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Jiguang Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Jiguang Wang.

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LEBGen: An LLM-Enhanced Bayesian Network Framework for Few-Shot Travel Survey Data Generation

Travel survey data are essential for transportation planning and travel behavior analysis, yet collecting large-scale representative samples is costly and time-consuming. A practical alternative is to generate synthetic survey records from a few-shot sample. However, such samples provide incomplete coverage of heterogeneous traveler groups and insufficient evidence for recovering the complex dependencies between demographic characteristics and travel behavior. Existing approaches have complementary limitations. Probabilistic generative models such as Bayesian networks (BNs) offer explicit distributional control, but structures learned from few-shot samples may omit meaningful dependencies or retain spurious ones. Large language models (LLMs) can help address these difficulties in BN structure learning by providing behavioral knowledge that complements the limited statistical evidence. We therefore propose LEBGen, an LLM-enhanced BN framework that uses this knowledge to refine network structure for few-shot travel survey data generation. Specifically, the LLM first identifies traveler personas from demographic attribute and travel behavior statistics, then recovers dependencies missed by the persona-augmented BN structure and prune spurious ones. The refined BN is parameterized exclusively from the observed data to generate synthetic records. Under a 2% few-shot setting on the 2022 Hong Kong Travel Characteristics Survey, LEBGen reduces the mean marginal Jensen-Shannon divergence from 0.0671 to 0.0091 and the mean absolute Cramer's V error by 14.3% over the best-performing baseline, substantially improving both distributional and dependency fidelity.

cs.AI

Fusion of Multi-scale Heterogeneous Pathology Foundation Models for Whole Slide Image Analysis

Whole slide image (WSI) analysis has emerged as an increasingly essential technique in computational pathology. Recent advances in the pathology foundation models (FMs) have demonstrated significant advantages in deriving meaningful patch-level or slide-level multi-scale features from WSIs. However, current pathology FMs have exhibited substantial heterogeneity caused by diverse private training datasets and different network architectures. This heterogeneity introduces performance variability when we utilize the features from different FMs in the downstream tasks. To fully explore the advantages of multiple FMs effectively, in this work, we propose a novel framework for the fusion of multi-scale heterogeneous pathology FMs, called FuseCPath, yielding a model with a superior ensemble performance. The main contributions of our framework can be summarized as follows: (i) To guarantee the representativeness of the training patches, we propose a multi-view clustering-based method to filter out the discriminative patches via multiple FMs' embeddings. (ii) To effectively fuse the patch-level FMs, we devise a cluster-level re-embedding strategy to online capture patch-level local features. (iii) To effectively fuse the slide-level FMs, we devise a collaborative distillation strategy to explore the connections between slide-level FMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed FuseCPath achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks on diverse datasets.

cs.CV

Towards A Generalizable Pathology Foundation Model via Unified Knowledge Distillation

Foundation models pretrained on large-scale datasets are revolutionizing the field of computational pathology (CPath). The generalization ability of foundation models is crucial for the success in various downstream clinical tasks. However, current foundation models have only been evaluated on a limited type and number of tasks, leaving their generalization ability and overall performance unclear. To address this gap, we established a most comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the performance of off-the-shelf foundation models across six distinct clinical task types, encompassing a total of 72 specific tasks, including slide-level classification, survival prediction, ROI-tissue classification, ROI retrieval, visual question answering, and report generation. Our findings reveal that existing foundation models excel at certain task types but struggle to effectively handle the full breadth of clinical tasks. To improve the generalization of pathology foundation models, we propose a unified knowledge distillation framework consisting of both expert and self-knowledge distillation, where the former allows the model to learn from the knowledge of multiple expert models, while the latter leverages self-distillation to enable image representation learning via local-global alignment. Based on this framework, we curated a dataset of 96,000 whole slide images (WSIs) and developed a Generalizable Pathology Foundation Model (GPFM). This advanced model was trained on a substantial dataset comprising 190 million images extracted from approximately 72,000 publicly available slides, encompassing 34 major tissue types. Evaluated on the established benchmark, GPFM achieves an impressive average rank of 1.6, with 42 tasks ranked 1st, while the second-best model, UNI, attains an average rank of 3.7, with only 6 tasks ranked 1st.

eess.IV

A Multimodal Knowledge-enhanced Whole-slide Pathology Foundation Model

Remarkable strides in computational pathology have been made in the task-agnostic foundation model that advances the performance of a wide array of downstream clinical tasks. Despite the promising performance, there are still several challenges. First, prior works have resorted to either vision-only or image-caption data, disregarding pathology reports with more clinically authentic information from pathologists and gene expression profiles which respectively offer distinct knowledge for versatile clinical applications. Second, the current progress in pathology FMs predominantly concentrates on the patch level, where the restricted context of patch-level pretraining fails to capture whole-slide patterns. Even recent slide-level FMs still struggle to provide whole-slide context for patch representation. In this study, for the first time, we develop a pathology foundation model incorporating three levels of modalities: pathology slides, pathology reports, and gene expression data, which resulted in 26,169 slide-level modality pairs from 10,275 patients across 32 cancer types, amounting to over 116 million pathological patch images. To leverage these data for CPath, we propose a novel whole-slide pretraining paradigm that injects the multimodal whole-slide context into the patch representation, called Multimodal Self-TAught PRetraining (mSTAR). The proposed paradigm revolutionizes the pretraining workflow for CPath, enabling the pathology FM to acquire the whole-slide context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to incorporate three modalities at the whole-slide context for enhancing pathology FMs. To systematically evaluate the capabilities of mSTAR, we built the largest spectrum of oncological benchmark, spanning 7 categories of oncological applications in 15 types of 97 practical oncological tasks.

cs.CV

Foundation Model for Advancing Healthcare: Challenges, Opportunities, and Future Directions

Foundation model, which is pre-trained on broad data and is able to adapt to a wide range of tasks, is advancing healthcare. It promotes the development of healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) models, breaking the contradiction between limited AI models and diverse healthcare practices. Much more widespread healthcare scenarios will benefit from the development of a healthcare foundation model (HFM), improving their advanced intelligent healthcare services. Despite the impending widespread deployment of HFMs, there is currently a lack of clear understanding about how they work in the healthcare field, their current challenges, and where they are headed in the future. To answer these questions, a comprehensive and deep survey of the challenges, opportunities, and future directions of HFMs is presented in this survey. It first conducted a comprehensive overview of the HFM including the methods, data, and applications for a quick grasp of the current progress. Then, it made an in-depth exploration of the challenges present in data, algorithms, and computing infrastructures for constructing and widespread application of foundation models in healthcare. This survey also identifies emerging and promising directions in this field for future development. We believe that this survey will enhance the community's comprehension of the current progress of HFM and serve as a valuable source of guidance for future development in this field. The latest HFM papers and related resources are maintained on our website: https://github.com/YutingHe-list/Awesome-Foundation-Models-for-Advancing-Healthcare.

cs.CY

iMD4GC: Incomplete Multimodal Data Integration to Advance Precise Treatment Response Prediction and Survival Analysis for Gastric Cancer

Gastric cancer (GC) is a prevalent malignancy worldwide, ranking as the fifth most common cancer with over 1 million new cases and 700 thousand deaths in 2020. Locally advanced gastric cancer (LAGC) accounts for approximately two-thirds of GC diagnoses, and neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) has emerged as the standard treatment for LAGC. However, the effectiveness of NACT varies significantly among patients, with a considerable subset displaying treatment resistance. Ineffective NACT not only leads to adverse effects but also misses the optimal therapeutic window, resulting in lower survival rate. However, existing multimodal learning methods assume the availability of all modalities for each patient, which does not align with the reality of clinical practice. The limited availability of modalities for each patient would cause information loss, adversely affecting predictive accuracy. In this study, we propose an incomplete multimodal data integration framework for GC (iMD4GC) to address the challenges posed by incomplete multimodal data, enabling precise response prediction and survival analysis. Specifically, iMD4GC incorporates unimodal attention layers for each modality to capture intra-modal information. Subsequently, the cross-modal interaction layers explore potential inter-modal interactions and capture complementary information across modalities, thereby enabling information compensation for missing modalities. To evaluate iMD4GC, we collected three multimodal datasets for GC study: GastricRes (698 cases) for response prediction, GastricSur (801 cases) for survival analysis, and TCGA-STAD (400 cases) for survival analysis. The scale of our datasets is significantly larger than previous studies. The iMD4GC achieved impressive performance with an 80.2% AUC on GastricRes, 71.4% C-index on GastricSur, and 66.1% C-index on TCGA-STAD, significantly surpassing other compared methods.

eess.IV

A Novel Two-Layer DAG-based Reactive Protocol for IoT Data Reliability in Metaverse

Many applications, e.g., digital twins, rely on sensing data from Internet of Things (IoT) networks, which is used to infer event(s) and initiate actions to affect an environment. This gives rise to concerns relating to data integrity and provenance. One possible solution to address these concerns is to employ blockchain. However, blockchain has high resource requirements, thereby making it unsuitable for use on resource-constrained IoT devices. To this end, this paper proposes a novel approach, called two-layer directed acyclic graph (2LDAG), whereby IoT devices only store a digital fingerprint of data generated by their neighbors. Further, it proposes a novel proof-of-path (PoP) protocol that allows an operator or digital twin to verify data in an on-demand manner. The simulation results show 2LDAG has storage and communication cost that is respectively two and three orders of magnitude lower than traditional blockchain and also blockchains that use a DAG structure. Moreover, 2LDAG achieves consensus even when 49\% of nodes are malicious.

cs.DC

Scaling Blockchains with Error Correction Codes: A Survey on Coded Blockchains

This paper reviews and highlights how coding schemes have been used to solve various problems in blockchain systems. Specifically, these problems relate to scaling blockchains in terms of their data storage, computation and communication cost, as well as security. To this end, this paper considers the use of coded blocks or shards that allows participants to store only a fraction of the total blockchain, protect against malicious nodes or erasures due to nodes leaving a blockchain system, ensure data availability in order to promote transparency, and scale the security of sharded blockchains. Further, it helps reduce communication cost when disseminating blocks, which is critical to bootstrapping new nodes and helps speed up consensus of blocks. For each category of solutions, we highlight problems and issues that motivated their designs and use of coding. Moreover, we provide a qualitative analysis of their storage, communication and computation cost.

cs.DC