Linguistically-Aligned and Visually-Grounded Preference Optimization for Clinically-Augmented Medical Report Generation

Despite significant advances in Medical Report Generation (MRG), the reliability remains constrained by the prevalence of factual errors. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising post-training paradigm to enhance the performance of Supervised Fine-Tuned (SFT) MRG models, existing DPO-based MRG methods typically adopt a naive preference construction that directly pairs model-generated reports with ground truth reports. This strategy inadvertently entangles critical clinical findings with clinically irrelevant linguistic characteristics, and fundamentally lacks explicit vision-language alignment. To address these challenges, we propose DPO-Clin, a novel post-training framework that focuses preference optimization on clinical findings and cross-modal alignment. First, we introduce the Entity-level Clinical Diagnostic (ECD) module to perform a precise entity-level factual diagnosis. ECD guides the generation of linguistically-aligned report preference pairs, isolating clinical discrepancies from linguistic variations. Second, to achieve fine-grained cross-modal alignment, we develop M2DPO, a retrieval-augmented multi-modal DPO variant that enforces textual preference inversion triggered by visual context switches. Third, we locate correct yet highly uncertain predicted entities and apply counterfactual modifications to construct targeted preference data for latent risk mitigation, thereby further enhancing the model reliability. Extensive experiments on two public chest X-ray datasets (MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray) and an in-house endoscopy dataset demonstrate that DPO-Clin significantly improves the SFT baselines on clinical-aware metrics. Furthermore, it achieves superior performance over existing DPO-based MRG methods, exhibiting robust generalizability across distinct baseline architectures and diverse medical imaging modalities.

LocAnyMed: Vision-Language Grounding for Multimodal Medical Images

Medical visual grounding connects free-form clinical queries to spatial evidence in medical images and is an important component of interpretable medical artificial intelligence. However, general-purpose grounding models are predominantly trained on natural images, while existing medical localization resources remain fragmented across imaging modalities, datasets, and task formulations. To address this gap, we construct LocAnyMed-200K, a multimodal medical visual grounding dataset containing approximately 200K image-query-answer examples across computed tomography, optical medical imaging, ultrasound, and X-ray. We harmonize heterogeneous detection and localization resources into a unified free-form instruction format that supports one or multiple bounding boxes, point coordinates, and no-target outputs for negative queries. Full-parameter fine-tuning of LocateAnything-3B on LocAnyMed-200K improves F1@IoU 0.50 from 10.64 to 85.59 on a held-out evaluation split, demonstrating that large-scale domain-specific supervision can equip a general grounding model with effective medical localization capabilities. Beyond spatial coordinates, a clinically interpretable grounding system should also communicate the evidence supporting its prediction. We therefore derive LocAnyMed-CoT-20K, a rationale-augmented subset that connects anatomical context, visual observations, and spatial conclusions through structured reasoning and further improves cross-source generalization through fine-tuning. Together, these resources provide a unified foundation for studying both localization accuracy and rationale quality across heterogeneous medical imaging modalities. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MiliLab/LocAnyMed.

Mask to Concept: Auto-Promptable SAM3 via Efficient Test-Time Concept Embedding Search for Few-Shot Annotation

Transforming foundation segmentation models from human-prompted tools into auto-promptable annotators is critical for scalable medical data annotation. Current methods commonly depend on external feature matchers or auxiliary networks to automate geometric prompting, but introducing architectural overhead and limiting performance scalability. Although SAM3 natively supports concept segmentation via reusable text prompts, its direct use in medical imaging is hindered by a lack of fine-grained clinical knowledge and the ambiguity of human-written descriptions. In this work, we propose Mask to Concept (M2C), an efficient framework that adapts SAM3 for medical few-shot annotation without external modules, parameter retraining, or manual text engineering. Using only a few labeled images, M2C enables SAM3 to automatically search for transferable visual concepts entirely within its frozen architecture: it initializes a learnable concept embedding, uses it to prompt segmentation, and updates the embedding by gradients of minimizing the concept segmentation error. We further introduce a Hybrid Uncertainty Estimation (HUE) module that calculates the prediction entropy and maps concept predictions back to the box prompts, measuring concept-geometry prompting inconsistency. Highly uncertain samples are flagged actively for human correction, and the corrected masks are then fed back to M2C to continuously search for more precise concept embeddings, forming a self-enhancing annotation loop with minimal expert effort. Experiments on medical segmentation benchmarks show that our method achieves SOTA few-shot segmentation performance and outstanding annotation efficiency, offering a practical and efficient pathway toward scalable medical image labeling. Codes are at https://github.com/Huster-Hq/M2C.

Echo-DM: Ultrasound Marker Removal via Conditional Latent Diffusion and Region-Aware Fusion

Clinical ultrasound images often contain artificial markers, such as measurement calipers and text, to assist diagnostic interpretation and comparison. However, these markers can introduce shortcut bias in downstream automated analysis, encouraging deep learning models to rely on marker-related cues rather than clinically meaningful anatomy. Existing marker removal methods are either mask-dependent and vulnerable to error propagation, or mask-free deterministic restorers that may over-smooth ultrasound texture and perturb unaffected background regions. To address these challenges, we present Echo-DM, a framework for ultrasound marker removal via conditional latent diffusion and region-aware fusion. Echo-DM follows a common encoder-diffusion-decoder pipeline, where a DiT-based conditional latent diffusion network performs global restoration and a region-aware fusion module enforces preservation-aware image-space refinement under end-to-end mask-free inference. Building on this fixed core design, we further instantiate Echo-DM-V and Echo-DM-R with VAE-based and RAE-based latent modules, respectively, which demonstrates that the Echo-DM architecture is compatible with diverse latent-module instantiations. Extensive experiments on Echo-PAIR, a large-scale paired clinical ultrasound dataset, demonstrate superior marker removal and strong anatomical fidelity compared with representative two-stage baselines, while providing favorable quality--efficiency trade-offs across deployment settings. Data, code and models will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/Echo-DM.

LoopVLA: Learning Sufficiency in Recurrent Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically treat the deepest representation of a vision-language backbone as universally optimal for action prediction. However, robotic manipulation is composed of many frequent closed-loop spatial adjustments, for which excessive abstraction may waste computation and weaken low-level geometric cues essential for precise control. Existing early-exit strategies attempt to reduce computation by stopping at predefined layers or applying heuristic rules such as action consistency, but they do not directly answer when a representation is actually sufficient for action. In this paper, we present LoopVLA, a recurrent VLA architecture that jointly learns representation refinement, action prediction, and sufficiency estimation. LoopVLA iteratively applies a shared Transformer block to refine multimodal tokens, and at each iteration produces both a candidate action and a sufficiency score that estimates whether further refinement is necessary. By sharing parameters across iterations, LoopVLA decouples refinement from absolute layer indices and grounds sufficiency estimation in the evolving representation itself. Since sufficiency has no direct supervision, we introduce a self-supervised distribution alignment objective, where intermediate confidence scores are trained to match the relative action quality across refinement steps, thereby linking sufficiency learning to policy optimization signals. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and VLA-Arena show that LoopVLA pushes the efficiency-performance frontier of VLA policies, reducing parameters by 45% and improving inference throughput by up to 1.7 times while matching or outperforming strong baselines in task success.

NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction in Real-world Adverse Conditions: RealX3D Challenge Results

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction (3DRR) Challenge, detailing the proposed methods and results. The challenge seeks to identify robust reconstruction pipelines that are robust under real-world adverse conditions, specifically extreme low-light and smoke-degraded environments, as captured by our RealX3D benchmark. A total of 279 participants registered for the competition, of whom 33 teams submitted valid results. We thoroughly evaluate the submitted approaches against state-of-the-art baselines, revealing significant progress in 3D reconstruction under adverse conditions. Our analysis highlights shared design principles among top-performing methods and provides insights into effective strategies for handling 3D scene degradation.

EPOFusion: Exposure aware Progressive Optimization Method for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Overexposure frequently occurs in practical scenarios, causing the loss of critical visual information. However, existing infrared and visible fusion methods still exhibit unsatisfactory performance in highly bright regions. To address this, we propose EPOFusion, an exposure-aware fusion model. Specifically, a guidance module is introduced to facilitate the encoder in extracting fine-grained infrared features from overexposed regions. Meanwhile, an iterative decoder incorporating a multiscale context fusion module is designed to progressively enhance the fused image, ensuring consistent details and superior visual quality. Finally, an adaptive loss function dynamically constrains the fusion process, enabling an effective balance between the modalities under varying exposure conditions. To achieve better exposure awareness, we construct the first infrared and visible overexposure dataset (IVOE) with high quality infrared guided annotations for overexposed regions. Extensive experiments show that EPOFusion outperforms existing methods. It maintains infrared cues in overexposed regions while achieving visually faithful fusion in non-overexposed areas, thereby enhancing both visual fidelity and downstream task performance. Code, fusion results and IVOE dataset will be made available at https://github.com/warren-wzw/EPOFusion.git.

Personalized Federated Learning with Residual Fisher Information for Medical Image Segmentation

Federated learning enables multiple clients (institutions) to collaboratively train machine learning models without sharing their private data. To address the challenge of data heterogeneity across clients, personalized federated learning (pFL) aims to learn customized models for each client. In this work, we propose pFL-ResFIM, a novel pFL framework that achieves client-adaptive personalization at the parameter level. Specifically, we introduce a new metric, Residual Fisher Information Matrix (ResFIM), to quantify the sensitivity of model parameters to domain discrepancies. To estimate ResFIM for each client model under privacy constraints, we employ a spectral transfer strategy that generates simulated data reflecting the domain styles of different clients. Based on the estimated ResFIM, we partition model parameters into domain-sensitive and domain-invariant components. A personalized model for each client is then constructed by aggregating only the domain-invariant parameters on the server. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that pFL-ResFIM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness.

Joint Segmentation and Grading with Iterative Optimization for Multimodal Glaucoma Diagnosis

Accurate diagnosis of glaucoma is challenging, as early-stage changes are subtle and often lack clear structural or appearance cues. Most existing approaches rely on a single modality, such as fundus or optical coherence tomography (OCT), capturing only partial pathological information and often missing early disease progression. In this paper, we propose an iterative multimodal optimization model (IMO) for joint segmentation and grading. IMO integrates fundus and OCT features through a mid-level fusion strategy, enhanced by a cross-modal feature alignment (CMFA) module to reduce modality discrepancies. An iterative refinement decoder progressively optimizes the multimodal features through a denoising diffusion mechanism, enabling fine-grained segmentation of the optic disc and cup while supporting accurate glaucoma grading. Extensive experiments show that our method effectively integrates multimodal features, providing a comprehensive and clinically significant approach to glaucoma assessment. Source codes are available at https://github.com/warren-wzw/IMO.git.

FL-MedSegBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Federated Learning on Medical Image Segmentation

Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving paradigm for collaborative medical image analysis without sharing raw data. However, the absence of standardized benchmarks for medical image segmentation hinders fair and comprehensive evaluation of FL methods. To address this gap, we introduce FL-MedSegBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for federated learning on medical image segmentation. Our benchmark encompasses nine segmentation tasks across ten imaging modalities, covering both 2D and 3D formats with realistic clinical heterogeneity. We systematically evaluate eight generic FL (gFL) and five personalized FL (pFL) methods across multiple dimensions: segmentation accuracy, fairness, communication efficiency, convergence behavior, and generalization to unseen domains. Extensive experiments reveal several key insights: (i) pFL methods, particularly those with client-specific batch normalization (\textit{e.g.}, FedBN), consistently outperform generic approaches; (ii) No single method universally dominates, with performance being dataset-dependent; (iii) Communication frequency analysis shows normalization-based personalization methods exhibit remarkable robustness to reduced communication frequency; (iv) Fairness evaluation identifies methods like Ditto and FedRDN that protect underperforming clients; (v) A method's generalization to unseen domains is strongly tied to its ability to perform well across participating clients. We will release an open-source toolkit to foster reproducible research and accelerate clinically applicable FL solutions, providing empirically grounded guidelines for real-world clinical deployment. The source code is available at https://github.com/meiluzhu/FL-MedSegBench.