SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Junjun He

Publications and source records attributed to Junjun He.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

dMLLM-TTS: Self-Verified and Efficient Test-Time Scaling for Diffusion Multi-Modal Large Language Models

Diffusion Multi-modal Large Language Models (dMLLMs) have recently emerged as a novel architecture unifying image generation and understanding. However, developing effective and efficient Test-Time Scaling (TTS) methods to unlock their full generative potential remains an underexplored challenge. To address this, we propose dMLLM-TTS, a novel framework operating on two complementary scaling axes: (1) trajectory exploration scaling to enhance the diversity of generated hypotheses, and (2) iterative refinement scaling for stable generation. Conventional TTS approaches typically perform linear search across these two dimensions, incurring substantial computational costs of O(NT) and requiring an external verifier for best-of-N selection. To overcome these limitations, we propose two innovations. First, we design an efficient hierarchical search algorithm with O(N+T) complexity that adaptively expands and prunes sampling trajectories. Second, we introduce a self-verified feedback mechanism that leverages the dMLLMs' intrinsic image understanding capabilities to assess text-image alignment, eliminating the need for external verifier. Extensive experiments on the GenEval benchmark across three representative dMLLMs (e.g., Lumina-DiMOO, MMaDA, Muddit) show that our framework substantially improves generation quality while achieving up to 6x greater efficiency than linear search. Project page: https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-DiMOO.

cs.CV

Unified Medical Image Tokenizer for Autoregressive Synthesis and Understanding

Autoregressive modeling has driven major advances in multimodal AI, yet its application to medical imaging remains constrained by the absence of a unified image tokenizer that simultaneously preserves fine-grained anatomical structures and rich clinical semantics across heterogeneous modalities. Existing approaches jointly optimize image reconstruction and textual semantic objectives, relying on large-scale image-caption pairs and are prone to gradient interference. This is ill-suited for the medical domain where paired data are scarce and abundant unpaired images remain unexploited. This work identifies these issues in building unified medical image tokenizers, and introduces a principled two-stage training framework using visual representation as a bridge to address them. The propose visual representation alignment stage enables the utilization of large-scale unpaired medical images to ensure reconstruction fidelity and establish foundational semantics, alleviating the interference and better preparing for the second stage where fine-grained textual semantics are injected using image-text pairs. The resulting tokenizer, MedITok, is trained on over 33 million medical images spanning 9 modalities and 2 million image-text pairs. MedITok achieves state-of-the-art performance on 30+ benchmarks spanning 9 imaging modalities and 4 task families. It further enables autoregressive modeling for diagnostic and generative applications, serving as a scalable component for future multimodal models with unified synthesis and understanding capabilities in the medical domain. Project page: https://github.com/Masaaki-75/meditok

eess.IV

TopoSculpt: Betti-Steered Topological Sculpting of 3D Fine-grained Tubular Shapes

Medical tubular anatomical structures are inherently three-dimensional conduits with lumens, enclosing walls, and complex branching topologies. Accurate reconstruction of their geometry and topology is crucial for applications such as bronchoscopic navigation and cerebral arterial connectivity assessment. Existing methods often rely on voxel-wise overlap measures, which fail to capture topological correctness and completeness. Although topology-aware losses and persistent homology constraints have shown promise, they are usually applied patch-wise and cannot guarantee global preservation or correct geometric errors at inference. To address these limitations, we propose a novel TopoSculpt, a framework for topological refinement of 3D fine-grained tubular structures. TopoSculpt (i) adopts a holistic whole-region modeling strategy to capture full spatial context, (ii) first introduces a Topological Integrity Betti (TIB) constraint that jointly enforces Betti number priors and global integrity, and (iii) employs a curriculum refinement scheme with persistent homology to progressively correct errors from coarse to fine scales. Extensive experiments on challenging pulmonary airway and Circle of Willis datasets demonstrate substantial improvements in both geometry and topology. For instance, $β_{0}$ errors are reduced from 69.00 to 3.40 on the airway dataset and from 1.65 to 0.30 on the CoW dataset, with Tree length detected and branch detected rates improving by nearly 10\%. These results highlight the effectiveness of TopoSculpt in correcting critical topological errors and advancing the high-fidelity modeling of complex 3D tubular anatomy. The project homepage is available at: https://github.com/Puzzled-Hui/TopoSculpt.

cs.CV

MedQ-Engine: A Closed-Loop Data Engine for Evolving MLLMs in Medical Image Quality Assessment

Medical image quality assessment (Med-IQA) is a prerequisite for clinical AI deployment, yet multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still fall substantially short of human experts, particularly when required to provide descriptive assessments with clinical reasoning beyond simple quality scores. However, improving them is hindered by the high cost of acquiring descriptive annotations and by the inability of one-time data collection to adapt to the model's evolving weaknesses. To address these challenges, we propose MedQ-Engine, a closed-loop data engine that iteratively evaluates the model to discover failure prototypes via data-driven clustering, explores a million-scale image pool using these prototypes as retrieval anchors with progressive human-in-the-loop annotation, and evolves through quality-assured fine-tuning, forming a self-improving cycle. Models are evaluated on complementary perception and description tasks. An entropy-guided routing mechanism triages annotations to minimize labeling cost. Experiments across five medical imaging modalities show that MedQ-Engine elevates an 8B-parameter model to surpass GPT-4o by over 13% and narrow the gap with human experts to only 4.34%, using only 10K annotations with more than 4x sample efficiency over random sampling.

cs.CV

MedQ-UNI: Toward Unified Medical Image Quality Assessment and Restoration via Vision-Language Modeling

Existing medical image restoration (Med-IR) methods are typically modality-specific or degradation-specific, failing to generalize across the heterogeneous degradations encountered in clinical practice. We argue this limitation stems from the isolation of Med-IR from medical image quality assessment (Med-IQA), as restoration models without explicit quality understanding struggle to adapt to diverse degradation types across modalities. To address these challenges, we propose MedQ-UNI, a unified vision-language model that follows an assess-then-restore paradigm, explicitly leveraging Med-IQA to guide Med-IR across arbitrary modalities and degradation types. MedQ-UNI adopts a multimodal autoregressive dual-expert architecture with shared attention: a quality assessment expert first identifies degradation issues through structured natural language descriptions, and a restoration expert then conditions on these descriptions to perform targeted image restoration. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale dataset of approximately 50K paired samples spanning three imaging modalities and five restoration tasks, each annotated with structured quality descriptions for joint Med-IQA and Med-IR training, along with a 2K-sample benchmark for evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that a single MedQ-UNI model, without any task-specific adaptation, achieves state-of-the-art restoration performance across all tasks while generating superior descriptions, confirming that explicit quality understanding meaningfully improves restoration fidelity and interpretability.

cs.CV

TopoVST: Toward Topology-fidelitous Vessel Skeleton Tracking

Automatic extraction of vessel skeletons is crucial for many clinical applications. However, achieving topologically faithful delineation of thin vessel skeletons remains highly challenging, primarily due to frequent discontinuities and the presence of spurious skeleton segments. To address these difficulties, we propose TopoVST, a topology-fidelitious vessel skeleton tracker. TopoVST constructs multi-scale sphere graphs to sample the input image and employs graph neural networks to jointly estimate tracking directions and vessel radii. The utilization of multi-scale representations is enhanced through a gating-based feature fusion mechanism, while the issue of class imbalance during training is mitigated by embedding a geometry-aware weighting scheme into the directional loss. In addition, we design a wave-propagation-based skeleton tracking algorithm that explicitly mitigates the generation of spurious skeletons through space-occupancy filtering. We evaluate TopoVST on two vessel datasets with different geometries. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art baselines demonstrate that TopoVST achieves competitive performance in both overlapping and topological metrics. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/EndoluminalSurgicalVision-IMR/TopoVST.

cs.CV

Towards Efficient Medical Reasoning with Minimal Fine-Tuning Data

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of the language backbone plays a pivotal role in adapting Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to specialized domains such as medical reasoning. However, existing SFT practices often rely on unfiltered textual datasets that contain redundant and low-quality samples, leading to substantial computational costs and suboptimal performance in complex clinical scenarios. Although existing methods attempt to alleviate this problem by selecting data based on sample difficulty, defined by knowledge and reasoning complexity, they overlook each sample's optimization utility reflected in its gradient. Interestingly, we find that gradient-based influence alone favors easy-to-optimize samples that cause large parameter shifts but lack deep reasoning chains, while difficulty alone selects noisy or overly complex textual cases that fail to guide stable optimization. Based on this observation, we propose a data selection strategy, Difficulty-Influence Quadrant (DIQ), which prioritizes samples in the "high-difficulty-high-influence" quadrant to balance complex clinical reasoning with substantial gradient influence. This enables efficient medical reasoning for VLMs with minimal fine-tuning data. Furthermore, Human and LLM-as-a-judge evaluations show that DIQ-selected subsets demonstrate higher data quality and generate clinical reasoning that is more aligned with expert practices in differential diagnosis, safety check, and evidence citation, as DIQ emphasizes samples that foster expert-like reasoning patterns. Extensive experiments on medical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DIQ enables VLM backbones fine-tuned on only 1% of selected data to match full-dataset performance, while using 10% consistently outperforms baseline methods, highlighting the superiority of principled data selection over brute-force scaling. The code is available at https://github.com/mihara-bot/DIQ.

cs.CL

Open World MRI Reconstruction with Bias-Calibrated Adaptation

Real-world MRI reconstruction systems face the open-world challenge: test data from unseen imaging centers, anatomical structures, or acquisition protocols can differ drastically from training data, causing severe performance degradation. Existing methods struggle with this challenge. To address this, we propose BiasRecon, a bias-calibrated adaptation framework grounded in the minimal intervention principle: preserve what transfers, calibrate what does not. Concretely, BiasRecon formulates open-world adaptation as an alternating optimization framework that jointly optimizes three components: (1) frequency-guided prior calibration that introduces layer-wise calibration variables to selectively modulate frequency-specific features of the pre-trained score network via self-supervised k-space signals, (2) score-based denoising that leverages the calibrated generative prior for high-fidelity image reconstruction, and (3) adaptive regularization that employs Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator to dynamically balance the prior-measurement trade-off, matching test-time noise characteristics without requiring ground truth. By intervening minimally and precisely through this alternating scheme, BiasRecon achieves robust adaptation with fewer than 100 tunable parameters. Extensive experiments across four datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on open-world reconstruction tasks.

eess.IV

MedQ-Deg: A Multidimensional Benchmark for Evaluating MLLMs Across Medical Image Quality Degradations

Despite impressive performance on standard benchmarks, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face critical challenges in real-world clinical environments where medical images inevitably suffer various quality degradations. Existing benchmarks exhibit two key limitations: (1) absence of large-scale, multidimensional assessment across medical image quality gradients and (2) no systematic confidence calibration analysis. To address these gaps, we present MedQ-Deg, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating medical MLLMs under image quality degradations. MedQ-Deg provides multi-dimensional evaluation spanning 18 distinct degradation types, 30 fine-grained capability dimensions, and 7 imaging modalities, with 24,894 question-answer pairs. Each degradation is implemented at 3 severity degrees, calibrated by expert radiologists. We further introduce Calibration Shift metric, which quantifies the gap between a model's perceived confidence and actual performance to assess metacognitive reliability under degradation. Our comprehensive evaluation of 40 mainstream MLLMs reveals several critical findings: (1) overall model performance degrades systematically as degradation severity increases, (2) models universally exhibit the AI Dunning-Kruger Effect, maintaining inappropriately high confidence despite severe accuracy collapse, and (3) models display markedly differentiated behavioral patterns across capability dimensions, imaging modalities, and degradation types. We hope MedQ-Deg drives progress toward medical MLLMs that are robust and trustworthy in real clinical practice.

cs.CV

UniGenBench++: A Unified Semantic Evaluation Benchmark for Text-to-Image Generation

Recent progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation underscores the importance of reliable benchmarks in evaluating how accurately generated images reflect the semantics of their textual prompt. However, (1) existing benchmarks lack the diversity of prompt scenarios and multilingual support, both essential for real-world applicability; (2) they offer only coarse evaluations across primary dimensions, covering a narrow range of sub-dimensions, and fall short in fine-grained sub-dimension assessment. To address these limitations, we introduce UniGenBench++, a unified semantic assessment benchmark for T2I generation. Specifically, it comprises 600 prompts organized hierarchically to ensure both coverage and efficiency: (1) spans across diverse real-world scenarios, i.e., 5 main prompt themes and 20 subthemes; (2) comprehensively probes T2I models' semantic consistency over 10 primary and 27 sub evaluation criteria, with each prompt assessing multiple testpoints. To rigorously assess model robustness to variations in language and prompt length, we provide both English and Chinese versions of each prompt in short and long forms. Leveraging the general world knowledge and fine-grained image understanding capabilities of a closed-source Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM), i.e., Gemini-2.5-Pro, an effective pipeline is developed for reliable benchmark construction and streamlined model assessment. Moreover, to further facilitate community use, we train a robust evaluation model that enables offline assessment of T2I model outputs. Through comprehensive benchmarking of both open- and closed-sourced T2I models, we systematically reveal their strengths and weaknesses across various aspects.

cs.CV

MedScope: Incentivizing "Think with Videos" for Clinical Reasoning via Coarse-to-Fine Tool Calling

Long-form clinical videos are central to visual evidence-based decision-making, with growing importance for applications such as surgical robotics and related settings. However, current multimodal large language models typically process videos with passive sampling or weakly grounded inspection, which limits their ability to iteratively locate, verify, and justify predictions with temporally targeted evidence. To close this gap, we propose MedScope, a tool-using clinical video reasoning model that performs coarse-to-fine evidence seeking over long-form procedures. By interleaving intermediate reasoning with targeted tool calls and verification on retrieved observations, MedScope produces more accurate and trustworthy predictions that are explicitly grounded in temporally localized visual evidence. To address the lack of high-fidelity supervision, we build ClinVideoSuite, an evidence-centric, fine-grained clinical video suite. We then optimize MedScope with Grounding-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GA-GRPO), which directly reinforces tool use with grounding-aligned rewards and evidence-weighted advantages. On full and fine-grained video understanding benchmarks, MedScope achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations. Our approach illuminates a path toward medical AI agents that can genuinely "think with videos" through tool-integrated reasoning. We will release our code, models, and data.

cs.CV

SurgVidLM: Towards Multi-grained Surgical Video Understanding with Large Language Model

Surgical scene understanding is critical for surgical training and robotic decision-making in robot-assisted surgery. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated great potential for advancing scene perception in the medical domain, facilitating surgeons to understand surgical scenes and procedures. However, these methods are primarily oriented towards image-based analysis or global video understanding, overlooking the fine-grained video reasoning that is crucial for analyzing specific processes and capturing detailed task execution within a surgical procedure. To bridge this gap, we propose SurgVidLM, the first video language model designed to address both full and fine-grained surgical video comprehension. To train our SurgVidLM, we construct the SVU-31K that is a large-scale dataset with over 31K video-instruction pairs, enabling both holistic understanding and detailed analysis of surgical procedures. Building on this resource, SurgVidLM incorporates a two-stage StageFocus mechanism: the first stage extracts global procedural context, while the second stage performs high-frequency local analysis guided by temporal cues. We also develop the Multi-frequency Fusion Attention to effectively integrate low- and high-frequency visual tokens, ensuring the preservation of critical task-specific details. Experimental results demonstrate that SurgVidLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art Vid-LLMs of comparable parameter scale in both full and fine-grained video understanding tasks, showcasing its superior capability in capturing the context of complex robot-assisted surgeries. Our code and dataset will be publicly accessible soon.

cs.CV

StructDiff: Structure-aware Diffusion Model for 3D Fine-grained Medical Image Synthesis

Solving medical imaging data scarcity through semantic image generation has attracted growing attention in recent years. However, existing generative models mainly focus on synthesizing whole-organ or large-tissue structures, showing limited capability in reproducing fine-grained anatomical details. Due to the stringent requirement of topological consistency and the complex 3D morphological heterogeneity of medical data, accurately reconstructing fine-grained anatomical details remains a significant challenge. To address these limitations, we propose StructDiff, a Structure-aware Diffusion Model for fine-grained 3D medical image synthesis, which enables precise generation of topologically complex anatomies. In addition to the conventional mask-based guidance, StructDiff further introduces a paired image-mask template to guide the generation process, providing structural constrains and offering explicit knowledge of mask-to-image correspondence. Moreover, a Mask Generation Module (MGM) is designed to enrich mask diversity and alleviate the scarcity of high-quality reference masks. Furthermore, we propose a Confidence-aware Adaptive Learning (CAL) strategy based on Skip-Sampling Variance (SSV), which mitigates uncertainty introduced by imperfect synthetic data when transferring to downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StructDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of topological consistency and visual realism, and significantly boosts downstream segmentation performance. Code will be released upon acceptance.

eess.IV

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

SciReasoner: Laying the Scientific Reasoning Ground Across Disciplines

We present a scientific reasoning foundation model that aligns natural language with heterogeneous scientific representations. The model is pretrained on a 206B-token corpus spanning scientific text, pure sequences, and sequence-text pairs, then aligned via SFT on 40M instructions, annealed cold-start bootstrapping to elicit long-form chain-of-thought, and reinforcement learning with task-specific reward shaping, which instills deliberate scientific reasoning. It supports four capability families, covering up to 103 tasks across workflows: (i) faithful translation between text and scientific formats, (ii) text/knowledge extraction, (iii) property prediction, (iv) property classification, (v) unconditional and conditional sequence generation and design. Compared with specialist systems, our approach broadens instruction coverage, improves cross-domain generalization, and enhances fidelity. We detail data curation and training and show that cross-discipline learning strengthens transfer and downstream reliability. The model, instruct tuning datasets and the evaluation code are open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/SciReason and https://github.com/open-sciencelab/SciReason.

cs.CL

HyperST: Hierarchical Hyperbolic Learning for Spatial Transcriptomics Prediction

Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) merges the benefits of pathology images and gene expression, linking molecular profiles with tissue structure to analyze spot-level function comprehensively. Predicting gene expression from histology images is a cost-effective alternative to expensive ST technologies. However, existing methods mainly focus on spot-level image-to-gene matching but fail to leverage the full hierarchical structure of ST data, especially on the gene expression side, leading to incomplete image-gene alignment. Moreover, a challenge arises from the inherent information asymmetry: gene expression profiles contain more molecular details that may lack salient visual correlates in histological images, demanding a sophisticated representation learning approach to bridge this modality gap. We propose HyperST, a framework for ST prediction that learns multi-level image-gene representations by modeling the data's inherent hierarchy within hyperbolic space, a natural geometric setting for such structures. First, we design a Multi-Level Representation Extractors to capture both spot-level and niche-level representations from each modality, providing context-aware information beyond individual spot-level image-gene pairs. Second, a Hierarchical Hyperbolic Alignment module is introduced to unify these representations, performing spatial alignment while hierarchically structuring image and gene embeddings. This alignment strategy enriches the image representations with molecular semantics, significantly improving cross-modal prediction. HyperST achieves state-of-the-art performance on four public datasets from different tissues, paving the way for more scalable and accurate spatial transcriptomics prediction.

cs.CV

Scaling Tumor Segmentation: Best Lessons from Real and Synthetic Data

AI for tumor segmentation is limited by the lack of large, voxel-wise annotated datasets, which are hard to create and require medical experts. In our proprietary JHH dataset of 3,000 annotated pancreatic tumor scans, we found that AI performance stopped improving after 1,500 scans. With synthetic data, we reached the same performance using only 500 real scans. This finding suggests that synthetic data can steepen data scaling laws, enabling more efficient model training than real data alone. Motivated by these lessons, we created AbdomenAtlas 2.0--a dataset of 10,135 CT scans with a total of 15,130 tumor instances per-voxel manually annotated in six organs (pancreas, liver, kidney, colon, esophagus, and uterus) and 5,893 control scans. Annotated by 23 expert radiologists, it is several orders of magnitude larger than existing public tumor datasets. While we continue expanding the dataset, the current version of AbdomenAtlas 2.0 already provides a strong foundation--based on lessons from the JHH dataset--for training AI to segment tumors in six organs. It achieves notable improvements over public datasets, with a +7% DSC gain on in-distribution tests and +16% on out-of-distribution tests.

cs.CV

From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping scientific discovery, evolving from specialized computational tools into autonomous research partners. We position Agentic Science as a pivotal stage within the broader AI for Science paradigm, where AI systems progress from partial assistance to full scientific agency. Enabled by large language models (LLMs), multimodal systems, and integrated research platforms, agentic AI shows capabilities in hypothesis generation, experimental design, execution, analysis, and iterative refinement -- behaviors once regarded as uniquely human. This survey provides a domain-oriented review of autonomous scientific discovery across life sciences, chemistry, materials science, and physics. We unify three previously fragmented perspectives -- process-oriented, autonomy-oriented, and mechanism-oriented -- through a comprehensive framework that connects foundational capabilities, core processes, and domain-specific realizations. Building on this framework, we (i) trace the evolution of AI for Science, (ii) identify five core capabilities underpinning scientific agency, (iii) model discovery as a dynamic four-stage workflow, (iv) review applications across the above domains, and (v) synthesize key challenges and future opportunities. This work establishes a domain-oriented synthesis of autonomous scientific discovery and positions Agentic Science as a structured paradigm for advancing AI-driven research.

cs.LG