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Kaixiang Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Kaixiang Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Harnessing Adversarial Distillation to Customise Debiased, Disease-Specific Pathology Foundation Models for Breast Cancer

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) provide strong tissue representations and have become central to digital pathology. However, deployment in disease-specific settings is limited by 1) the high computational cost of billion-parameter PFMs and 2) distribution mismatch and non-biological bias inherited from pan-cancer, multi-centre pre-training, including site-specific signatures and imbalanced disease prevalence. These factors can encourage shortcut learning and under-emphasise subtle morphology required for reliable modelling of a specific cancer type. We present SmartStu (a Smart Student), a framework to customise compact, breast-cancer-specific PFMs via distillation whilst mitigating confounding. SmartStu distils representations from multiple teacher PFMs into a lightweight student backbone. Crucially, we introduce adversarial distillation that leverages a dedicated noise model trained to predict nuisance, edge-dominated cues on the distillation set. Using this noise model as a counterexample, the adversarial objective encourages the student to recognise, yet suppress, features predictive of nuisance targets. We further incorporate multi-teacher ensemble distillation and an auxiliary self-supervised objective with artefact injection. We validate SmartStu on three external cohorts (Yale HER2, SLN-Breast, and BRACS) with multiple tiny backbones. SmartStu yields breast-cancer-specific PFMs that are over $30\times$ smaller than general PFMs whilst largely preserving, and sometimes improving, downstream performance measured by balanced accuracy (bAcc) and AUC. Code is available at https://github.com/zwchen03/advDistall.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Understanding Synergistic Interactions among Pathology Foundation Models via Adaptive Fusion

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) provide strong tile-level representations via self-supervised pre-training on large-scale pathology images. Yet, PFMs are developed under diverse and often opaque data, architecture, and objective choices, inducing latent representational biases that limit robustness and obscure what each model specialises in. We present AdaFusion, a lightweight adaptive fusion framework that integrates complementary signals from multiple frozen PFMs through (1) low-dimensional feature compression and (2) a sample-conditioned gating module that reweights model-wise (and optionally channel-wise) contributions. Beyond improving predictive accuracy, AdaFusion provides contribution-driven interpretation that offers evidence consistent with model-specific preferences and synergistic interactions across tissue phenotypes. We evaluate AdaFusion on three public benchmarks spanning treatment response prediction, prostate cancer grading, and spatial gene expression inference. AdaFusion consistently outperforms individual PFMs and other fusion baselines, while providing interpretable tissue visualisation which aligns model preferences with morphological patterns. Code is available at: https://github.com/xyx-98/PathoOracle.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Learning universal approximations for partial differential equations with Physics-Informed Broad Learning System

Partial differential equations (PDEs) play a central role in modeling complex physical, biological, and engineering systems. While traditional numerical solvers are robust, they often incur prohibitive computational costs due to mesh dependencies, whereas recent Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but frequently suffer from slow convergence and optimization instability. To bridge this gap, this article proposes the Physics-Informed Broad Learning System (PIBLS), a novel backpropagation-free framework that reformulates PDE solving as a direct least-squares optimization. We improved an algorithm within this framework to handle nonlinear PDEs efficiently and provide a rigorous mathematical proof establishing the universal approximation property of PIBLS for these equations. Experiments on linear and nonlinear PDEs demonstrate that PIBLS is one to three orders of magnitude faster than conventional PINNs while achieving significantly higher solution accuracy. This framework provides a computationally efficient paradigm for scientific machine learning, offering a practical, high-speed alternative for real-time simulation and design optimization tasks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

LoopVLA: Learning Sufficiency in Recurrent Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically treat the deepest representation of a vision-language backbone as universally optimal for action prediction. However, robotic manipulation is composed of many frequent closed-loop spatial adjustments, for which excessive abstraction may waste computation and weaken low-level geometric cues essential for precise control. Existing early-exit strategies attempt to reduce computation by stopping at predefined layers or applying heuristic rules such as action consistency, but they do not directly answer when a representation is actually sufficient for action. In this paper, we present LoopVLA, a recurrent VLA architecture that jointly learns representation refinement, action prediction, and sufficiency estimation. LoopVLA iteratively applies a shared Transformer block to refine multimodal tokens, and at each iteration produces both a candidate action and a sufficiency score that estimates whether further refinement is necessary. By sharing parameters across iterations, LoopVLA decouples refinement from absolute layer indices and grounds sufficiency estimation in the evolving representation itself. Since sufficiency has no direct supervision, we introduce a self-supervised distribution alignment objective, where intermediate confidence scores are trained to match the relative action quality across refinement steps, thereby linking sufficiency learning to policy optimization signals. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and VLA-Arena show that LoopVLA pushes the efficiency-performance frontier of VLA policies, reducing parameters by 45% and improving inference throughput by up to 1.7 times while matching or outperforming strong baselines in task success.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2025

A Problem-Oriented Taxonomy of Evaluation Metrics for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is widely used in IoT and cyber-physical systems, yet its evaluation remains challenging due to diverse application objectives and heterogeneous metric assumptions. This study introduces a problem-oriented framework that reinterprets existing metrics based on the specific evaluation challenges they are designed to address, rather than their mathematical forms or output structures. We categorize over twenty commonly used metrics into six dimensions: 1) basic accuracy-driven evaluation; 2) timeliness-aware reward mechanisms; 3) tolerance to labeling imprecision; 4) penalties reflecting human-audit cost; 5) robustness against random or inflated scores; and 6) parameter-free comparability for cross-dataset benchmarking. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to examine metric behavior under genuine, random, and oracle detection scenarios. By comparing their resulting score distributions, we quantify each metric's discriminative ability -- its capability to distinguish meaningful detections from random noise. The results show that while most event-level metrics exhibit strong separability, several widely used metrics (e.g., NAB, Point-Adjust) demonstrate limited resistance to random-score inflation. These findings reveal that metric suitability must be inherently task-dependent and aligned with the operational objectives of IoT applications. The proposed framework offers a unified analytical perspective for understanding existing metrics and provides practical guidance for selecting or developing more context-aware, robust, and fair evaluation methodologies for time series anomaly detection.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2025

Democratic Recommendation with User and Item Representatives Produced by Graph Condensation

The challenges associated with large-scale user-item interaction graphs have attracted increasing attention in graph-based recommendation systems, primarily due to computational inefficiencies and inadequate information propagation. Existing methods provide partial solutions but suffer from notable limitations: model-centric approaches, such as sampling and aggregation, often struggle with generalization, while data-centric techniques, including graph sparsification and coarsening, lead to information loss and ineffective handling of bipartite graph structures. Recent advances in graph condensation offer a promising direction by reducing graph size while preserving essential information, presenting a novel approach to mitigating these challenges. Inspired by the principles of democracy, we propose \textbf{DemoRec}, a framework that leverages graph condensation to generate user and item representatives for recommendation tasks. By constructing a compact interaction graph and clustering nodes with shared characteristics from the original graph, DemoRec significantly reduces graph size and computational complexity. Furthermore, it mitigates the over-reliance on high-order information, a critical challenge in large-scale bipartite graphs. Extensive experiments conducted on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DemoRec, showcasing substantial improvements in recommendation performance, computational efficiency, and robustness compared to SOTA methods.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Large Language Model Enhanced Graph Invariant Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Distribution Recommendation

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization has emerged as a significant challenge in graph recommender systems. Traditional graph neural network algorithms often fail because they learn spurious environmental correlations instead of stable causal relationships, leading to substantial performance degradation under distribution shifts. While recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue due to their vast world knowledge and reasoning capabilities, effectively integrating this knowledge with the fine-grained topology of specific graphs to solve the OOD problem remains a significant challenge. To address these issues, we propose {$\textbf{Inv}$ariant $\textbf{G}$raph $\textbf{C}$ontrastive Learning with $\textbf{LLM}$s for Out-of-Distribution Recommendation (InvGCLLM)}, an innovative causal learning framework that synergistically integrates the strengths of data-driven models and knowledge-driven LLMs. Our framework first employs a data-driven invariant learning model to generate causal confidence scores for each user-item interaction. These scores then guide an LLM to perform targeted graph refinement, leveraging its world knowledge to prune spurious connections and augment missing causal links. Finally, the structurally purified graphs provide robust supervision for a causality-guided contrastive learning objective, enabling the model to learn representations that are resilient to spurious correlations. Experiments conducted on four public datasets demonstrate that InvGCLLM achieves significant improvements in out-of-distribution recommendation, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Labels Matter More Than Models: Rethinking the Unsupervised Paradigm in Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) is a critical data mining task often constrained by label scarcity. Consequently, current research predominantly focuses on Unsupervised Time-series Anomaly Detection (UTAD), relying on increasingly complex architectures to model normal data distributions. However, this algorithm-centric trend often overlooks the significant performance gains achievable from limited anomaly labels available in practical scenarios. This paper challenges the premise that algorithmic complexity is the optimal path for TSAD. Instead of proposing another intricate unsupervised model, we present a comprehensive benchmark and empirical study to rigorously compare supervised and unsupervised paradigms. To isolate the value of labels, we introduce \stand, a deliberately minimalist supervised baseline. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that: (1) Labels matter more than models: under a limited labeling budget, simple supervised models significantly outperform complex state-of-the-art unsupervised methods; (2) Supervision yields higher returns: the performance gain from minimal supervision far exceeds the incremental gains from architectural innovations; and (3) Practicality: \stand~exhibits superior prediction consistency and anomaly localization compared to unsupervised counterparts. These findings advocate for a paradigm shift in TSAD research, urging the community to prioritize data-centric label utilization over purely algorithmic complexity. The code and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/EmorZz1G/STAND.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

FIA-Edit: Frequency-Interactive Attention for Efficient and High-Fidelity Inversion-Free Text-Guided Image Editing

Text-guided image editing has advanced rapidly with the rise of diffusion models. While flow-based inversion-free methods offer high efficiency by avoiding latent inversion, they often fail to effectively integrate source information, leading to poor background preservation, spatial inconsistencies, and over-editing due to the lack of effective integration of source information. In this paper, we present FIA-Edit, a novel inversion-free framework that achieves high-fidelity and semantically precise edits through a Frequency-Interactive Attention. Specifically, we design two key components: (1) a Frequency Representation Interaction (FRI) module that enhances cross-domain alignment by exchanging frequency components between source and target features within self-attention, and (2) a Feature Injection (FIJ) module that explicitly incorporates source-side queries, keys, values, and text embeddings into the target branch's cross-attention to preserve structure and semantics. Comprehensive and extensive experiments demonstrate that FIA-Edit supports high-fidelity editing at low computational cost (~6s per 512 * 512 image on an RTX 4090) and consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse tasks in visual quality, background fidelity, and controllability. Furthermore, we are the first to extend text-guided image editing to clinical applications. By synthesizing anatomically coherent hemorrhage variations in surgical images, FIA-Edit opens new opportunities for medical data augmentation and delivers significant gains in downstream bleeding classification. Our project is available at: https://github.com/kk42yy/FIA-Edit.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Bidirectional Mammogram View Translation with Column-Aware and Implicit 3D Conditional Diffusion

Dual-view mammography, including craniocaudal (CC) and mediolateral oblique (MLO) projections, offers complementary anatomical views crucial for breast cancer diagnosis. However, in real-world clinical workflows, one view may be missing, corrupted, or degraded due to acquisition errors or compression artifacts, limiting the effectiveness of downstream analysis. View-to-view translation can help recover missing views and improve lesion alignment. Unlike natural images, this task in mammography is highly challenging due to large non-rigid deformations and severe tissue overlap in X-ray projections, which obscure pixel-level correspondences. In this paper, we propose Column-Aware and Implicit 3D Diffusion (CA3D-Diff), a novel bidirectional mammogram view translation framework based on conditional diffusion model. To address cross-view structural misalignment, we first design a column-aware cross-attention mechanism that leverages the geometric property that anatomically corresponding regions tend to lie in similar column positions across views. A Gaussian-decayed bias is applied to emphasize local column-wise correlations while suppressing distant mismatches. Furthermore, we introduce an implicit 3D structure reconstruction module that back-projects noisy 2D latents into a coarse 3D feature volume based on breast-view projection geometry. The reconstructed 3D structure is refined and injected into the denoising UNet to guide cross-view generation with enhanced anatomical awareness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CA3D-Diff achieves superior performance in bidirectional tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in visual fidelity and structural consistency. Furthermore, the synthesized views effectively improve single-view malignancy classification in screening settings, demonstrating the practical value of our method in real-world diagnostics.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

ScatterAD: Temporal-Topological Scattering Mechanism for Time Series Anomaly Detection

One main challenge in time series anomaly detection for industrial IoT lies in the complex spatio-temporal couplings within multivariate data. However, traditional anomaly detection methods focus on modeling spatial or temporal dependencies independently, resulting in suboptimal representation learning and limited sensitivity to anomalous dispersion in high-dimensional spaces. In this work, we conduct an empirical analysis showing that both normal and anomalous samples tend to scatter in high-dimensional space, especially anomalous samples are markedly more dispersed. We formalize this dispersion phenomenon as scattering, quantified by the mean pairwise distance among sample representations, and leverage it as an inductive signal to enhance spatio-temporal anomaly detection. Technically, we propose ScatterAD to model representation scattering across temporal and topological dimensions. ScatterAD incorporates a topological encoder for capturing graph-structured scattering and a temporal encoder for constraining over-scattering through mean squared error minimization between neighboring time steps. We introduce a contrastive fusion mechanism to ensure the complementarity of the learned temporal and topological representations. Additionally, we theoretically show that maximizing the conditional mutual information between temporal and topological views improves cross-view consistency and enhances more discriminative representations. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks show that ScatterAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on multivariate time series anomaly detection. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/jk-sounds/ScatterAD.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

The SAGES Critical View of Safety Challenge: A Global Benchmark for AI-Assisted Surgical Quality Assessment

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for surgical quality assessment promise to democratize access to expertise, with applications in training, guidance, and accreditation. This study presents the SAGES Critical View of Safety (CVS) Challenge, the first AI competition organized by a surgical society, using the CVS in laparoscopic cholecystectomy, a universally recommended yet inconsistently performed safety step, as an exemplar of surgical quality assessment. A global collaboration across 54 institutions in 24 countries engaged hundreds of clinicians and engineers to curate 1,000 videos annotated by 20 surgical experts according to a consensus-validated protocol. The challenge addressed key barriers to real-world deployment in surgery, including achieving high performance, capturing uncertainty in subjective assessment, and ensuring robustness to clinical variability. To enable this scale of effort, we developed EndoGlacier, a framework for managing large, heterogeneous surgical video and multi-annotator workflows. Thirteen international teams participated, achieving up to a 17% relative gain in assessment performance, over 80% reduction in calibration error, and a 17% relative improvement in robustness over the state-of-the-art. Analysis of results highlighted methodological trends linked to model performance, providing guidance for future research toward robust, clinically deployable AI for surgical quality assessment.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

MVQA-68K: A Multi-dimensional and Causally-annotated Dataset with Quality Interpretability for Video Assessment

With the rapid advancement of video generation models such as Sora, video quality assessment (VQA) is becoming increasingly crucial for selecting high-quality videos from large-scale datasets used in pre-training. Traditional VQA methods, typically producing single numerical scores, often lack comprehensiveness and interpretability. To address these challenges, we introduce MVQA-68K, a novel multi-dimensional VQA dataset comprising over 68,000 carefully annotated videos, covering seven essential quality dimensions: overall aesthetics, camera movement, dynamic degree, texture detail, composition, visual quality, and factual consistency. Each annotation includes detailed chain-of-thought reasoning to facilitate interpretability and comprehensive understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MVQA-68K significantly enhances the performance of various multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on the VQA task, achieving state-of-the-art results not only on our internal test set (Fig.1) but also on public benchmarks including LSVQ-test, LSVQ-1080p, and LIVE-VQC. Meantime, incorporating explicit reasoning process during VQA training substantially boosts the zero-shot generalization. Code and dataset will be available at github: https://github.com/Controller01-ai/MVQA-68K

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

CCE: Confidence-Consistency Evaluation for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time Series Anomaly Detection metrics serve as crucial tools for model evaluation. However, existing metrics suffer from several limitations: insufficient discriminative power, strong hyperparameter dependency, sensitivity to perturbations, and high computational overhead. This paper introduces Confidence-Consistency Evaluation (CCE), a novel evaluation metric that simultaneously measures prediction confidence and uncertainty consistency. By employing Bayesian estimation to quantify the uncertainty of anomaly scores, we construct both global and event-level confidence and consistency scores for model predictions, resulting in a concise CCE metric. Theoretically and experimentally, we demonstrate that CCE possesses strict boundedness, Lipschitz robustness against score perturbations, and linear time complexity $\mathcal{O}(n)$. Furthermore, we establish RankEval, a benchmark for comparing the ranking capabilities of various metrics. RankEval represents the first standardized and reproducible evaluation pipeline that enables objective comparison of evaluation metrics. Both CCE and RankEval implementations are fully open-source.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

PatchAD: A Lightweight Patch-based MLP-Mixer for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is a pivotal task in data analysis, yet it poses the challenge of discerning normal and abnormal patterns in label-deficient scenarios. While prior studies have largely employed reconstruction-based approaches, which limit the models' representational capacities. Moreover, existing deep learning-based methods are not sufficiently lightweight. Addressing these issues, we present PatchAD, our novel, highly efficient multiscale patch-based MLP-Mixer architecture that utilizes contrastive learning for representation extraction and anomaly detection. With its four distinct MLP Mixers and innovative dual project constraint module, PatchAD mitigates potential model degradation and offers a lightweight solution, requiring only $0.403M$ parameters. Its efficacy is demonstrated by state-of-the-art results across $8$ datasets sourced from different application scenarios, outperforming over $30$ comparative algorithms. PatchAD significantly improves the classical F1 score by 6.84%, the Aff-F1 score by 4.27%, and the V-ROC by 2.49%. Simultaneously, an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms underlying PatchAD has been conducted from both theoretical and experimental perspectives, validating the design motivations of the model. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/EmorZz1G/PatchAD.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Joint Holistic and Lesion Controllable Mammogram Synthesis via Gated Conditional Diffusion Model

Mammography is the most commonly used imaging modality for breast cancer screening, driving an increasing demand for deep-learning techniques to support large-scale analysis. However, the development of accurate and robust methods is often limited by insufficient data availability and a lack of diversity in lesion characteristics. While generative models offer a promising solution for data synthesis, current approaches often fail to adequately emphasize lesion-specific features and their relationships with surrounding tissues. In this paper, we propose Gated Conditional Diffusion Model (GCDM), a novel framework designed to jointly synthesize holistic mammogram images and localized lesions. GCDM is built upon a latent denoising diffusion framework, where the noised latent image is concatenated with a soft mask embedding that represents breast, lesion, and their transitional regions, ensuring anatomical coherence between them during the denoising process. To further emphasize lesion-specific features, GCDM incorporates a gated conditioning branch that guides the denoising process by dynamically selecting and fusing the most relevant radiomic and geometric properties of lesions, effectively capturing their interplay. Experimental results demonstrate that GCDM achieves precise control over small lesion areas while enhancing the realism and diversity of synthesized mammograms. These advancements position GCDM as a promising tool for clinical applications in mammogram synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/lixinHUST/Gated-Conditional-Diffusion-Model/

eess.IV↗
arXiv2025

SimAD: A Simple Dissimilarity-based Approach for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Despite the prevalence of reconstruction-based deep learning methods, time series anomaly detection remains a tremendous challenge. Existing approaches often struggle with limited temporal contexts, insufficient representation of normal patterns, and flawed evaluation metrics, all of which hinder their effectiveness in detecting anomalous behavior. To address these issues, we introduce a $\textbf{Sim}$ple dissimilarity-based approach for time series $\textbf{A}$nomaly $\textbf{D}$etection, referred to as $\textbf{SimAD}$. Specifically, SimAD first incorporates a patching-based feature extractor capable of processing extended temporal windows and employs the EmbedPatch encoder to fully integrate normal behavioral patterns. Second, we design an innovative ContrastFusion module in SimAD, which strengthens the robustness of anomaly detection by highlighting the distributional differences between normal and abnormal data. Third, we introduce two robust enhanced evaluation metrics, Unbiased Affiliation (UAff) and Normalized Affiliation (NAff), designed to overcome the limitations of existing metrics by providing better distinctiveness and semantic clarity. The reliability of these two metrics has been demonstrated by both theoretical and experimental analyses. Experiments conducted on seven diverse time series datasets clearly demonstrate SimAD's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, achieving relative improvements of $\textbf{19.85%}$ on F1, $\textbf{4.44%}$ on Aff-F1, $\textbf{77.79%}$ on NAff-F1, and $\textbf{9.69%}$ on AUC on six multivariate datasets. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/EmorZz1G/SimAD.

cs.LG↗