arXiv subjects

Yucheng Xing

Publications and source records attributed to Yucheng Xing.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

What Is Missing in Surgical Risk Stratification and Outcome Prediction: A Scoping Review of End-to-End Machine Learning Approaches

Postoperative adverse events, including mortality and morbidity, remain a major global burden, many of which are preventable through early identification of high-risk patients and targeted perioperative care. Accurate risk stratification is therefore essential. With the growing availability of large-scale electronic health records (EHRs), machine learning (ML) provides a data-driven approach to model complex clinical patterns. However, existing studies vary widely in design, and methodological practices remain fragmented. This scoping review characterizes ML pipelines for surgical risk stratification and outcome prediction using EHR data. We reviewed 190 studies covering the ML workflow, including data preprocessing, algorithm selection, model evaluation, and explainability. Most studies relied on single-center private datasets with limited data modalities, while the scarcity of open-access surgical datasets constrained reproducibility and generalizability. Reporting of key preprocessing steps, including missing data handling, feature selection, and class imbalance, was often incomplete. Conventional ML models and simple neural networks predominated, whereas deep learning and multimodal approaches remained uncommon. Benchmark datasets and standardized evaluation protocols were largely absent, hindering cross-study comparisons. Only about one-third of studies incorporated explainability methods. This review identifies methodological gaps limiting clinically robust postoperative ML tools and provides a structured reference to support more rigorous, reproducible, and clinically meaningful ML development for perioperative care.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis

Whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for computational cancer prognosis. However, most existing methods primarily focus on in-domain performance and fail to generalize across clinical centers. This limitation stems from their reliance on pixel-derived representations that are highly susceptible to domain-specific artifacts caused by staining protocols and scanner hardware. We hypothesize that high-level pathology semantics, such as tumor grade and micro-environmental architecture, provide a domain-invariant semantic representation that mirrors the robust diagnostic logic of human pathologists. Therefore, we propose a Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion Survival (SAEFS) framework, where SAEFS derives semantic anchors from WSIs via Visual Question Answering (VQA), employs a dual-stream WSI evidence extraction architecture, uses Dirichlet-based Subjective Logic to model uncertainty, and fuses semantic and visual evidence through a cautious conjunction rule to avoid overconfident fusion from correlated sources. Trained exclusively on one source domain and evaluated zero-shot across four unseen domains, SAEFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models both in prediction accuracy and reliability, improving the average C-index by 10.2%. Quantitative analyses further show that VQA-derived semantic features exhibit significantly lower cross-center divergence than pixel-derived features, highlighting their robustness for cross-center clinical applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Evidential Fusion Network for Multimodal Survival Prediction under Missing Modalities

Recent multimodal survival prediction models have demonstrated strong predictive performance by leveraging complementary information across modalities. However, such models generally assume data completeness and exhibit limited robustness toward missing modalities, which are frequently encountered in real-world clinical settings. We propose the Evidential Missing Modality Survival Fusion (EMMS) model for multimodal survival prediction under missing modalities. EMMS offers a straightforward, computationally effective approach to survival analysis without requiring a generative phase for missing data. By employing Dempster-Shafer theory and Gaussian Random Fuzzy Numbers for multimodal decision fusion, it considers both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty alongside modality reliability for fusion. Moreover, the model treats missing modalities as vacuous evidence, preventing interference with available inputs and naturally reflecting increased uncertainty and calibrated predictions. Extensive experiments on four cancer datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance while providing calibrated and interpretable uncertainty estimates under incomplete multimodal observations, without introducing additional computational overhead.

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arXiv2026

Bridging the Modality Bottleneck in Pathology MIL through Virtual Molecular Staining

Multiple instance learning (MIL) is the dominant framework for whole-slide image analysis in computational pathology, typically combining a frozen patch encoder, a projection layer, and a slide-level aggregator. While encoders and aggregators have been extensively studied, the projection layer remains a largely morphology-only bottleneck. This limits endpoints such as biomarker status and survival, which are governed by a molecular state that is not fully captured by H&E morphology. We introduce Molecularly Informed Staining Transform (MIST), a plug-in replacement for the MIL projection layer that uses paired spatial transcriptomics only during training to construct virtual molecular stains. MIST clusters gene expression profiles into cross-modal prototypes, anchors them in the frozen foundation model feature space, and uses them to reorganize H&E patch features along molecularly guided axes. It requires no transcriptomics at inference and can be inserted before standard MIL aggregators. We evaluate MIST across 23 downstream tasks and 8 MIL aggregators. MIST improves 240 of 256 configurations over the standard projection layer, with an average gain of +3.5%, observed consistently across endpoint types: +5.2% on survival prediction, +3.3% on tissue subtyping, and +2.6% on biomarker prediction. Ablations confirm that gene-derived prototypes are the primary source of the gains, while spatial, biological, and pathological analyses show that cross-modal prototype affinities capture spatially coherent molecular programs from H&E alone.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2026

Sparse Task Vector Mixup with Hypernetworks for Efficient Knowledge Transfer in Whole-Slide Image Prognosis

Whole-Slide Images (WSIs) are widely used for estimating the prognosis of cancer patients. Current studies generally follow a cancer-specific learning paradigm. However, the available training samples for one cancer type are usually scarce in pathology. Consequently, the model often struggles to learn generalizable knowledge, thus performing worse on the tumor samples with inherent high heterogeneity. Although multi-cancer joint learning and knowledge transfer approaches have been explored recently to address it, they either rely on large-scale joint training or extensive inference across multiple models, posing new challenges in computational efficiency. To this end, this paper proposes a new scheme, Sparse Task Vector Mixup with Hypernetworks (STEPH). Unlike previous ones, it efficiently absorbs generalizable knowledge from other cancers for the target via model merging: i) applying task vector mixup to each source-target pair and then ii) sparsely aggregating task vector mixtures to obtain an improved target model, driven by hypernetworks. Extensive experiments on 13 cancer datasets show that STEPH improves over cancer-specific learning and an existing knowledge transfer baseline by 5.14% and 2.01%, respectively. Moreover, it is a more efficient solution for learning prognostic knowledge from other cancers, without requiring large-scale joint training or extensive multi-model inference. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/liupei101/STEPH.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Spectral-Structured Diffusion for Single-Image Rain Removal

Rain streaks manifest as directional and frequency-concentrated structures that overlap across multiple scales, making single-image rain removal particularly challenging. While diffusion-based restoration models provide a powerful framework for progressive denoising, standard spatial-domain diffusion does not explicitly account for such structured spectral characteristics. We introduce SpectralDiff, a spectral-structured diffusion-based framework tailored for single-image rain removal. Rather than redefining the diffusion formulation, our method incorporates structured spectral perturbations to guide the progressive suppression of multi-directional rain components. To support this design, we further propose a full-product U-Net architecture that leverages the convolution theorem to replace convolution operations with element-wise product layers, improving computational efficiency while preserving modeling capacity. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SpectralDiff achieves competitive rain removal performance with improved model compactness and favorable inference efficiency compared to existing diffusion-based approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

N-Tree Diffusion for Long-Horizon Wildfire Risk Forecasting

Long-horizon wildfire risk forecasting requires generating probabilistic spatial fields under sparse event supervision while maintaining computational efficiency across multiple prediction horizons. Extending diffusion models to multi-step forecasting typically repeats the denoising process independently for each horizon, leading to redundant computation. We introduce N-Tree Diffusion (NT-Diffusion), a hierarchical diffusion model designed for long-horizon wildfire risk forecasting. Fire occurrences are represented as continuous Fire Risk Maps (FRMs), which provide a smoothed spatial risk field suitable for probabilistic modeling. Instead of running separate diffusion trajectories for each predicted timestamp, NT-Diffusion shares early denoising stages and branches at later levels, allowing horizon-specific refinement while reducing redundant sampling. We evaluate the proposed framework on a newly collected real-world wildfire dataset constructed for long-horizon probabilistic prediction. Results indicate that NT-Diffusion achieves consistent accuracy improvements and reduced inference cost compared to baseline forecasting approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

SCOPE: Structured Prototype-Guided Adaptation for EEG Foundation Models with Limited Labels

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models (EFMs) have shown strong potential for transferable representation learning, yet their adaptation in realistic settings remains challenging when only a few labeled subjects are available. We show that this challenge stems from a structural mismatch between noisy, limited supervision and the highly plastic parameter space of EFMs, reflected in three key failure modes: overconfident miscalibration, prediction collapse, and representation drift caused by unconstrained parameter updates. To address these challenges, we propose SCOPE, a Structured COnfidence-aware Prototype-guided framework for label-limited EFM adaptation. SCOPE first constructs cohort-level external supervision to provide persistent guidance and further derives confidence-aware pseudo-labels to select reliable unlabeled samples for adaptation. Building on the constructed external supervision, SCOPE introduces ProAdapter, a lightweight prototype-conditioned adapter that modulates frozen EFMs to preserve pretrained representations. Experiments across 50 label-limited adaptation settings, covering 6 EEG tasks, 5 EFM backbones, and 5%-50% training labeled-subject ratios, show that SCOPE consistently achieves strong performance and efficiency.

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arXiv2025

DANCER: Dance ANimation via Condition Enhancement and Rendering with diffusion model

Recently, diffusion models have shown their impressive ability in visual generation tasks. Besides static images, more and more research attentions have been drawn to the generation of realistic videos. The video generation not only has a higher requirement for the quality, but also brings a challenge in ensuring the video continuity. Among all the video generation tasks, human-involved contents, such as human dancing, are even more difficult to generate due to the high degrees of freedom associated with human motions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named as DANCER (Dance ANimation via Condition Enhancement and Rendering with Diffusion Model), for realistic single-person dance synthesis based on the most recent stable video diffusion model. As the video generation is generally guided by a reference image and a video sequence, we introduce two important modules into our framework to fully benefit from the two inputs. More specifically, we design an Appearance Enhancement Module (AEM) to focus more on the details of the reference image during the generation, and extend the motion guidance through a Pose Rendering Module (PRM) to capture pose conditions from extra domains. To further improve the generation capability of our model, we also collect a large amount of video data from Internet, and generate a novel datasetTikTok-3K to enhance the model training. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been evaluated through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, where the performance of our model is superior to that of the state-of-the-art methods. All the data and codes will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

DPsurv: Dual-Prototype Evidential Fusion for Uncertainty-Aware and Interpretable Whole-Slide Image Survival Prediction

Pathology whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for cancer survival analysis because of their comprehensive histopathological information at both cellular and tissue levels, enabling quantitative, large-scale, and prognostically rich tumor feature analysis. However, most existing methods in WSI survival analysis struggle with limited interpretability and often overlook predictive uncertainty in heterogeneous slide images. In this paper, we propose DPsurv, a dual-prototype whole-slide image evidential fusion network that outputs uncertainty-aware survival intervals, while enabling interpretation of predictions through patch prototype assignment maps, component prototypes, and component-wise relative risk aggregation. Experiments on five publicly available datasets achieve the highest mean concordance index and the lowest mean integrated Brier score, validating the effectiveness and reliability of DPsurv. The interpretation of prediction results provides transparency at the feature, reasoning, and decision levels, thereby enhancing the trustworthiness and interpretability of DPsurv.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

CodeBrain: Bridging Decoupled Tokenizer and Multi-Scale Architecture for EEG Foundation Model

Electroencephalography (EEG) provides real-time insights into brain activity and supports diverse applications in neuroscience. While EEG foundation models (EFMs) have emerged to address the scalability issues of task-specific models, current approaches still yield clinically uninterpretable and weakly discriminative representations, inefficiently capturing global dependencies and neglecting important local neural events. We present CodeBrain, a two-stage EFM designed to fill this gap. In the first stage, we introduce the TFDual-Tokenizer, which decouples heterogeneous temporal and frequency EEG signals into discrete tokens, quadratically expanding the representation space to enhance discriminative power and offering domain-specific representation-level interpretability by suggesting potential links to neural events and spectral rhythms. In the second stage, we propose the multi-scale EEGSSM architecture, which combines structured global convolution with sliding window attention to efficiently capture both sparse long-range and local dependencies, reflecting the brain's small-world topology. Pretrained on the largest public EEG corpus, CodeBrain achieves strong generalization across eight downstream tasks and ten datasets under distribution shifts, supported by comprehensive ablations, scaling-law analyzes, and interpretability evaluations. The code and the pretrained weights are available at https://github.com/jingyingma01/CodeBrain.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Evidential time-to-event prediction with calibrated uncertainty quantification

Time-to-event analysis provides insights into clinical prognosis and treatment recommendations. However, this task is more challenging than standard regression problems due to the presence of censored observations. Additionally, the lack of confidence assessment, model robustness, and prediction calibration raises concerns about the reliability of predictions. To address these challenges, we propose an evidential regression model specifically designed for time-to-event prediction. The proposed model quantifies both epistemic and aleatory uncertainties using Gaussian Random Fuzzy Numbers and belief functions, providing clinicians with uncertainty-aware survival time predictions. The model is trained by minimizing a generalized negative log-likelihood function accounting for data censoring. Experimental evaluations using simulated datasets with different data distributions and censoring conditions, as well as real-world datasets across diverse clinical applications, demonstrate that our model delivers both accurate and reliable performance, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. These results highlight the potential of our approach for enhancing clinical decision-making in survival analysis.

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arXiv2024

EsurvFusion: An evidential multimodal survival fusion model based on Gaussian random fuzzy numbers

Multimodal survival analysis aims to combine heterogeneous data sources (e.g., clinical, imaging, text, genomics) to improve the prediction quality of survival outcomes. However, this task is particularly challenging due to high heterogeneity and noise across data sources, which vary in structure, distribution, and context. Additionally, the ground truth is often censored (uncertain) due to incomplete follow-up data. In this paper, we propose a novel evidential multimodal survival fusion model, EsurvFusion, designed to combine multimodal data at the decision level through an evidence-based decision fusion layer that jointly addresses both data and model uncertainty while incorporating modality-level reliability. Specifically, EsurvFusion first models unimodal data with newly introduced Gaussian random fuzzy numbers, producing unimodal survival predictions along with corresponding aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. It then estimates modality-level reliability through a reliability discounting layer to correct the misleading impact of noisy data modalities. Finally, a multimodal evidence-based fusion layer is introduced to combine the discounted predictions to form a unified, interpretable multimodal survival analysis model, revealing each modality's influence based on the learned reliability coefficients. This is the first work that studies multimodal survival analysis with both uncertainty and reliability. Extensive experiments on four multimodal survival datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in handling high heterogeneity data, establishing new state-of-the-art on several benchmarks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Puppet-CNN: Continuous Parameter Dynamics for Input-Adaptive Convolutional Networks

Modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) organize computation as a discrete stack of layers whose parameters are independently stored and learned, with the number of layers fixed as an architectural hyperparameter. In this work, we explore an alternative perspective: can network parameterization itself be modeled as a continuous dynamical system? We introduce Puppet-CNN, a framework that represents convolutional layer parameters as states evolving along a learned parameter flow governed by a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE). Under this formulation, layer parameters are generated through continuous evolution in parameter space, and the effective number of generated layers is determined by the integration horizon of the learned dynamics, which can be modulated by input complexity to enable input-adaptive computation. We validate this formulation on standard image classification benchmarks and demonstrate that continuous parameter dynamics can achieve competitive predictive performance while substantially reducing stored trainable parameters. These results suggest that viewing neural network parameterization through the lens of dynamical systems provides a structured and flexible design space for adaptive convolutional models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Input-Adaptive Generative Dynamics in Diffusion Models

Diffusion models typically generate data through a fixed denoising trajectory that is shared across all samples. However, generation targets can differ in complexity, suggesting that a single pre-defined diffusion process may not be optimal for every input. In this work, we investigate input-adaptive generative dynamics for diffusion models, where the generation process itself adapts to the conditions of each sample. Instead of relying on a fixed diffusion trajectory, the proposed framework allows the generative dynamics to adjust across inputs according to their generation requirements. To enable this behavior, we train the diffusion backbone under varying horizons and noise schedules, so that it can operate consistently under different input-adaptive trajectories. Experiments on conditional image generation show that diffusion trajectories can vary across inputs while maintaining generation quality and reducing the average number of sampling steps. These results provide a proof of the concept that diffusion processes can benefit from input-adaptive generative dynamics rather than relying on a single fixed trajectory.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Map-Free Trajectory Prediction with Map Distillation and Hierarchical Encoding

Reliable motion forecasting of surrounding agents is essential for ensuring the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. Many existing trajectory prediction methods rely heavily on high-definition (HD) maps as strong driving priors. However, the availability and accuracy of these priors are not guaranteed due to substantial costs to build, localization errors of vehicles, or ongoing road constructions. In this paper, we introduce MFTP, a Map-Free Trajectory Prediction method that offers several advantages. First, it eliminates the need for HD maps during inference while still benefiting from map priors during training via knowledge distillation. Second, we present a novel hierarchical encoder that effectively extracts spatial-temporal agent features and aggregates them into multiple trajectory queries. Additionally, we introduce an iterative decoder that sequentially decodes trajectory queries to generate the final predictions. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse dataset under the map-free setting.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

An evidential time-to-event prediction model based on Gaussian random fuzzy numbers

We introduce an evidential model for time-to-event prediction with censored data. In this model, uncertainty on event time is quantified by Gaussian random fuzzy numbers, a newly introduced family of random fuzzy subsets of the real line with associated belief functions, generalizing both Gaussian random variables and Gaussian possibility distributions. Our approach makes minimal assumptions about the underlying time-to-event distribution. The model is fit by minimizing a generalized negative log-likelihood function that accounts for both normal and censored data. Comparative experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the very good performance of our model as compared to the state-of-the-art.

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arXiv2023

A review of uncertainty quantification in medical image analysis: probabilistic and non-probabilistic methods

The comprehensive integration of machine learning healthcare models within clinical practice remains suboptimal, notwithstanding the proliferation of high-performing solutions reported in the literature. A predominant factor hindering widespread adoption pertains to an insufficiency of evidence affirming the reliability of the aforementioned models. Recently, uncertainty quantification methods have been proposed as a potential solution to quantify the reliability of machine learning models and thus increase the interpretability and acceptability of the result. In this review, we offer a comprehensive overview of prevailing methods proposed to quantify uncertainty inherent in machine learning models developed for various medical image tasks. Contrary to earlier reviews that exclusively focused on probabilistic methods, this review also explores non-probabilistic approaches, thereby furnishing a more holistic survey of research pertaining to uncertainty quantification for machine learning models. Analysis of medical images with the summary and discussion on medical applications and the corresponding uncertainty evaluation protocols are presented, which focus on the specific challenges of uncertainty in medical image analysis. We also highlight some potential future research work at the end. Generally, this review aims to allow researchers from both clinical and technical backgrounds to gain a quick and yet in-depth understanding of the research in uncertainty quantification for medical image analysis machine learning models.

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