arXiv subjects

Huazhu Fu

Publications and source records attributed to Huazhu Fu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

DPsurv: Dual-Prototype Evidential Fusion for Uncertainty-Aware and Interpretable Whole-Slide Image Survival Prediction

Pathology whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for cancer survival analysis because of their comprehensive histopathological information at both cellular and tissue levels, enabling quantitative, large-scale, and prognostically rich tumor feature analysis. However, most existing methods in WSI survival analysis struggle with limited interpretability and often overlook predictive uncertainty in heterogeneous slide images. In this paper, we propose DPsurv, a dual-prototype whole-slide image evidential fusion network that outputs uncertainty-aware survival intervals, while enabling interpretation of predictions through patch prototype assignment maps, component prototypes, and component-wise relative risk aggregation. Experiments on five publicly available datasets achieve the highest mean concordance index and the lowest mean integrated Brier score, validating the effectiveness and reliability of DPsurv. The interpretation of prediction results provides transparency at the feature, reasoning, and decision levels, thereby enhancing the trustworthiness and interpretability of DPsurv.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

Colon-X: Advancing Intelligent Colonoscopy toward Clinical Reasoning

In this study, we present Colon-X, an open initiative aimed at advancing multimodal intelligence in colonoscopy. We begin by constructing ColonVQA, the most comprehensive multimodal dataset ever built for colonoscopy, featuring over 1.1M+ visual question answering entries across 76 clinical findings and 18 multimodal tasks. Beyond serving as a community-wide data foundation, we further investigate a critical yet underexplored transition in colonoscopy - evolving from multimodal understanding to clinical reasoning: (a) To capture the current landscape of multimodal understanding behaviors, we systematically assess the generalizability of 22 multimodal large language models and examine their reliability under human-induced perturbations. The results reveal that clinical outputs from leading MLLMs remain far from robust and trustworthy. (b) To narrow this gap, we further explore reasoning-centric intelligence tailored for colonoscopy. Specifically, we curate ColonReason, a clinically grounded reasoning dataset annotated through a multi-agent debating pipeline, and develop ColonR1, the first R1-styled model that mitigates reward information collapse through task-adaptive rewards and gradient-stable policy optimization. Under data-scarce conditions, our ColonR1 achieves 56.61% overall accuracy, outperforming supervised fine-tuning by 25.22%, and sets a new reasoning-enabled baseline for multimodal colonoscopy analysis. All data and model resources are publicly available at https://github.com/ai4colonoscopy/Colon-X.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

UniVRSE: Unified Vision-conditioned Response Semantic Entropy for Hallucination Detection in Medical Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) have great potential for medical image understanding, particularly in Visual Report Generation (VRG) and Visual Question Answering (VQA), but they may generate hallucinated responses that contradict visual evidence, limiting clinical deployment. Although uncertainty-based hallucination detection methods are intuitive and effective, they are limited in medical VLMs. Specifically, Semantic Entropy (SE), effective in text-only LLMs, becomes less reliable in medical VLMs due to their overconfidence from strong language priors. To address this challenge, we propose UniVRSE, a Unified Vision-conditioned Response Semantic Entropy framework for hallucination detection in medical VLMs. UniVRSE strengthens visual guidance during uncertainty estimation by contrasting the semantic predictive distributions derived from an original image-text pair and a visually distorted counterpart, with higher entropy indicating hallucination risk. For VQA, UniVRSE works on the image-question pair, while for VRG, it decomposes the report into claims, generates verification questions, and applies vision-conditioned entropy estimation at the claim level. To evaluate hallucination detection, we propose a unified pipeline that generates responses on medical datasets and derives hallucination labels via factual consistency assessment. However, current evaluation methods rely on subjective criteria or modality-specific rules. To improve reliability, we introduce Alignment Ratio of Atomic Facts (ALFA), a novel method that quantifies fine-grained factual consistency. ALFA-derived labels provide ground truth for robust benchmarking. Experiments on six medical VQA/VRG datasets and three VLMs show UniVRSE significantly outperforms existing methods with strong cross-modal generalization.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

Plasticine: A Traceable Diffusion Model for Medical Image Translation

Domain gaps arising from variations in imaging devices and population distributions pose significant challenges for machine learning in medical image analysis. Existing image-to-image translation methods primarily aim to learn mappings between domains, often generating diverse synthetic data with variations in anatomical scale and shape, but they usually overlook spatial correspondence during the translation process. For clinical applications, traceability, defined as the ability to provide pixel-level correspondences between original and translated images, is equally important. This property enhances clinical interpretability but has been largely overlooked in previous approaches. To address this gap, we propose Plasticine, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first end-to-end image-to-image translation framework explicitly designed with traceability as a core objective. Our method combines intensity translation and spatial transformation within a denoising diffusion framework. This design enables the generation of synthetic images with interpretable intensity transitions and spatially coherent deformations, supporting pixel-wise traceability throughout the translation process.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2025

Probing Scientific General Intelligence of LLMs with Scientist-Aligned Workflows

Despite advances in scientific AI, a coherent framework for Scientific General Intelligence (SGI)-the ability to autonomously conceive, investigate, and reason across scientific domains-remains lacking. We present an operational SGI definition grounded in the Practical Inquiry Model (PIM: Deliberation, Conception, Action, Perception) and operationalize it via four scientist-aligned tasks: deep research, idea generation, dry/wet experiments, and experimental reasoning. SGI-Bench comprises over 1,000 expert-curated, cross-disciplinary samples inspired by Science's 125 Big Questions, enabling systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs. Results reveal gaps: low exact match (10--20%) in deep research despite step-level alignment; ideas lacking feasibility and detail; high code executability but low execution result accuracy in dry experiments; low sequence fidelity in wet protocols; and persistent multimodal comparative-reasoning challenges. We further introduce Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL), which optimizes retrieval-augmented novelty rewards at inference, enhancing hypothesis novelty without reference answer. Together, our PIM-grounded definition, workflow-centric benchmark, and empirical insights establish a foundation for AI systems that genuinely participate in scientific discovery.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Few-Shot Learning from Gigapixel Images via Hierarchical Vision-Language Alignment and Modeling

Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently been integrated into multiple instance learning (MIL) frameworks to address the challenge of few-shot, weakly supervised classification of whole slide images (WSIs). A key trend involves leveraging multi-scale information to better represent hierarchical tissue structures. However, existing methods often face two key limitations: (1) insufficient modeling of interactions within the same modalities across scales (e.g., 5x and 20x) and (2) inadequate alignment between visual and textual modalities on the same scale. To address these gaps, we propose HiVE-MIL, a hierarchical vision-language framework that constructs a unified graph consisting of (1) parent-child links between coarse (5x) and fine (20x) visual/textual nodes to capture hierarchical relationships, and (2) heterogeneous intra-scale edges linking visual and textual nodes on the same scale. To further enhance semantic consistency, HiVE-MIL incorporates a two-stage, text-guided dynamic filtering mechanism that removes weakly correlated patch-text pairs, and introduces a hierarchical contrastive loss to align textual semantics across scales. Extensive experiments on TCGA breast, lung, and kidney cancer datasets demonstrate that HiVE-MIL consistently outperforms both traditional MIL and recent VLM-based MIL approaches, achieving gains of up to 4.1% in macro F1 under 16-shot settings. Our results demonstrate the value of jointly modeling hierarchical structure and multimodal alignment for efficient and scalable learning from limited pathology data. The code is available at https://github.com/bryanwong17/HiVE-MIL.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Prompt Guiding Multi-Scale Adaptive Sparse Representation-driven Network for Low-Dose CT MAR

Low-dose CT (LDCT) is capable of reducing X-ray radiation exposure, but it will potentially degrade image quality, even yields metal artifacts at the case of metallic implants. For simultaneous LDCT reconstruction and metal artifact reduction (LDMAR), existing deep learning-based efforts face two main limitations: i) the network design neglects multi-scale and within-scale information; ii) training a distinct model for each dose necessitates significant storage space for multiple doses. To fill these gaps, we propose a prompt guiding multi-scale adaptive sparse representation-driven network, abbreviated as PMSRNet, for LDMAR task. Specifically, we construct PMSRNet inspired from multi-scale sparsifying frames, and it can simultaneously employ within-scale characteristics and cross-scale complementarity owing to an elaborated prompt guiding scale-adaptive threshold generator (PSATG) and a built multi-scale coefficient fusion module (MSFuM). The PSATG can adaptively capture multiple contextual information to generate more faithful thresholds, achieved by fusing features from local, regional, and global levels. Furthermore, we elaborate a model interpretable dual domain LDMAR framework called PDuMSRNet, and train single model with a prompt guiding strategy for multiple dose levels. We build a prompt guiding module, whose input contains dose level, metal mask and input instance, to provide various guiding information, allowing a single model to accommodate various CT dose settings. Extensive experiments at various dose levels demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art LDMAR methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Prompting Lipschitz-constrained network for multiple-in-one sparse-view CT reconstruction

Despite significant advancements in deep learning-based sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) reconstruction algorithms, these methods still encounter two primary limitations: (i) It is challenging to explicitly prove that the prior networks of deep unfolding algorithms satisfy Lipschitz constraints due to their empirically designed nature. (ii) The substantial storage costs of training a separate model for each setting in the case of multiple views hinder practical clinical applications. To address these issues, we elaborate an explicitly provable Lipschitz-constrained network, dubbed LipNet, and integrate an explicit prompt module to provide discriminative knowledge of different sparse sampling settings, enabling the treatment of multiple sparse view configurations within a single model. Furthermore, we develop a storage-saving deep unfolding framework for multiple-in-one SVCT reconstruction, termed PromptCT, which embeds LipNet as its prior network to ensure the convergence of its corresponding iterative algorithm. In simulated and real data experiments, PromptCT outperforms benchmark reconstruction algorithms in multiple-in-one SVCT reconstruction, achieving higher-quality reconstructions with lower storage costs. On the theoretical side, we explicitly demonstrate that LipNet satisfies boundary property, further proving its Lipschitz continuity and subsequently analyzing the convergence of the proposed iterative algorithms. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/shibaoshun/PromptCT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

GEMeX-RMCoT: An Enhanced Med-VQA Dataset for Region-Aware Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Medical visual question answering aims to support clinical decision-making by enabling models to answer natural language questions based on medical images. While recent advances in multi-modal learning have significantly improved performance, current methods still suffer from limited answer reliability and poor interpretability, impairing the ability of clinicians and patients to understand and trust model outputs. To address these limitations, this work first proposes a Region-Aware Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (RMCoT) dataset, in which the process of producing an answer is preceded by a sequence of intermediate reasoning steps that explicitly ground relevant visual regions of the medical image, thereby providing fine-grained explainability. Furthermore, we introduce a novel verifiable reward mechanism for reinforcement learning to guide post-training, improving the alignment between the model's reasoning process and its final answer. Remarkably, our method achieves comparable performance using only one-eighth of the training data, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposal. The dataset is available at https://www.med-vqa.com/GEMeX/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

AdaFusion: Prompt-Guided Inference with Adaptive Fusion of Pathology Foundation Models

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have demonstrated strong representational capabilities through self-supervised pre-training on large-scale, unannotated histopathology image datasets. However, their diverse yet opaque pretraining contexts, shaped by both data-related and structural/training factors, introduce latent biases that hinder generalisability and transparency in downstream applications. In this paper, we propose AdaFusion, a novel prompt-guided inference framework that, to our knowledge, is among the very first to dynamically integrate complementary knowledge from multiple PFMs. Our method compresses and aligns tile-level features from diverse models and employs a lightweight attention mechanism to adaptively fuse them based on tissue phenotype context. We evaluate AdaFusion on three real-world benchmarks spanning treatment response prediction, tumour grading, and spatial gene expression inference. Our approach consistently surpasses individual PFMs across both classification and regression tasks, while offering interpretable insights into each model's biosemantic specialisation. These results highlight AdaFusion's ability to bridge heterogeneous PFMs, achieving both enhanced performance and interpretability of model-specific inductive biases.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Towards Reliable Medical Image Segmentation by Modeling Evidential Calibrated Uncertainty

Medical image segmentation is critical for disease diagnosis and treatment assessment. However, concerns regarding the reliability of segmentation regions persist among clinicians, mainly attributed to the absence of confidence assessment, robustness, and calibration to accuracy. To address this, we introduce DEviS, an easily implementable foundational model that seamlessly integrates into various medical image segmentation networks. DEviS not only enhances the calibration and robustness of baseline segmentation accuracy but also provides high-efficiency uncertainty estimation for reliable predictions. By leveraging subjective logic theory, we explicitly model probability and uncertainty for medical image segmentation. Here, the Dirichlet distribution parameterizes the distribution of probabilities for different classes of the segmentation results. To generate calibrated predictions and uncertainty, we develop a trainable calibrated uncertainty penalty. Furthermore, DEviS incorporates an uncertainty-aware filtering module, which designs the metric of uncertainty-calibrated error to filter out-of-distribution data. We conducted validation studies on publicly available datasets, including ISIC2018, KiTS2021, LiTS2017, and BraTS2019, to assess the accuracy and robustness of different backbone segmentation models enhanced by DEviS, as well as the efficiency and reliability of uncertainty estimation.

eess.IV↗