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Yong Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Yong Liang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

DeepTCM1.0: A Multi-Expert AI Agent for Deciphering Mechanisms of Chinese Herbal Formulae Based on General Large Language Models

Background: Mechanistic elucidation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) compound formulas remains a central challenge in the modernization of TCM. Conventional approaches, including data mining and network pharmacology, are insufficient for achieving deep integration between classical TCM theory and modern scientific research. In addition, direct question-answering using general-purpose artificial intelligence large language models is limited by inadequate adaptation to TCM theoretical frameworks and susceptibility to reasoning hallucinations. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop intelligent analytical methods aligned with the holistic principles of TCM. Objective: To establish a multi-expert intelligent agent framework integrating classical TCM theory with modern life sciences, thereby enabling systematic and interpretable mechanistic analysis of TCM compound formulas, with Guizhi Decoction serving as a representative validation case. Methods: The DeepTCM1.0 framework was constructed based on the general-purpose large language model DeepSeek V3.2. It adopts a three-tier collaborative architecture and a three-round iterative quality-control workflow, simulating the collaborative analytical process of 11 interdisciplinary intelligent agents. The framework was applied to the mechanistic interpretation of Guizhi Decoction from the dual perspectives of classical traditional Chinese medicine theory and modern scientific research. Framework performance was comprehensively evaluated through double-blind five-dimensional scoring, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) reliability testing, Mann-Whitney U tests, and effect size analysis. The evaluation employed four independent large language models as evaluators, each conducting five rounds of repeated scoring on five anonymized reports, resulting in a total of 100 independent scoring assessments.

cs.CL

Feature Partitioning and Semantic Equalization for Intrinsic Robustness in Semantic Communication under Packet Loss

Semantic communication can improve transmission efficiency by focusing on task-relevant information. However, under packet-based communication protocols, any error typically results in the loss of an entire packet, making semantic communication particularly vulnerable to packet loss. Since high-dimensional semantic features must be partitioned into one-dimensional transmission units during packetization. A critical open question is how to partition semantic features to maximize robustness. To address this, we systematically investigate the performance of two mainstream architectures, Transformer and Convolutional neural networks (CNN), under various feature partitioning schemes. The results show that the Transformer architecture exhibits inherent robustness to packet loss when partitioned along the channel dimension. In contrast, the CNN-based baseline exhibits imbalanced channel utilization, causing severe degradation once dominant channels are lost. To enhance the CNN resilience, we propose a lightweight Semantic Equalization Mechanism (SEM) that balances channel contributions and prevents a few channels from dominating. SEM consists of two parallel approaches: a Dynamic Scale module that adaptively adjusts channel importance, and a Broadcast module that facilitates information interaction among channels. Experimental results demonstrate that CNN equipped with SEM achieve graceful degradation under packet loss (retaining about 85% of lossless PSNR at 40% packet loss), comparable to that of Transformer models. Our findings indicate that, under an appropriate partitioning strategy, maintaining a balanced semantic representation is a fundamental condition for achieving intrinsic robustness against packet loss. These insights may also extend to other modalities such as video and support practical semantic communication design.

eess.SY

BioVFM-21M: Benchmarking and Scaling Self-Supervised Vision Foundation Models for Biomedical Image Analysis

Scaling up model and data size have demonstrated impressive performance improvement over a wide range of tasks. Despite extensive studies on scaling behaviors for general-purpose tasks, medical images exhibit substantial differences from natural data. It remains unclear the key factors in developing medical vision foundation models at scale due to the absence of an extensive understanding of scaling behavior in the medical domain. In this paper, we explored the scaling behavior across model sizes, training algorithms, data sizes, and imaging modalities in developing scalable medical vision foundation models by self-supervised learning. To support scalable pretraining, we introduce BioVFM-21M, a large-scale biomedical image dataset encompassing a wide range of biomedical image modalities and anatomies. We observed that scaling up does provide benefits but varies across tasks. Additional analysis reveals several factors correlated with scaling benefits. Finally, we propose BioVFM, a large-scale medical vision foundation model pretrained on 21 million biomedical images, which outperforms the previous state-of-the-art foundation models across 12 medical benchmarks. Our results highlight that while scaling up is beneficial for pursuing better performance, task characteristics, data diversity, pretraining methods, and computational efficiency remain critical considerations for developing scalable medical foundation models.

cs.CV

Open-Loop and Closed-Loop Strategies for Linear Quadratic Mean Field Games: The Direct Approach

This paper delves into studying the differences and connections between open-loop and closed-loop strategies for the linear quadratic (LQ) mean field games (MFGs) by the direct approach. The investigation begins with the finite-population system for solving the solvability of open-loop and closed-loop systems within a unified framework under the global information pattern. By a comprehensive analysis through variational methods, the necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained for the existence of centralized open-loop and closed-loop Nash equilibria, which are characterized by the solvability of a system of forward-backward stochastic differential equations and a system of Riccati equations, respectively. The connections and disparities between centralized open-loop and closed-loop Nash equilibria are analyzed. Then, the decentralized control is designed by studying the asymptotic solvability for both open-loop and closed-loop systems. Asymptotically decentralized Nash equilibria are obtained by considering the centralized open-loop and closed-loop Nash equilibria in the infinite-population system, which requires a standard and an asymmetric Riccati equations. The results demonstrate that divergences between the centralized open-loop and closed-loop Nash equilibria in the finite-population system, but the corresponding asymptotically decentralized Nash equilibria in the infinite-population system are consistent. Therefore, the choice of open-loop and closed-loop strategies does not play an essential role in the design of decentralized control for LQ MFGs.

math.OC

Linear Quadratic Mean Field Stackelberg Games: Open-loop and Feedback Solutions

This paper investigates open-loop and feedback solutions of linear quadratic mean field (MF) games with a leader and a large number of followers. The leader first gives its strategy and then all the followers cooperate to optimize the social cost as the sum of their costs. By variational analysis with MF approximations, we obtain a set of open-loop controls of players in terms of solutions to MF forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs), which is further shown be to an asymptotic Stackelberg equilibrium. By applying the matrix maximum principle, a set of decentralized feedback strategies is constructed for all the players. For open-loop and feedback solutions, the corresponding optimal costs of all players are explicitly given by virtue of the solutions to two Riccati equations, respectively. The performances of two solutions are compared by the numerical simulation.

math.OC

SMPR: A structure-enhanced multimodal drug-disease prediction model for drug repositioning and cold start

Repositioning drug-disease relationships has always been a hot field of research. However, actual cases of biologically validated drug relocation remain very limited, and existing models have not yet fully utilized the structural information of the drug. Furthermore, most repositioning models are only used to complete the relationship matrix, and their practicality is poor when dealing with drug cold start problems. This paper proposes a structure-enhanced multimodal relationship prediction model (SMRP). SMPR is based on the SMILE structure of the drug, using the Mol2VEC method to generate drug embedded representations, and learn disease embedded representations through heterogeneous network graph neural networks. Ultimately, a drug-disease relationship matrix is constructed. In addition, to reduce the difficulty of users' use, SMPR also provides a cold start interface based on structural similarity based on reposition results to simply and quickly predict drug-related diseases. The repositioning ability and cold start capability of the model are verified from multiple perspectives. While the AUC and ACUPR scores of repositioning reach 99% and 61% respectively, the AUC of cold start achieve 80%. In particular, the cold start Recall indicator can reach more than 70%, which means that SMPR is more sensitive to positive samples. Finally, case analysis is used to verify the practical value of the model and visual analysis directly demonstrates the improvement of the structure to the model. For quick use, we also provide local deployment of the model and package it into an executable program.

cs.LG

Spatial-Angular Representation Learning for High-Fidelity Continuous Super-Resolution in Diffusion MRI

Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) often suffers from low spatial and angular resolution due to inherent limitations in imaging hardware and system noise, adversely affecting the accurate estimation of microstructural parameters with fine anatomical details. Deep learning-based super-resolution techniques have shown promise in enhancing dMRI resolution without increasing acquisition time. However, most existing methods are confined to either spatial or angular super-resolution, limiting their effectiveness in capturing detailed microstructural features. Furthermore, traditional pixel-wise loss functions struggle to recover intricate image details essential for high-resolution reconstruction. To address these challenges, we propose SARL-dMRI, a novel Spatial-Angular Representation Learning framework for high-fidelity, continuous super-resolution in dMRI. SARL-dMRI explores implicit neural representations and spherical harmonics to model continuous spatial and angular representations, simultaneously enhancing both spatial and angular resolution while improving microstructural parameter estimation accuracy. To further preserve image fidelity, a data-fidelity module and wavelet-based frequency loss are introduced, ensuring the super-resolved images remain consistent with the original input and retain fine details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared to five other state-of-the-art methods, our method significantly enhances dMRI data resolution, improves the accuracy of microstructural parameter estimation, and provides better generalization capabilities. It maintains stable performance even under a 45$\times$ downsampling factor.

eess.IV

A manufacturable platform for photonic quantum computing

Whilst holding great promise for low noise, ease of operation and networking, useful photonic quantum computing has been precluded by the need for beyond-state-of-the-art components, manufactured by the millions. Here we introduce a manufacturable platform for quantum computing with photons. We benchmark a set of monolithically-integrated silicon photonics-based modules to generate, manipulate, network, and detect photonic qubits, demonstrating dual-rail photonic qubits with $99.98\% \pm 0.01\%$ state preparation and measurement fidelity, Hong-Ou-Mandel quantum interference between independent photon sources with $99.50\%\pm0.25\%$ visibility, two-qubit fusion with $99.22\%\pm0.12\%$ fidelity, and a chip-to-chip qubit interconnect with $99.72\%\pm0.04\%$ fidelity, not accounting for loss. In addition, we preview a selection of next generation technologies, demonstrating low-loss silicon nitride waveguides and components, fabrication-tolerant photon sources, high-efficiency photon-number-resolving detectors, low-loss chip-to-fiber coupling, and barium titanate electro-optic phase shifters.

quant-ph

CSR-dMRI: Continuous Super-Resolution of Diffusion MRI with Anatomical Structure-assisted Implicit Neural Representation Learning

Deep learning-based dMRI super-resolution methods can effectively enhance image resolution by leveraging the learning capabilities of neural networks on large datasets. However, these methods tend to learn a fixed scale mapping between low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) images, overlooking the need for radiologists to scale the images at arbitrary resolutions. Moreover, the pixel-wise loss in the image domain tends to generate over-smoothed results, losing fine textures and edge information. To address these issues, we propose a novel continuous super-resolution method for dMRI, called CSR-dMRI, which utilizes an anatomical structure-assisted implicit neural representation learning approach. Specifically, the CSR-dMRI model consists of two components. The first is the latent feature extractor, which primarily extracts latent space feature maps from LR dMRI and anatomical images while learning structural prior information from the anatomical images. The second is the implicit function network, which utilizes voxel coordinates and latent feature vectors to generate voxel intensities at corresponding positions. Additionally, a frequency-domain-based loss is introduced to preserve the structural and texture information, further enhancing the image quality. Extensive experiments on the publicly available HCP dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, our method demonstrates superior generalization capability and can be applied to arbitrary-scale super-resolution, including non-integer scale factors, expanding its applicability beyond conventional approaches.

eess.IV

Swin-UMamba: Mamba-based UNet with ImageNet-based pretraining

Accurate medical image segmentation demands the integration of multi-scale information, spanning from local features to global dependencies. However, it is challenging for existing methods to model long-range global information, where convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are constrained by their local receptive fields, and vision transformers (ViTs) suffer from high quadratic complexity of their attention mechanism. Recently, Mamba-based models have gained great attention for their impressive ability in long sequence modeling. Several studies have demonstrated that these models can outperform popular vision models in various tasks, offering higher accuracy, lower memory consumption, and less computational burden. However, existing Mamba-based models are mostly trained from scratch and do not explore the power of pretraining, which has been proven to be quite effective for data-efficient medical image analysis. This paper introduces a novel Mamba-based model, Swin-UMamba, designed specifically for medical image segmentation tasks, leveraging the advantages of ImageNet-based pretraining. Our experimental results reveal the vital role of ImageNet-based training in enhancing the performance of Mamba-based models. Swin-UMamba demonstrates superior performance with a large margin compared to CNNs, ViTs, and latest Mamba-based models. Notably, on AbdomenMRI, Encoscopy, and Microscopy datasets, Swin-UMamba outperforms its closest counterpart U-Mamba_Enc by an average score of 2.72%.

eess.IV

Enhancing Representation in Medical Vision-Language Foundation Models via Multi-Scale Information Extraction Techniques

The development of medical vision-language foundation models has attracted significant attention in the field of medicine and healthcare due to their promising prospect in various clinical applications. While previous studies have commonly focused on feature learning at a single learning scale, investigation on integrating multi-scale information is lacking, which may hinder the potential for mutual reinforcement among these features. This paper aims to bridge this gap by proposing a method that effectively exploits multi-scale information to enhance the performance of medical foundation models. The proposed method simultaneously exploits features at the local, instance, modality and global aspects, facilitating comprehensive representation learning within the models. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on six open-source datasets across different clinical tasks, demonstrating its ability to enhance the performance of medical foundation models.

cs.CV

Enhancing the vision-language foundation model with key semantic knowledge-emphasized report refinement

Recently, vision-language representation learning has made remarkable advancements in building up medical foundation models, holding immense potential for transforming the landscape of clinical research and medical care. The underlying hypothesis is that the rich knowledge embedded in radiology reports can effectively assist and guide the learning process, reducing the need for additional labels. However, these reports tend to be complex and sometimes even consist of redundant descriptions that make the representation learning too challenging to capture the key semantic information. This paper develops a novel iterative vision-language representation learning framework by proposing a key semantic knowledge-emphasized report refinement method. Particularly, raw radiology reports are refined to highlight the key information according to a constructed clinical dictionary and two model-optimized knowledge-enhancement metrics. The iterative framework is designed to progressively learn, starting from gaining a general understanding of the patient's condition based on raw reports and gradually refines and extracts critical information essential to the fine-grained analysis tasks. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated on various downstream medical image analysis tasks, including disease classification, region-of-interest segmentation, and phrase grounding. Our framework surpasses seven state-of-the-art methods in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, demonstrating its encouraging potential for different clinical applications.

cs.CV

A multi-modal vision-language model for generalizable annotation-free pathology localization

Existing deep learning models for defining pathology from clinical imaging data rely on expert annotations and lack generalization capabilities in open clinical environments. Here, we present a generalizable vision-language model for Annotation-Free pathology Localization (AFLoc). The core strength of AFLoc is extensive multi-level semantic structure-based contrastive learning, which comprehensively aligns multi-granularity medical concepts with abundant image features to adapt to the diverse expressions of pathologies without the reliance on expert image annotations. We conduct primary experiments on a dataset of 220K pairs of image-report chest X-ray images and perform validation across eight external datasets encompassing 34 types of chest pathologies. The results demonstrate that AFLoc outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both annotation-free localization and classification tasks. Additionally, we assess the generalizability of AFLoc on other modalities, including histopathology and retinal fundus images. We show that AFLoc exhibits robust generalization capabilities, even surpassing human benchmarks in localizing five different types of pathological images. These results highlight the potential of AFLoc in reducing annotation requirements and its applicability in complex clinical environments.

cs.CV

Multimodal self-supervised learning for lesion localization

Multimodal deep learning utilizing imaging and diagnostic reports has made impressive progress in the field of medical imaging diagnostics, demonstrating a particularly strong capability for auxiliary diagnosis in cases where sufficient annotation information is lacking. Nonetheless, localizing diseases accurately without detailed positional annotations remains a challenge. Although existing methods have attempted to utilize local information to achieve fine-grained semantic alignment, their capability in extracting the fine-grained semantics of the comprehensive context within reports is limited. To address this problem, a new method is introduced that takes full sentences from textual reports as the basic units for local semantic alignment. This approach combines chest X-ray images with their corresponding textual reports, performing contrastive learning at both global and local levels. The leading results obtained by this method on multiple datasets confirm its efficacy in the task of lesion localization.

cs.CV

MLIP: Medical Language-Image Pre-training with Masked Local Representation Learning

Existing contrastive language-image pre-training aims to learn a joint representation by matching abundant image-text pairs. However, the number of image-text pairs in medical datasets is usually orders of magnitude smaller than that in natural datasets. Besides, medical image-text pairs often involve numerous complex fine-grained correspondences. This paper aims to enhance the data efficiency by introducing multiple-to-multiple local relationship modeling to capture denser supervisions. More specifically, we propose a Medical Language-Image Pre-training (MLIP) framework, which exploits the limited image-text medical data more efficiently through patch-sentence matching. Furthermore, we introduce a masked contrastive learning strategy with semantic integrity estimation to reduce redundancy in images while preserving the underlying semantics. Our evaluation results show that MLIP outperforms previous work in zero/few-shot classification and few-shot segmentation tasks by a large margin.

cs.CV

Enhancing Representation in Radiography-Reports Foundation Model: A Granular Alignment Algorithm Using Masked Contrastive Learning

Recently, multi-modal vision-language foundation models have gained significant attention in the medical field. While these models offer great opportunities, they still face crucial challenges, such as the requirement for fine-grained knowledge understanding in computer-aided diagnosis and the capability of utilizing very limited or even no task-specific labeled data in real-world clinical applications. In this study, we present MaCo, a masked contrastive chest X-ray foundation model that tackles these challenges. MaCo explores masked contrastive learning to simultaneously achieve fine-grained image understanding and zero-shot learning for a variety of medical imaging tasks. It designs a correlation weighting mechanism to adjust the correlation between masked chest X-ray image patches and their corresponding reports, thereby enhancing the model's representation learning capabilities. To evaluate the performance of MaCo, we conducted extensive experiments using 6 well-known open-source X-ray datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MaCo over 10 state-of-the-art approaches across tasks such as classification, segmentation, detection, and phrase grounding. These findings highlight the significant potential of MaCo in advancing a wide range of medical image analysis tasks.

cs.CV

Online Joint Assortment-Inventory Optimization under MNL Choices

We study an online joint assortment-inventory optimization problem, in which we assume that the choice behavior of each customer follows the Multinomial Logit (MNL) choice model, and the attraction parameters are unknown a priori. The retailer makes periodic assortment and inventory decisions to dynamically learn from the customer choice observations about the attraction parameters while maximizing the expected total profit over time. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that can effectively balance exploration and exploitation in the online decision-making of assortment and inventory. Our algorithm builds on a new estimator for the MNL attraction parameters, an innovative approach to incentivize exploration by adaptively tuning certain known and unknown parameters, and an optimization oracle to static single-cycle assortment-inventory planning problems with given parameters. We establish a regret upper bound for our algorithm and a lower bound for the online joint assortment-inventory optimization problem, suggesting that our algorithm achieves nearly optimal regret rate, provided that the static optimization oracle is exact. Then we incorporate more practical approximate static optimization oracles into our algorithm, and bound from above the impact of static optimization errors on the regret of our algorithm. We perform numerical studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. At last, we extend our study by incorporating inventory carryover and the learning of customer arrival distribution.

cs.LG

RCDNet: An Interpretable Rain Convolutional Dictionary Network for Single Image Deraining

As a common weather, rain streaks adversely degrade the image quality. Hence, removing rains from an image has become an important issue in the field. To handle such an ill-posed single image deraining task, in this paper, we specifically build a novel deep architecture, called rain convolutional dictionary network (RCDNet), which embeds the intrinsic priors of rain streaks and has clear interpretability. In specific, we first establish a RCD model for representing rain streaks and utilize the proximal gradient descent technique to design an iterative algorithm only containing simple operators for solving the model. By unfolding it, we then build the RCDNet in which every network module has clear physical meanings and corresponds to each operation involved in the algorithm. This good interpretability greatly facilitates an easy visualization and analysis on what happens inside the network and why it works well in inference process. Moreover, taking into account the domain gap issue in real scenarios, we further design a novel dynamic RCDNet, where the rain kernels can be dynamically inferred corresponding to input rainy images and then help shrink the space for rain layer estimation with few rain maps so as to ensure a fine generalization performance in the inconsistent scenarios of rain types between training and testing data. By end-to-end training such an interpretable network, all involved rain kernels and proximal operators can be automatically extracted, faithfully characterizing the features of both rain and clean background layers, and thus naturally lead to better deraining performance. Comprehensive experiments substantiate the superiority of our method, especially on its well generality to diverse testing scenarios and good interpretability for all its modules. Code is available in \emph{\url{https://github.com/hongwang01/DRCDNet}}.

eess.IV