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Junjie Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Junjie Yang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

KaLDeX: Kalman Filter based Linear Deformable Cross Attention for Retina Vessel Segmentation

Background and Objective: In the realm of ophthalmic imaging, accurate vascular segmentation is paramount for diagnosing and managing various eye diseases. Contemporary deep learning-based vascular segmentation models rival human accuracy but still face substantial challenges in accurately segmenting minuscule blood vessels in neural network applications. Due to the necessity of multiple downsampling operations in the CNN models, fine details from high-resolution images are inevitably lost. The objective of this study is to design a structure to capture the delicate and small blood vessels. Methods: To address these issues, we propose a novel network (KaLDeX) for vascular segmentation leveraging a Kalman filter based linear deformable cross attention (LDCA) module, integrated within a UNet++ framework. Our approach is based on two key components: Kalman filter (KF) based linear deformable convolution (LD) and cross-attention (CA) modules. The LD module is designed to adaptively adjust the focus on thin vessels that might be overlooked in standard convolution. The CA module improves the global understanding of vascular structures by aggregating the detailed features from the LD module with the high level features from the UNet++ architecture. Finally, we adopt a topological loss function based on persistent homology to constrain the topological continuity of the segmentation. Results: The proposed method is evaluated on retinal fundus image datasets (DRIVE, CHASE_BD1, and STARE) as well as the 3mm and 6mm of the OCTA-500 dataset, achieving an average accuracy (ACC) of 97.25%, 97.77%, 97.85%, 98.89%, and 98.21%, respectively. Conclusions: Empirical evidence shows that our method outperforms the current best models on different vessel segmentation datasets. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/AIEyeSystem/KalDeX.

eess.IV↗

The Python Simulations of Chemistry Framework: 10 years of an open-source quantum chemistry project

Over the past decade, the Python-based Simulations of Chemistry Framework (PySCF) has developed into a widely used open-source platform for electronic structure theory and quantum chemical method development. This article reviews the major advances since the previous overview in 2020, covering new modules and methodology, infrastructure changes, and performance benchmarks.

physics.chem-ph↗

Implementation of the multigrid Gaussian-Plane-Wave algorithm with GPU acceleration in PySCF

We introduce a GPU-accelerated multigrid Gaussian-Plane-Wave density fitting (FFTDF) approach for efficient Fock builds and nuclear gradient evaluations within Kohn-Sham density functional theory, as implemented in the GPU4PySCF module of PySCF. Our CUDA kernels employ a grid-based parallelization strategy for contracting Gaussian basis function pairs and achieve up to 80% of the FP64 peak performance on NVIDIA GPUs, with no loss of efficiency for high angular momentum (up to f-shell) functions. Benchmark calculations on molecules and solids with up to 1536 atoms and 20480 basis functions show up to 25x speedup on an H100 GPU relative to the CPU implementation on a 28-core shared memory node. For a 256-water cluster, the ground-state energy and nuclear gradients can be computed in ~30 seconds on a single H100 GPU. This implementation serves as an open-source foundation for many applications, such as ab initio molecular dynamics and high-throughput calculations.

physics.chem-ph↗

Bootstrapping Exploration with Group-Level Natural Language Feedback in Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) typically receive diverse natural language (NL) feedback through interaction with the environment. However, current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms rely solely on scalar rewards, leaving the rich information in NL feedback underutilized and leading to inefficient exploration. In this work, we propose GOLF, an RL framework that explicitly exploits group-level language feedback to guide targeted exploration through actionable refinements. GOLF aggregates two complementary feedback sources: (i) external critiques that pinpoint errors or propose targeted fixes, and (ii) intra-group attempts that supply alternative partial ideas and diverse failure patterns. These group-level feedbacks are aggregated to produce high-quality refinements, which are adaptively injected into training as off-policy scaffolds to provide targeted guidance in sparse-reward regions. Meanwhile, GOLF jointly optimizes generation and refinement within a unified RL loop, creating a virtuous cycle that continuously improves both capabilities. Experiments on both verifiable and non-verifiable benchmarks show that GOLF achieves superior performance and exploration efficiency, achieving 2.2$\times$ improvements in sample efficiency compared to RL methods trained solely on scalar rewards. Code is available at https://github.com/LuckyyySTA/GOLF.

cs.CL↗

Distilling human mobility models with symbolic regression

Human mobility is a fundamental aspect of social behavior, with broad applications in transportation, urban planning, and epidemic modeling. Represented by the gravity model and the radiation model, established analytical models for mobility phenomena are often discovered by analogy to physical processes. Such discoveries can be challenging and rely on intuition, while the potential of emerging social observation data in model discovery is largely unexploited. Here, we propose a systematic approach that leverages symbolic regression to automatically discover interpretable models from human mobility data. Our approach finds several well-known formulas, such as the distance decay effect and classical gravity models, as well as previously unknown ones, such as an exponential-power-law decay that can be explained by the maximum entropy principle. By relaxing the constraints on the complexity of model expressions, we further show how key variables of human mobility are progressively incorporated into the model, making this framework a powerful tool for revealing the underlying mathematical structures of complex social phenomena directly from observational data.

physics.soc-ph↗

Topological Magneto-optical Kerr Effect without Spin-orbit Coupling in Spin-compensated Antiferromagnet

The magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE), the differential reflection of oppositely circularly polarized light, has traditionally been associated with relativistic spin-orbit coupling (SOC), which links a particle's spin with its orbital motion. In ferromagnets, large MOKE signals arise from the combination of magnetization and SOC, while in certain coplanar antiferromagnets, SOC-induced Berry curvature enables MOKE despite zero net magnetization. Theoretically, large MOKE can also arise in a broader class of magnetic materials with compensated spins, without relying on SOC - for example, in systems exhibiting real-space scalar spin chirality. The experimental verification has remained elusive. Here, we demonstrate such a SOC- and magnetization-free MOKE in the noncoplanar antiferromagnet Co1/3TaS2. Using a Sagnac interferometer microscope, we image domains of scalar spin chirality and their reversal. Our findings establish experimentally a new mechanism for generating large MOKE signals and position chiral spin textures in compensated magnets as a compelling platform for ultrafast, stray-field-immune opto-spintronic applications.

physics.optics↗

Ab Initio Many Body Quantum Embedding and Local Correlation in Crystalline Materials using Interpolative Separable Density Fitting

We present an efficient implementation of ab initio many-body quantum embedding and local correlation methods for infinite periodic systems through translational symmetry adapted interpolative separable density fitting, an approach which reduces the scaling of the calculations to only linear with the number of k-points. Employing this methodology, we compute correlated ground-state coupled cluster energies within density matrix embedding and local natural orbital correlation frameworks for both weakly and strongly correlated solids, using up to 1000 k-points. By extrapolating the local correlation domains and k-point sampling we further obtain estimates of the full coupled cluster with singles, doubles, and perturbative triples ground-state energies in the thermodynamic limit.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Scalable Oversight for Superhuman AI via Recursive Self-Critiquing

As AI capabilities increasingly surpass human proficiency in complex tasks, current alignment techniques, including SFT and RLHF, face fundamental challenges in ensuring reliable oversight. These methods rely on direct human assessment and become impractical when AI outputs exceed human cognitive thresholds. In response to this challenge, we explore two hypotheses: (1) \textit{Critique of critique can be easier than critique itself}, extending the widely-accepted observation that verification is easier than generation to the critique domain, as critique itself is a specialized form of generation; (2) \textit{This difficulty relationship holds recursively}, suggesting that when direct evaluation is infeasible, performing higher-order critiques (e.g., critique of critique of critique) offers a more tractable supervision pathway. We conduct Human-Human, Human-AI, and AI-AI experiments to investigate the potential of recursive self-critiquing for AI supervision. Our results highlight recursive critique as a promising approach for scalable AI oversight.

cs.AI↗

Active Sensing Shapes Real-World Decision-Making through Dynamic Evidence Accumulation

Human decision-making heavily relies on active sensing, a well-documented cognitive behaviour for evidence gathering to accommodate ever-changing environments. However, its operational mechanism in the real world remains non-trivial. Currently, an in-laboratory paradigm, called evidence accumulation modelling (EAM), points out that human decision-making involves transforming external evidence into internal mental beliefs. However, the gap in evidence affordance between real-world contexts and laboratory settings hinders the effective application of EAM. Here we generalize EAM to the real world and conduct analysis in real-world driving scenarios. A cognitive scheme is proposed to formalize real-world evidence affordance and capture active sensing through eye movements. Empirically, our scheme can plausibly portray the accumulation of drivers' mental beliefs, explaining how active sensing transforms evidence into mental beliefs from the perspective of information utility. Also, our results demonstrate a negative correlation between evidence affordance and attention recruited by individuals, revealing how human drivers adapt their evidence-collection patterns across various contexts. Moreover, we reveal the positive influence of evidence affordance and attention distribution on decision-making propensity. In a nutshell, our computational scheme generalizes EAM to real-world contexts and provides a comprehensive account of how active sensing underlies real-world decision-making, unveiling multifactorial, integrated characteristics in real-world decision-making.

cs.AI↗

Towards Alignment-Centric Paradigm: A Survey of Instruction Tuning in Large Language Models

Instruction tuning is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, safety constraints, and domain-specific requirements. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the full pipeline, encompassing (i) data collection methodologies, (ii) full-parameter and parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies, and (iii) evaluation protocols. We categorized data construction into three major paradigms: expert annotation, distillation from larger models, and self-improvement mechanisms, each offering distinct trade-offs between quality, scalability, and resource cost. Fine-tuning techniques range from conventional supervised training to lightweight approaches, such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and prefix tuning, with a focus on computational efficiency and model reusability. We further examine the challenges of evaluating faithfulness, utility, and safety across multilingual and multimodal scenarios, highlighting the emergence of domain-specific benchmarks in healthcare, legal, and financial applications. Finally, we discuss promising directions for automated data generation, adaptive optimization, and robust evaluation frameworks, arguing that a closer integration of data, algorithms, and human feedback is essential for advancing instruction-tuned LLMs. This survey aims to serve as a practical reference for researchers and practitioners seeking to design LLMs that are both effective and reliably aligned with human intentions.

cs.CL↗

SphereDrag: Spherical Geometry-Aware Panoramic Image Editing

Image editing has made great progress on planar images, but panoramic image editing remains underexplored. Due to their spherical geometry and projection distortions, panoramic images present three key challenges: boundary discontinuity, trajectory deformation, and uneven pixel density. To tackle these issues, we propose SphereDrag, a novel panoramic editing framework utilizing spherical geometry knowledge for accurate and controllable editing. Specifically, adaptive reprojection (AR) uses adaptive spherical rotation to deal with discontinuity; great-circle trajectory adjustment (GCTA) tracks the movement trajectory more accurate; spherical search region tracking (SSRT) adaptively scales the search range based on spherical location to address uneven pixel density. Also, we construct PanoBench, a panoramic editing benchmark, including complex editing tasks involving multiple objects and diverse styles, which provides a standardized evaluation framework. Experiments show that SphereDrag gains a considerable improvement compared with existing methods in geometric consistency and image quality, achieving up to 10.5% relative improvement.

cs.CV↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Knowledge

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific tasks. However, existing RAG methods do not adequately utilize the naturally inherent hierarchical knowledge in human cognition, which limits the capabilities of RAG systems. In this paper, we introduce a new RAG approach, called HiRAG, which utilizes hierarchical knowledge to enhance the semantic understanding and structure capturing capabilities of RAG systems in the indexing and retrieval processes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that HiRAG achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline methods.

cs.CL↗

CLAPS: A CLIP-Unified Auto-Prompt Segmentation for Multi-Modal Retinal Imaging

Recent advancements in foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have significantly impacted medical image segmentation, especially in retinal imaging, where precise segmentation is vital for diagnosis. Despite this progress, current methods face critical challenges: 1) modality ambiguity in textual disease descriptions, 2) a continued reliance on manual prompting for SAM-based workflows, and 3) a lack of a unified framework, with most methods being modality- and task-specific. To overcome these hurdles, we propose CLIP-unified Auto-Prompt Segmentation (\CLAPS), a novel method for unified segmentation across diverse tasks and modalities in retinal imaging. Our approach begins by pre-training a CLIP-based image encoder on a large, multi-modal retinal dataset to handle data scarcity and distribution imbalance. We then leverage GroundingDINO to automatically generate spatial bounding box prompts by detecting local lesions. To unify tasks and resolve ambiguity, we use text prompts enhanced with a unique "modality signature" for each imaging modality. Ultimately, these automated textual and spatial prompts guide SAM to execute precise segmentation, creating a fully automated and unified pipeline. Extensive experiments on 12 diverse datasets across 11 critical segmentation categories show that CLAPS achieves performance on par with specialized expert models while surpassing existing benchmarks across most metrics, demonstrating its broad generalizability as a foundation model.

cs.CV↗

UOPSL: Unpaired OCT Predilection Sites Learning for Fundus Image Diagnosis Augmentation

Significant advancements in AI-driven multimodal medical image diagnosis have led to substantial improvements in ophthalmic disease identification in recent years. However, acquiring paired multimodal ophthalmic images remains prohibitively expensive. While fundus photography is simple and cost-effective, the limited availability of OCT data and inherent modality imbalance hinder further progress. Conventional approaches that rely solely on fundus or textual features often fail to capture fine-grained spatial information, as each imaging modality provides distinct cues about lesion predilection sites. In this study, we propose a novel unpaired multimodal framework \UOPSL that utilizes extensive OCT-derived spatial priors to dynamically identify predilection sites, enhancing fundus image-based disease recognition. Our approach bridges unpaired fundus and OCTs via extended disease text descriptions. Initially, we employ contrastive learning on a large corpus of unpaired OCT and fundus images while simultaneously learning the predilection sites matrix in the OCT latent space. Through extensive optimization, this matrix captures lesion localization patterns within the OCT feature space. During the fine-tuning or inference phase of the downstream classification task based solely on fundus images, where paired OCT data is unavailable, we eliminate OCT input and utilize the predilection sites matrix to assist in fundus image classification learning. Extensive experiments conducted on 9 diverse datasets across 28 critical categories demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

Intertwined polar, chiral, and ferro-rotational orders in a rotation-only insulator

Intertwined orders refer to strongly coupled and mutually dependent orders that coexist in correlated electron systems, often underpinning key physical properties of the host materials. Among them, polar, chiral, and ferro-rotational orders have been theoretically known to form a closed set of intertwined orders. However, experimental investigation into their mutual coupling and physical consequences has remained elusive. In this work, we employ the polar-chiral insulator Ni$_3$TeO$_6$ as a platform and utilize a multimodal optical approach to directly probe and reveal the intertwining among polarity, chirality, and ferro-rotational order. We demonstrate how their coupling governs the formation of domains and dictates the nature of domain walls. Within the domains, we identify spatial inversion symmetry as the operation connecting two domain states of opposite polarity and chirality, with a common ferro-rotational state serving as the prerequisite for these interlocked configurations. At the domain walls, we observe a pronounced enhancement of in-plane polarization accompanied by a suppression of chirality. By combining with Ginzburg-Landau theory within the framework of a pre-existing ferro-rotational background, we uncover the emergence of mixed Néel- and Bloch-type domain walls. Our findings highlight the critical role of intertwined orders in defining domain and domain wall characteristics and open pathways for domain switching and domain wall control via intertwined order parameters.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

RankGraph: Unified Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross-domain recommendation systems face the challenge of integrating fine-grained user and item relationships across various product domains. To address this, we introduce RankGraph, a scalable graph learning framework designed to serve as a core component in recommendation foundation models (FMs). By constructing and leveraging graphs composed of heterogeneous nodes and edges across multiple products, RankGraph enables the integration of complex relationships between users, posts, ads, and other entities. Our framework employs a GPU-accelerated Graph Neural Network and contrastive learning, allowing for dynamic extraction of subgraphs such as item-item and user-user graphs to support similarity-based retrieval and real-time clustering. Furthermore, RankGraph integrates graph-based pretrained representations as contextual tokens into FM sequence models, enriching them with structured relational knowledge. RankGraph has demonstrated improvements in click (+0.92%) and conversion rates (+2.82%) in online A/B tests, showcasing its effectiveness in cross-domain recommendation scenarios.

cs.IR↗

Economy and Geography Shape the Collective Attention of Cities

Complex networks are commonly used to explore human behavior. However, previous studies largely overlooked the geographical and economic factors embedded in collective attention. To address this, we construct attention networks from time-series data for the United States and China, each a key economic power in the West and the East, respectively. We reveal a strong macroscale correlation between urban attention and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At the mesoscale, community detection of attention networks shows that high-GDP cities consistently act as core nodes within their communities and occupy strategic geographic positions. At the microscale, structural hole theory identifies these cities as key connectors between communities, with influence proportional to economic output. Overlapping community detection further reveals tightly connected urban clusters, prompting us to introduce geographic and topic-based metrics, which show that closely linked cities are spatially proximate and topically coherent. Of course, not all patterns were consistent across regions. A notable distinction emerged in the relationship between population size and urban attention, which was evident in the United States but absent in China. Building on these insights, we integrate key variables reflecting GDP, geography, and scenic resources into regression model to cross-verify the influence of economic and geographic factors on collective user attention, and unexpectedly discover that a composite index of population, access, and scenery fails to account for cross-city variations in attention. Our study bridges the gap between economic prosperity and geographic centrality in shaping urban attention landscapes.

physics.soc-ph↗

Are We on the Right Way for Assessing Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation?

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great promise for complex document understanding, yet their development is critically hampered by inadequate evaluation. Current benchmarks often focus on specific part of document RAG system and use synthetic data with incomplete ground truth and evidence labels, therefore failing to reflect real-world bottlenecks and challenges. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Double-Bench: a new large-scale, multilingual, and multimodal evaluation system that is able to produce fine-grained assessment to each component within document RAG systems. It comprises 3,276 documents (72,880 pages) and 5,168 single- and multi-hop queries across 6 languages and 4 document types with streamlined dynamic update support for potential data contamination issues. Queries are grounded in exhaustively scanned evidence pages and verified by human experts to ensure maximum quality and completeness. Our comprehensive experiments across 9 state-of-the-art embedding models, 4 MLLMs and 4 end-to-end document RAG frameworks demonstrate the gap between text and visual embedding models is narrowing, highlighting the need in building stronger document retrieval models. Our findings also reveal the over-confidence dilemma within current document RAG frameworks that tend to provide answer even without evidence support. We hope our fully open-source Double-Bench provide a rigorous foundation for future research in advanced document RAG systems. We plan to retrieve timely corpus and release new benchmarks on an annual basis.

cs.CL↗