SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Yixuan Yuan

Publications and source records attributed to Yixuan Yuan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Medical Reasoning in the Era of LLMs: A Systematic Review of Enhancement Techniques and Applications

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in medicine has enabled impressive capabilities, yet a critical gap remains in their ability to perform systematic, transparent, and verifiable reasoning, a cornerstone of clinical practice. This has catalyzed a shift from single-step answer generation to the development of LLMs explicitly designed for medical reasoning. This paper provides the first systematic review of this emerging field. We propose a taxonomy of reasoning enhancement techniques, categorized into training-time strategies (e.g., supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning) and test-time mechanisms (e.g., prompt engineering, multi-agent systems). We analyze how these techniques are applied across different data modalities (text, image, code) and in key clinical applications such as diagnosis, education, and treatment planning. Furthermore, we survey the evolution of evaluation benchmarks from simple accuracy metrics to sophisticated assessments of reasoning quality and visual interpretability. Based on an analysis of 60 seminal studies from 2022-2025, we conclude by identifying critical challenges, including the faithfulness-plausibility gap and the need for native multimodal reasoning, and outlining future directions toward building efficient, robust, and sociotechnically responsible medical AI.

cs.CL

Task-Relevant Feature-Dynamics Fidelity Enables Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer for Robotic Ultrasound Scanning

Robotic ultrasound policies operating directly on B-mode images require extensive interaction data, whereas real-robot data collection is costly and safety-constrained. Simulation provides a scalable alternative, but zero-shot transfer depends not only on single-frame realism but also on whether simulated observations reproduce task-relevant feature changes induced by probe motion. We term this cross-domain consistency task-relevant feature-dynamics fidelity (TR-FDF). Under local regularity assumptions, our contraction analysis shows that greater sensitivity of TR-FDF mismatch to probe motion reduces the effective closed-loop contraction margin, whereas motion-independent errors primarily enlarge the residual error bound. Guided by this analysis, we develop a TR-FDF-oriented ultrasound simulator that combines a shared structural intermediate domain, trajectory-level fixed noise, and few-step conditional flow generation. In phantom experiments, a policy trained exclusively in simulation succeeded in 390 of 400 zero-shot deployments across four target planes. The simulator achieved an FID of 29.66 and generated observations at 67.1 Hz. Controlled interventions, ablations, and baseline comparisons showed that TR-FDF sensitivity complements single-frame realism in predicting zero-shot transfer performance.

cs.RO

Volumetric Radiology AI in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models

Advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are extending radiological artificial intelligence (AI) beyond task-specific image analysis toward multimodal understanding and reasoning. Volumetric radiology, however, presents a fundamental representational mismatch: clinical interpretation often requires full-volume spatial context and acquisition-dependent quantitative information, whereas current MLLMs are commonly conditioned on selected two-dimensional (2D) images, compressed visual representations, or report-derived text. Reliable volumetric radiology AI therefore requires representations that preserve task-relevant three-dimensional (3D) information and systems that can access, verify, and integrate this information across clinical workflows. In this Review, we examine more than 200 publications through July 2026. We organize the literature around volumetric representation and multimodal understanding at the model level, agentic orchestration at the system level, and their links to clinical applications and evaluation. We review volumetric foundation models, language alignment and compression strategies, and agentic systems that extend MLLMs through planning, tools, memory, and workflow interaction. We distinguish settings in which selected 2D views or report-mediated reasoning may suffice from those that warrant native volumetric modeling. We also introduce a Claim-Design-Validation framework to assess whether technical, workflow, and clinical claims are matched by appropriate design and validation. Across the literature, native volumetric modeling and agentic capabilities depend on the spatial, quantitative, contextual, and workflow requirements of the intended task. Clinical credibility requires faithful volumetric representation, traceable system behavior, claim-aligned validation, and clearly defined human oversight in realistic workflows.

cs.AI

Insurance as AI Risk Infrastructure: A Generative-Agent Simulation of AI Adoption

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has demonstrated immense potential to enhance societal well-being and operational efficiency. However, the inherent unreliability and uncertain operational consequences of modern AI systems, typified by large language models (LLMs), have created a significant barrier to enterprise adoption. Many enterprises remain hesitant to integrate these tools deeply into their workflows due to concerns about unpredictable losses and liability exposure. While existing technical safeguards primarily seek to reduce the likelihood or severity of AI-enabled workflow failures, they do not by themselves provide ex post financial protection when residual pecuniary tail losses materialize. In this paper, we introduce a socio-economic framework that complements these safeguards by transferring and absorbing the residual financial consequences of AI adoption through insurance. To evaluate this framework, we develop an LLM-driven agent-based social simulation (LABSS) system. We assess the behavioral validity of the simulation using established economic and sociological theories. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed insurance framework reduces firm-level financial exposure, thereby accelerating the aggregate adoption of AI tools and improving firm solvency and aggregate capital.

cs.MA

WorldMirror: Universal 3D World Reconstruction with Any-Prior Prompting

We present WorldMirror, a unified feed-forward model for comprehensive 3D geometric prediction tasks. Unlike existing methods constrained to image-only inputs or customized for a specific task, our framework flexibly integrates diverse geometric priors, including camera poses, intrinsics, and depth maps, while simultaneously generating multiple 3D representations: dense point clouds, multi-view depth maps, camera parameters, surface normals, and 3D Gaussians. Remarkably, prior injection yields universal gains across all tasks, suggesting that input flexibility and multi-task prediction are mutually reinforcing. WorldMirror achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks from camera, point map, depth, and surface normal estimation to novel view synthesis, while maintaining the efficiency of feed-forward inference.

cs.CV

PanDent: Toward Comprehensive Tooth-Level Structure-Language Consistency in Dental Radiology

Accurate evaluation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in dental panoramic radiography (orthopantomogram, OPG) is limited by the lack of fine-grained, clinically reliable benchmarks that reflect expert interpretation. This work introduces PanDent, a large-scale, clinically grounded OPG benchmark built upon fine-grained, expert-validated tooth-level annotations. The dataset comprises 9,524 high-quality OPGs, each associated with comprehensive structured annotations produced by experienced dentists and further validated by an oral and maxillofacial radiologist, providing clinically reliable supervision for tooth-level diagnosis and reasoning. Clinically consistent radiology reports are constructed from expert-validated findings using clinician-defined reporting logic, establishing explicit correspondence between structured clinical evidence and free-text descriptions. This design enables evaluation of whether MLLMs generate reports that are not only linguistically coherent but also clinically consistent with expert-validated tooth-level findings. Experiments are conducted on diverse MLLMs, including state-of-the-art (SOTA) proprietary models, general-domain open-source models, and medical-specific models. Results show that current MLLMs can generate fluent reports, yet fail to produce clinically consistent descriptions, exhibiting substantial errors in fine-grained localization and tooth-level diagnosis. Fine-tuning on PanDent significantly improves structure-language consistency, substantially enhancing visual localization accuracy and diagnostic correctness, and bringing model outputs closer to expert dental interpretation. These results establish PanDent as a rigorous benchmark for evaluating tooth-level clinical reasoning in MLLMs and a valuable resource for clinically grounded dental AI.

cs.CV

UniMedSeg: Unified In-Context Learning for Multi-Paradigm 2D/3D Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation foundation models are expected to generalize across diverse clinical scenarios, yet existing universal methods remain fragmented by prompt paradigms and spatial dimensions. Visual in-context learning, interactive segmentation, and language-guided segmentation are typically handled by paradigm-specific models, while 2D and 3D images are also modeled separately. Such isolation prevents heterogeneous annotations and data from being jointly absorbed by a single scalable model and limits cross-paradigm knowledge transfer. To address this bottleneck, we propose UniMedSeg, a Transformer-centric universal segmentation framework that maps visual examples, geometric interactions, language instructions, and 2D/3D images into a shared sequence space, enabling heterogeneous medical supervision to be jointly learned through a unified in-context interface without prompt- or dimension-specific branches. To overcome the long-sequence memory bottleneck caused by visual contexts, we introduce Decoupled Split Attention, which reduces attention complexity to linear while preserving hardware-friendly computation and focused context-target interaction. Extensively trained and evaluated on a large corpus curated from 27 public datasets, UniMedSeg achieves state-of-the-art performance across visual in-context, interactive, and language-guided segmentation without task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrating strong generalization on diverse held-out tasks. The code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/Lii1228/UniMedSeg

cs.CV

Towards Autonomous and Auditable Medical Imaging Model Development

Large language model (LLM) agents are beginning to automate machine learning engineering (MLE) by coupling planning, code execution, debugging, and empirical feedback. Translating this capability to medical imaging remains difficult because each task imposes modality-specific experimentation and strict requirements for validation protocols and prediction artifacts. Here we introduce AMID, an autonomous multi-agent framework for medical imaging model development. AMID first proposes Data-Conditioned Method Planning, which refines coarse task-level search spaces into executable, parallelizable method lanes grounded in task-specific data analysis and runnable medical-imaging resources. It then develops Verification-Guided Two-Stage Optimization, moving from broad early exploration of diverse method lanes to selective exploitation of promising candidates while enforcing strict verification of validation protocols, metric computation, and prediction artifacts throughout the optimization. Across 20 medical imaging challenge tasks spanning diverse modalities and prediction types, AMID outperformed evaluated general-purpose MLE systems and, on several tasks, approached or matched strong human-designed challenge solutions. These results suggest that AMID can turn task-specific medical imaging model development from bespoke manual engineering into an agentic workflow for producing high-performing and auditable model artifacts across heterogeneous tasks.

cs.CV

UniField: A Unified Field-Aware MRI Enhancement Framework

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) field-strength enhancement holds immense value for both clinical diagnostics and advanced research. However, existing methods typically focus on isolated enhancement tasks, such as specific 64mT-to-3T or 3T-to-7T transitions using limited subject cohorts, thereby failing to exploit the shared degradation patterns inherent across different field strengths and severely restricting model generalization. To address this challenge, we propose \methodname, a unified framework integrating multiple modalities and enhancement tasks to mutually promote representation learning by exploiting these shared degradation characteristics. Specifically, our main contributions are threefold. Firstly, to overcome MRI data scarcity and capture continuous anatomical structures, \methodname departs from conventional methods that treat 3D MRI volumes as independent 2D slices. Instead, we directly exploit comprehensive 3D volumetric information by leveraging pre-trained 3D foundation models, thereby embedding generalized and robust structural representations to significantly boost enhancement performance. In addition, to mitigate the spectral bias of mainstream flow-matching models that often over-smooth high-frequency details, we explicitly incorporate the physical mechanisms of magnetic fields to introduce a Field-Aware Spectral Rectification Mechanism (FASRM), tailoring customized spectral corrections to distinct field strengths. Finally, to resolve the fundamental data bottleneck, we organize and publicly release a comprehensive paired multi-field MRI dataset, which is an order of magnitude larger than existing datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's superiority over state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an average improvement of approximately 1.81 dB in PSNR and 9.47% in SSIM. Codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/linyiyang98/UniField.

cs.CV

MedPruner: Training-Free Hierarchical Token Pruning for Efficient 3D Medical Image Understanding in Vision-Language Models

While specialized Medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in interpreting 2D and 3D medical modalities, their deployment for 3D volumetric data remains constrained by significant computational inefficiencies. Current architectures typically suffer from massive anatomical redundancy due to the direct concatenation of consecutive 2D slices and lack the flexibility to handle heterogeneous information densities across different slices using fixed pruning ratios. To address these challenges, we propose MedPruner, a training-free and model-agnostic hierarchical token pruning framework specifically designed for efficient 3D medical image understanding. MedPruner introduces a two-stage mechanism: an Inter-slice Anchor-based Filtering module to eliminate slice-level temporal redundancy, followed by a Dynamic Information Nucleus Selection strategy that achieves adaptive token-level compression by quantifying cumulative attention weights. Extensive experiments on three 3D medical benchmarks and across three diverse medical VLMs reveal massive token redundancy in existing architectures. Notably, MedPruner enables models such as MedGemma-1.5 to maintain or even exceed their original performance while retaining fewer than 5\% of visual tokens, thereby reducing visual-token overhead and validating the necessity of dynamic token selection for practical clinical deployment. Our code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/MedPruner.

cs.CV

SurgVista: Long-Horizon Surgical World Modeling with Plausible Instrument-Tissue Dynamics

Scaling robot policy learning for autonomous surgery is challenging, as expert demonstrations are expensive and in vivo exploration poses substantial safety risks. Surgical world models address this by generating realistic, action-conditioned future frames from an initial observation, but existing methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: spatial interaction incoherence, where visible instrument contact fails to induce spatially consistent tissue deformation, and temporal fidelity collapse, where prediction errors compound across autoregressive rollouts and progressively corrupt visual quality. We present SurgVista, a surgical world model that mitigates both failures through two training recipes. Deformation Consistency Regularization extracts scene-point trajectories from training videos and enforces cross-frame coherence through latent contrastive learning, strengthening physically consistent instrument-tissue dynamics. Drift Adaptation Training mitigates long-horizon drift by perturbing conditioning frames with online prediction residuals and photometric augmentations calibrated to long-horizon drift statistics, sustaining visual fidelity over extended rollouts. To enable rigorous evaluation, we further introduce SurgWorld-Bench, featuring diverse procedure types, long-range rollouts, and decoupled metrics for instrument-motion accuracy and tissue-response fidelity. Extensive experiments show that SurgVista consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across visual quality, temporal consistency, and interaction fidelity, with gains widening as the prediction horizon grows.

cs.CV

NeuroClaw Technical Report

Agentic artificial intelligence systems promise to accelerate scientific workflows, but neuroimaging poses unique challenges: heterogeneous modalities (sMRI, fMRI, dMRI, EEG), long multi-stage pipelines, and persistent reproducibility risks. To address this gap, we present NeuroClaw, a domain-specialized multi-agent research assistant for executable and reproducible neuroimaging research. NeuroClaw operates directly on raw neuroimaging data across formats and modalities, grounding decisions in dataset semantics and BIDS metadata so users need not prepare curated inputs or bespoke model code. The platform combines harness engineering with end-to-end environment management, including pinned Python environments, Docker support, automated installers for common neuroimaging tools, and GPU configuration. In practice, this layer emphasizes checkpointing, post-execution verification, structured audit traces, and controlled runtime setup, making toolchains more transparent while improving reproducibility and auditability. A three-tier skill/agent hierarchy separates user-facing interaction, high-level orchestration, and low-level tool skills to decompose complex workflows into safe, reusable units. Alongside the NeuroClaw framework, we introduce NeuroBench, a system-level benchmark for executability, artifact validity, and reproducibility readiness. Across multiple multimodal LLMs, NeuroClaw-enabled runs yield consistent and substantial score improvements compared with direct agent invocation. Project homepage: https://cuhk-aim-group.github.io/NeuroClaw/index.html

cs.CV

VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents

In recent years, image editing models have made significant progress, enabling users to manipulate visual content in a flexible and interactive manner through natural language instructions. However, an important yet underexplored research direction remains dense visual document image editing, which involves modifying textual content within images while faithfully preserving the original text style and background context. Existing methods primarily focus on English scenarios and images with relatively sparse text, and thus cannot adequately address dense, structurally complex documents or non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. To bridge this gap, we propose VDE Bench (Visual Doc Edit Bench), a rigorously human annotated and evaluated benchmark specifically designed to assess the performance of image editing models on bilingual Chinese-English and complex visual document editing tasks. The benchmark comprises a high quality dataset of 942 instruction based image editing samples, whose seed images encompass dense Chinese and English text documents including academic papers, posters, presentation slides, examination materials, and newspapers. Furthermore, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that systematically quantifies editing performance at the OCR parsing level, thereby enabling fine grained assessment of text modification accuracy. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of representative image editing models. Human verification demonstrates a high degree of consistency between human judgments and automated evaluation metrics. VDE Bench constitutes the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the performance of image editing models on bilingual dense text visual documents.

cs.CV

Towards a Virtual Neuroscientist: Autonomous Neuroimaging Analysis via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Transforming neuroimaging data into clinically actionable biomarkers is a knowledge-intensive and labor-intensive process. Standardized workflows such as fMRIPrep have improved robustness and efficiency, but they are statically configured and cannot reason about downstream objectives, deliberate over alternative strategies, or close the loop between intermediate evidence and subsequent decisions in the way a human researcher would. This lack of closed-loop adaptation often leaves domain experts trapped in a cycle of manual trial-and-error to tune parameters and remediate pipeline failures, severely constraining the scalability of clinical biomarker development. To bridge this gap, we introduce NEXUS, an autonomous multi-agent framework that integrates neuroimaging workflow execution with scientific-objective understanding. Unlike conventional flat toolcalling agents, NEXUS adopts a code-centric execution paradigm where specialist agents collaboratively synthesize and optimize executable programs over composable domain-specific primitives. This design enables robust, long-horizon workflow construction that adapts dynamically to runtime observations. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical verification framework for autonomous quality control, integrating cohort-level metric screening with agentic visual inspection to drive evidence-grounded workflow remediation. Experiments on ADHD-200 and ADNI demonstrate that NEXUS outperforms standard workflow-based baselines in predictive performance while exhibiting sophisticated agentic behaviors, including strategy exploration and adaptive refinement. The code is available at https://github.com/LearningKeqi/Virtual-Neuroscientist-NEXUS.

cs.AI

AutoResearch AI: Towards AI-Powered Research Automation for Scientific Discovery

Scientific research is being reshaped by AI systems that move beyond isolated assistance toward longer-horizon workflows spanning literature grounding, hypothesis generation, experimentation, validation, reporting, and revision. This shift marks a transition from task-level AI for science to workflow-level research automation. Yet current systems remain fragmented, differing in autonomy, domain scope, execution environment, validation mechanism, and human oversight, while still struggling with evidence preservation, reproducibility, weak-direction rejection, provenance tracking, cross-domain robustness, and accountable scientific closure. This survey examines these developments through AutoResearch, defined as the developmental spectrum of AI-powered scientific workflow automation. Within it, Vibe Research denotes the human-steered region of prompt-based assistance and human-verified execution, whereas emerging AI-led systems coordinate larger portions of the discovery loop without achieving robust autonomy. We analyze how research systems redistribute control, evidence, execution, validation, and accountability across workflows and organize the field around five workflow conditions: literature and research grounding; hypothesis formation and planning; experimentation and tool use; feedback, validation, and review; and reporting and knowledge communication. We further synthesize AI scientist systems, mixed-initiative co-research frameworks, benchmarks, domain deployments, and open-source infrastructures. Finally, we propose five evaluation dimensions--novelty, validity, impact, reliability, and provenance--and show that AutoResearch autonomy is domain-conditioned, being more credible in structured, executable, and rapidly verifiable settings but limited in embodied, delayed, heterogeneous, ethical, or institutionally accountable contexts.

cs.AI

MAC: Masked Agent Collaboration Boosts Large Language Model Medical Decision-Making

Large language models (LLMs) have proven effective in artificial intelligence, where the multi-agent system (MAS) holds considerable promise for healthcare development by achieving the collaboration of LLMs. However, the absence of a systematic pipeline for agent construction and the rigidity of static collaboration patterns render current MAS-based models vulnerable to collaboration failures, resulting in substantial performance degradation in medical decision-making scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel Masked Agent Collaboration (MAC) framework that harnesses Pareto-optimal agent construction and cross-consistency maximization mechanisms to achieve adaptive progressive propagation of collaborative information, boosting the medical decision-making capacity. Specifically, we first conduct a Pareto-frontier factors analysis towards the LLMs pool to consider their key factors, including the model size, inference time, diversity score, and throughput ratio, where we calculate the similarity between pairwise outputs within an LLM to derive its diversity score. Beyond this analysis, we enable the identification of Pareto-optimal models that balance efficiency and capability, which are subsequently selected as collaborative agents to consider the fundamental trade-offs inherent in practical LLM deployment. Afterward, we measure the pairwise similarity between the outputs from collaborative agents to determine their cross-consistency values, subsequently masking out the agent with the lowest cross-consistency value to eliminate the output that is likely semantically inconsistent. Finally, we conduct collaboration of agents by achieving adaptive progressive propagation, where each agent aggregates the outputs of unmasked agents from the previous layer as its input to generate the corresponding output via prompt engineering.

cs.AI

The autoPET3 Challenge: Automated Lesion Segmentation in Whole-Body PET/CT $\unicode{x2013}$ Multitracer Multicenter Generalization

We report the design and results of the third autoPET challenge (MICCAI 2024), which benchmarked automated lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT under a compositional generalization setting. Training data comprised 1,014 [18F]-FDG PET/CT studies from the University Hospital Tübingen and 597 [18F]/[68Ga]-PSMA PET/CT studies from the LMU University Hospital Munich, constituting the largest publicly available annotated PSMA PET/CT dataset to date. The held-out test set of 200 studies covered four tracer-center combinations, two of which represented unseen compositional pairings. A complementary data-centric award category isolated the contribution of data handling strategies by restricting participants to a fixed baseline model. Seventeen teams submitted 27 algorithms, predominantly nnU-Net-based 3D networks with PET/CT channel concatenation. The top-ranked algorithm achieved a mean DSC of 0.66, FNV of 3.18 mL, and FPV of 2.78 mL across all four test conditions, improving DSC by 8% and reducing the false-negative volume by 5 mL relative to the provided baseline. Ranking was stable across bootstrap resampling and alternative ranking schemes for the top tier. Beyond the benchmark, we provide an in-depth analysis of segmentation performance at the patient and lesion level. Three main conclusions can be drawn: (1) in-domain multitracer PET/CT segmentation is sufficient and probably approaching reader agreement; (2) compositional generalization to unseen tracer-center combinations remains an open problem mainly driven by systematic volume overestimation; (3) heterogeneity and case difficulty drive performance variation substantially more than the choice of algorithm among top-ranked teams.

cs.CV

Claw-Eval-Live: A Live Agent Benchmark for Evolving Real-World Workflows

LLM agents are expected to complete end-to-end units of work across software tools, business services, and local workspaces. Yet many agent benchmarks freeze a curated task set at release time and grade mainly the final response, making it difficult to evaluate agents against evolving workflow demand or verify whether a task was executed. We introduce Claw-Eval-Live, a live benchmark for workflow agents that separates a refreshable signal layer, updated across releases from public workflow-demand signals, from a reproducible, time-stamped release snapshot. Each release is constructed from public workflow-demand signals, with ClawHub Top-500 skills used in the current release, and materialized as controlled tasks with fixed fixtures, services, workspaces, and graders. For grading, Claw-Eval-Live records execution traces, audit logs, service state, and post-run workspace artifacts, using deterministic checks when evidence is sufficient and structured LLM judging only for semantic dimensions. The release contains 105 tasks spanning controlled business services and local workspace repair, and evaluates 13 frontier models under a shared public pass rule. Experiments reveal that reliable workflow automation remains far from solved: the leading model passes only 66.7% of tasks and no model reaches 70%. Failures are structured by task family and execution surface, with HR, management, and multi-system business workflows as persistent bottlenecks and local workspace repair comparatively easier but unsaturated. Leaderboard rank alone is insufficient because models with similar pass rates can diverge in overall completion, and task-level discrimination concentrates in a middle band of tasks. Claw-Eval-Live suggests that workflow-agent evaluation should be grounded twice, in fresh external demand and in verifiable agent action.

cs.SE