arXiv subjects

Ming Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Ming Hu.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Towards Visual Discrimination and Reasoning of Real-World Physical Dynamics: Physics-Grounded Anomaly Detection

Humans detect real-world object anomalies by perceiving, interacting, and reasoning based on object-conditioned physical knowledge. The long-term goal of Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) is to enable machines to autonomously replicate this skill. However, current IAD algorithms are largely developed and tested on static, semantically simple datasets, which diverge from real-world scenarios where physical understanding and reasoning are essential. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Physics Anomaly Detection (Phys-AD) dataset, the first large-scale, real-world, physics-grounded video dataset for industrial anomaly detection. Collected using a real robot arm and motor, Phys-AD provides a diverse set of dynamic, semantically rich scenarios. The dataset includes more than 6400 videos across 22 real-world object categories, interacting with robot arms and motors, and exhibits 47 types of anomalies. Anomaly detection in Phys-AD requires visual reasoning, combining both physical knowledge and video content to determine object abnormality. We benchmark state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods under three settings: unsupervised AD, weakly-supervised AD, and video-understanding AD, highlighting their limitations in handling physics-grounded anomalies. Additionally, we introduce the Physics Anomaly Explanation (PAEval) metric, designed to assess the ability of visual-language foundation models to not only detect anomalies but also provide accurate explanations for their underlying physical causes. Our project is available at https://guyao2023.github.io/Phys-AD/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

PG-SAM: Prior-Guided SAM with Medical for Multi-organ Segmentation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates powerful zero-shot capabilities; however, its accuracy and robustness significantly decrease when applied to medical image segmentation. Existing methods address this issue through modality fusion, integrating textual and image information to provide more detailed priors. In this study, we argue that the granularity of text and the domain gap affect the accuracy of the priors. Furthermore, the discrepancy between high-level abstract semantics and pixel-level boundary details in images can introduce noise into the fusion process. To address this, we propose Prior-Guided SAM (PG-SAM), which employs a fine-grained modality prior aligner to leverage specialized medical knowledge for better modality alignment. The core of our method lies in efficiently addressing the domain gap with fine-grained text from a medical LLM. Meanwhile, it also enhances the priors' quality after modality alignment, ensuring more accurate segmentation. In addition, our decoder enhances the model's expressive capabilities through multi-level feature fusion and iterative mask optimizer operations, supporting unprompted learning. We also propose a unified pipeline that effectively supplies high-quality semantic information to SAM. Extensive experiments on the Synapse dataset demonstrate that the proposed PG-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is released at https://github.com/logan-0623/PG-SAM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Self-supervised Vision Pretraining with Local Masked Reconstruction

Self-supervised learning for computer vision has achieved tremendous progress and improved many downstream vision tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Among these, generative self-supervised vision learning approaches such as MAE and BEiT show promising performance. However, their global masked reconstruction mechanism is computationally demanding. To address this issue, we propose local masked reconstruction (LoMaR), a simple yet effective approach that performs masked reconstruction within a small window of 7$\times$7 patches on a simple Transformer encoder, improving the trade-off between efficiency and accuracy compared to global masked reconstruction over the entire image. Extensive experiments show that LoMaR reaches 84.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification, outperforming MAE by 0.5%. After finetuning the pretrained LoMaR on 384$\times$384 images, it can reach 85.4% top-1 accuracy, surpassing MAE by 0.6%. On MS COCO, LoMaR outperforms MAE by 0.5 $\text{AP}^\text{box}$ on object detection and 0.5 $\text{AP}^\text{mask}$ on instance segmentation. LoMaR is especially more computation-efficient on pretraining high-resolution images, e.g., it is 3.1$\times$ faster than MAE with 0.2% higher classification accuracy on pretraining 448$\times$448 images. This local masked reconstruction learning mechanism can be easily integrated into any other generative self-supervised learning approach. Our code is publicly available in https://github.com/junchen14/LoMaR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SlideChat: A Large Vision-Language Assistant for Whole-Slide Pathology Image Understanding

Despite the progress made by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in computational pathology, they remain limited by a predominant focus on patch-level analysis, missing essential contextual information at the whole-slide level. The lack of large-scale instruction datasets and the gigapixel scale of whole slide images (WSIs) pose significant developmental challenges. In this paper, we present SlideChat, the first vision-language assistant capable of understanding gigapixel whole-slide images, exhibiting excellent multimodal conversational capability and response complex instruction across diverse pathology scenarios. To support its development, we created SlideInstruction, the largest instruction-following dataset for WSIs consisting of 4.2K WSI captions and 176K VQA pairs with multiple categories. Furthermore, we propose SlideBench, a multimodal benchmark that incorporates captioning and VQA tasks to assess SlideChat's capabilities in varied clinical settings such as microscopy, diagnosis. Compared to both general and specialized MLLMs, SlideChat exhibits exceptional capabilities achieving state-of-the-art performance on 18 of 22 tasks. For example, it achieved an overall accuracy of 81.17% on SlideBench-VQA (TCGA), and 54.15% on SlideBench-VQA (BCNB). Our code, data, and model is publicly accessible at https://uni-medical.github.io/SlideChat.github.io.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

MSWAL: 3D Multi-class Segmentation of Whole Abdominal Lesions Dataset

With the significantly increasing incidence and prevalence of abdominal diseases, there is a need to embrace greater use of new innovations and technology for the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Although deep-learning methods have notably been developed to assist radiologists in diagnosing abdominal diseases, existing models have the restricted ability to segment common lesions in the abdomen due to missing annotations for typical abdominal pathologies in their training datasets. To address the limitation, we introduce MSWAL, the first 3D Multi-class Segmentation of the Whole Abdominal Lesions dataset, which broadens the coverage of various common lesion types, such as gallstones, kidney stones, liver tumors, kidney tumors, pancreatic cancer, liver cysts, and kidney cysts. With CT scans collected from 694 patients (191,417 slices) of different genders across various scanning phases, MSWAL demonstrates strong robustness and generalizability. The transfer learning experiment from MSWAL to two public datasets, LiTS and KiTS, effectively demonstrates consistent improvements, with Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) increase of 3.00% for liver tumors and 0.89% for kidney tumors, demonstrating that the comprehensive annotations and diverse lesion types in MSWAL facilitate effective learning across different domains and data distributions. Furthermore, we propose Inception nnU-Net, a novel segmentation framework that effectively integrates an Inception module with the nnU-Net architecture to extract information from different receptive fields, achieving significant enhancement in both voxel-level DSC and region-level F1 compared to the cutting-edge public algorithms on MSWAL. Our dataset will be released after being accepted, and the code is publicly released at https://github.com/tiuxuxsh76075/MSWAL-.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

JailGuard: A Universal Detection Framework for LLM Prompt-based Attacks

The systems and software powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-Modal LLMs (MLLMs) have played a critical role in numerous scenarios. However, current LLM systems are vulnerable to prompt-based attacks, with jailbreaking attacks enabling the LLM system to generate harmful content, while hijacking attacks manipulate the LLM system to perform attacker-desired tasks, underscoring the necessity for detection tools. Unfortunately, existing detecting approaches are usually tailored to specific attacks, resulting in poor generalization in detecting various attacks across different modalities. To address it, we propose JailGuard, a universal detection framework deployed on top of LLM systems for prompt-based attacks across text and image modalities. JailGuard operates on the principle that attacks are inherently less robust than benign ones. Specifically, JailGuard mutates untrusted inputs to generate variants and leverages the discrepancy of the variants' responses on the target model to distinguish attack samples from benign samples. We implement 18 mutators for text and image inputs and design a mutator combination policy to further improve detection generalization. The evaluation on the dataset containing 15 known attack types suggests that JailGuard achieves the best detection accuracy of 86.14%/82.90% on text and image inputs, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 11.81%-25.73% and 12.20%-21.40%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in open-ended conversation, generating more accurate and personalized responses. However, their abilities to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions within real-world scenarios remain underexplored. This paper introduces MMRC, a Multi-Modal Real-world Conversation benchmark for evaluating six core open-ended abilities of MLLMs: information extraction, multi-turn reasoning, information update, image management, memory recall, and answer refusal. With data collected from real-world scenarios, MMRC comprises 5,120 conversations and 28,720 corresponding manually labeled questions, posing a significant challenge to existing MLLMs. Evaluations on 20 MLLMs in MMRC indicate an accuracy drop during open-ended interactions. We identify four common failure patterns: long-term memory degradation, inadequacies in updating factual knowledge, accumulated assumption of error propagation, and reluctance to say no. To mitigate these issues, we propose a simple yet effective NOTE-TAKING strategy, which can record key information from the conversation and remind the model during its responses, enhancing conversational capabilities. Experiments across six MLLMs demonstrate significant performance improvements.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Progress of the TianQin project

TianQin is a future space-based gravitational wave observatory targeting the frequency window of $10^{-4}$ Hz $\sim 1$ Hz. A large variety of gravitational wave sources are expected in this frequency band, including the merger of massive black hole binaries, the inspiral of extreme/intermediate mass ratio systems, stellar-mass black hole binaries, Galactic compact binaries, and so on. TianQin will consist of three Earth orbiting satellites on nearly identical orbits with orbital radii of about $10^5$ km. The satellites will form a normal triangle constellation whose plane is nearly perpendicular to the ecliptic plane. The TianQin project has been progressing smoothly following the ``0123" technology roadmap. In step ``0", the TianQin laser ranging station has been constructed and it has successfully ranged to all the five retro-reflectors on the Moon. In step ``1", the drag-free control technology has been tested and demonstrated using the TianQin-1 satellite. In step ``2", the inter-satellite laser interferometry technology will be tested using the pair of TianQin-2 satellites. The TianQin-2 mission has been officially approved and the satellites will be launched around 2026. In step ``3", i.e., the TianQin-3 mission, three identical satellites will be launched around 2035 to form the space-based gravitational wave detector, TianQin, and to start gravitational wave detection in space.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2025

Intention is All You Need: Refining Your Code from Your Intention

Code refinement aims to enhance existing code by addressing issues, refactoring, and optimizing to improve quality and meet specific requirements. As software projects scale in size and complexity, the traditional iterative exchange between reviewers and developers becomes increasingly burdensome. While recent deep learning techniques have been explored to accelerate this process, their performance remains limited, primarily due to challenges in accurately understanding reviewers' intents. This paper proposes an intention-based code refinement technique that enhances the conventional comment-to-code process by explicitly extracting reviewer intentions from the comments. Our approach consists of two key phases: Intention Extraction and Intention Guided Revision Generation. Intention Extraction categorizes comments using predefined templates, while Intention Guided Revision Generation employs large language models (LLMs) to generate revised code based on these defined intentions. Three categories with eight subcategories are designed for comment transformation, which is followed by a hybrid approach that combines rule-based and LLM-based classifiers for accurate classification. Extensive experiments with five LLMs (GPT4o, GPT3.5, DeepSeekV2, DeepSeek7B, CodeQwen7B) under different prompting settings demonstrate that our approach achieves 79% accuracy in intention extraction and up to 66% in code refinement generation. Our results highlight the potential of our approach in enhancing data quality and improving the efficiency of code refinement.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Smart Contract Fuzzing Towards Profitable Vulnerabilities

Billions of dollars are transacted through smart contracts, making vulnerabilities a major financial risk. One focus in the security arms race is on profitable vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Fuzzing is a key method for identifying these vulnerabilities. However, current solutions face two main limitations: a lack of profit-centric techniques for expediting detection, and insufficient automation in maximizing the profitability of discovered vulnerabilities, leaving the analysis to human experts. To address these gaps, we have developed VERITE, a profit-centric smart contract fuzzing framework that not only effectively detects those profitable vulnerabilities but also maximizes the exploited profits. VERITE has three key features: 1) DeFi action-based mutators for boosting the exploration of transactions with different fund flows; 2) potentially profitable candidates identification criteria, which checks whether the input has caused abnormal fund flow properties during testing; 3) a gradient descent-based profit maximization strategy for these identified candidates. VERITE is fully developed from scratch and evaluated on a dataset consisting of 61 exploited real-world DeFi projects with an average of over 1.1 million dollars loss. The results show that VERITE can automatically extract more than 18 million dollars in total and is significantly better than state-of-the-art fuzzer ITYFUZZ in both detection (29/10) and exploitation (134 times more profits gained on average). Remarkably, in 12 targets, it gains more profits than real-world attacking exploits (1.01 to 11.45 times more). VERITE is also applied by auditors in contract auditing, where 6 (5 high severity) zero-day vulnerabilities are found with over $2,500 bounty rewards.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Neighbor Does Matter: Density-Aware Contrastive Learning for Medical Semi-supervised Segmentation

In medical image analysis, multi-organ semi-supervised segmentation faces challenges such as insufficient labels and low contrast in soft tissues. To address these issues, existing studies typically employ semi-supervised segmentation techniques using pseudo-labeling and consistency regularization. However, these methods mainly rely on individual data samples for training, ignoring the rich neighborhood information present in the feature space. In this work, we argue that supervisory information can be directly extracted from the geometry of the feature space. Inspired by the density-based clustering hypothesis, we propose using feature density to locate sparse regions within feature clusters. Our goal is to increase intra-class compactness by addressing sparsity issues. To achieve this, we propose a Density-Aware Contrastive Learning (DACL) strategy, pushing anchored features in sparse regions towards cluster centers approximated by high-density positive samples, resulting in more compact clusters. Specifically, our method constructs density-aware neighbor graphs using labeled and unlabeled data samples to estimate feature density and locate sparse regions. We also combine label-guided co-training with density-guided geometric regularization to form complementary supervision for unlabeled data. Experiments on the Multi-Organ Segmentation Challenge dataset demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its efficacy in medical image segmentation tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

NebulaFL: Effective Asynchronous Federated Learning for JointCloud Computing

With advancements in AI infrastructure and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology, Federated Learning as a Service (FLaaS) through JointCloud Computing (JCC) is promising to break through the resource constraints caused by heterogeneous edge devices in the traditional Federated Learning (FL) paradigm. Specifically, with the protection from TEE, data owners can achieve efficient model training with high-performance AI services in the cloud. By providing additional FL services, cloud service providers can achieve collaborative learning among data owners. However, FLaaS still faces three challenges, i.e., i) low training performance caused by heterogeneous data among data owners, ii) high communication overhead among different clouds (i.e., data centers), and iii) lack of efficient resource scheduling strategies to balance training time and cost. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel asynchronous FL approach named NebulaFL for collaborative model training among multiple clouds. To address data heterogeneity issues, NebulaFL adopts a version control-based asynchronous FL training scheme in each data center to balance training time among data owners. To reduce communication overhead, NebulaFL adopts a decentralized model rotation mechanism to achieve effective knowledge sharing among data centers. To balance training time and cost, NebulaFL integrates a reward-guided strategy for data owners selection and resource scheduling. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art FL methods, NebulaFL can achieve up to 5.71\% accuracy improvement. In addition, NebulaFL can reduce up to 50% communication overhead and 61.94% costs under a target accuracy.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

HGCLIP: Exploring Vision-Language Models with Graph Representations for Hierarchical Understanding

Object categories are typically organized into a multi-granularity taxonomic hierarchy. When classifying categories at different hierarchy levels, traditional uni-modal approaches focus primarily on image features, revealing limitations in complex scenarios. Recent studies integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with class hierarchies have shown promise, yet they fall short of fully exploiting the hierarchical relationships. These efforts are constrained by their inability to perform effectively across varied granularity of categories. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel framework (HGCLIP) that effectively combines CLIP with a deeper exploitation of the Hierarchical class structure via Graph representation learning. We explore constructing the class hierarchy into a graph, with its nodes representing the textual or image features of each category. After passing through a graph encoder, the textual features incorporate hierarchical structure information, while the image features emphasize class-aware features derived from prototypes through the attention mechanism. Our approach demonstrates significant improvements on 11 diverse visual recognition benchmarks. Our codes are fully available at https://github.com/richard-peng-xia/HGCLIP.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

OphCLIP: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Learning for Ophthalmic Surgical Video-Language Pretraining

Surgical practice involves complex visual interpretation, procedural skills, and advanced medical knowledge, making surgical vision-language pretraining (VLP) particularly challenging due to this complexity and the limited availability of annotated data. To address the gap, we propose OphCLIP, a hierarchical retrieval-augmented vision-language pretraining framework specifically designed for ophthalmic surgical workflow understanding. OphCLIP leverages the OphVL dataset we constructed, a large-scale and comprehensive collection of over 375K hierarchically structured video-text pairs with tens of thousands of different combinations of attributes (surgeries, phases/operations/actions, instruments, medications, as well as more advanced aspects like the causes of eye diseases, surgical objectives, and postoperative recovery recommendations, etc). These hierarchical video-text correspondences enable OphCLIP to learn both fine-grained and long-term visual representations by aligning short video clips with detailed narrative descriptions and full videos with structured titles, capturing intricate surgical details and high-level procedural insights, respectively. Our OphCLIP also designs a retrieval-augmented pretraining framework to leverage the underexplored large-scale silent surgical procedure videos, automatically retrieving semantically relevant content to enhance the representation learning of narrative videos. Evaluation across 11 datasets for phase recognition and multi-instrument identification shows OphCLIP's robust generalization and superior performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

An Empirical Study of Vulnerability Detection using Federated Learning

Although Deep Learning (DL) methods becoming increasingly popular in vulnerability detection, their performance is seriously limited by insufficient training data. This is mainly because few existing software organizations can maintain a complete set of high-quality samples for DL-based vulnerability detection. Due to the concerns about privacy leakage, most of them are reluctant to share data, resulting in the data silo problem. Since enables collaboratively model training without data sharing, Federated Learning (FL) has been investigated as a promising means of addressing the data silo problem in DL-based vulnerability detection. However, since existing FL-based vulnerability detection methods focus on specific applications, it is still far unclear i) how well FL adapts to common vulnerability detection tasks and ii) how to design a high-performance FL solution for a specific vulnerability detection task. To answer these two questions, this paper first proposes VulFL, an effective evaluation framework for FL-based vulnerability detection. Then, based on VulFL, this paper conducts a comprehensive study to reveal the underlying capabilities of FL in dealing with different types of CWEs, especially when facing various data heterogeneity scenarios. Our experimental results show that, compared to independent training, FL can significantly improve the detection performance of common AI models on all investigated CWEs, though the performance of FL-based vulnerability detection is limited by heterogeneous data. To highlight the performance differences between different FL solutions for vulnerability detection, we extensively investigate the impacts of different configuration strategies for each framework component of VulFL. Our study sheds light on the potential of FL in vulnerability detection, which can be used to guide the design of FL-based solutions for vulnerability detection.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

FedQP: Towards Accurate Federated Learning using Quadratic Programming Guided Mutation

Due to the advantages of privacy-preserving, Federated Learning (FL) is widely used in distributed machine learning systems. However, existing FL methods suffer from low-inference performance caused by data heterogeneity. Specifically, due to heterogeneous data, the optimization directions of different local models vary greatly, making it difficult for the traditional FL method to get a generalized global model that performs well on all clients. As one of the state-of-the-art FL methods, the mutation-based FL method attempts to adopt a stochastic mutation strategy to guide the model training towards a well-generalized area (i.e., flat area in the loss landscape). Specifically, mutation allows the model to shift within the solution space, providing an opportunity to escape areas with poor generalization (i.e., sharp area). However, the stochastic mutation strategy easily results in diverse optimal directions of mutated models, which limits the performance of the existing mutation-based FL method. To achieve higher performance, this paper proposes a novel mutation-based FL approach named FedQP, utilizing a quadratic programming strategy to regulate the mutation directions wisely. By biasing the model mutation towards the direction of gradient update rather than traditional random mutation, FedQP can effectively guide the model to optimize towards a well-generalized area (i.e., flat area). Experiments on multiple well-known datasets show that our quadratic programming-guided mutation strategy effectively improves the inference accuracy of the global model in various heterogeneous data scenarios.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Deep Neural Newsvendor

We consider a data-driven newsvendor problem, where one has access to past demand data and the associated feature information. We solve the problem by estimating the target quantile function using a deep neural network (DNN). The remarkable representational power of DNN allows our framework to incorporate or approximate various extant data-driven models. We provide theoretical guarantees in terms of excess risk bounds for the DNN solution characterized by the network structure and sample size in a non-asymptotic manner, which justify the applicability of DNNs in the relevant contexts. Specifically, the convergence rate of the excess risk bound with respect to the sample size increases in the smoothness of the target quantile function but decreases in the dimension of feature variables. This rate can be further accelerated when the target function possesses a composite structure. In particular, our theoretical framework can be extended to accommodate the data-dependent scenarios, where the data-generating process could be time-dependent but not necessarily identical over time. Building on our theoretical results, we provide further managerial insights and practical guidance through simulation studies. Finally, we apply the DNN method to a real-world dataset obtained from a food supermarket. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that (1) the DNN method consistently outperforms other alternatives across a wide range of cost parameters, and (2) it exhibits good performance when the sample size is either very large or relatively limited.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Federated Graph Learning with Adaptive Importance-based Sampling

For privacy-preserving graph learning tasks involving distributed graph datasets, federated learning (FL)-based GCN (FedGCN) training is required. A key challenge for FedGCN is scaling to large-scale graphs, which typically incurs high computation and communication costs when dealing with the explosively increasing number of neighbors. Existing graph sampling-enhanced FedGCN training approaches ignore graph structural information or dynamics of optimization, resulting in high variance and inaccurate node embeddings. To address this limitation, we propose the Federated Adaptive Importance-based Sampling (FedAIS) approach. It achieves substantial computational cost saving by focusing the limited resources on training important nodes, while reducing communication overhead via adaptive historical embedding synchronization. The proposed adaptive importance-based sampling method jointly considers the graph structural heterogeneity and the optimization dynamics to achieve optimal trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. Extensive evaluations against five state-of-the-art baselines on five real-world graph datasets show that FedAIS achieves comparable or up to 3.23% higher test accuracy, while saving communication and computation costs by 91.77% and 85.59%.

cs.DC↗