arXiv subjects

Hongwei Li

Publications and source records attributed to Hongwei Li.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

GIGP: A Global Information Interacting and Geometric Priors Focusing Framework for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised learning enhances medical image segmentation by leveraging unlabeled data, reducing reliance on extensive labeled datasets. On the one hand, the distribution discrepancy between limited labeled data and abundant unlabeled data can hinder model generalization. Most existing methods rely on local similarity matching, which may introduce bias. In contrast, Mamba effectively models global context with linear complexity, learning more comprehensive data representations. On the other hand, medical images usually exhibit consistent anatomical structures defined by geometric features. Most existing methods fail to fully utilize global geometric priors, such as volumes, moments etc. In this work, we introduce a global information interaction and geometric priors focus framework (GIGP). Firstly, we present a Global Information Interaction Mamba module to reduce distribution discrepancy between labeled and unlabeled data. Secondly, we propose a Geometric Moment Attention Mechanism to extract richer global geometric features. Finally, we propose Global Geometric Perturbation Consistency to simulate organ dynamics and geometric variations, enhancing the ability of the model to learn generalized features. The superior performance on the NIH Pancreas and Left Atrium datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Knowledge Mining from Large Models

Large-scale vision models like SAM have extensive visual knowledge, yet their general nature and computational demands limit their use in specialized tasks like medical image segmentation. In contrast, task-specific models such as U-Net++ often underperform due to sparse labeled data. This study introduces a strategic knowledge mining method that leverages SAM's broad understanding to boost the performance of small, locally hosted deep learning models. In our approach, we trained a U-Net++ model on a limited labeled dataset and extend its capabilities by converting SAM's output infered on unlabeled images into prompts. This process not only harnesses SAM's generalized visual knowledge but also iteratively improves SAM's prediction to cater specialized medical segmentation tasks via U-Net++. The mined knowledge, serving as "pseudo labels", enriches the training dataset, enabling the fine-tuning of the local network. Applied to the Kvasir SEG and COVID-QU-Ex datasets which consist of gastrointestinal polyp and lung X-ray images respectively, our proposed method consistently enhanced the segmentation performance on Dice by 3% and 1% respectively over the baseline U-Net++ model, when the same amount of labelled data were used during training (75% and 50% of labelled data). Remarkably, our proposed method surpassed the baseline U-Net++ model even when the latter was trained exclusively on labeled data (100% of labelled data). These results underscore the potential of knowledge mining to overcome data limitations in specialized models by leveraging the broad, albeit general, knowledge of large-scale models like SAM, all while maintaining operational efficiency essential for clinical applications.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Watch Out for Your Guidance on Generation! Exploring Conditional Backdoor Attacks against Large Language Models

Mainstream backdoor attacks on large language models (LLMs) typically set a fixed trigger in the input instance and specific responses for triggered queries. However, the fixed trigger setting (e.g., unusual words) may be easily detected by human detection, limiting the effectiveness and practicality in real-world scenarios. To enhance the stealthiness of backdoor activation, we present a new poisoning paradigm against LLMs triggered by specifying generation conditions, which are commonly adopted strategies by users during model inference. The poisoned model performs normally for output under normal/other generation conditions, while becomes harmful for output under target generation conditions. To achieve this objective, we introduce BrieFool, an efficient attack framework. It leverages the characteristics of generation conditions by efficient instruction sampling and poisoning data generation, thereby influencing the behavior of LLMs under target conditions. Our attack can be generally divided into two types with different targets: Safety unalignment attack and Ability degradation attack. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that BrieFool is effective across safety domains and ability domains, achieving higher success rates than baseline methods, with 94.3 % on GPT-3.5-turbo

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Adversarial Transferability in Deep Denoising Models: Theoretical Insights and Robustness Enhancement via Out-of-Distribution Typical Set Sampling

Deep learning-based image denoising models demonstrate remarkable performance, but their lack of robustness analysis remains a significant concern. A major issue is that these models are susceptible to adversarial attacks, where small, carefully crafted perturbations to input data can cause them to fail. Surprisingly, perturbations specifically crafted for one model can easily transfer across various models, including CNNs, Transformers, unfolding models, and plug-and-play models, leading to failures in those models as well. Such high adversarial transferability is not observed in classification models. We analyze the possible underlying reasons behind the high adversarial transferability through a series of hypotheses and validation experiments. By characterizing the manifolds of Gaussian noise and adversarial perturbations using the concept of typical set and the asymptotic equipartition property, we prove that adversarial samples deviate slightly from the typical set of the original input distribution, causing the models to fail. Based on these insights, we propose a novel adversarial defense method: the Out-of-Distribution Typical Set Sampling Training strategy (TS). TS not only significantly enhances the model's robustness but also marginally improves denoising performance compared to the original model.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

The Patchkeeper: An Integrated Wearable Electronic Stethoscope with Multiple Sensors

Many parts of human body generate internal sound during biological processes, which are rich sources of information for understanding health and wellbeing. Despite a long history of development and usage of stethoscopes, there is still a lack of proper tools for recording internal body sound together with complementary sensors for long term monitoring. In this paper, we show our development of a wearable electronic stethoscope, coined Patchkeeper (PK), that can be used for internal body sound recording over long periods of time. Patchkeeper also integrates several state-of-the-art biological sensors, including electrocardiogram (ECG), photoplethysmography (PPG), and inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors. As a wearable device, Patchkeeper can be placed on various parts of the body to collect sound from particular organs, including heart, lung, stomach, and joints etc. We show in this paper that several vital signals can be recorded simultaneously with high quality. As Patchkeeper can be operated directly by the user, e.g. without involving health care professionals, we believe it could be a useful tool for telemedicine and remote diagnostics.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Observation of non-Hermitian topology from optical loss modulation

Understanding the interplay of non-Hermiticity and topology is crucial given the intrinsic openness of most natural and engineered systems and it has important ramifications in topological lasers and sensors. Intense efforts have been devoted to unveiling how non-Hermiticity may impact the most significant features of topological systems, but only recently it has been theoretically proposed that topological features could originate solely from the system's non-Hermiticity in photonic systems. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate the appearance of non-Hermitian topology exclusively from loss modulation in a photonic system that is topologically trivial in the absence of loss. We do this by implementing a non-Hermitian generalization of an Aubry-Andre-Harper model with purely imaginary potential in a programmable integrated photonics platform, which allows us to investigate different periodic and quasi-periodic configurations of the model. In both cases, we show the emergence of topological edge modes and explore their resilience to different kinds of disorder. Our work highlights loss engineering as a mechanism to generate topological properties.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Backdoor Attack Against Vision Transformers via Attention Gradient-Based Image Erosion

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have outperformed traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) across various computer vision tasks. However, akin to CNN, ViTs are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where the adversary embeds the backdoor into the victim model, causing it to make wrong predictions about testing samples containing a specific trigger. Existing backdoor attacks against ViTs have the limitation of failing to strike an optimal balance between attack stealthiness and attack effectiveness. In this work, we propose an Attention Gradient-based Erosion Backdoor (AGEB) targeted at ViTs. Considering the attention mechanism of ViTs, AGEB selectively erodes pixels in areas of maximal attention gradient, embedding a covert backdoor trigger. Unlike previous backdoor attacks against ViTs, AGEB achieves an optimal balance between attack stealthiness and attack effectiveness, ensuring the trigger remains invisible to human detection while preserving the model's accuracy on clean samples. Extensive experimental evaluations across various ViT architectures and datasets confirm the effectiveness of AGEB, achieving a remarkable Attack Success Rate (ASR) without diminishing Clean Data Accuracy (CDA). Furthermore, the stealthiness of AGEB is rigorously validated, demonstrating minimal visual discrepancies between the clean and the triggered images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Unsupervised Low-dose CT Reconstruction with One-way Conditional Normalizing Flows

Deep-learning methods have shown promising performance for low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) reconstruction. However, supervised methods face the problem of lacking labeled data in clinical scenarios, and the CNN-based unsupervised denoising methods would cause excessive smoothing in the reconstructed image. Recently, the normalizing flows (NFs) based methods have shown advantages in producing detail-rich images and avoiding over-smoothing, however, there are still issues: (1) Although the alternating optimization in the data and latent space can well utilize the regularization and generation capabilities of NFs, the current two-way transformation strategy of noisy images and latent variables would cause detail loss and secondary artifacts; and (2) Training NFs on high-resolution CT images is hard due to huge computation. Though using conditional normalizing flows (CNFs) to learn conditional probability can reduce the computational burden, current methods require labeled data for conditionalization, and the unsupervised CNFs-based LDCT reconstruction remains a problem. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel CNFs-based unsupervised LDCT iterative reconstruction algorithm. It employs strict one-way transformation when performing alternating optimization in the dual spaces, thus effectively avoiding the problems of detail loss and secondary artifacts. By proposing a novel unsupervised conditionalization strategy, we train CNFs on high-resolution CT images, thus achieving fast and high-quality unsupervised reconstruction. Experiments on different datasets suggest that the performance of the proposed algorithm could surpass some state-of-the-art unsupervised and even supervised methods.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

A Low-dose CT Reconstruction Network Based on TV-regularized OSEM Algorithm

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) offers significant advantages in reducing the potential harm to human bodies. However, reducing the X-ray dose in CT scanning often leads to severe noise and artifacts in the reconstructed images, which might adversely affect diagnosis. By utilizing the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, statistical priors could be combined with artificial priors to improve LDCT reconstruction quality. However, conventional EM-based regularization methods adopt an alternating solving strategy, i.e. full reconstruction followed by image-regularization, resulting in over-smoothing and slow convergence. In this paper, we propose to integrate TV regularization into the ``M''-step of the EM algorithm, thus achieving effective and efficient regularization. Besides, by employing the Chambolle-Pock (CP) algorithm and the ordered subset (OS) strategy, we propose the OSEM-CP algorithm for LDCT reconstruction, in which both reconstruction and regularization are conducted view-by-view. Furthermore, by unrolling OSEM-CP, we propose an end-to-end reconstruction neural network (NN), named OSEM-CPNN, with remarkable performance and efficiency that achieves high-quality reconstructions in just one full-view iteration. Experiments on different models and datasets demonstrate our methods' outstanding performance compared to traditional and state-of-the-art deep-learning methods.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

SeLoRA: Self-Expanding Low-Rank Adaptation of Latent Diffusion Model for Medical Image Synthesis

The persistent challenge of medical image synthesis posed by the scarcity of annotated data and the need to synthesize `missing modalities' for multi-modal analysis, underscored the imperative development of effective synthesis methods. Recently, the combination of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with latent diffusion models (LDMs) has emerged as a viable approach for efficiently adapting pre-trained large language models, in the medical field. However, the direct application of LoRA assumes uniform ranking across all linear layers, overlooking the significance of different weight matrices, and leading to sub-optimal outcomes. Prior works on LoRA prioritize the reduction of trainable parameters, and there exists an opportunity to further tailor this adaptation process to the intricate demands of medical image synthesis. In response, we present SeLoRA, a Self-Expanding Low-Rank Adaptation Module, that dynamically expands its ranking across layers during training, strategically placing additional ranks on crucial layers, to allow the model to elevate synthesis quality where it matters most. The proposed method not only enables LDMs to fine-tune on medical data efficiently but also empowers the model to achieve improved image quality with minimal ranking. The code of our SeLoRA method is publicly available on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SeLoRA-980D .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Backdoor Attacks against Image-to-Image Networks

Recently, deep learning-based Image-to-Image (I2I) networks have become the predominant choice for I2I tasks such as image super-resolution and denoising. Despite their remarkable performance, the backdoor vulnerability of I2I networks has not been explored. To fill this research gap, we conduct a comprehensive investigation on the susceptibility of I2I networks to backdoor attacks. Specifically, we propose a novel backdoor attack technique, where the compromised I2I network behaves normally on clean input images, yet outputs a predefined image of the adversary for malicious input images containing the trigger. To achieve this I2I backdoor attack, we propose a targeted universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) generation algorithm for I2I networks, where the generated UAP is used as the backdoor trigger. Additionally, in the backdoor training process that contains the main task and the backdoor task, multi-task learning (MTL) with dynamic weighting methods is employed to accelerate convergence rates. In addition to attacking I2I tasks, we extend our I2I backdoor to attack downstream tasks, including image classification and object detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the I2I backdoor on state-of-the-art I2I network architectures, as well as the robustness against different mainstream backdoor defenses.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

DDFAD: Dataset Distillation Framework for Audio Data

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant success in numerous applications. The remarkable performance of DNNs is largely attributed to the availability of massive, high-quality training datasets. However, processing such massive training data requires huge computational and storage resources. Dataset distillation is a promising solution to this problem, offering the capability to compress a large dataset into a smaller distilled dataset. The model trained on the distilled dataset can achieve comparable performance to the model trained on the whole dataset. While dataset distillation has been demonstrated in image data, none have explored dataset distillation for audio data. In this work, for the first time, we propose a Dataset Distillation Framework for Audio Data (DDFAD). Specifically, we first propose the Fused Differential MFCC (FD-MFCC) as extracted features for audio data. After that, the FD-MFCC is distilled through the matching training trajectory distillation method. Finally, we propose an audio signal reconstruction algorithm based on the Griffin-Lim Algorithm to reconstruct the audio signal from the distilled FD-MFCC. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DDFAD on various audio datasets. In addition, we show that DDFAD has promising application prospects in many applications, such as continual learning and neural architecture search.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

Properties of Besov-Lorentz spaces and application to Navier-Stokes equations

Inspired by Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg, Fefferman and Lin, we try to investigate how to control the set of large value points for the strong solution of Navier-Stokes equations. Besov-Lorentz spaces have multiple indices which can reflect complex changes of the set of the large value points. Hence we consider some properties of Gauss flow, paraproduct flow and couple flow related to the Besov-Lorentz spaces. When dealing with Lorentz index, we use wavelets and maximum norm to describe the decay situation in the binary time ring and to define time-frequency microlocal maximum norm space. We use maximum operator, $α$-triangle inequality and Hölder inequality etc to get accurate estimates. As an application, we get a global wellposedness result of the Navier-Stokes equations where the solution can reflect how the size of the set of large value points changes.

math.AP↗

arXiv2024

BAZAM: A Blockchain-Assisted Zero-Trust Authentication in Multi-UAV Wireless Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are vulnerable to interception and attacks when operated remotely without a unified and efficient identity authentication. Meanwhile, the openness of wireless communication environments potentially leads to data leakage and system paralysis. However, conventional authentication schemes in the UAV network are system-centric, failing to adapt to the diversity of UAVs identities and access, resulting in changes in network environments and connection statuses. Additionally, UAVs are not subjected to periodic identity compliance checks once authenticated, leading to difficulties in controlling access anomalies. Therefore, in this work, we consider a zero-trust framework for UAV network authentication, aiming to achieve UAVs identity authentication through the principle of ``never trust and always verify''. We introduce a blockchain-assisted zero-trust authentication scheme, namely BAZAM, designed for multi-UAV wireless networks. In this scheme, UAVs follow a key generation approach using physical unclonable functions (PUFs), and cryptographic technique helps verify registration and access requests of UAVs. The blockchain is applied to store UAVs authentication information in immutable storage. Through thorough security analysis and extensive evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed BAZAM.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Stealthy Targeted Backdoor Attacks against Image Captioning

In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in multimodal learning. Image captioning, a classical multimodal task, has demonstrated promising applications and attracted extensive research attention. However, recent studies have shown that image caption models are vulnerable to some security threats such as backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks against image captioning typically pair a trigger either with a predefined sentence or a single word as the targeted output, yet they are unrelated to the image content, making them easily noticeable as anomalies by humans. In this paper, we present a novel method to craft targeted backdoor attacks against image caption models, which are designed to be stealthier than prior attacks. Specifically, our method first learns a special trigger by leveraging universal perturbation techniques for object detection, then places the learned trigger in the center of some specific source object and modifies the corresponding object name in the output caption to a predefined target name. During the prediction phase, the caption produced by the backdoored model for input images with the trigger can accurately convey the semantic information of the rest of the whole image, while incorrectly recognizing the source object as the predefined target. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve a high attack success rate while having a negligible impact on model clean performance. In addition, we show our method is stealthy in that the produced backdoor samples are indistinguishable from clean samples in both image and text domains, which can successfully bypass existing backdoor defenses, highlighting the need for better defensive mechanisms against such stealthy backdoor attacks.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Instruction Backdoor Attacks Against Customized LLMs

The increasing demand for customized Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the development of solutions like GPTs. These solutions facilitate tailored LLM creation via natural language prompts without coding. However, the trustworthiness of third-party custom versions of LLMs remains an essential concern. In this paper, we propose the first instruction backdoor attacks against applications integrated with untrusted customized LLMs (e.g., GPTs). Specifically, these attacks embed the backdoor into the custom version of LLMs by designing prompts with backdoor instructions, outputting the attacker's desired result when inputs contain the pre-defined triggers. Our attack includes 3 levels of attacks: word-level, syntax-level, and semantic-level, which adopt different types of triggers with progressive stealthiness. We stress that our attacks do not require fine-tuning or any modification to the backend LLMs, adhering strictly to GPTs development guidelines. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 prominent LLMs and 5 benchmark text classification datasets. The results show that our instruction backdoor attacks achieve the desired attack performance without compromising utility. Additionally, we propose two defense strategies and demonstrate their effectiveness in reducing such attacks. Our findings highlight the vulnerability and the potential risks of LLM customization such as GPTs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

The 2024 Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge: Glioma Segmentation on Post-treatment MRI

Gliomas are the most common malignant primary brain tumors in adults and one of the deadliest types of cancer. There are many challenges in treatment and monitoring due to the genetic diversity and high intrinsic heterogeneity in appearance, shape, histology, and treatment response. Treatments include surgery, radiation, and systemic therapies, with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) playing a key role in treatment planning and post-treatment longitudinal assessment. The 2024 Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge on post-treatment glioma MRI will provide a community standard and benchmark for state-of-the-art automated segmentation models based on the largest expert-annotated post-treatment glioma MRI dataset. Challenge competitors will develop automated segmentation models to predict four distinct tumor sub-regions consisting of enhancing tissue (ET), surrounding non-enhancing T2/fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) hyperintensity (SNFH), non-enhancing tumor core (NETC), and resection cavity (RC). Models will be evaluated on separate validation and test datasets using standardized performance metrics utilized across the BraTS 2024 cluster of challenges, including lesion-wise Dice Similarity Coefficient and Hausdorff Distance. Models developed during this challenge will advance the field of automated MRI segmentation and contribute to their integration into clinical practice, ultimately enhancing patient care.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Non-Hermitian topology and criticality in photonic arrays with engineered losses

Integrated photonic systems provide a flexible platform where artificial lattices can be engineered in a reconfigurable fashion. Here, we show that one-dimensional photonic arrays with engineered losses allow the realization of topological excitations stemming from non-Hermiticity and bulk mode criticality. We show that a generalized modulation of the local photonic losses allows the creation of topological modes both in the presence of periodicity and even in the quasiperiodic regime. We demonstrate that a localization transition of all the bulk photonic modes can be engineered in the presence of a quasiperiodic loss modulation, and we further demonstrate that such a transition can be created in the presence of both resonance frequency modulation and loss modulation. We finally address the robustness of this phenomenology to the presence of next to the nearest neighbor couplings and disorder in the emergence of criticality and topological modes. Our results put forward a strategy to engineer topology and criticality solely from engineered losses in a photonic system, establishing a potential platform to study the impact of nonlinearities in topological and critical photonic matter.

physics.optics↗