TSCnet: A Text-driven Semantic-level Controllable Framework for Customized Low-Light Image Enhancement

Deep learning-based image enhancement methods show significant advantages in reducing noise and improving visibility in low-light conditions. These methods are typically based on one-to-one mapping, where the model learns a direct transformation from low light to specific enhanced images. Therefore, these methods are inflexible as they do not allow highly personalized mapping, even though an individual's lighting preferences are inherently personalized. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new light enhancement task and a new framework that provides customized lighting control through prompt-driven, semantic-level, and quantitative brightness adjustments. The framework begins by leveraging a Large Language Model (LLM) to understand natural language prompts, enabling it to identify target objects for brightness adjustments. To localize these target objects, the Retinex-based Reasoning Segment (RRS) module generates precise target localization masks using reflection images. Subsequently, the Text-based Brightness Controllable (TBC) module adjusts brightness levels based on the generated illumination map. Finally, an Adaptive Contextual Compensation (ACC) module integrates multi-modal inputs and controls a conditional diffusion model to adjust the lighting, ensuring seamless and precise enhancements accurately. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate our framework's superior performance at increasing visibility, maintaining natural color balance, and amplifying fine details without creating artifacts. Furthermore, its robust generalization capabilities enable complex semantic-level lighting adjustments in diverse open-world environments through natural language interactions.

Think Before You Segment: High-Quality Reasoning Segmentation with GPT Chain of Thoughts

Reasoning segmentation is a challenging vision-language task that aims to output the segmentation mask with respect to a complex, implicit, and even non-visual query text. Previous works incorporated multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with segmentation models to approach the difficult problem. However, their segmentation quality often falls short in complex cases, particularly when dealing with out-of-domain objects with intricate structures, blurry boundaries, occlusions, or high similarity with surroundings. In this paper, we introduce ThinkFirst, a training-free reasoning segmentation framework that leverages GPT's chain of thought to address these challenging cases. Our approach allows GPT-4o or other powerful MLLMs to generate a detailed, chain-of-thought description of an image. This summarized description is then passed to a language-instructed segmentation assistant to aid the segmentation process. Our framework allows users to easily interact with the segmentation agent using multimodal inputs, such as easy text and image scribbles, for successive refinement or communication. We evaluate the performance of ThinkFirst on diverse objects. Extensive experiments show that, this zero-shot-CoT approach significantly improves the vanilla reasoning segmentation agent, both qualitatively and quantitatively, while being less sensitive or critical to user-supplied prompts after Thinking First.

AI-Driven Automated Tool for Abdominal CT Body Composition Analysis in Gastrointestinal Cancer Management

The incidence of gastrointestinal cancers remains significantly high, particularly in China, emphasizing the importance of accurate prognostic assessments and effective treatment strategies. Research shows a strong correlation between abdominal muscle and fat tissue composition and patient outcomes. However, existing manual methods for analyzing abdominal tissue composition are time-consuming and costly, limiting clinical research scalability. To address these challenges, we developed an AI-driven tool for automated analysis of abdominal CT scans to effectively identify and segment muscle, subcutaneous fat, and visceral fat. Our tool integrates a multi-view localization model and a high-precision 2D nnUNet-based segmentation model, demonstrating a localization accuracy of 90% and a Dice Score Coefficient of 0.967 for segmentation. Furthermore, it features an interactive interface that allows clinicians to refine the segmentation results, ensuring high-quality outcomes effectively. Our tool offers a standardized method for effectively extracting critical abdominal tissues, potentially enhancing the management and treatment for gastrointestinal cancers. The code is available at https://github.com/NanXinyu/AI-Tool4Abdominal-Seg.git}{https://github.com/NanXinyu/AI-Tool4Abdominal-Seg.git.

Continuous Online Adaptation Driven by User Interaction for Medical Image Segmentation

Interactive segmentation models use real-time user interactions, such as mouse clicks, as extra inputs to dynamically refine the model predictions. After model deployment, user corrections of model predictions could be used to adapt the model to the post-deployment data distribution, countering distribution-shift and enhancing reliability. Motivated by this, we introduce an online adaptation framework that enables an interactive segmentation model to continuously learn from user interaction and improve its performance on new data distributions, as it processes a sequence of test images. We introduce the Gaussian Point Loss function to train the model how to leverage user clicks, along with a two-stage online optimization method that adapts the model using the corrected predictions generated via user interactions. We demonstrate that this simple and therefore practical approach is very effective. Experiments on 5 fundus and 4 brain MRI databases demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches under various data distribution shifts, including segmentation of image modalities and pathologies not seen during training.

Interactive Tumor Progression Modeling via Sketch-Based Image Editing

Accurately visualizing and editing tumor progression in medical imaging is crucial for diagnosis, treatment planning, and clinical communication. To address the challenges of subjectivity and limited precision in existing methods, we propose SkEditTumor, a sketch-based diffusion model for controllable tumor progression editing. By leveraging sketches as structural priors, our method enables precise modifications of tumor regions while maintaining structural integrity and visual realism. We evaluate SkEditTumor on four public datasets - BraTS, LiTS, KiTS, and MSD-Pancreas - covering diverse organs and imaging modalities. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior image fidelity and segmentation accuracy. Our contributions include a novel integration of sketches with diffusion models for medical image editing, fine-grained control over tumor progression visualization, and extensive validation across multiple datasets, setting a new benchmark in the field.

FunGraph: Functionality Aware 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Prompted Scene Interaction

The concept of 3D scene graphs is increasingly recognized as a powerful semantic and hierarchical representation of the environment. Current approaches often address this at a coarse, object-level resolution. In contrast, our goal is to develop a representation that enables robots to directly interact with their environment by identifying both the location of functional interactive elements and how these can be used. To achieve this, we focus on detecting and storing objects at a finer resolution, focusing on affordance-relevant parts. The primary challenge lies in the scarcity of data that extends beyond instance-level detection and the inherent difficulty of capturing detailed object features using robotic sensors. We leverage currently available 3D resources to generate 2D data and train a detector, which is then used to augment the standard 3D scene graph generation pipeline. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves functional element segmentation comparable to state-of-the-art 3D models and that our augmentation enables task-driven affordance grounding with higher accuracy than the current solutions.

SAQ-SAM: Semantically-Aligned Quantization for Segment Anything Model

Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable zero-shot segmentation capability; however, its prohibitive computational costs make edge deployment challenging. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a promising compression solution, existing methods yield unsatisfactory results when applied to SAM, owing to its specialized model components and promptable workflow: (i) The mask decoder's attention exhibits extreme outliers, and we find that aggressive clipping (ranging down to even 100$\times$), instead of smoothing or isolation, is effective in suppressing outliers while maintaining semantic capabilities. Unfortunately, traditional metrics (e.g., MSE) fail to provide such large-scale clipping. (ii) Existing reconstruction methods potentially neglect prompts' intention, resulting in distorted visual encodings during prompt interactions. To address the above issues, we propose SAQ-SAM in this paper, which boosts PTQ of SAM with semantic alignment. Specifically, we propose Perceptual-Consistency Clipping, which exploits attention focus overlap as clipping metric, to significantly suppress outliers. Furthermore, we propose Prompt-Aware Reconstruction, which incorporates visual-prompt interactions by leveraging cross-attention responses in mask decoder, thus facilitating alignment in both distribution and semantics. To ensure the interaction efficiency, we also introduce a layer-skipping strategy for visual tokens. Extensive experiments are conducted on different segmentation tasks and SAMs of various sizes, and the results show that the proposed SAQ-SAM consistently outperforms baselines. For example, when quantizing SAM-B to 4-bit, our method achieves 11.7% higher mAP than the baseline in instance segmentation task.

FORESCENE: FOREcasting human activity via latent SCENE graphs diffusion

Forecasting human-environment interactions in daily activities is challenging due to the high variability of human behavior. While predicting directly from videos is possible, it is limited by confounding factors like irrelevant objects or background noise that do not contribute to the interaction. A promising alternative is using Scene Graphs (SGs) to track only the relevant elements. However, current methods for forecasting future SGs face significant challenges and often rely on unrealistic assumptions, such as fixed objects over time, limiting their applicability to long-term activities where interacted objects may appear or disappear. In this paper, we introduce FORESCENE, a novel framework for Scene Graph Anticipation (SGA) that predicts both object and relationship evolution over time. FORESCENE encodes observed video segments into a latent representation using a tailored Graph Auto-Encoder and forecasts future SGs using a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM). Our approach enables continuous prediction of interaction dynamics without making assumptions on the graph's content or structure. We evaluate FORESCENE on the Action Genome dataset, where it outperforms existing SGA methods while solving a significantly more complex task.

WaveStitch: Flexible and Fast Conditional Time Series Generation with Diffusion Models

Generating temporal data under constraints is critical for forecasting, imputation, and synthesis. These datasets often include auxiliary conditions that influence the values within the time series signal. Existing methods face three key challenges: (1) they fail to adapt to conditions at inference time; (2) they rely on sequential generation, which slows the generation speed; and (3) they inefficiently encode categorical features, leading to increased sparsity and input sizes. We propose WaveStitch, a novel method that addresses these challenges by leveraging denoising diffusion probabilistic models to efficiently generate accurate temporal data under given auxiliary constraints. WaveStitch overcomes these limitations by: (1) modeling interactions between constraints and signals to generalize to new, unseen conditions; (2) enabling the parallel synthesis of sequential segments with a novel "stitching" mechanism to enforce coherence across segments; and (3) encoding categorical features as compact periodic signals while preserving temporal patterns. Extensive evaluations across diverse datasets highlight WaveStitch's ability to generalize to unseen conditions during inference, achieving up to a 10x lower mean-squared-error compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, WaveStitch generates data up to 460x faster than autoregressive methods while maintaining comparable accuracy. By efficiently encoding categorical features, WaveStitch provides a robust and efficient solution for temporal data generation. Our code is open-sourced: https://github.com/adis98/HierarchicalTS

S4M: Segment Anything with 4 Extreme Points

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized open-set interactive image segmentation, inspiring numerous adapters for the medical domain. However, SAM primarily relies on sparse prompts such as point or bounding box, which may be suboptimal for fine-grained instance segmentation, particularly in endoscopic imagery, where precise localization is critical and existing prompts struggle to capture object boundaries effectively. To address this, we introduce S4M (Segment Anything with 4 Extreme Points), which augments SAM by leveraging extreme points -- the top-, bottom-, left-, and right-most points of an instance -- prompts. These points are intuitive to identify and provide a faster, structured alternative to box prompts. However, a na\"ive use of extreme points degrades performance, due to SAM's inability to interpret their semantic roles. To resolve this, we introduce dedicated learnable embeddings, enabling the model to distinguish extreme points from generic free-form points and better reason about their spatial relationships. We further propose an auxiliary training task through the Canvas module, which operates solely on prompts -- without vision input -- to predict a coarse instance mask. This encourages the model to internalize the relationship between extreme points and mask distributions, leading to more robust segmentation. S4M outperforms other SAM-based approaches on three endoscopic surgical datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex scenarios. Finally, we validate our approach through a human annotation study on surgical endoscopic videos, confirming that extreme points are faster to acquire than bounding boxes.