arXiv subjects

Yinghuan Shi

Publications and source records attributed to Yinghuan Shi.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

On the Implicit Adversariality of Catastrophic Forgetting in Deep Continual Learning

Continual learning seeks the human-like ability to accumulate new skills in machine intelligence. Its central challenge is catastrophic forgetting, whose underlying cause has not been fully understood for deep networks. In this paper, we demystify catastrophic forgetting by revealing that the new-task training is implicitly an adversarial attack against the old-task knowledge. Specifically, the new-task gradients automatically and accurately align with the sharp directions of the old-task loss landscape, rapidly increasing the old-task loss. This adversarial alignment is intriguingly counter-intuitive because the sharp directions are too sparsely distributed to align with by chance. To understand it, we theoretically show that it arises from training's low-rank bias, which, through forward and backward propagation, confines the two directions into the same low-dimensional subspace, facilitating alignment. Gradient projection (GP) methods, a representative family of forgetting-mitigating methods, reduce adversarial alignment caused by forward propagation, but cannot address the alignment due to backward propagation. We propose backGP to address it, which reduces forgetting by 10.8% and improves accuracy by 12.7% on average over GP methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

An Adaptor for Triggering Semi-Supervised Learning to Out-of-Box Serve Deep Image Clustering

Recently, some works integrate SSL techniques into deep clustering frameworks to enhance image clustering performance. However, they all need pretraining, clustering learning, or a trained clustering model as prerequisites, limiting the flexible and out-of-box application of SSL learners in the image clustering task. This work introduces ASD, an adaptor that enables the cold-start of SSL learners for deep image clustering without any prerequisites. Specifically, we first randomly sample pseudo-labeled data from all unlabeled data, and set an instance-level classifier to learn them with semantically aligned instance-level labels. With the ability of instance-level classification, we track the class transitions of predictions on unlabeled data to extract high-level similarities of instance-level classes, which can be utilized to assign cluster-level labels to pseudo-labeled data. Finally, we use the pseudo-labeled data with assigned cluster-level labels to trigger a general SSL learner trained on the unlabeled data for image clustering. We show the superior performance of ASD across various benchmarks against the latest deep image clustering approaches and very slight accuracy gaps compared to SSL methods using ground-truth, e.g., only 1.33% on CIFAR-10. Moreover, ASD can also further boost the performance of existing SSL-embedded deep image clustering methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Diversity-enhanced Collaborative Mamba for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Acquiring high-quality annotated data for medical image segmentation is tedious and costly. Semi-supervised segmentation techniques alleviate this burden by leveraging unlabeled data to generate pseudo labels. Recently, advanced state space models, represented by Mamba, have shown efficient handling of long-range dependencies. This drives us to explore their potential in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel Diversity-enhanced Collaborative Mamba framework (namely DCMamba) for semi-supervised medical image segmentation, which explores and utilizes the diversity from data, network, and feature perspectives. Firstly, from the data perspective, we develop patch-level weak-strong mixing augmentation with Mamba's scanning modeling characteristics. Moreover, from the network perspective, we introduce a diverse-scan collaboration module, which could benefit from the prediction discrepancies arising from different scanning directions. Furthermore, from the feature perspective, we adopt an uncertainty-weighted contrastive learning mechanism to enhance the diversity of feature representation. Experiments demonstrate that our DCMamba significantly outperforms other semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods, e.g., yielding the latest SSM-based method by 6.69% on the Synapse dataset with 20% labeled data.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Towards Perfection: Building Inter-component Mutual Correction for Retinex-based Low-light Image Enhancement

In low-light image enhancement, Retinex-based deep learning methods have garnered significant attention due to their exceptional interpretability. These methods decompose images into mutually independent illumination and reflectance components, allows each component to be enhanced separately. In fact, achieving perfect decomposition of illumination and reflectance components proves to be quite challenging, with some residuals still existing after decomposition. In this paper, we formally name these residuals as inter-component residuals (ICR), which has been largely underestimated by previous methods. In our investigation, ICR not only affects the accuracy of the decomposition but also causes enhanced components to deviate from the ideal outcome, ultimately reducing the final synthesized image quality. To address this issue, we propose a novel Inter-correction Retinex model (IRetinex) to alleviate ICR during the decomposition and enhancement stage. In the decomposition stage, we leverage inter-component residual reduction module to reduce the feature similarity between illumination and reflectance components. In the enhancement stage, we utilize the feature similarity between the two components to detect and mitigate the impact of ICR within each enhancement unit. Extensive experiments on three low-light benchmark datasets demonstrated that by reducing ICR, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively.

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arXiv2025

Correspondence as Video: Test-Time Adaption on SAM2 for Reference Segmentation in the Wild

Large vision models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibit significant limitations when applied to downstream tasks in the wild. Consequently, reference segmentation, which leverages reference images and their corresponding masks to impart novel knowledge to the model, emerges as a promising new direction for adapting vision models. However, existing reference segmentation approaches predominantly rely on meta-learning, which still necessitates an extensive meta-training process and brings massive data and computational cost. In this study, we propose a novel approach by representing the inherent correspondence between reference-target image pairs as a pseudo video. This perspective allows the latest version of SAM, known as SAM2, which is equipped with interactive video object segmentation (iVOS) capabilities, to be adapted to downstream tasks in a lightweight manner. We term this approach Correspondence As Video for SAM (CAV-SAM). CAV-SAM comprises two key modules: the Diffusion-Based Semantic Transition (DBST) module employs a diffusion model to construct a semantic transformation sequence, while the Test-Time Geometric Alignment (TTGA) module aligns the geometric changes within this sequence through test-time fine-tuning. We evaluated CAVSAM on widely-used datasets, achieving segmentation performance improvements exceeding 5% over SOTA methods. Implementation is provided in the supplementary materials.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Divide-and-Conquer for Enhancing Unlabeled Learning, Stability, and Plasticity in Semi-supervised Continual Learning

Semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) seeks to leverage both labeled and unlabeled data in a sequential learning setup, aiming to reduce annotation costs while managing continual data arrival. SSCL introduces complex challenges, including ensuring effective unlabeled learning (UL), while balancing memory stability (MS) and learning plasticity (LP). Previous SSCL efforts have typically focused on isolated aspects of the three, while this work presents USP, a divide-and-conquer framework designed to synergistically enhance these three aspects: (1) Feature Space Reservation (FSR) strategy for LP, which constructs reserved feature locations for future classes by shaping old classes into an equiangular tight frame; (2) Divide-and-Conquer Pseudo-labeling (DCP) approach for UL, which assigns reliable pseudo-labels across both high- and low-confidence unlabeled data; and (3) Class-mean-anchored Unlabeled Distillation (CUD) for MS, which reuses DCP's outputs to anchor unlabeled data to stable class means for distillation to prevent forgetting. Comprehensive evaluations show USP outperforms prior SSCL methods, with gains up to 5.94% in the last accuracy, validating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUyued/USP4SSCL.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Unleashing the Power of Intermediate Domains for Mixed Domain Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Both limited annotation and domain shift are prevalent challenges in medical image segmentation. Traditional semi-supervised segmentation and unsupervised domain adaptation methods address one of these issues separately. However, the coexistence of limited annotation and domain shift is quite common, which motivates us to introduce a novel and challenging scenario: Mixed Domain Semi-supervised medical image Segmentation (MiDSS), where limited labeled data from a single domain and a large amount of unlabeled data from multiple domains. To tackle this issue, we propose the UST-RUN framework, which fully leverages intermediate domain information to facilitate knowledge transfer. We employ Unified Copy-paste (UCP) to construct intermediate domains, and propose a Symmetric GuiDance training strategy (SymGD) to supervise unlabeled data by merging pseudo-labels from intermediate samples. Subsequently, we introduce a Training Process aware Random Amplitude MixUp (TP-RAM) to progressively incorporate style-transition components into intermediate samples. To generate more diverse intermediate samples, we further select reliable samples with high-quality pseudo-labels, which are then mixed with other unlabeled data. Additionally, we generate sophisticated intermediate samples with high-quality pseudo-labels for unreliable samples, ensuring effective knowledge transfer for them. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the superiority of UST-RUN. Notably, UST-RUN achieves a 12.94% improvement in Dice score on the Prostate dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/MQinghe/UST-RUN

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Background Matters: A Cross-view Bidirectional Modeling Framework for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation (SSMIS) leverages unlabeled data to reduce reliance on manually annotated images. However, current SOTA approaches predominantly focus on foreground-oriented modeling (i.e., segmenting only the foreground region) and have largely overlooked the potential benefits of explicitly modeling the background region. Our study theoretically and empirically demonstrates that highly certain predictions in background modeling enhance the confidence of corresponding foreground modeling. Building on this insight, we propose the Cross-view Bidirectional Modeling (CVBM) framework, which introduces a novel perspective by incorporating background modeling to improve foreground modeling performance. Within CVBM, background modeling serves as an auxiliary perspective, providing complementary supervisory signals to enhance the confidence of the foreground model. Additionally, CVBM introduces an innovative bidirectional consistency mechanism, which ensures mutual alignment between foreground predictions and background-guided predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves SOTA performance on the LA, Pancreas, ACDC, and HRF datasets. Notably, on the Pancreas dataset, CVBM outperforms fully supervised methods (i.e., DSC: 84.57% vs. 83.89%) while utilizing only 20% of the labeled data. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/caoluyang0830/CVBM.git.

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arXiv2025

Mamba-Sea: A Mamba-based Framework with Global-to-Local Sequence Augmentation for Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation

To segment medical images with distribution shifts, domain generalization (DG) has emerged as a promising setting to train models on source domains that can generalize to unseen target domains. Existing DG methods are mainly based on CNN or ViT architectures. Recently, advanced state space models, represented by Mamba, have shown promising results in various supervised medical image segmentation. The success of Mamba is primarily owing to its ability to capture long-range dependencies while keeping linear complexity with input sequence length, making it a promising alternative to CNNs and ViTs. Inspired by the success, in the paper, we explore the potential of the Mamba architecture to address distribution shifts in DG for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we propose a novel Mamba-based framework, Mamba-Sea, incorporating global-to-local sequence augmentation to improve the model's generalizability under domain shift issues. Our Mamba-Sea introduces a global augmentation mechanism designed to simulate potential variations in appearance across different sites, aiming to suppress the model's learning of domain-specific information. At the local level, we propose a sequence-wise augmentation along input sequences, which perturbs the style of tokens within random continuous sub-sequences by modeling and resampling style statistics associated with domain shifts. To our best knowledge, Mamba-Sea is the first work to explore the generalization of Mamba for medical image segmentation, providing an advanced and promising Mamba-based architecture with strong robustness to domain shifts. Remarkably, our proposed method is the first to surpass a Dice coefficient of 90% on the Prostate dataset, which exceeds previous SOTA of 88.61%. The code is available at https://github.com/orange-czh/Mamba-Sea.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Balancing Multi-Target Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Collaborative Generalist and Specialists

Despite the promising performance achieved by current semi-supervised models in segmenting individual medical targets, many of these models suffer a notable decrease in performance when tasked with the simultaneous segmentation of multiple targets. A vital factor could be attributed to the imbalanced scales among different targets: during simultaneously segmenting multiple targets, large targets dominate the loss, leading to small targets being misclassified as larger ones. To this end, we propose a novel method, which consists of a Collaborative Generalist and several Specialists, termed CGS. It is centered around the idea of employing a specialist for each target class, thus avoiding the dominance of larger targets. The generalist performs conventional multi-target segmentation, while each specialist is dedicated to distinguishing a specific target class from the remaining target classes and the background. Based on a theoretical insight, we demonstrate that CGS can achieve a more balanced training. Moreover, we develop cross-consistency losses to foster collaborative learning between the generalist and the specialists. Lastly, regarding their intrinsic relation that the target class of any specialized head should belong to the remaining classes of the other heads, we introduce an inter-head error detection module to further enhance the quality of pseudo-labels. Experimental results on three popular benchmarks showcase its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Taste More, Taste Better: Diverse Data and Strong Model Boost Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting

Semi-supervised crowd counting is crucial for addressing the high annotation costs of densely populated scenes. Although several methods based on pseudo-labeling have been proposed, it remains challenging to effectively and accurately utilize unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Taste More Taste Better (TMTB), which emphasizes both data and model aspects. Firstly, we explore a data augmentation technique well-suited for the crowd counting task. By inpainting the background regions, this technique can effectively enhance data diversity while preserving the fidelity of the entire scenes. Secondly, we introduce the Visual State Space Model as backbone to capture the global context information from crowd scenes, which is crucial for extremely crowded, low-light, and adverse weather scenarios. In addition to the traditional regression head for exact prediction, we employ an Anti-Noise classification head to provide less exact but more accurate supervision, since the regression head is sensitive to noise in manual annotations. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Code is publicly available on https://github.com/syhien/taste_more_taste_better.

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arXiv2025

Balanced Direction from Multifarious Choices: Arithmetic Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization

Domain generalization is proposed to address distribution shift, arising from statistical disparities between training source and unseen target domains. The widely used first-order meta-learning algorithms demonstrate strong performance for domain generalization by leveraging the gradient matching theory, which aims to establish balanced parameters across source domains to reduce overfitting to any particular domain. However, our analysis reveals that there are actually numerous directions to achieve gradient matching, with current methods representing just one possible path. These methods actually overlook another critical factor that the balanced parameters should be close to the centroid of optimal parameters of each source domain. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective arithmetic meta-learning with arithmetic-weighted gradients. This approach, while adhering to the principles of gradient matching, promotes a more precise balance by estimating the centroid between domain-specific optimal parameters. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our strategy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Steady Progress Beats Stagnation: Mutual Aid of Foundation and Conventional Models in Mixed Domain Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Large pretrained visual foundation models exhibit impressive general capabilities. However, the extensive prior knowledge inherent in these models can sometimes be a double-edged sword when adapting them to downstream tasks in specific domains. In the context of semi-supervised medical image segmentation with domain shift, foundation models like MedSAM tend to make overconfident predictions, some of which are incorrect. The error accumulation hinders the effective utilization of unlabeled data and limits further improvements. In this paper, we introduce a Synergistic training framework for Foundation and Conventional models (SynFoC) to address the issue. We observe that a conventional model trained from scratch has the ability to correct the high-confidence mispredictions of the foundation model, while the foundation model can supervise it with high-quality pseudo-labels in the early training stages. Furthermore, to enhance the collaborative training effectiveness of both models and promote reliable convergence towards optimization, the consensus-divergence consistency regularization is proposed. We demonstrate the superiority of our method across four public multi-domain datasets. In particular, our method improves the Dice score by 10.31\% on the Prostate dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/MQinghe/SynFoC .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

WeakMedSAM: Weakly-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via SAM with Sub-Class Exploration and Prompt Affinity Mining

We have witnessed remarkable progress in foundation models in vision tasks. Currently, several recent works have utilized the segmenting anything model (SAM) to boost the segmentation performance in medical images, where most of them focus on training an adaptor for fine-tuning a large amount of pixel-wise annotated medical images following a fully supervised manner. In this paper, to reduce the labeling cost, we investigate a novel weakly-supervised SAM-based segmentation model, namely WeakMedSAM. Specifically, our proposed WeakMedSAM contains two modules: 1) to mitigate severe co-occurrence in medical images, a sub-class exploration module is introduced to learn accurate feature representations. 2) to improve the quality of the class activation maps, our prompt affinity mining module utilizes the prompt capability of SAM to obtain an affinity map for random-walk refinement. Our method can be applied to any SAM-like backbone, and we conduct experiments with SAMUS and EfficientSAM. The experimental results on three popularly-used benchmark datasets, i.e., BraTS 2019, AbdomenCT-1K, and MSD Cardiac dataset, show the promising results of our proposed WeakMedSAM. Our code is available at https://github.com/wanghr64/WeakMedSAM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Stitching, Fine-tuning, Re-training: A SAM-enabled Framework for Semi-supervised 3D Medical Image Segmentation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) fine-tuning has shown remarkable performance in medical image segmentation in a fully supervised manner, but requires precise annotations. To reduce the annotation cost and maintain satisfactory performance, in this work, we leverage the capabilities of SAM for establishing semi-supervised medical image segmentation models. Rethinking the requirements of effectiveness, efficiency, and compatibility, we propose a three-stage framework, i.e., Stitching, Fine-tuning, and Re-training (SFR). The current fine-tuning approaches mostly involve 2D slice-wise fine-tuning that disregards the contextual information between adjacent slices. Our stitching strategy mitigates the mismatch between natural and 3D medical images. The stitched images are then used for fine-tuning SAM, providing robust initialization of pseudo-labels. Afterwards, we train a 3D semi-supervised segmentation model while maintaining the same parameter size as the conventional segmenter such as V-Net. Our SFR framework is plug-and-play, and easily compatible with various popular semi-supervised methods. We also develop an extended framework SFR$^+$ with selective fine-tuning and re-training through confidence estimation. Extensive experiments validate that our SFR and SFR$^+$ achieve significant improvements in both moderate annotation and scarce annotation across five datasets. In particular, SFR framework improves the Dice score of Mean Teacher from 29.68% to 74.40% with only one labeled data of LA dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

START: A Generalized State Space Model with Saliency-Driven Token-Aware Transformation

Domain Generalization (DG) aims to enable models to generalize to unseen target domains by learning from multiple source domains. Existing DG methods primarily rely on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which inherently learn texture biases due to their limited receptive fields, making them prone to overfitting source domains. While some works have introduced transformer-based methods (ViTs) for DG to leverage the global receptive field, these methods incur high computational costs due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Recently, advanced state space models (SSMs), represented by Mamba, have shown promising results in supervised learning tasks by achieving linear complexity in sequence length during training and fast RNN-like computation during inference. Inspired by this, we investigate the generalization ability of the Mamba model under domain shifts and find that input-dependent matrices within SSMs could accumulate and amplify domain-specific features, thus hindering model generalization. To address this issue, we propose a novel SSM-based architecture with saliency-based token-aware transformation (namely START), which achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances and offers a competitive alternative to CNNs and ViTs. Our START can selectively perturb and suppress domain-specific features in salient tokens within the input-dependent matrices of SSMs, thus effectively reducing the discrepancy between different domains. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that START outperforms existing SOTA DG methods with efficient linear complexity. Our code is available at https://github.com/lingeringlight/START.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Text and Image Are Mutually Beneficial: Enhancing Training-Free Few-Shot Classification with CLIP

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has been widely used in vision tasks. Notably, CLIP has demonstrated promising performance in few-shot learning (FSL). However, existing CLIP-based methods in training-free FSL (i.e., without the requirement of additional training) mainly learn different modalities independently, leading to two essential issues: 1) severe anomalous match in image modality; 2) varying quality of generated text prompts. To address these issues, we build a mutual guidance mechanism, that introduces an Image-Guided-Text (IGT) component to rectify varying quality of text prompts through image representations, and a Text-Guided-Image (TGI) component to mitigate the anomalous match of image modality through text representations. By integrating IGT and TGI, we adopt a perspective of Text-Image Mutual guidance Optimization, proposing TIMO. Extensive experiments show that TIMO significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) training-free method. Additionally, by exploring the extent of mutual guidance, we propose an enhanced variant, TIMO-S, which even surpasses the best training-required methods by 0.33% with approximately 100 times less time cost. Our code is available at https://github.com/lyymuwu/TIMO.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SETA: Semantic-Aware Token Augmentation for Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) aims to enhance the model robustness against domain shifts without accessing target domains. A prevalent category of methods for DG is data augmentation, which focuses on generating virtual samples to simulate domain shifts. However, existing augmentation techniques in DG are mainly tailored for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), with limited exploration in token-based architectures, i.e., vision transformer (ViT) and multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) models. In this paper, we study the impact of prior CNN-based augmentation methods on token-based models, revealing their performance is suboptimal due to the lack of incentivizing the model to learn holistic shape information. To tackle the issue, we propose the SEmantic-aware Token Augmentation (SETA) method. SETA transforms token features by perturbing local edge cues while preserving global shape features, thereby enhancing the model learning of shape information. To further enhance the generalization ability of the model, we introduce two stylized variants of our method combined with two state-of-the-art style augmentation methods in DG. We provide a theoretical insight into our method, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing the generalization risk bound. Comprehensive experiments on five benchmarks prove that our method achieves SOTA performances across various ViT and MLP architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/lingeringlight/SETA.

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