3.6%, +1.5%, +1.2% mIoU) and MS COCO (+1.2%, +1.6% mIoU). Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/DOEI.

Interleaved Block-based Learned Image Compression with Feature Enhancement and Quantization Error Compensation

In recent years, learned image compression (LIC) methods have achieved significant performance improvements. However, obtaining a more compact latent representation and reducing the impact of quantization errors remain key challenges in the field of LIC. To address these challenges, we propose a feature extraction module, a feature refinement module, and a feature enhancement module. Our feature extraction module shuffles the pixels in the image, splits the resulting image into sub-images, and extracts coarse features from the sub-images. Our feature refinement module stacks the coarse features and uses an attention refinement block composed of concatenated three-dimensional convolution residual blocks to learn more compact latent features by exploiting correlations across channels, within sub-images (intra-sub-image correlations), and across sub-images (inter-sub-image correlations). Our feature enhancement module reduces information loss in the decoded features following quantization. We also propose a quantization error compensation module that mitigates the quantization mismatch between training and testing. Our four modules can be readily integrated into state-of-the-art LIC methods. Experiments show that combining our modules with Tiny-LIC outperforms existing LIC methods and image compression standards in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) on the Kodak dataset and the CLIC dataset.

Towards Understanding Fine-Tuning Mechanisms of LLMs via Circuit Analysis

Fine-tuning significantly improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper aims to provide an in-depth interpretation of the fine-tuning process through circuit analysis, a popular tool in Mechanistic Interpretability (MI). Unlike previous studies \cite{prakash2024finetuningenhancesexistingmechanisms,chhabra2024neuroplasticity} that focus on tasks where pre-trained models already perform well, we develop a set of mathematical tasks where fine-tuning yields substantial performance gains, which are closer to the practical setting. In our experiments, we identify circuits at various checkpoints during fine-tuning and examine the interplay between circuit analysis, fine-tuning methods, and task complexities. First, we find that while circuits maintain high node similarity before and after fine-tuning, their edges undergo significant changes, which is in contrast to the previous work \cite{prakash2024finetuningenhancesexistingmechanisms,chhabra2024neuroplasticity} that show circuits only add some additional components after fine-tuning. Based on these observations, we develop a circuit-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method, which assigns ranks to layers based on edge changes in the circuits. Experimental results demonstrate that our circuit-based LoRA algorithm achieves an average performance improvement of 2.46\% over standard LoRA with similar parameter sizes. Furthermore, we explore how combining circuits from subtasks can enhance fine-tuning in compositional tasks, providing new insights into the design of such tasks and deepening the understanding of circuit dynamics and fine-tuning mechanisms.

Fast Omni-Directional Image Super-Resolution: Adapting the Implicit Image Function with Pixel and Semantic-Wise Spherical Geometric Priors

In the context of Omni-Directional Image (ODI) Super-Resolution (SR), the unique challenge arises from the non-uniform oversampling characteristics caused by EquiRectangular Projection (ERP). Considerable efforts in designing complex spherical convolutions or polyhedron reprojection offer significant performance improvements but at the expense of cumbersome processing procedures and slower inference speeds. Under these circumstances, this paper proposes a new ODI-SR model characterized by its capacity to perform Fast and Arbitrary-scale ODI-SR processes, denoted as FAOR. The key innovation lies in adapting the implicit image function from the planar image domain to the ERP image domain by incorporating spherical geometric priors at both the latent representation and image reconstruction stages, in a low-overhead manner. Specifically, at the latent representation stage, we adopt a pair of pixel-wise and semantic-wise sphere-to-planar distortion maps to perform affine transformations on the latent representation, thereby incorporating it with spherical properties. Moreover, during the image reconstruction stage, we introduce a geodesic-based resampling strategy, aligning the implicit image function with spherical geometrics without introducing additional parameters. As a result, the proposed FAOR outperforms the state-of-the-art ODI-SR models with a much faster inference speed. Extensive experimental results and ablation studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of our design.

Show-o Turbo: Towards Accelerated Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

There has been increasing research interest in building unified multimodal understanding and generation models, among which Show-o stands as a notable representative, demonstrating great promise for both text-to-image and image-to-text generation. The inference of Show-o involves progressively denoising image tokens and autoregressively decoding text tokens, and hence, unfortunately, suffers from inefficiency issues from both sides. This paper introduces Show-o Turbo to bridge the gap. We first identify a unified denoising perspective for the generation of images and text in Show-o based on the parallel decoding of text tokens. We then propose to extend consistency distillation (CD), a qualified approach for shortening the denoising process of diffusion models, to the multimodal denoising trajectories of Show-o. We introduce a trajectory segmentation strategy and a curriculum learning procedure to improve the training convergence. Empirically, in text-to-image generation, Show-o Turbo displays a GenEval score of 0.625 at 4 sampling steps without using classifier-free guidance (CFG), outperforming that of the original Show-o with 8 steps and CFG; in image-to-text generation, Show-o Turbo exhibits a 1.5x speedup without significantly sacrificing performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/Show-o-Turbo.

TransformDAS: Mapping Φ-OTDR Signals to Riemannian Manifold for Robust Classification

Phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry ({\Phi}-OTDR) is a widely used distributed fiber optic sensing system in engineering. Machine learning algorithms for {\Phi}-OTDR event classification require high volumes and quality of datasets; however, high-quality datasets are currently extremely scarce in the field, leading to a lack of robustness in models, which is manifested by higher false alarm rates in real-world scenarios. One promising approach to address this issue is to augment existing data using generative models combined with a small amount of real-world data. We explored mapping both {\Phi}-OTDR features in a GAN-based generative pipeline and signal features in a Transformer classifier to hyperbolic space to seek more effective model generalization. The results indicate that state-of-the-art models exhibit stronger generalization performance and lower false alarm rates in real-world scenarios when trained on augmented datasets. TransformDAS, in particular, demonstrates the best classification performance, highlighting the benefits of Riemannian manifold mapping in {\Phi}-OTDR data generation and model classification.