Diffusion Actor-Critic with Entropy Regulator

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven highly effective in addressing complex decision-making and control tasks. However, in most traditional RL algorithms, the policy is typically parameterized as a diagonal Gaussian distribution with learned mean and variance, which constrains their capability to acquire complex policies. In response to this problem, we propose an online RL algorithm termed diffusion actor-critic with entropy regulator (DACER). This algorithm conceptualizes the reverse process of the diffusion model as a novel policy function and leverages the capability of the diffusion model to fit multimodal distributions, thereby enhancing the representational capacity of the policy. Since the distribution of the diffusion policy lacks an analytical expression, its entropy cannot be determined analytically. To mitigate this, we propose a method to estimate the entropy of the diffusion policy utilizing Gaussian mixture model. Building on the estimated entropy, we can learn a parameter $\alpha$ that modulates the degree of exploration and exploitation. Parameter $\alpha$ will be employed to adaptively regulate the variance of the added noise, which is applied to the action output by the diffusion model. Experimental trials on MuJoCo benchmarks and a multimodal task demonstrate that the DACER algorithm achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in most MuJoCo control tasks while exhibiting a stronger representational capacity of the diffusion policy.

MambaMorph: a Mamba-based Backbone with Contrastive Feature Learning for Deformable MR-CT Registration

Deformable image registration is an essential approach for medical image analysis.This paper introduces MambaMorph, an innovative multi-modality deformable registration network, specifically designed for Magnetic Resonance (MR) and Computed Tomography (CT) image alignment. MambaMorph stands out with its Mamba-based registration module and a contrastive feature learning approach, addressing the prevalent challenges in multi-modality registration. The network leverages Mamba blocks for efficient long-range modeling and high-dimensional data processing, coupled with a feature extractor that learns fine-grained features for enhanced registration accuracy. Experimental results showcase MambaMorph's superior performance over existing methods in MR-CT registration, underlining its potential in clinical applications. This work underscores the significance of feature learning in multi-modality registration and positions MambaMorph as a trailblazing solution in this field. The code for MambaMorph is available at: https://github.com/Guo-Stone/MambaMorph.

SAMIHS: Adaptation of Segment Anything Model for Intracranial Hemorrhage Segmentation

Segment Anything Model (SAM), a vision foundation model trained on large-scale annotations, has recently continued raising awareness within medical image segmentation. Despite the impressive capabilities of SAM on natural scenes, it struggles with performance decline when confronted with medical images, especially those involving blurry boundaries and highly irregular regions of low contrast. In this paper, a SAM-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, called SAMIHS, is proposed for intracranial hemorrhage segmentation, which is a crucial and challenging step in stroke diagnosis and surgical planning. Distinguished from previous SAM and SAM-based methods, SAMIHS incorporates parameter-refactoring adapters into SAM's image encoder and considers the efficient and flexible utilization of adapters' parameters. Additionally, we employ a combo loss that combines binary cross-entropy loss and boundary-sensitive loss to enhance SAMIHS's ability to recognize the boundary regions. Our experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/mileswyn/SAMIHS .