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Search papers from 30+ top conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ACL and AAAI. Filter by keyword, then open any paper for its abstract, authors and links.

arXiv

Unified Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Complex Graph Reasoning in Large Language Models

Fali Wang, Ali Al-Lawati, Iliyas Bektas, Jinxuan Fang, Alek Melenski, Tianxiang Zhao, Yao Ma, Suhang Wang

Graph reasoning provides a promising testbed for evaluating the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), as graph instances can be programmatically generated, structurally controlled, and naturally scaled to long-input settings. However, existing graph reasoning benchmarks have limited coverage of data complexity, rely heavily on manual construction, and lack unified evaluation across text-based and code-based reasoning modes. To address these limitations, we propose {\dataset}, a five-stage \textit{semi-automatic} framework for constructing complex graph reasoning benchmarks. It expands benchmark coverage along five dimensions: \textit{Graph Size}, \textit{Task Complexity}, \textit{Task Description}, \textit{Graph Loading}, and \textit{Task Source}. The framework uses an LLM-based data generator to automatically produce task descriptions, graph data, reference solutions, graph-loading scripts, question forms, and evaluation scripts, while retaining human validation at key quality-control stages. Based on it, we construct a benchmark with $202$ tasks and evaluate LLMs under text-based, code-based, and augmented reasoning settings. Experiments show that the complexity dimensions reveal model limitations that are less visible in existing benchmarks; existing fine-tuned models struggle to generalize to GraphGym, whereas retrieval-augmented methods show scenario-dependent adaptability, improving textual reasoning but not consistently improving coding reasoning. These findings suggest that ours serves as a challenging and diagnostic benchmark for graph reasoning and provides empirical guidance for future enhancement methods. Code and dataset will be published soon.

arXiv

BEST-KAG: Enhancing Question Answering of Building Engineering Standards with Multimodal Knowledge Graph Modeling and Large Language Model

Jia-Rui Lin, Junxi Guo, Keyin Chen, Peng Pan

Construction standards are critical for building safety and sustainability. Existing standard application workflows rely on keyword-based document retrieval and manual cross-clause interpretation, which cannot reliably support multi-clause reasoning, multimodal knowledge utilization, or traceable clause-level evidence linkage. To address these limitations, this study develops a multimodal knowledge-driven framework that supports question answering on standard knowledge named BEST-KAG (Knowledge-Augmented Generation for Building Engineering STandards). The framework introduces 1) a multimodal knowledge graph (MKG) for unified representation of document hierarchy and heterogeneous standard knowledge with various connections, 2) a rule-LLM hybrid knowledge construction pipeline for scalable multimodal knowledge extraction, creating a large MAG with 251 building engineering standards, 171,652 nodes and 310,914 edges, and 3) a graph-retrieval-based knowledge-augmented generation architecture for clause-grounded and traceable question answering. Experiments demonstrate that BEST-KAG consistently outperforms multiple mainstream LLMs in terms of Expert evaluation, and metrics including BLEU, and ROUGE, with the best improvement up to 74.01% compared to the baselines.

arXiv

Stochastic Sequential Search in Very-High-Dimensional Feature Selection

Petr Somol, Jiří Grim

Sequential subset search -- forward selection with floating backtracking and its descendants -- remains the quality reference in feature selection, but every member of the family sweeps the full pool of remaining candidate features at each step, which excludes it from very-high-dimensional problems; there, only individual-feature ranking remains practical, and it models feature interplay weakly or not at all. We introduce a budgeted sampled step operator pair that replaces the full sweeps by a fixed number of candidate evaluations per step. Candidates are drawn by temperature-controlled softmax sampling from dependency-aware per-feature statistics learned online from every criterion evaluation the search performs, guarded by a uniform exploration floor; per-step cost becomes independent of dimensionality. Substituting the operators turns any sequential method into its stochastic counterpart, defining the Stochastic Sequential Search (SSS) family; we study the stochastic counterpart of floating search, sSFFS. On 500-dimensional madelon, sSFFS retains at least 97% of the full-SFFS criterion value at every subset size at about a quarter of its evaluations, while uniform sampling at the same budget collapses on madelon's synergistic features. On 5,000-dimensional gisette, far beyond full-SFFS reach, sSFFS exceeds the saturated criterion level of DAF and BIF ranking at matched budgets; holdout validation shows that at 500 training samples the binding constraint beyond the sequential frontier becomes the criterion, not the search. On 10,105-dimensional reuters, under a trustworthy multinomial filter criterion, sSFFS dominates BIF and DAF on the search objective and on holdout accuracy at every subset size, in about two minutes of single-core evaluation work. A verified standalone implementation accompanies the paper.

arXiv

Measuring Product Quality Using Images: The CLIP Q-Score and an Application to Real Estate

Fabian Slonimczyk, Danila Karapsin

The CLIP Q-score is a novel, safe, fully reproducible, and computationally efficient method for extracting objective product quality metrics from visual data using contrastive language-image pre-training. We introduce the technique and provide an extensive application to real estate data from an online platform ($\sim500,000$ images). Our open-source metric aligns with LLM assessments and proves to be a powerful predictor of housing market prices for both sales and rentals. We also show that a higher CLIP Q-store is associated with better liquidity (reduced time on the market), especially for properties on sale.

arXiv

STAR-VLM: Spatiotemporal Grounding Vision-Language Models for Motion and Velocity Estimation via Automotive Radar Supervision

Pou-Chun Kung, Aryaman Rao, Utkrisht Sahai, Hemanth Murali, Yi Liu, Rui-Yu Lin, Katherine A. Skinner

Vision-language models (VLMs) are emerging as a key component of embodied intelligence, with growing applications in auto-labeling and end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing approaches for improving spatiotemporal reasoning in VLMs often rely on complex preprocessing pipelines, expensive human annotations, or synthetic data, which limit scalability and introduce potential sim-to-real gaps. Moreover, although these methods have improved spatiotemporal understanding, they still lack strong metric reasoning capabilities for dynamic scenes, such as estimating object motion in real-world units. Prior work has explored LiDAR-based metric depth supervision to enhance spatial perception, but it does not directly address temporal reasoning. We introduce STAR-VLM, an automotive radar-supervised framework that enhances spatiotemporal VLMs with motion reasoning and metric velocity estimation for autonomous driving. Automotive radar is a low-cost and widely deployed sensor that provides complementary spatiotemporal supervision through range and Doppler measurements. By leveraging these measurements as label-free ground truth during training, STAR-VLM improves the metric spatiotemporal reasoning ability of VLMs. Through experiments on driving scenarios, we show that STAR-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both motion classification and metric velocity estimation, outperforming even task-specific methods designed for each task. These results highlight automotive radar as a scalable and cost-effective source of supervision for building metric-aware spatiotemporal VLMs for real-world autonomous driving.

arXiv

Recursive Vision Language Models for General Symbolic Reasoning

Omid Nejati Manzari, Guillaume Lajoie, Hassan Rivaz

Hard symbolic-reasoning tasks such as Sudoku, maze pathfinding, and ARC remain challenging for LLMs due to their fixed-depth autoregressive reasoning, which limits systematic search, refinement, and backtracking. While recursive models such as Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) and Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) address this limitation through iterative latent-state refinement, they are typically task-specific and do not leverage pretrained language priors. We propose R-Qwen, a recursive reasoning framework built upon a pretrained Qwen backbone. R-Qwen repeatedly refines a candidate solution through programmatic self-recursion and deep supervision, combining the structured iterative computation of recursive models with the linguistic and reasoning priors of pretrained LLMs. We further adapt Hierarchical Supervision Weighting (HSW) to autoregressive models by exponentially weighting losses across recursive steps. HSW reduces gradient variance by at least 50\%, improves the signal-to-noise ratio of stochastic gradients, and accelerates convergence. Across eight challenging benchmarks, R-Qwen consistently outperforms prior recursive reasoning models and substantially larger LLMs while using a comparable number of trainable parameters. Notably, on ARC-AGI dataset, our model achieves a 27.6\% improvement over the baseline, highlighting the effectiveness of recursive refinement for general symbolic reasoning. These results suggest that recursive reasoning mechanisms and pretrained language model priors are complementary approaches for improving symbolic puzzle-solving. Code and models will be released after acceptance.

arXiv

ST-LoRA: Single Trajectory LoRA Ensemble for Uncertainty Aware Agricultural Segmentation

Mohamed Farag, Genc Hoxha, Yahia Maleki, Chris McCool, Ribana Roscher

Reliable decision-support in digital agriculture requires accurate predictions and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, particularly for dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. Ensemble methods provide strong uncertainty quantification, but their computational and memory demands limit practical use, while single-model approximations often trade off uncertainty quality for efficiency. We propose ST-LoRA, a parameter-efficient ensemble framework that builds diverse ensemble members from a single training trajectory by combining Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with snapshot ensembling. Each member shares a frozen pretrained backbone and differs only in lightweight low-rank adapters, reducing trainable parameters to under 10% of the full model while preserving ensemble diversity. We evaluate across two agricultural datasets - GrowliFlower-L (cauliflower, open field) and BUP20 (sweet pepper, glasshouse) - using SegFormer and Mask2Former, covering in-distribution performance, calibration under distribution shift, and out-of-distribution detection. Ablations show feed-forward layers, not attention layers, are the critical LoRA target for dense prediction, contrary to the attention-only convention from language models. ST-LoRA matches or exceeds full-rank ensembles in segmentation accuracy and calibration across both datasets and architectures, while substantially reducing training time, inference latency, memory footprint, and storage requirements. Against efficient baselines - Snapshot Ensemble, MC Dropout, and Deep Deterministic Uncertainty - ST-LoRA consistently matches or outperforms them in image/pixel-level OoD detection, calibration stability under shift, and cross-seed variance, with far fewer parameters and lower compute. These results show LoRA-efficient ensemble adaptation is a highly effective, practical approach for uncertainty-aware agricultural vision systems.

arXiv

UCBound-Net: Uncertainty-Guided Boundary-Aware Continual Learning for Domain-Incremental Ultrasound Segmentation

Mohammad Amanour Rahman

Continual learning in clinical imaging faces a dual challenge: a model must assimilate knowledge from new anatomical domains while retaining representations learned from prior tasks, a problem known as catastrophic forgetting. Existing mitigation strategies, including regularization and knowledge distillation, treat all spatial regions equally, ignoring the fact that prediction uncertainty is strongly correlated with the propensity for forgetting. We introduce UCBound-Net, a continual segmentation framework that exploits Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout uncertainty as a spatial proxy for forgetting risk. Our method contributes three synergistic components: (i) uncertainty-weighted boundary distillation, which amplifies the knowledge transfer signal at high-entropy regions of the frozen teacher; (ii) uncertainty-calibration regularization, which explicitly penalizes overconfident erroneous predictions; and (iii) uncertainty-guided exemplar selection, a memory buffer that preferentially stores samples whose boundary regions exhibit the highest predictive entropy. Evaluated on a sequential domain-incremental benchmark comprising breast ultrasound (BUSI, Task 1) followed by thyroid ultrasound (TN3K, Task 2), UCBound-Net reduces forgetting relative to naive fine-tuning, achieving a backward transfer (BWT) of -0.098 compared with -0.173, while obtaining an average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.755 across both tasks. The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods without requiring task-boundary supervision. An ablation study further demonstrates that each component contributes independently to forgetting mitigation, providing a practical pathway toward uncertainty-aware continual learning for clinical image segmentation.

arXiv

Probing the 3D Object-Level Understanding of Pre-Trained Detection Transformers

Robin Kim, Colin Samplawski, Benjamin M. Marlin

Detection transformer models, including DETR and its extensions, learn to output a set of object-level embeddings that can be simultaneously decoded into 2D bounding boxes and class distributions. In this paper, we investigate what pre-trained 2D detection transformers understand about the 3D properties of objects. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which properties including the depth of objects from the camera and the 3D location of objects relative to the camera can be recovered from object-level embeddings using linear and non-linear probes. Across a range of detection transformer models, our results show a surprisingly strong and previously unknown ability of 2D DETR models to represent useful information about the 3D properties of objects, despite the complete lack of 3D supervision during model pre-training.

arXiv

GaussianSelector: Lightweight Human-Guided Object Selection in 3D Gaussian Splatting with Graph Optimization

Baihan Yang, Tiexin Li, Yuheng Liu, Xin Lin, Xinke Li, Xiaohui Xie, Truong Nguyen

Selecting a complete 3D object from a reconstructed scene with minimal user effort is essential for practical scene editing and embodied interaction. Existing 3DGS-based methods either retrain the Gaussian representation to embed per-object labels, or build dense multi-view SAM observations, both requiring heavy computation and dense viewpoint coverage that is rarely available in practice. We present GaussianSelector, a training-free framework for interactive 3D object selection from sparse views and sparse scribble guidance. Operating directly on native Gaussian primitives, we coarsen dense Gaussians into geometrically coherent superpoints and construct a continuity-weighted graph using appearance and spatial cues. Sparse user scribbles are lifted into 3D via visibility-aware transmittance coverage, and selection is solved as a global graph-cut energy minimization that propagates sparse evidence to a complete 3D object. This design naturally supports multi-round refinement, where users iteratively correct the selection from additional viewpoints to progressively improve the result. Experiments demonstrate that GaussianSelector achieves competitive selection quality against state-of-the-art multi-view SAM-based methods, while requiring significantly fewer interaction views and substantially lower computational overhead. These properties make it well suited for human-in-the-loop 3D scene editing and 3D asset extraction in real-world deployment scenarios.

arXiv

Towards Compact Unified Multimodal Tracking: Synergizing Knowledge Distillation with Structural Pruning

Yuqi Li, Yuedong Tan, Huiran Duan, Weilun Feng, Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Zongwei Wu, Shiping Wen, Tingwen Huang, Yingli Tian

Unified multimodal object tracking has achieved remarkable robustness by leveraging complementary sensor data (e.g., RGB, Thermal, Depth), yet the heavy computational burden of state-of-the-art models hinders their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. In this work, we identify the prediction head as a critical but often overlooked efficiency bottleneck. By strategically streamlining the decoder architecture, we unlock the potential for real-time inference but simultaneously introduce a capacity gap between the lightweight student and the heavy teacher. To resolve this, we conduct a systematic analysis of 17 distillation strategies and introduce a Dual-Alignment Distillation framework. Our key insight is that effective compression requires decoupling knowledge transfer into two complementary streams: (1) Spatial Representation Alignment, which employs feature distillation to sharpen the student's spatial focus on foreground targets ("Where to track"); and (2) Semantic Distribution Alignment, which utilizes logit-based distillation to align decision boundaries and transfer discriminative dark knowledge ("What to track"). Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms complex state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our distilled model achieves 91.5% MPR on RGBT234 and operates at 54 FPS on a single RTX 4090, representing a 5x speedup over the teacher model while maintaining superior accuracy.

arXiv

VGER: Voxel-Guided Global Event Ranking for Event Cloud Attribution

Youxin Jiang, Baoheng Fu, Hongwei Ren, Xiangqian Wu

Event cameras produce sparse and asynchronous event streams that provide rich spatio-temporal information for efficient perception. Recent advances in event-based models have demonstrated strong performance by directly modeling asynchronous events without dense frame reconstruction. However, identifying the event-level evidence behind their predictions is crucial for improving model transparency and reliability. Directly adapting point-level saliency methods from point clouds provides fine-grained attribution but overlooks event-specific spatio-temporal structures. To address this limitation, we propose Voxel-Guided Global Event Ranking (VGER), a training-free attribution framework for point-based event cloud networks. VGER combines event-level gradient evidence with task-aware voxel perturbation evidence, transferring regional contribution into event-level attribution scores while preserving fine-grained resolution. Furthermore, VGER introduces a unified event ranking strategy, where high-ranked events are expected to be prediction-critical and low-ranked events are expected to have limited influence on predictions. We evaluate VGER on three event-based benchmarks with PointNet, PointNet++, and EventMamba. Across nine dataset-backbone settings, VGER consistently improves both high-tail and low-tail deletion performance over point-level saliency baselines.

arXiv

Clear-Weighted Bit Allocation for Satellite Downlinks

Alireza Furutanpey, Qiyang Zhang, Yujie Huang, Philipp Raith, Schahram Dustdar

Earth-observation satellites capture more imagery than intermittent ground contacts can transmit. Onboard systems threshold a cloud detector, discard frames or tiles, and compress the survivors with a fixed codec. On expert-labeled imagery, these rules remove more than one-fifth of clear pixels, primarily through detector false positives. We train a neural codec with a clear-probability-weighted reconstruction loss, reallocating coded bytes from clouds to clear ground without requiring or transmitting a cloud map onboard. Each capture is encoded into a resumable base layer and a dependent refinement layer, while clear content is estimated from features produced by the encoder. At each contact, we causally rank arrived layers using estimated clear content, unfinished bytes, deadline slack, and aggregate deadline pressure. The scheduler serves base and computational deadlines, bounds stored residual bytes, and resumes interrupted packets. We evaluate the onboard-to-downlink pipeline using real entropy-coded bytes, orbit-derived interruptible contact capacities, and measured service time and energy on resource-constrained embedded accelerators. Clear-weighted codecs require up to 47.8\% fewer bytes than learned-compression baselines at matched clear-region quality. The optimized encoder consumes less time and energy than one pass of the cloud detector used by the frame-discard rules. Relative to fixed two-stage service on the same streams, our scheduler more than doubles deadline-full clear-content delivery for the interrupted combined cohort, reaches 83.6\% of a certified clairvoyant upper bound, and exceeds replayed reference orders in deadline-usable delivery.

arXiv

DynamicManip: Enabling Dynamic Manipulation from a Single Static Demonstration

Haoran Liao, Pengyue Wang, Shuoyu Chen, Kehan Cheng, Xuhang Chen, Yuhao Lin, Mu Lin, Zhizhao Liang, Xiaoyi Fan, Chengyi Xing, Dan Niu, Yi-Lin Wei, Wei-Shi Zheng

Dynamic manipulation is a critical capability for robots operating in complex and dynamic environments, where robots must interact with objects that are moving or require rapid adjustments. However, learning models for dynamic manipulation tasks face two major challenges: (1) the combinatorial complexity of dynamic scenarios leads to substantial data requirements, and (2) rapid variations in dynamics require real-time and accurate policy execution. In this paper, we propose DynamicManip to address these challenges through an efficient data augmentation pipeline and a low-latency imitation policy. We first propose a static-to-dynamic augmentation pipeline that synthesizes diverse dynamic manipulation demonstrations from a single static demonstration. Second, we introduce a dynamic-aware adaptive policy that adjusts its inference frequency according to task dynamics, enabling responsive and effective dynamic manipulation. Third, we build a dynamic manipulation benchmark, which includes diverse dynamic tasks with an automatic evaluation system for scalable and consistent assessment. Extensive experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate that DynamicManip not only provides significant improvements in data efficiency but also achieves better performance in dynamic manipulation tasks, with a mean success rate 18.4 percentage points higher and policy-query latency 32.9% lower.

arXiv

PackingGPT: 3D Packing Agent for Real Furniture in Last-Mile Delivery

Yi You, Hui Li

3D bin packing rectangular items into standardised containers to maximise space utilisation under geometric shipping automation. Loading a furniture purchase into a personal vehicle is the same task, but under more complex conditions that standard container loading algorithms ignore. This paper addresses the physically stable placement under these realistic conditions with heterogeneous boxes (e.g. varying dimensions and weights) and occupied containers (e.g. groceries). This paper provides a real-world benchmark dataset and baseline model for the Heterogeneous furniture-in-vehicle packing task. The dataset uses real furniture company flat-pack packaging data covering a large number of catalogue products via family-level extrapolation with diversity length, widths, heights, and weights. We also propose a PackingGPT framework for packing as a sequential placement inspired by the Lego assembly process, where heterogeneous boxes of varying dimensions (bricks) are placed step-by-step into the irregular remaining cargo space (creations). Five baseline packing methods were tested on our dataset without considering the Centre-of- Mass (CoM) constraints. In sedan car simulations, 10-40% of placed boxes failed the stability check on average. When the LLP model was trained on packing sequences with CoM constraints enforced during placement, the failure rate dropped to 0.67% (SUV-500).

arXiv

Training-Free Out-of-Distribution Detection for Pathology Whole-Slide Images

Sabri Mustafa Kahya, Richard R. Chen, Muhammet Sami Yavuz, Jerry Jierui Lou, Akanimoh Adeleye, Haci Ali Kahya, Jana Lipkova

Safe deployment of AI methods in medicine requires robust guardrails that detect when input data deviate from the training distribution to ensure that models provide predictions only within their scope of expertise and abstain otherwise. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection can provide such safeguards and is extensively studied in general computer vision. Yet, it remains underdeveloped in computational pathology, where gigapixel whole-slide images (WSIs), subtle differences between disease subtypes, and variability in tissue preparation pose unique challenges for conventional OOD methods. We propose ZIO, a training-free, multimodal OOD detector for pathology WSIs that leverages vision--language pathology foundation models (FMs). ZIO constructs text and visual prototypes of in-distribution classes and integrates their complementary information through a prototype shrinkage mechanism to derive OOD scores. We provide the ZIO formulation for both slide- and patch-level FMs. We evaluate ZIO across diverse clinically relevant domain shifts, including rare diseases and near-OOD settings. Extensive evaluation of over 14,700 WSIs from five independent consortia shows that ZIO consistently outperforms both unimodal prototypes and 40 state-of-the-art OOD methods. These results demonstrate the benefits of multimodal representation for OOD detection and pave the way towards safer AI deployment in clinical practice.

arXiv

SG-WAM: Self-Guided World Modeling in Geometry-Aware Policy Space

Ruiteng Zhao, Zhengshen Zhang, Yue Su, Wenshuo Wang, Jiahui Li, Zhiyuan Yang, Francis E. H. Tay, Marcelo H Ang Jr, Haiyue Zhu

World Action Models (WAMs) couple action generation with prediction of future states. Their effectiveness depends on whether future dynamics are modeled in a space that is both aligned with action generation and sufficiently geometry-aware to capture where and how actions change the scene. Existing WAMs typically satisfy only part of this requirement, relying on either perceptually heavy observation-space targets or auxiliary latent spaces that are not jointly structured for action relevance and geometry. We propose SG-WAM, a self-guided framework that learns geometry-aware action-conditioned dynamics directly in the policy-derived representation space. SG-WAM introduces learnable dynamics tokens and a Self-Guided World Predictor that forecasts their future latent states conditioned on intervening robot actions. Prediction targets are generated by an exponential moving average copy of the same policy backbone, providing stable supervision within the representation family used by the action expert. Geometric supervision further structures the policy image-token representations, providing spatially grounded context for the dynamics tokens and yielding a future-alignment space that is both action-relevant and geometry-aware. Latent future prediction, geometric grounding, and flow-matching action generation are jointly optimized end-to-end in a unified framework. Built on a 0.9B model without large-scale embodied pretraining, SG-WAM achieves 98.5% average success on LIBERO and 73% on LIBERO-Plus, while outperforming strong baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-world evaluations.

arXiv

FineMoLA: Towards Fine-Grained Motion-Language Alignment from Clip-Level Supervision

Tongyan Wang, Zhengyuan Li, Muhan Lin, Shengyang Luo, Yifan Shen, Aniket Bera, Baijian Yang, Yingjie Victor Chen

Text-conditioned human motion generation has made rapid progress with the emergence of large-scale motion--language datasets. However, even datasets with rich long-form descriptions typically provide supervision only at the clip level, without explicit temporal correspondence between motion frames and language. This limits fine-grained motion--text grounding and temporally precise generation. We propose FineMoLA, a weakly supervised framework that learns fine-grained frame--phrase correspondence directly from clip-level annotations. Our method first segments long-form descriptions into action-bearing phrases, and then formulates motion--language alignment as an optimal transport problem, which naturally models many-to-many relations between motion frames and text under global constraints. With entropic regularization and Sinkhorn iterations, FineMoLA efficiently infers pseudo frame-level alignments without human labeling. Experiments on SnapMoGen demonstrate that the learned alignments outperform baselines in motion--text grounding.

arXiv

Understanding Synergistic Interactions among Pathology Foundation Models via Adaptive Fusion

Yuxiang Xiao, Yang Hu, Bin Li, Tianyang Zhang, Zexi Li, Huazhu Fu, Jens Rittscher, Kaixiang Yang

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) provide strong tile-level representations via self-supervised pre-training on large-scale pathology images. Yet, PFMs are developed under diverse and often opaque data, architecture, and objective choices, inducing latent representational biases that limit robustness and obscure what each model specialises in. We present AdaFusion, a lightweight adaptive fusion framework that integrates complementary signals from multiple frozen PFMs through (1) low-dimensional feature compression and (2) a sample-conditioned gating module that reweights model-wise (and optionally channel-wise) contributions. Beyond improving predictive accuracy, AdaFusion provides contribution-driven interpretation that offers evidence consistent with model-specific preferences and synergistic interactions across tissue phenotypes. We evaluate AdaFusion on three public benchmarks spanning treatment response prediction, prostate cancer grading, and spatial gene expression inference. AdaFusion consistently outperforms individual PFMs and other fusion baselines, while providing interpretable tissue visualisation which aligns model preferences with morphological patterns. Code is available at: https://github.com/xyx-98/PathoOracle.

arXiv

Harnessing Adversarial Distillation to Customise Debiased, Disease-Specific Pathology Foundation Models for Breast Cancer

Zhiwei Chen, Yang Hu, Yuxiang Xiao, Yakun Ju, Tianyang Zhang, Yingxue Xu, Wei Li, Hao Chen, Jens Rittscher, Kaixiang Yang

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) provide strong tissue representations and have become central to digital pathology. However, deployment in disease-specific settings is limited by 1) the high computational cost of billion-parameter PFMs and 2) distribution mismatch and non-biological bias inherited from pan-cancer, multi-centre pre-training, including site-specific signatures and imbalanced disease prevalence. These factors can encourage shortcut learning and under-emphasise subtle morphology required for reliable modelling of a specific cancer type. We present SmartStu (a Smart Student), a framework to customise compact, breast-cancer-specific PFMs via distillation whilst mitigating confounding. SmartStu distils representations from multiple teacher PFMs into a lightweight student backbone. Crucially, we introduce adversarial distillation that leverages a dedicated noise model trained to predict nuisance, edge-dominated cues on the distillation set. Using this noise model as a counterexample, the adversarial objective encourages the student to recognise, yet suppress, features predictive of nuisance targets. We further incorporate multi-teacher ensemble distillation and an auxiliary self-supervised objective with artefact injection. We validate SmartStu on three external cohorts (Yale HER2, SLN-Breast, and BRACS) with multiple tiny backbones. SmartStu yields breast-cancer-specific PFMs that are over $30\times$ smaller than general PFMs whilst largely preserving, and sometimes improving, downstream performance measured by balanced accuracy (bAcc) and AUC. Code is available at https://github.com/zwchen03/advDistall.

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