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Yaxuan Song

Publications and source records attributed to Yaxuan Song.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

RNA-FM: Flow-Matching Generative Model for Genome-wide RNA-Seq Prediction

Histopathology whole-slide images (WSIs) are routinely acquired in clinical practice and contain rich tissue morphology but lack direct molecular architecture and functional programs defining pathological states, whereas RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) provides genome-wide transcriptional profiles at substantial cost, thereby motivating WSI-based genome-wide transcriptomic prediction. Existing approaches for predicting gene expression from WSIs predominantly rely on deterministic regression with one-to-one mapping, limiting their ability to capture biological heterogeneity and predictive uncertainty. We propose RNA-FM, a flow-matching generative framework for genome-wide bulk RNA-seq prediction from WSIs. RNA-FM formulates transcriptomic prediction as a continuous-time conditional transport problem, learning a velocity field that maps a simple prior to the target gene expression distribution conditioned on morphologies. By integrating pathway-level structure, RNA-FM enables scalable and biologically interpretable genome-wide gene expression imputation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RNA-FM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while maintaining biological meaningfulness. Code is available at https://github.com/YXSong000/RNA-FM.

cs.CV

LUMOS: Latent Universal Medical Priors for Segmentation

General vision foundation models (VFMs) have been primarily developed on natural images, and their utility for medical image segmentation is therefore often considered to depend on costly adaptation or domain-specific fine-tuning. In this paper, we revisit this assumption from a different perspective: rather than requiring VFM segmentors to relearn visual regularities, we investigate whether the low-level visual priors necessary for anatomical delineation already lie dormant within general VFMs. We observe that frozen VFMs, despite lacking medical supervision, encode transferable visual regularities. These properties are not exclusive to natural images but are also fundamental to medical image understanding. Motivated by this observation, we propose Latent Universal Medical PriOrs for Segmentation (LUMOS), a novel framework that amplifies general VFM priors to conventional medical segmentors. LUMOS consists of two key components: (1) Pathfinder that distills visual cues from a frozen vision foundation model, and (2) Inspiror that sparks the conventional medical networks with spatial guidance from distilled visual regularities. In this way, the segmentor is relieved from learning complex visual regularities entirely from limited medical annotations and can instead focus on task-specific anatomical delineation. Across diverse medical datasets and token-based VFMs, LUMOS shows that general VFMs can serve as spatial prior generators when their frozen token spaces preserve patch-level pattern relevance. DINO provides stable matched-backbone gains, while SigLIP exposes VFM-specific sensitivity caused by its different token granularity and representation objective.

cs.CV

SCENIC: A Location-based System to Foster Cognitive Development in Children During Car Rides

Car-riding is common for children in modern life. Given the repetitive nature of daily commutes, they often feel bored and turn to electronic devices for entertainment. Meanwhile, the rich and dynamic scenery outside the car naturally attracts children's curiosity and offers valuable resources for cognitive development. Our formative study reveals that parents' support during car rides is often fleeting, as accompanying adults may struggle to consistently guide children's exploration. To address this, we propose SCENIC, an interactive system that helps children aged 6 to 11 better perceive the external environment using location-based cognitive development strategies. SCENIC builds upon experiential approaches used by parents, resulting in six strategies embedded into the system. To improve engagement during routine rides, SCENIC also incorporates dynamic point-of-interest selection and journey gallery generation. We evaluated the generated content (N=21) and conducted an in-situ user study with seven families and ten children. Results suggest that SCENIC enhances the car-riding experience and helps children better connect with their surroundings.

cs.HC

Gene-DML: Dual-Pathway Multi-Level Discrimination for Gene Expression Prediction from Histopathology Images

Accurately predicting gene expression from histopathology images offers a scalable and non-invasive approach to molecular profiling, with significant implications for precision medicine and computational pathology. However, existing methods often underutilize the cross-modal representation alignment between histopathology images and gene expression profiles across multiple representational levels, thereby limiting their prediction performance. To address this, we propose Gene-DML, a unified framework that structures latent space through Dual-pathway Multi-Level discrimination to enhance correspondence between morphological and transcriptional modalities. The multi-scale instance-level discrimination pathway aligns hierarchical histopathology representations extracted at local, neighbor, and global levels with gene expression profiles, capturing scale-aware morphological-transcriptional relationships. In parallel, the cross-level instance-group discrimination pathway enforces structural consistency between individual (image/gene) instances and modality-crossed (gene/image, respectively) groups, strengthening the alignment across modalities. By jointly modeling fine-grained and structural-level discrimination, Gene-DML is able to learn robust cross-modal representations, enhancing both predictive accuracy and generalization across diverse biological contexts. Extensive experiments on public spatial transcriptomics datasets demonstrate that Gene-DML achieves state-of-the-art performance in gene expression prediction. The code and processed datasets are available at https://github.com/YXSong000/Gene-DML.

cs.CV

Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting

Object counting models often degrade under cross-domain deployment because density composition varies across domains and is itself task-relevant. Standard feature alignment methods tend to suppress such variation by encouraging global domain invariance, which can be harmful when source and target domains contain different proportions of background, sparse foreground, and dense foreground. We propose Conditional Feature Alignment (CFA), a cross-domain counting framework that aligns representations within label-induced conditions rather than across full marginal feature distributions. Given density annotations or pseudo-density predictions, CFA constructs foreground/background or density-level conditions and aligns only features belonging to matching conditions. We formalise this idea through a conditional divergence perspective, characterising an ideal conditionally aligned state with no within-condition discrepancy while preserving condition-marginal density shift. For unsupervised domain adaptation, CFA estimates source conditions from annotations and target conditions from detached pseudo-density maps, then performs condition-wise adversarial alignment with full-image consistency regularisation. For source-domain generalisation, we instantiate the same principle with MPCount by enforcing condition-wise memory-consistency between generated source-domain views. Experiments on crowd and cell counting benchmarks show competitive or improved performance across diverse UDA and DG settings. For example, on JHU-CROWD++ FH->SN, CFA-DG reduces MAE/RMSE from MPCount's 216.3/421.4 to 90.5/169.9, showing a marked improvement on this large weather- and density-induced shift. These results suggest that condition-wise alignment is a promising design principle for domain-adaptive counting.

cs.CV

Understanding Design Fixation in Generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) provides new opportunities for creativity support, but the phenomenon of GenAI design fixation remains underexplored. While human design fixation typically constrains ideas to familiar or existing solutions, our findings reveal that GenAI similarly experience design fixation, limiting its ability to generate novel and diverse design outcomes. To advance understanding of GenAI design fixation, we propose a theoretical framework includes the definition, causes, manifestations, and impacts of GenAI design fixation for creative design. We also conducted an experimental study to investigate the characteristics of GenAI design fixation in practice. We summarize how GenAI design fixation manifests in text generation model and image generation model respectively. Furthermore, we propose methods for mitigating GenAI design fixation for future creativity support tool design. We recommend adopting the lens of GenAI design fixation for creativity-oriented HCI research, as the unique perspectives and insights it provides.

cs.HC

How Generative AI supports human in conceptual design

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) is a collection of AI technologies that can generate new information such as texts and images. With its strong capabilities, Generative AI has been actively studied in creative design processes. However, limited studies have explored the roles of humans and Generative AI in conceptual design processes, leaving a gap for human-AI collaboration investigation. To address this gap, this study uncovers the contributions of different Generative AI technologies in assisting humans in the conceptual design process. Novice designers completed two design tasks with or without the assistance of Generative AI. Results revealed that Generative AI primarily assists humans in problem definition and idea generation stages, while idea selection and evaluation remain predominantly human-led. Additionally, with Generative AI assistance, the idea selection and evaluation stages were further enhanced. Based on the findings, we discuss the role of Generative AI in human-AI collaboration and implications for enhancing future conceptual design support with Generative AI assistance.

cs.HC

MindScratch: A Visual Programming Support Tool for Classroom Learning Based on Multimodal Generative AI

Programming has become an essential component of K-12 education and serves as a pathway for developing computational thinking skills. Given the complexity of programming and the advanced skills it requires, previous research has introduced user-friendly tools to support young learners. However, our interviews with six programming educators revealed that current tools often fail to reflect classroom learning objectives, offer flexible, high-quality guidance, and foster student creativity. This highlights the need for more adaptive and reflective tools. Therefore, we introduced MindScratch, a multimodal generative AI (GAI) powered visual programming support tool. MindScratch aims to balance structured classroom activities with free programming creation, supporting students in completing creative programming projects based on teacher-set learning objectives while also providing programming scaffolding. Our user study results indicate that, compared to the baseline, MindScratch more effectively helps students achieve high-quality projects aligned with learning objectives. It also enhances students' computational thinking skills and creative thinking. Overall, we believe that GAI-driven educational tools like MindScratch offer students a focused and engaging learning experience.

cs.HC

Cell as Point: One-Stage Framework for Efficient Cell Tracking

Conventional multi-stage cell tracking approaches rely heavily on detection or segmentation in each frame as a prerequisite, requiring substantial resources for high-quality segmentation masks and increasing the overall prediction time. To address these limitations, we propose CAP, a novel end-to-end one-stage framework that reimagines cell tracking by treating Cell as Point. Unlike traditional methods, CAP eliminates the need for explicit detection or segmentation, instead jointly tracking cells for sequences in one stage by leveraging the inherent correlations among their trajectories. This simplification reduces both labeling requirements and pipeline complexity. However, directly processing the entire sequence in one stage poses challenges related to data imbalance in capturing cell division events and long sequence inference. To solve these challenges, CAP introduces two key innovations: (1) adaptive event-guided (AEG) sampling, which prioritizes cell division events to mitigate the occurrence imbalance of cell events, and (2) the rolling-as-window (RAW) inference strategy, which ensures continuous and stable tracking of newly emerging cells over extended sequences. By removing the dependency on segmentation-based preprocessing while addressing the challenges of imbalanced occurrence of cell events and long-sequence tracking, CAP demonstrates promising cell tracking performance and is 8 to 32 times more efficient than existing methods. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/YXSong000/CAP.

eess.IV

TRIZ-GPT: An LLM-augmented method for problem-solving

TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, is derived from a comprehensive analysis of patents across various domains, offering a framework and practical tools for problem-solving. Despite its potential to foster innovative solutions, the complexity and abstractness of TRIZ methodology often make its acquisition and application challenging. This often requires users to have a deep understanding of the theory, as well as substantial practical experience and knowledge across various disciplines. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to address these challenges by leveraging their extensive knowledge bases and reasoning capabilities for innovative solution generation within TRIZ-based problem-solving process. This study explores and evaluates the application of LLMs within the TRIZ-based problem-solving process. The construction of TRIZ case collections establishes a solid empirical foundation for our experiments and offers valuable resources to the TRIZ community. A specifically designed workflow, utilizing step-by-step reasoning and evaluation-validated prompt strategies, effectively transforms concrete problems into TRIZ problems and finally generates inventive solutions. Finally, we present a case study in mechanical engineering field that highlights the practical application of this LLM-augmented method. It showcases GPT-4's ability to generate solutions that closely resonate with original solutions and suggests more implementation mechanisms.

cs.HC

UI Semantic Group Detection: Grouping UI Elements with Similar Semantics in Mobile Graphical User Interface

Texts, widgets, and images on a UI page do not work separately. Instead, they are partitioned into groups to achieve certain interaction functions or visual information. Existing studies on UI elements grouping mainly focus on a specific single UI-related software engineering task, and their groups vary in appearance and function. In this case, we propose our semantic component groups that pack adjacent text and non-text elements with similar semantics. In contrast to those task-oriented grouping methods, our semantic component group can be adopted for multiple UI-related software tasks, such as retrieving UI perceptual groups, improving code structure for automatic UI-to-code generation, and generating accessibility data for screen readers. To recognize semantic component groups on a UI page, we propose a robust, deep learning-based vision detector, UISCGD, which extends the SOTA deformable-DETR by incorporating UI element color representation and a learned prior on group distribution. The model is trained on our UI screenshots dataset of 1988 mobile GUIs from more than 200 apps in both iOS and Android platforms. The evaluation shows that our UISCGD achieves 6.1\% better than the best baseline algorithm and 5.4 \% better than deformable-DETR in which it is based.

cs.SE

Multi-source-free Domain Adaptation via Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Distillation

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) alleviates the domain discrepancy among data obtained from domains without accessing the data for the awareness of data privacy. However, existing conventional SFDA methods face inherent limitations in medical contexts, where medical data are typically collected from multiple institutions using various equipment. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method, named Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Distillation (UAD) for the multi-source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (MSFDA) setting. UAD aims to perform well-calibrated knowledge distillation from (i) model level to deliver coordinated and reliable base model initialisation and (ii) instance level via model adaptation guided by high-quality pseudo-labels, thereby obtaining a high-performance target domain model. To verify its general applicability, we evaluate UAD on two image-based diagnosis benchmarks among two multi-centre datasets, where our method shows a significant performance gain compared with existing works. The code is available at https://github.com/YXSong000/UAD.

cs.CV

ChatScratch: An AI-Augmented System Toward Autonomous Visual Programming Learning for Children Aged 6-12

As Computational Thinking (CT) continues to permeate younger age groups in K-12 education, established CT platforms such as Scratch face challenges in catering to these younger learners, particularly those in the elementary school (ages 6-12). Through formative investigation with Scratch experts, we uncover three key obstacles to children's autonomous Scratch learning: artist's block in project planning, bounded creativity in asset creation, and inadequate coding guidance during implementation. To address these barriers, we introduce ChatScratch, an AI-augmented system to facilitate autonomous programming learning for young children. ChatScratch employs structured interactive storyboards and visual cues to overcome artist's block, integrates digital drawing and advanced image generation technologies to elevate creativity, and leverages Scratch-specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) for professional coding guidance. Our study shows that, compared to Scratch, ChatScratch efficiently fosters autonomous programming learning, and contributes to the creation of high-quality, personally meaningful Scratch projects for children.

cs.HC

EGFE: End-to-end Grouping of Fragmented Elements in UI Designs with Multimodal Learning

When translating UI design prototypes to code in industry, automatically generating code from design prototypes can expedite the development of applications and GUI iterations. However, in design prototypes without strict design specifications, UI components may be composed of fragmented elements. Grouping these fragmented elements can greatly improve the readability and maintainability of the generated code. Current methods employ a two-stage strategy that introduces hand-crafted rules to group fragmented elements. Unfortunately, the performance of these methods is not satisfying due to visually overlapped and tiny UI elements. In this study, we propose EGFE, a novel method for automatically End-to-end Grouping Fragmented Elements via UI sequence prediction. To facilitate the UI understanding, we innovatively construct a Transformer encoder to model the relationship between the UI elements with multi-modal representation learning. The evaluation on a dataset of 4606 UI prototypes collected from professional UI designers shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in the precision (by 29.75\%), recall (by 31.07\%), and F1-score (by 30.39\%) at edit distance threshold of 4. In addition, we conduct an empirical study to assess the improvement of the generated front-end code. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a real software engineering application. Our end-to-end fragmented elements grouping method creates opportunities for improving UI-related software engineering tasks.

cs.SE