SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Yakun Ju

Publications and source records attributed to Yakun Ju.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

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

OASIS: Occlusion-aware Single-image Hand Avatar Reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Splatting

Single-image 3D hand avatar reconstruction is fundamentally ill-posed and particularly challenging due to limited visual evidence under severe self-occlusion and the complex pose-dependent deformation of highly articulated hands. Existing methods predominantly rely on implicit NeRF-style representations, whose volumetric fitting is computationally expensive and often struggles to preserve fine-grained hand details. In this work, we present OASIS, a tailored 3D Gaussian Splatting framework for single-image hand avatar reconstruction. To faithfully encode sparse image-specific appearance cues in single-view reconstruction, we construct geometry-aligned visual evidence tokens by explicitly aligning input image observations with 3D hand geometry and context-adaptively tokenizing the resulting visual evidence. Since severe self-occlusion makes the reliability of image evidence inherently visibility-dependent, we introduce a visibility-conditioned point-image attention to reliably transfer visual evidence to geometric tokens, yielding occlusion-aware Gaussian features for faithful and robust reconstruction. To further capture non-rigid deformation of articulated hands, we introduce a Feature-on-Mesh representation to enable Gaussian deformation to be guided by local surface stretching. Under this framework, we adopt a one-shot adaptation scheme that learns a shared hand prior from multi-identity training data and then fits it to a target image for target-specific reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that OASIS outperforms existing baselines in both visual fidelity and efficiency across challenging poses and in-the-wild scenarios, and further demonstrates strong versatility in downstream applications such as text-to-avatar generation and texture editing.

cs.CV

SA$^{2}$Net: Scale-Adaptive Structure-Affinity Transformation for Spine Segmentation from Ultrasound Volume Projection Imaging

Spine segmentation, based on ultrasound volume projection imaging (VPI), plays a vital role for intelligent scoliosis diagnosis in clinical applications. However, this task faces several significant challenges. Firstly, the global contextual knowledge of spines may not be well-learned if we neglect the high spatial correlation of different bone features. Secondly, the spine bones contain rich structural knowledge regarding their shapes and positions, which deserves to be encoded into the segmentation process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel scale-adaptive structure-aware network (SA$^{2}$Net) for effective spine segmentation. First, we propose a scale-adaptive complementary strategy to learn the cross-dimensional long-distance correlation features for spinal images. Second, motivated by the consistency between multi-head self-attention in Transformers and semantic level affinity, we propose structure-affinity transformation to transform semantic features with class-specific affinity and combine it with a Transformer decoder for structure-aware reasoning. In addition, we adopt a feature mixing loss aggregation method to enhance model training. This method improves the robustness and accuracy of the segmentation process. The experimental results demonstrate that our SA$^{2}$Net achieves superior segmentation performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the adaptability of SA$^{2}$Net to various backbones enhances its potential as a promising tool for advanced scoliosis diagnosis using intelligent spinal image analysis. The code and experimental demo are available at https://github.com/taetiseo09/SA2Net.

cs.CV

SGDFuse: SAM-Guided Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is essential for integrating thermal saliency with textural details to support downstream perception. However, most existing approaches suffer from "semantic blindness," leading to the erroneous suppression of thermal targets and the introduction of visual artifacts. To address this, we propose SAM-Guided Diffusion Fusion Network (SGDFuse), a novel Semantic-Guided Generation (SGG) framework that reframes IVIF as a semantically-steered generative task rather than simplistic pixel mapping. Our method uniquely couples high-level semantic priors from the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with the high-fidelity generative power of a conditional diffusion model. We employ a deliberate two-stage strategy to decouple multimodal alignment from iterative refinement: Stage I establishes a robust structural foundation via preliminary fusion, while Stage II utilizes dual-modality semantic masks as spatial anchors to guide the diffusion process toward a semantically coherent, high-fidelity reconstruction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SGDFuse not only delivers state-of-the-art image quality but also enhances downstream task performance, confirming its effectiveness as a new Methodological Framework for semantically aware image fusion. The code is available at https://github.com/boshizhang123/SGDFuse.

cs.CV

Prototype-Driven Structure Synergy Network for Remote Sensing Images Segmentation

In the semantic segmentation of remote sensing images, acquiring complete ground objects is critical for achieving precise analysis. However, this task is severely hindered by two major challenges: high intra-class variance and high inter-class similarity. Traditional methods often yield incomplete segmentation results due to their inability to effectively unify class representations and distinguish between similar features. Even emerging class-guided approaches are limited by coarse class prototype representations and a neglect of target structural information. Therefore, this paper proposes a Prototype-Driven Structure Synergy Network (PDSSNet). The design of this network is based on a core concept, a complete ground object is jointly defined by its invariant class semantics and its variant spatial structure. To implement this, we have designed three key modules. First, the Adaptive Prototype Extraction Module (APEM) ensures semantic accuracy from the source by encoding the ground truth to extract unbiased class prototypes. Subsequently, the designed Semantic-Structure Coordination Module (SSCM) follows a hierarchical semantics-first, structure-second principle. This involves first establishing a global semantic cognition, then leveraging structural information to constrain and refine the semantic representation, thereby ensuring the integrity of class information. Finally, the Channel Similarity Adjustment Module (CSAM) employs a dynamic step-size adjustment mechanism to focus on discriminative features between classes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PDSSNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/wangjunyi-1/PDSSNet.

cs.CV

Excavate the potential of Single-Scale Features: A Decomposition Network for Water-Related Optical Image Enhancement

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) techniques aim to improve visual quality of images captured in aquatic environments by addressing degradation issues caused by light absorption and scattering effects, including color distortion, blurring, and low contrast. Current mainstream solutions predominantly employ multi-scale feature extraction (MSFE) mechanisms to enhance reconstruction quality through multi-resolution feature fusion. However, our extensive experiments demonstrate that high-quality image reconstruction does not necessarily rely on multi-scale feature fusion. Contrary to popular belief, our experiments show that single-scale feature extraction alone can match or surpass the performance of multi-scale methods, significantly reducing complexity. To comprehensively explore single-scale feature potential in underwater enhancement, we propose an innovative Single-Scale Decomposition Network (SSD-Net). This architecture introduces an asymmetrical decomposition mechanism that disentangles input image into clean layer along with degradation layer. The former contains scene-intrinsic information and the latter encodes medium-induced interference. It uniquely combines CNN's local feature extraction capabilities with Transformer's global modeling strengths through two core modules: 1) Parallel Feature Decomposition Block (PFDB), implementing dual-branch feature space decoupling via efficient attention operations and adaptive sparse transformer; 2) Bidirectional Feature Communication Block (BFCB), enabling cross-layer residual interactions for complementary feature mining and fusion. This synergistic design preserves feature decomposition independence while establishing dynamic cross-layer information pathways, effectively enhancing degradation decoupling capacity.

cs.CV

Aerial Multi-View Stereo via Adaptive Depth Range Inference and Normal Cues

Three-dimensional digital urban reconstruction from multi-view aerial images is a critical application where deep multi-view stereo (MVS) methods outperform traditional techniques. However, existing methods commonly overlook the key differences between aerial and close-range settings, such as varying depth ranges along epipolar lines and insensitive feature-matching associated with low-detailed aerial images. To address these issues, we propose an Adaptive Depth Range MVS (ADR-MVS), which integrates monocular geometric cues to improve multi-view depth estimation accuracy. The key component of ADR-MVS is the depth range predictor, which generates adaptive range maps from depth and normal estimates using cross-attention discrepancy learning. In the first stage, the range map derived from monocular cues breaks through predefined depth boundaries, improving feature-matching discriminability and mitigating convergence to local optima. In later stages, the inferred range maps are progressively narrowed, ultimately aligning with the cascaded MVS framework for precise depth regression. Moreover, a normal-guided cost aggregation operation is specially devised for aerial stereo images to improve geometric awareness within the cost volume. Finally, we introduce a normal-guided depth refinement module that surpasses existing RGB-guided techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that ADR-MVS achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WHU, LuoJia-MVS, and M\"unchen datasets, while exhibits superior computational complexity.

cs.CV

FNIN: A Fourier Neural Operator-based Numerical Integration Network for Surface-form-gradients

Surface-from-gradients (SfG) aims to recover a three-dimensional (3D) surface from its gradients. Traditional methods encounter significant challenges in achieving high accuracy and handling high-resolution inputs, particularly facing the complex nature of discontinuities and the inefficiencies associated with large-scale linear solvers. Although recent advances in deep learning, such as photometric stereo, have enhanced normal estimation accuracy, they do not fully address the intricacies of gradient-based surface reconstruction. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Fourier neural operator-based Numerical Integration Network (FNIN) within a two-stage optimization framework. In the first stage, our approach employs an iterative architecture for numerical integration, harnessing an advanced Fourier neural operator to approximate the solution operator in Fourier space. Additionally, a self-learning attention mechanism is incorporated to effectively detect and handle discontinuities. In the second stage, we refine the surface reconstruction by formulating a weighted least squares problem, addressing the identified discontinuities rationally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in both accuracy and efficiency compared to current state-of-the-art solvers. This is particularly evident in handling high-resolution images with complex data, achieving errors of fewer than 0.1 mm on tested objects.

cs.CV

Image Gradient-Aided Photometric Stereo Network

Photometric stereo (PS) endeavors to ascertain surface normals using shading clues from photometric images under various illuminations. Recent deep learning-based PS methods often overlook the complexity of object surfaces. These neural network models, which exclusively rely on photometric images for training, often produce blurred results in high-frequency regions characterized by local discontinuities, such as wrinkles and edges with significant gradient changes. To address this, we propose the Image Gradient-Aided Photometric Stereo Network (IGA-PSN), a dual-branch framework extracting features from both photometric images and their gradients. Furthermore, we incorporate an hourglass regression network along with supervision to regularize normal regression. Experiments on DiLiGenT benchmarks show that IGA-PSN outperforms previous methods in surface normal estimation, achieving a mean angular error of 6.46 while preserving textures and geometric shapes in complex regions.

cs.CV

Frequency-Aware Guidance for Blind Image Restoration via Diffusion Models

Blind image restoration remains a significant challenge in low-level vision tasks. Recently, denoising diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in image synthesis. Guided diffusion models, leveraging the potent generative priors of pre-trained models along with a differential guidance loss, have achieved promising results in blind image restoration. However, these models typically consider data consistency solely in the spatial domain, often resulting in distorted image content. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency-aware guidance loss that can be integrated into various diffusion models in a plug-and-play manner. Our proposed guidance loss, based on 2D discrete wavelet transform, simultaneously enforces content consistency in both the spatial and frequency domains. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in three blind restoration tasks: blind image deblurring, imaging through turbulence, and blind restoration for multiple degradations. Notably, our method achieves a significant improvement in PSNR score, with a remarkable enhancement of 3.72\,dB in image deblurring. Moreover, our method exhibits superior capability in generating images with rich details and reduced distortion, leading to the best visual quality.

cs.CV

MedAide: Information Fusion and Anatomy of Medical Intents via LLM-based Agent Collaboration

In healthcare intelligence, the ability to fuse heterogeneous, multi-intent information from diverse clinical sources is fundamental to building reliable decision-making systems. Large Language Model (LLM)-driven information interaction systems currently showing potential promise in the healthcare domain. Nevertheless, they often suffer from information redundancy and coupling when dealing with complex medical intents, leading to severe hallucinations and performance bottlenecks. To this end, we propose MedAide, an LLM-based medical multi-agent collaboration framework designed to enable intent-aware information fusion and coordinated reasoning across specialized healthcare domains. Specifically, we introduce a regularization-guided module that combines syntactic constraints with retrieval augmented generation to decompose complex queries into structured representations, facilitating fine-grained clinical information fusion and intent resolution. Additionally, a dynamic intent prototype matching module is proposed to utilize dynamic prototype representation with a semantic similarity matching mechanism to achieve adaptive recognition and updating of the agent's intent in multi-round healthcare dialogues. Ultimately, we design a rotation agent collaboration mechanism that introduces dynamic role rotation and decision-level information fusion across specialized medical agents. Extensive experiments are conducted on four medical benchmarks with composite intents. Experimental results from automated metrics and expert doctor evaluations show that MedAide outperforms current LLMs and improves their medical proficiency and strategic reasoning.

cs.CL

Generalized Face Forgery Detection via Adaptive Learning for Pre-trained Vision Transformer

With the rapid progress of generative models, the current challenge in face forgery detection is how to effectively detect realistic manipulated faces from different unseen domains. Though previous studies show that pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) based models can achieve some promising results after fully fine-tuning on the Deepfake dataset, their generalization performances are still unsatisfactory. One possible reason is that fully fine-tuned ViT-based models may disrupt the pre-trained features [1, 2] and overfit to some data-specific patterns [3]. To alleviate this issue, we present a \textbf{F}orgery-aware \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{Vi}sion \textbf{T}ransformer (FA-ViT) under the adaptive learning paradigm, where the parameters in the pre-trained ViT are kept fixed while the designed adaptive modules are optimized to capture forgery features. Specifically, a global adaptive module is designed to model long-range interactions among input tokens, which takes advantage of self-attention mechanism to mine global forgery clues. To further explore essential local forgery clues, a local adaptive module is proposed to expose local inconsistencies by enhancing the local contextual association. In addition, we introduce a fine-grained adaptive learning module that emphasizes the common compact representation of genuine faces through relationship learning in fine-grained pairs, driving these proposed adaptive modules to be aware of fine-grained forgery-aware information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our FA-ViT achieves state-of-the-arts results in the cross-dataset evaluation, and enhances the robustness against unseen perturbations. Particularly, FA-ViT achieves 93.83\% and 78.32\% AUC scores on Celeb-DF and DFDC datasets in the cross-dataset evaluation. The code and trained model have been released at: https://github.com/LoveSiameseCat/FAViT.

cs.CV

Exposing Image Splicing Traces in Scientific Publications via Uncertainty-guided Refinement

Recently, a surge in scientific publications suspected of image manipulation has led to numerous retractions, bringing the issue of image integrity into sharp focus. Although research on forensic detectors for image plagiarism and image synthesis exists, the detection of image splicing traces in scientific publications remains unexplored. Compared to image duplication and synthesis, image splicing detection is more challenging due to the lack of reference images and the typically small tampered areas. Furthermore, disruptive factors in scientific images, such as artifacts from digital compression, abnormal patterns, and noise from physical operations, present misleading features like splicing traces, significantly increasing the difficulty of this task. Moreover, the scarcity of high-quality datasets of spliced scientific images limits potential advancements. In this work, we propose an Uncertainty-guided Refinement Network (URN) to mitigate the impact of these disruptive factors. Our URN can explicitly suppress the propagation of unreliable information flow caused by disruptive factors between regions, thus obtaining robust splicing features. Additionally, the URN is designed to concentrate improvements in uncertain prediction areas during the decoding phase. We also construct a dataset for image splicing detection (SciSp) containing 1,290 spliced images. Compared to existing datasets, SciSp includes the largest number of spliced images and the most diverse sources. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. We also validate the URN's generalisability in resisting cross-dataset domain shifts and its robustness against various post-processing techniques, including advanced deep-learning-based inpainting.

cs.CV

RMAFF-PSN: A Residual Multi-Scale Attention Feature Fusion Photometric Stereo Network

Predicting accurate normal maps of objects from two-dimensional images in regions of complex structure and spatial material variations is challenging using photometric stereo methods due to the influence of surface reflection properties caused by variations in object geometry and surface materials. To address this issue, we propose a photometric stereo network called a RMAFF-PSN that uses residual multiscale attentional feature fusion to handle the ``difficult'' regions of the object. Unlike previous approaches that only use stacked convolutional layers to extract deep features from the input image, our method integrates feature information from different resolution stages and scales of the image. This approach preserves more physical information, such as texture and geometry of the object in complex regions, through shallow-deep stage feature extraction, double branching enhancement, and attention optimization. To test the network structure under real-world conditions, we propose a new real dataset called Simple PS data, which contains multiple objects with varying structures and materials. Experimental results on a publicly available benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms most existing calibrated photometric stereo methods for the same number of input images, especially in the case of highly non-convex object structures. Our method also obtains good results under sparse lighting conditions.

cs.CV

Deep Learning Methods for Calibrated Photometric Stereo and Beyond

Photometric stereo recovers the surface normals of an object from multiple images with varying shading cues, i.e., modeling the relationship between surface orientation and intensity at each pixel. Photometric stereo prevails in superior per-pixel resolution and fine reconstruction details. However, it is a complicated problem because of the non-linear relationship caused by non-Lambertian surface reflectance. Recently, various deep learning methods have shown a powerful ability in the context of photometric stereo against non-Lambertian surfaces. This paper provides a comprehensive review of existing deep learning-based calibrated photometric stereo methods. We first analyze these methods from different perspectives, including input processing, supervision, and network architecture. We summarize the performance of deep learning photometric stereo models on the most widely-used benchmark data set. This demonstrates the advanced performance of deep learning-based photometric stereo methods. Finally, we give suggestions and propose future research trends based on the limitations of existing models.

cs.CV

Incorporating Lambertian Priors into Surface Normals Measurement

The goal of photometric stereo is to measure the precise surface normal of a 3D object from observations with various shading cues. However, non-Lambertian surfaces influence the measurement accuracy due to irregular shading cues. Despite deep neural networks have been employed to simulate the performance of non-Lambertian surfaces, the error in specularities, shadows, and crinkle regions is hard to be reduced. In order to address this challenge, we here propose a photometric stereo network that incorporates Lambertian priors to better measure the surface normal. In this paper, we use the initial normal under the Lambertian assumption as the prior information to refine the normal measurement, instead of solely applying the observed shading cues to deriving the surface normal. Our method utilizes the Lambertian information to reparameterize the network weights and the powerful fitting ability of deep neural networks to correct these errors caused by general reflectance properties. Our explorations include: the Lambertian priors (1) reduce the learning hypothesis space, making our method learn the mapping in the same surface normal space and improving the accuracy of learning, and (2) provides the differential features learning, improving the surfaces reconstruction of details. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed Lambertian prior photometric stereo network in accurate surface normal measurement, on the challenging benchmark dataset.

cs.CV