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Huazhu Fu

Publications and source records attributed to Huazhu Fu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

ComBodied Agents: a New Paradigm of Human-Centric Agentic AI

After an older adult misses a medication dose, a software agent can send another reminder and an embodied agent can bring the medication. Yet neither explains whether the person forgot, is confused, has side effects, or deliberately refused, nor what support is appropriate. This reveals a structural gap in Agentic AI: Digital Agents primarily transform software states, while Embodied Agents transform physical states; neither makes a person's evolving state and agency the primary object of modeling, intervention, and evaluation. We introduce Combodied Agents, a human-centered paradigm that perceives, models, predicts, and supports individual human-state trajectories over time, using software tools, sensors, wearables, robots, and human services as action channels rather than end goals. We unify fragmented capabilities across personal assistants, health agents, AI companions, and adaptive human--AI systems into a closed loop: event-based multimodal perception reconstructs meaningful personal events; longitudinal, correctable memory provides temporal context; Personal World Models estimate future personal states and outcomes under alternative decisions and interventions; and an admissible intervention policy selects proportionate support under consent, uncertainty, safety, reversibility, and user control. Feedback from the person and environment updates the loop. Rather than requiring an exhaustive Human Digital Twin, the framework uses purpose-bounded, uncertainty-aware, user-correctable representations. We organize the design space by human-state targets, relational contexts, and agent roles, and propose scenario-centered evaluation, agency-preservation metrics, benchmark requirements, edge-native personal models, and governance directions. Combodied Agents shift Agentic AI from external task completion toward sustained human benefit.

cs.AI

Advantage-Guided Gate: Reshaping Open-Ended Reasoning for Vision-Based Spatial Intelligence

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex spatial scene understanding and reasoning tasks. However, their open-ended reasoning process is prone to decision errors and error accumulation, leading to instability in answer quality. To address this, we propose an advantage-guided gating framework that dynamically intervenes in and corrects deviations during the reasoning process. Specifically, we model step-by-step reasoning as a finite-horizon decision process and introduce Monte Carlo value evaluation on the reasoning tree to provide intermediate supervision signals. The framework includes Step-Advantage Gate and Trajectory-Advantage Gate, which dynamically select high-value reasoning steps and high-quality complete reasoning trajectories, respectively. During training, we perform supervised learning for the gates using reasoning trees generated via multi-branch sampling, and combine shared-parameter initialization with task-specific heads to achieve cross-task robustness and diversity. During inference, the model greedily selects high-value prefix reasoning steps while choosing the optimal reasoning head based on the problem type, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of the final answer. Furthermore, we constructed the Reasoning-Tree-160k dataset and performed two-stage learning on it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this advantage-guided gating framework effectively enhances the performance of benchmark MLLMs in visual-based spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. The code is open to the public for research: https://github.com/LingLin-ll/Advantage-Guided-Gate.

cs.CV

Beyond Relevance: Bayesian Evidence Acquisition for Agentic Whole-Slide Image Reasoning

Whole-slide image (WSI) reasoning requires an agent to sequentially acquire visual evidence before answering a diagnostic question. Existing training-free agentic frameworks formulate this process as iterative patch retrieval based on semantic relevance to the question. However, semantic relevance does not necessarily imply diagnostic informativeness in computational pathology, where competing diagnoses often exhibit similar and overlapping morphological patterns, making many patches semantically relevant yet diagnostically non-discriminative. Consequently, relevance-based retrieval may acquire redundant observations and leave diagnostic uncertainty unresolved. We propose BEACON, a plug-and-play agentic framework that reformulates WSI reasoning as a Bayesian evidence acquisition problem. BEACON maintains a probabilistic belief over competing diagnostic hypotheses and sequentially acquires patches by maximizing expected information gain (EIG) to reduce diagnostic uncertainty. An evidence controller then determines whether to answer, acquire additional evidence, or perform higher-resolution inspection. Built entirely from off-the-shelf foundation models, BEACON requires no additional training or fine-tuning. Extensive zero-shot experiments across five WSI-VQA benchmarks demonstrate that BEACON achieves the strongest overall performance among training-free agentic frameworks while substantially improving evidence acquisition efficiency, establishing Bayesian evidence acquisition as a principled paradigm for uncertainty-aware agentic WSI reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/bryanwong17/BEACON

cs.CV

Understanding Synergistic Interactions among Pathology Foundation Models via Adaptive Fusion

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.

cs.CV

Reasoning with Memory: A Temporal Granularity-Adaptive Framework for Training-Free Long Video Understanding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate superior generalization in fundamental video tasks, restricted context windows limit their long video understanding. To accommodate this constraint, models typically resort to keyframe selection. However, uniform sampling or static query-guided selection often overlooks critical temporal context, failing to adapt to the varying query temporal granularities. In this paper, we propose ReMem, a temporal granularity-adaptive keyframe selection framework for training-free LongVideoQA. ReMem introduces a dual-level memory-augmented adaptation. At the query level, Memory-Driven Question Parsing leverages LLM long-term memory to decode question temporal granularity and extract semantic entities. At the video level, Synergistic Dual-Semantic Frame Alignment exploits intrinsic structural memory to align frames with query semantics, guiding Structure-Aware Dynamic Frame Routing to cluster events and optimally distribute sampling budgets. By explicitly preserving temporal information with memory mechanisms, ReMem suppresses redundancy and empowers MLLMs to perform robust multi-granular video reasoning. Evaluations across four popular LongVideoQA benchmarks using three MLLMs demonstrate highly efficient, state-of-the-art zero-shot performance; notably, LLaVA-Video with ReMem reaches 54.5% (+12.3%) on LVBench and 67.1% (+8.2%) on LongVideoBench.

cs.AI

Hallucination Detection and Correction in Medical VLMs via Counter-Evidence Verification

Vision-Language models (VLMs) reliability in medical diagnosis is challenged by trust-undermining hallucinations. Existing hallucination detection approaches mainly focus on identifying factual inconsistencies between generated text and reference data. While some studies analyze where models attend in images, they seldom verify whether such attention truly reflects the visual evidence supporting the generated text. To address this gap, we propose Co}unter-Evidence Verification (CoEV), a training-free plug-and-play framework that detects and corrects hallucinations through evidence-based factual consistency verification. CoEV performs bidirectional verification between textual assertions and visual evidence, testing whether each statement is supported by its corresponding evidence region, and assigns each statement into a four-quadrant diagnostic map capturing combinations of text factuality and visual grounding. CoEV detects hallucinated content and serves as a post hoc refinement tool, correcting hallucinations without retraining. Extensive experiments on four medical datasets show that CoEV combats hallucinations in VLMs.For hallucination detection, CoEV consistently outperforms existing methods, improving average PR-AUC and ROC-AUC by 3.0% and 3.9% absolute points respectively, with notable gains of up to 18.5% in specific VQA scenarios. For hallucination correction, it improves Micro-F1 by up to 12.5%, reduces hallucination rates by over 11.9% on medical report generation, and also boosts medical VQA accuracy. These results show that CoEV enables reliable detection and correction of hallucinations, providing clinicians with dependable, evidence-based cues for diagnosis. Code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV

PathAR: Structure-First Autoregressive Synthesis of Multimodal Pathology Images

Data scarcity in multimodal pathology motivates unified generative models that synthesize modality-specific appearance while preserving anatomically coherent structure. Although modalities differ in appearance statistics, morphological structures such as cellular topology and tissue boundaries are largely preserved across acquisition protocols. However, existing methods often model these factors within a homogeneous token stream, implicitly coupling structure with appearance and weakening structural controllability under modality shifts. To address this, we propose pathology Autorgressive modeling (PathAR), a structure-first autoregressive synthesis framework that explicitly factorizes structure and appearance for modality-label-conditioned pathology generation.PathAR employs a dual vector quantization (Dual-VQ) tokenizer to decompose samples into mask-grounded structure and appearance tokens, and an interleaved autoregressive (IAR) transformer with asymmetric attention visibility to enforce structure-to-appearance dependence. PathAR stabilizes morphology under heterogeneous modality-specific appearances and enables spatially aligned image--mask pair generation. Extensive experiments show that PathAR improves structural consistency and modality fidelity over baselines, maintains sample diversity, supports downstream segmentation in data-scarce regimes, and demonstrates extensibility to finer-grained intra-modality organ-label variation.

cs.CV

MARVEL: Universal Murray's Law-informed Vessel Tree Segmentation and Topology Estimation

Vascular circulation follows fundamental biophysical principles that optimize mass transport and metabolic energy expenditure, which can be effectively modeled by Murray's law. However, contemporary deep learning methods for vascular segmentation often neglect these biophysical constraints. This leads to physiologically implausible branching and misclassification vascular trees, rendering. These automated segmentation results are unreliable unreliable for downstream clinical tasks such as blood flow simulation or disease quantification. In this paper, we introduce MARVEL (Universal MurrAy's law-infoRmed Vessel sEgmentation and topoLogy estimation), a backbone-agnostic framework that integrates biophysical priors into vascular tree extraction. MARVEL combines per-pixel supervision with explicit radius predictions to enforce local bifurcation constraints derived from an empirical width-exponent mapping. We implement these constraints as differentiable regularizers during training to guide models toward physiologically consistent reconstructions. We evaluate MARVEL on eight public datasets across multiple vascular modalities and segmentation backbones. Results demonstrate MARVEL's superior performance in segmentation accuracy, topological consistency, and physiological plausibility. By converting segmented masks into graph-based hemodynamic simulations, we demonstrate that MARVEL preserves the subtle pathological narrowing and topological connectivity required to distinguish hypertensive from normotensive eyes. Results show that MARVEL significantly improves the classification of hypertension via arteriovenous pressure differences in the eye (p < 0.001), outperforming baseline models in both topological consistency and clinical predictive value.

cs.CV

Towards Clinically Interpretable Ophthalmic VQA via Spatially-Grounded Lesion Evidence

Visual Question Answering (VQA) holds great promise for clinical support, particularly in ophthalmology, where retinal fundus photography is essential for diagnosis. However, ophthalmic VQA benchmarks primarily emphasize answer accuracy, neglecting the explicit visual evidence necessary for clinical interpretability. In this work, we introduce FundusGround, a new benchmark for clinically interpretable ophthalmic VQA with spatially-grounded lesion evidence. Specifically, we propose a three-stage pipeline that collects 10,719 fundus images with 15,595 image-level meticulously annotated lesions. To ensure anatomical consistency and clinical validity, all lesions are spatially localized using the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) grid, enabling standardized mapping to nine clinically meaningful retinal regions. Built upon this structured lesion evidence, 72,706 questions are then generated spanning four formats: open-ended, closed-ended, single-choice, and multiple-choice. We further benchmark multiple general- and medical- large vision-language models using dual metrics for answer accuracy and lesion-level reasoning. The experiments demonstrate that incorporating lesion-level visual evidence consistently improves model performance and transparency, highlighting the necessity of explicit spatial grounding for reliable and explainable ophthalmic VQA.

cs.CV

Thinking in Scales: Accelerating Gigapixel Pathology Image Analysis via Adaptive Continuous Reasoning

Traditional whole slide image (WSI) analysis methods typically rely on the multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigm, which extracts patch-level features at high magnification and aggregates them for slide-level prediction. However, such exhaustive patch-level processing is computationally expensive, severely limiting the efficiency and scalability of WSI analysis. To address this challenge, we propose PathCTM (a Pathology-oriented Continuous Thought Model) that enables token-efficient scale-space continuous reasoning for gigapixel WSIs. PathCTM formulates diagnostic inference as a dynamic sequential information pursuit. It progressively transitions from low-magnification global to high-magnification local inspection, and adaptively terminates inference when sufficient evidence is gathered to effectively bound decision uncertainty. Specifically, it uses conditional computation for dynamic scale switching with attention-guided region pruning, coupled with confidence-aware early stopping. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared with standard MIL-based methods, PathCTM reduces the number of required image patches by 95.95% and shortens inference time by approximately 95.62%, while maintaining AUC without degradation. Code is available at https://github.com/JSGe-AI/PathCTM.

cs.CV

PRIME: Prototype-Driven Multimodal Pretraining for Cancer Prognosis with Missing Modalities

Multimodal self-supervised pretraining offers a promising route to cancer prognosis by integrating histopathology whole-slide images, gene expression, and pathology reports, yet most existing approaches require fully paired and complete inputs. In practice, clinical cohorts are fragmented and often miss one or more modalities, limiting both supervised fusion and scalable multimodal pretraining. We propose PRIME, a missing-aware multimodal self-supervised pretraining framework that learns robust and transferable representations from partially observed cohorts. PRIME maps heterogeneous modality embeddings into a unified token space and introduces a shared prototype memory bank for latent-space semantic imputation via patient-level consensus retrieval, producing structurally aligned tokens without reconstructing raw signals. Two complementary pretraining objectives: inter-modality alignment and post-fusion consistency under structured missingness augmentation, jointly learn representations that remain predictive under arbitrary modality subsets. We evaluate PRIME on The Cancer Genome Atlas with label-free pretraining on 32 cancer types and downstream 5-fold evaluation on five cohorts across overall survival prediction, 3-year mortality classification, and 3-year recurrence classification. PRIME achieves the best macro-average performance among all compared methods, reaching 0.653 C-index, 0.689 AUROC, and 0.637 AUROC on the three tasks, respectively, while improving robustness under test-time missingness and supporting parameter-efficient and label-efficient adaptation. These results support missing-aware multimodal pretraining as a practical strategy for prognosis modeling in fragmented clinical data settings.

cs.LG

Enhancing Medical Visual Grounding via Knowledge-guided Spatial Prompts

Medical Visual Grounding (MVG) aims to identify diagnostically relevant phrases from free-text radiology reports and localize their corresponding regions in medical images, providing interpretable visual evidence to support clinical decision-making. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit promising multimodal reasoning ability, their grounding remains insufficient spatial precision, largely due to a lack of explicit localization priors when relying solely on latent embeddings. In this work, we analyze this limitation from an attention perspective and propose KnowMVG, a Knowledge-prior and global-local attention enhancement framework for MVG in VLMs that explicitly strengthens spatial awareness during decoding. Specifically, we present a knowledge-enhanced prompting strategy that encodes phrase related medical knowledge into compact embeddings, together with a global-local attention that jointly leverages coarse global information and refined local cues to guide precise region localization. localization. This design bridges high-level semantic understanding and fine-grained visual perception without introducing extra textual reasoning overhead. Extensive experiments on four MVG benchmarks demonstrate that our KnowMVG consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving gains of 3.0% in AP50 and 2.6% in mIoU over prior state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative and ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component.

cs.CV

Deep Expert Injection for Anchoring Retinal VLMs with Domain-Specific Knowledge

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) show immense potential for automated ophthalmic diagnosis. However, their clinical deployment is severely hindered by lacking domain-specific knowledge. In this work, we identify two structural deficiencies hindering reliable medical reasoning: 1) the Perception Gap, where general-purpose visual encoders fail to resolve fine-grained pathological cues (e.g., microaneurysms); and 2) the Reasoning Gap, where sparse visual evidence is progressively overridden by massive language priors in deeper transformer layers, leading to ungrounded hallucinations. To bridge these gaps, we propose EyExIn, a data-efficient framework designed to anchor retinal VLMs with expert knowledge via a Deep Expert Injection mechanism. Our architecture employs an Expert-Aware Dual-Stream encoding strategy that decouples visual representation into a general stream for anatomical context and a specialized expert stream for pathological semantics. To ensure high-fidelity integration, we design a Semantic-Adaptive Gated Fusion module, which dynamically amplifies subtle lesion signals while filtering irrelevant background noise. Furthermore, we introduce Adaptive Deep Expert Injection to embed persistent "Vision Anchors" by integrating fused visual features as residual biases directly into intermediate LLM layers. This mechanism creates a visual shortcut that forces the reasoning stack to remain strictly grounded in visual evidence. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms massive proprietary systems. EyExIn significantly enhances domain-specific knowledge embedding and achieves state-of-the-art precision in ophthalmic visual question answering, advancing the development of trustworthy ophthalmic AI.

cs.CV

CORE-Seg: Reasoning-Driven Segmentation for Complex Lesions via Reinforcement Learning

Medical image segmentation is undergoing a paradigm shift from conventional visual pattern matching to cognitive reasoning analysis. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in integrating linguistic and visual knowledge, significant gaps remain: existing general MLLMs possess broad common sense but lack the specialized visual reasoning required for complex lesions, whereas traditional segmentation models excel at pixel-level segmentation but lack logical interpretability. In this paper, we introduce ComLesion-14K, the first diverse Chain-of-Thought (CoT) benchmark for reasoning-driven complex lesion segmentation. To accomplish this task, we propose CORE-Seg, an end-to-end framework integrating reasoning with segmentation through a Semantic-Guided Prompt Adapter. We design a progressive training strategy from SFT to GRPO, equipped with an adaptive dual-granularity reward mechanism to mitigate reward sparsity. Our Method achieves state-of-the-art results with a mean Dice of 37.06\% (14.89\% higher than the second-best baseline), while reducing the failure rate to 18.42\%. Project Page: https://xyxl024.github.io/CORE-Seg.github.io/

cs.CV

Authorize-on-Demand: Dynamic Authorization with Legality-Aware Intellectual Property Protection for VLMs

The rapid adoption of vision-language models (VLMs) has heightened the demand for robust intellectual property (IP) protection of these high-value pretrained models. Effective IP protection should proactively confine model deployment within authorized domains and prevent unauthorized transfers. However, existing methods rely on static training-time definitions, limiting flexibility in dynamic environments and often producing opaque responses to unauthorized inputs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel dynamic authorization with legality-aware intellectual property protection (AoD-IP) for VLMs, a framework that supports authorize-on-demand and legality-aware assessment. AoD-IP introduces a lightweight dynamic authorization module that enables flexible, user-controlled authorization, allowing users to actively specify or switch authorized domains on demand at deployment time. This enables the model to adapt seamlessly as application scenarios evolve and provides substantially greater extensibility than existing static-domain approaches. In addition, AoD-IP incorporates a dual-path inference mechanism that jointly predicts input legality-aware and task-specific outputs. Comprehensive experimental results on multiple cross-domain benchmarks demonstrate that AoD-IP maintains strong authorized-domain performance and reliable unauthorized detection, while supporting user-controlled authorization for adaptive deployment in dynamic environments.

cs.AI

OODBench: Out-of-Distribution Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models

Existing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved significant progress by being trained on massive-scale datasets, typically under the assumption that data are independent and identically distributed (IID). However, in real-world scenarios, it is often impractical to expect that all data processed by an AI system satisfy this assumption. Furthermore, failure to appropriately handle out-of-distribution (OOD) objects may introduce safety risks in real-world applications (e.g., autonomous driving or medical assistance). Unfortunately, current research has not yet provided valid benchmarks that can comprehensively assess the performance of VLMs in response to OOD data. Therefore, we propose OODBench, a predominantly automated method with minimal human verification, for constructing new benchmarks and evaluating the ability of VLMs to process OOD data. OODBench contains 40K instance-level OOD instance-category pairs, and we show that current VLMs still exhibit notable performance degradation on OODBench, even when the underlying image categories are common. In addition, we propose a reliable automated assessment metric that employs a Basic-to-Advanced Progression of prompted questions to assess the impact of OOD data on questions of varying difficulty more fully. Lastly, we summarize substantial findings and insights to facilitate future research in the acquisition and evaluation of OOD data.

cs.CV

Structure-constrained Language-informed Diffusion Model for Unpaired Low-dose Computed Tomography Angiography Reconstruction

The application of iodinated contrast media (ICM) improves the sensitivity and specificity of computed tomography (CT) for a wide range of clinical indications. However, overdose of ICM can cause problems such as kidney damage and life-threatening allergic reactions. Deep learning methods can generate CT images of normal-dose ICM from low-dose ICM, reducing the required dose while maintaining diagnostic power. However, existing methods are difficult to realize accurate enhancement with incompletely paired images, mainly because of the limited ability of the model to recognize specific structures. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Structure-constrained Language-informed Diffusion Model (SLDM), a unified medical generation model that integrates structural synergy and spatial intelligence. First, the structural prior information of the image is effectively extracted to constrain the model inference process, thus ensuring structural consistency in the enhancement process. Subsequently, semantic supervision strategy with spatial intelligence is introduced, which integrates the functions of visual perception and spatial reasoning, thus prompting the model to achieve accurate enhancement. Finally, the subtraction angiography enhancement module is applied, which serves to improve the contrast of the ICM agent region to suitable interval for observation. Qualitative analysis of visual comparison and quantitative results of several metrics demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in angiographic reconstruction for low-dose contrast medium CT angiography.

cs.CV

Topology-aware Pathological Consistency Matching for Weakly-Paired IHC Virtual Staining

Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining provides crucial molecular characterization of tissue samples and plays an indispensable role in the clinical examination and diagnosis of cancers. However, compared with the commonly used Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining, IHC staining involves complex procedures and is both time-consuming and expensive, which limits its widespread clinical use. Virtual staining converts H&E images to IHC images, offering a cost-effective alternative to clinical IHC staining. Nevertheless, using adjacent slides as ground truth often results in weakly-paired data with spatial misalignment and local deformations, hindering effective supervised learning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel topology-aware framework for H&E-to-IHC virtual staining. Specifically, we introduce a Topology-aware Consistency Matching (TACM) mechanism that employs graph contrastive learning and topological perturbations to learn robust matching patterns despite spatial misalignments, ensuring structural consistency. Furthermore, we propose a Topology-constrained Pathological Matching (TCPM) mechanism that aligns pathological positive regions based on node importance to enhance pathological consistency. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks across four staining tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving superior generation quality with higher clinical relevance.

cs.CV