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Monocular depth estimation has shown promise in general imaging tasks, aiding in localization and 3D reconstruction. While effective in various domains, its application to bronchoscopic images is hindered by the lack of labeled data, challenging the use of supervised learning methods. In this work, we propose a transfer learning framework that leverages synthetic data with depth labels for training and adapts domain knowledge for accurate depth estimation in real bronchoscope data. Our network demonstrates improved depth prediction on real footage using domain adaptation compared to training solely on synthetic data, validating our approach.

Accurate and complete segmentation of airways in chest CT images is essential for the quantitative assessment of lung diseases and the facilitation of pulmonary interventional procedures. Although deep learning has led to significant advancements in medical image segmentation, maintaining airway continuity remains particularly challenging. This difficulty arises primarily from the small and dispersed nature of airway structures, as well as class imbalance in CT scans. To address these challenges, we designed a Multi-scale Nested Residual U-Net (MNR-UNet), incorporating multi-scale inputs and Residual Multi-scale Modules (RMM) into a nested residual framework to enhance information flow, effectively capturing the intricate details of small airways and mitigating gradient vanishing. Building on this, we developed a three-stage segmentation pipeline to optimize the training of the MNR-UNet. The first two stages prioritize high accuracy and sensitivity, while the third stage focuses on repairing airway breakages to balance topological completeness and correctness. To further address class imbalance, we introduced a weighted Breakage-Aware Loss (wBAL) to heighten focus on challenging samples, penalizing breakages and thereby extending the length of the airway tree. Additionally, we proposed a hierarchical evaluation framework to offer more clinically meaningful analysis. Validation on both in-house and public datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves superior performance in detecting more accurate airway voxels and identifying additional branches, significantly improving airway topological completeness. The code will be released publicly following the publication of the paper.

In a prompt injection attack, an attacker injects a prompt into the original one, aiming to make the LLM follow the injected prompt and perform a task chosen by the attacker. Existing prompt injection attacks primarily focus on how to blend the injected prompt into the original prompt without altering the LLM itself. Our experiments show that these attacks achieve some success, but there is still significant room for improvement. In this work, we show that an attacker can boost the success of prompt injection attacks by poisoning the LLM's alignment process. Specifically, we propose PoisonedAlign, a method to strategically create poisoned alignment samples. When even a small fraction of the alignment data is poisoned using our method, the aligned LLM becomes more vulnerable to prompt injection while maintaining its foundational capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/Sadcardation/PoisonedAlign

Visual hallucination (VH) occurs when a multimodal large language model (MLLM) generates responses with incorrect visual details for prompts. Existing methods for generating VH test cases primarily rely on human annotations, typically in the form of triples: (image, question, answer). In this paper, we introduce VHExpansion, the first automated method for expanding VH test cases for MLLMs. Given an initial VH test case, VHExpansion automatically expands it by perturbing the question and answer through negation as well as modifying the image using both common and adversarial perturbations. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation metric, symmetric accuracy, which measures the proportion of correctly answered VH test-case pairs. Each pair consists of a test case and its negated counterpart. Our theoretical analysis shows that symmetric accuracy is an unbiased evaluation metric that remains unaffected by the imbalance of VH testing cases with varying answers when an MLLM is randomly guessing the answers, whereas traditional accuracy is prone to such imbalance. We apply VHExpansion to expand three VH datasets annotated manually and use these expanded datasets to benchmark seven MLLMs. Our evaluation shows that VHExpansion effectively identifies more VH test cases. Moreover, symmetric accuracy, being unbiased, leads to different conclusions about the vulnerability of MLLMs to VH compared to traditional accuracy metric. Finally, we show that fine-tuning MLLMs on the expanded VH dataset generated by VHExpansion mitigates VH more effectively than fine-tuning on the original, manually annotated dataset. Our code is available at: https://github.com/lycheeefish/VHExpansion.

Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) systems, particularly those with voice cloning capabilities, have made voice impersonation readily accessible, raising ethical and legal concerns due to potential misuse for malicious activities like misinformation campaigns and fraud. While synthetic speech detectors (SSDs) exist to combat this, they are vulnerable to ``test domain shift", exhibiting decreased performance when audio is altered through transcoding, playback, or background noise. This vulnerability is further exacerbated by deliberate manipulation of synthetic speech aimed at deceiving detectors. This work presents the first systematic study of such active malicious attacks against state-of-the-art open-source SSDs. White-box attacks, black-box attacks, and their transferability are studied from both attack effectiveness and stealthiness, using both hardcoded metrics and human ratings. The results highlight the urgent need for more robust detection methods in the face of evolving adversarial threats.

Large ASR models can inadvertently leak sensitive information, which can be mitigated by formal privacy measures like differential privacy (DP). However, traditional DP training is computationally expensive, and can hurt model performance. Our study explores DP parameter-efficient fine-tuning as a way to mitigate privacy risks with smaller computation and performance costs for ASR models. Through extensive experimentation and progressive optimization, we achieve 4.6%/8.1% word error rate on LibriSpeech clean/other test-sets, setting a new performance benchmark while maintaining (10, 3.52e-6)-DP in fine-tuning a large ASR model with over 600M parameters.

Surgical phase recognition is critical for assisting surgeons in understanding surgical videos. Existing studies focused more on online surgical phase recognition, by leveraging preceding frames to predict the current frame. Despite great progress, they formulated the task as a series of frame-wise classification, which resulted in a lack of global context of the entire procedure and incoherent predictions. Moreover, besides online analysis, accurate offline surgical phase recognition is also in significant clinical need for retrospective analysis, and existing online algorithms do not fully analyze the entire video, thereby limiting accuracy in offline analysis. To overcome these challenges and enhance both online and offline inference capabilities, we propose a universal Surgical Phase Localization Network, named SurgPLAN++, with the principle of temporal detection. To ensure a global understanding of the surgical procedure, we devise a phase localization strategy for SurgPLAN++ to predict phase segments across the entire video through phase proposals. For online analysis, to generate high-quality phase proposals, SurgPLAN++ incorporates a data augmentation strategy to extend the streaming video into a pseudo-complete video through mirroring, center-duplication, and down-sampling. For offline analysis, SurgPLAN++ capitalizes on its global phase prediction framework to continuously refine preceding predictions during each online inference step, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of phase recognition. We perform extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness, and our SurgPLAN++ achieves remarkable performance in both online and offline modes, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/lxj22/SurgPLAN-Plus.

Quantum computation for chemical problems will require the construction of guiding states with sufficient overlap with a target state. Since easily available and initializable mean-field states are characterized by an overlap that is reduced for multi-configurational electronic structures and even vanishes with growing system size, we here investigate the severity of state preparation for reaction chemistry. We emphasize weaknesses in current traditional approaches (even for weakly correlated molecules) and highlight the advantage of quantum phase estimation algorithms. An important result is the introduction of a new classification scheme for electronic structures based on orbital entanglement information. We identify two categories of multi-configurational molecules. Whereas class-1 molecules are dominated by very few determinants and often found in reaction chemistry, class-2 molecules do not allow one to single out a reasonably sized number of important determinants. The latter are particularly hard for traditional approaches and an ultimate target for quantum computation. Some open-shell iron-sulfur clusters belong to class 2. We discuss the role of the molecular orbital basis set and show that true class-2 molecules remain in this class independent of the choice of the orbital basis, with the iron-molybdenum cofactor of nitrogenase being a prototypical example. We stress that class-2 molecules can be build in a systematic fashion from open-shell centers or unsaturated carbon atoms. Our key result is that it will always be possible to initialize a guiding state for chemical reaction chemistry in the ground state based on initial low-cost approximate electronic structure information, which is facilitated by the finite size of the atomistic structures to be considered., Comment: 58 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables

We demonstrate the first end-to-end integration of high-performance computing (HPC), reliable quantum computing, and AI in a case study on catalytic reactions producing chiral molecules. We present a hybrid computation workflow to determine the strongly correlated reaction configurations and estimate, for one such configuration, its active site's ground state energy. We combine 1) the use of HPC tools like AutoRXN and AutoCAS to systematically identify the strongly correlated chemistry within a large chemical space with 2) the use of logical qubits in the quantum computing stage to prepare the quantum ground state of the strongly correlated active site, demonstrating the advantage of logical qubits compared to physical qubits, and 3) the use of optimized quantum measurements of the logical qubits with so-called classical shadows to accurately predict various properties of the ground state including energies. The combination of HPC, reliable quantum computing, and AI in this demonstration serves as a proof of principle of how future hybrid chemistry applications will require integration of large-scale quantum computers with classical computing to be able to provide a measurable quantum advantage., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures

Single-image depth estimation is essential for endoscopy tasks such as localization, reconstruction, and augmented reality. Most existing methods in surgical scenes focus on in-domain depth estimation, limiting their real-world applicability. This constraint stems from the scarcity and inferior labeling quality of medical data for training. In this work, we present EndoOmni, the first foundation model for zero-shot cross-domain depth estimation for endoscopy. To harness the potential of diverse training data, we refine the advanced self-learning paradigm that employs a teacher model to generate pseudo-labels, guiding a student model trained on large-scale labeled and unlabeled data. To address training disturbance caused by inherent noise in depth labels, we propose a robust training framework that leverages both depth labels and estimated confidence from the teacher model to jointly guide the student model training. Moreover, we propose a weighted scale-and-shift invariant loss to adaptively adjust learning weights based on label confidence, thus imposing learning bias towards cleaner label pixels while reducing the influence of highly noisy pixels. Experiments on zero-shot relative depth estimation show that our EndoOmni improves state-of-the-art methods in medical imaging for 41\% and existing foundation models for 25\% in terms of absolute relative error on specific dataset. Furthermore, our model provides strong initialization for fine-tuning to metric depth estimation, maintaining superior performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. The source code will be publicly available.

Vision-based surgical navigation has received increasing attention due to its non-invasive, cost-effective, and flexible advantages. In particular, a critical element of the vision-based navigation system is tracking surgical instruments. Compared with 2D instrument tracking methods, 3D instrument tracking has broader value in clinical practice, but is also more challenging due to weak texture, occlusion, and lack of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models for 3D registration. To solve these challenges, we propose the SurgTrack, a two-stage 3D instrument tracking method for CAD-free and robust real-world applications. In the first registration stage, we incorporate an Instrument Signed Distance Field (SDF) modeling the 3D representation of instruments, achieving CAD-freed 3D registration. Due to this, we can obtain the location and orientation of instruments in the 3D space by matching the video stream with the registered SDF model. In the second tracking stage, we devise a posture graph optimization module, leveraging the historical tracking results of the posture memory pool to optimize the tracking results and improve the occlusion robustness. Furthermore, we collect the Instrument3D dataset to comprehensively evaluate the 3D tracking of surgical instruments. The extensive experiments validate the superiority and scalability of our SurgTrack, by outperforming the state-of-the-arts with a remarkable improvement. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wenwucode/SurgTrack.

Real-time visual feedback from catheterization analysis is crucial for enhancing surgical safety and efficiency during endovascular interventions. However, existing datasets are often limited to specific tasks, small scale, and lack the comprehensive annotations necessary for broader endovascular intervention understanding. To tackle these limitations, we introduce CathAction, a large-scale dataset for catheterization understanding. Our CathAction dataset encompasses approximately 500,000 annotated frames for catheterization action understanding and collision detection, and 25,000 ground truth masks for catheter and guidewire segmentation. For each task, we benchmark recent related works in the field. We further discuss the challenges of endovascular intentions compared to traditional computer vision tasks and point out open research questions. We hope that CathAction will facilitate the development of endovascular intervention understanding methods that can be applied to real-world applications. The dataset is available at https://airvlab.github.io/cathaction/., Comment: 10 pages. Webpage: https://airvlab.github.io/cathaction/

Accurate identification of arteries and veins in ultrasound images is crucial for vascular examinations and interventions in robotics-assisted surgeries. However, current methods for ultrasound vessel segmentation face challenges in distinguishing between arteries and veins due to their morphological similarities. To address this challenge, this study introduces a novel force sensing guided segmentation approach to enhance artery-vein segmentation accuracy by leveraging their distinct deformability. Our proposed method utilizes force magnitude to identify key frames with the most significant vascular deformation in a sequence of ultrasound images. These key frames are then integrated with the current frame through attention mechanisms, with weights assigned in accordance with force magnitude. Our proposed force sensing guided framework can be seamlessly integrated into various segmentation networks and achieves significant performance improvements in multiple U-shaped networks such as U-Net, Swin-unet and Transunet. Furthermore, we contribute the first multimodal ultrasound artery-vein segmentation dataset, Mus-V, which encompasses both force and image data simultaneously. The dataset comprises 3114 ultrasound images of carotid and femoral vessels extracted from 105 videos, with corresponding force data recorded by the force sensor mounted on the US probe. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.

Surgical instrument segmentation is crucial in surgical scene understanding, thereby facilitating surgical safety. Existing algorithms directly detected all instruments of pre-defined categories in the input image, lacking the capability to segment specific instruments according to the surgeon's intention. During different stages of surgery, surgeons exhibit varying preferences and focus toward different surgical instruments. Therefore, an instrument segmentation algorithm that adheres to the surgeon's intention can minimize distractions from irrelevant instruments and assist surgeons to a great extent. The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) reveals the capability to segment objects following prompts, but the manual annotations for prompts are impractical during the surgery. To address these limitations in operating rooms, we propose an audio-driven surgical instrument segmentation framework, named ASI-Seg, to accurately segment the required surgical instruments by parsing the audio commands of surgeons. Specifically, we propose an intention-oriented multimodal fusion to interpret the segmentation intention from audio commands and retrieve relevant instrument details to facilitate segmentation. Moreover, to guide our ASI-Seg segment of the required surgical instruments, we devise a contrastive learning prompt encoder to effectively distinguish the required instruments from the irrelevant ones. Therefore, our ASI-Seg promotes the workflow in the operating rooms, thereby providing targeted support and reducing the cognitive load on surgeons. Extensive experiments are performed to validate the ASI-Seg framework, which reveals remarkable advantages over classical state-of-the-art and medical SAMs in both semantic segmentation and intention-oriented segmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/Zonmgin-Zhang/ASI-Seg., Comment: This work is accepted by IROS 2024 (Oral)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have become the cornerstone of today's generative AI ecosystem, sparking intense competition among tech giants and startups. In particular, an MLLM generates a text response given a prompt consisting of an image and a question. While state-of-the-art MLLMs use safety filters and alignment techniques to refuse unsafe prompts, in this work, we introduce MLLM-Refusal, the first method that induces refusals for safe prompts. In particular, our MLLM-Refusal optimizes a nearly-imperceptible refusal perturbation and adds it to an image, causing target MLLMs to likely refuse a safe prompt containing the perturbed image and a safe question. Specifically, we formulate MLLM-Refusal as a constrained optimization problem and propose an algorithm to solve it. Our method offers competitive advantages for MLLM model providers by potentially disrupting user experiences of competing MLLMs, since competing MLLM's users will receive unexpected refusals when they unwittingly use these perturbed images in their prompts. We evaluate MLLM-Refusal on four MLLMs across four datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in causing competing MLLMs to refuse safe prompts while not affecting non-competing MLLMs. Furthermore, we explore three potential countermeasures-adding Gaussian noise, DiffPure, and adversarial training. Our results show that though they can mitigate MLLM-Refusal's effectiveness, they also sacrifice the accuracy and/or efficiency of the competing MLLM. The code is available at https://github.com/Sadcardation/MLLM-Refusal.

Poisoning attacks compromise the training phase of federated learning (FL) such that the learned global model misclassifies attacker-chosen inputs called target inputs. Existing defenses mainly focus on protecting the training phase of FL such that the learnt global model is poison free. However, these defenses often achieve limited effectiveness when the clients' local training data is highly non-iid or the number of malicious clients is large, as confirmed in our experiments. In this work, we propose FLForensics, the first poison-forensics method for FL. FLForensics complements existing training-phase defenses. In particular, when training-phase defenses fail and a poisoned global model is deployed, FLForensics aims to trace back the malicious clients that performed the poisoning attack after a misclassified target input is identified. We theoretically show that FLForensics can accurately distinguish between benign and malicious clients under a formal definition of poisoning attack. Moreover, we empirically show the effectiveness of FLForensics at tracing back both existing and adaptive poisoning attacks on five benchmark datasets.

Accurate bronchoscope localization is essential for pulmonary interventions, by providing six degrees of freedom (DOF) in airway navigation. However, the robustness of current vision-based methods is often compromised in clinical practice, and they struggle to perform in real-time and to generalize across cases unseen during training. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Probabilistic Airway Navigation System (PANS), leveraging Monte-Carlo method with pose hypotheses and likelihoods to achieve robust and real-time bronchoscope localization. Specifically, our PANS incorporates diverse visual representations (\textit{e.g.}, odometry and landmarks) by leveraging two key modules, including the Depth-based Motion Inference (DMI) and the Bronchial Semantic Analysis (BSA). To generate the pose hypotheses of bronchoscope for PANS, we devise the DMI to accurately propagate the estimation of pose hypotheses over time. Moreover, to estimate the accurate pose likelihood, we devise the BSA module by effectively distinguishing between similar bronchial regions in endoscopic images, along with a novel metric to assess the congruence between estimated depth maps and the segmented airway structure. Under this probabilistic formulation, our PANS is capable of achieving the 6-DOF bronchoscope localization with superior accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments on the collected pulmonary intervention dataset comprising 10 clinical cases confirm the advantage of our PANS over state-of-the-arts, in terms of both robustness and generalization in localizing deeper airway branches and the efficiency of real-time inference. The proposed PANS reveals its potential to be a reliable tool in the operating room, promising to enhance the quality and safety of pulmonary interventions.

We present a new approach for vision-based force estimation in Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery based on frequency domain basis of motion of organs derived directly from video. Using internal movements generated by natural processes like breathing or the cardiac cycle, we infer the image-space basis of the motion on the frequency domain. As we are working with this representation, we discretize the problem to a limited amount of low-frequencies to build an image-space mechanical model of the environment. We use this pre-built model to define our force estimation problem as a dynamic constraint problem. We demonstrate that this method can estimate point contact forces reliably for silicone phantom and ex-vivo experiments, matching real readings from a force sensor. In addition, we perform qualitative experiments in which we synthesize coherent force textures from surgical videos over a certain region of interest selected by the user. Our method demonstrates good results for both quantitative and qualitative analysis, providing a good starting point for a purely vision-based method for surgical force estimation.

Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is highly valued for its non-invasive and painless approach, though its effectiveness is compromised by uneven illumination from hardware constraints and complex internal dynamics, leading to overexposed or underexposed images. While researchers have discussed the challenges of low-light enhancement in WCE, the issue of correcting for different exposure levels remains underexplored. To tackle this, we introduce EndoUIC, a WCE unified illumination correction solution using an end-to-end promptable diffusion transformer (DiT) model. In our work, the illumination prompt module shall navigate the model to adapt to different exposure levels and perform targeted image enhancement, in which the Adaptive Prompt Integration (API) and Global Prompt Scanner (GPS) modules shall further boost the concurrent representation learning between the prompt parameters and features. Besides, the U-shaped restoration DiT model shall capture the long-range dependencies and contextual information for unified illumination restoration. Moreover, we present a novel Capsule-endoscopy Exposure Correction (CEC) dataset, including ground-truth and corrupted image pairs annotated by expert photographers. Extensive experiments against a variety of state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on four datasets showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method and components in WCE illumination restoration, and the additional downstream experiments further demonstrate its utility for clinical diagnosis and surgical assistance., Comment: To appear in MICCAI 2024. Code and dataset availability: https://github.com/longbai1006/EndoUIC

Ultrasonography has revolutionized non-invasive diagnostic methodologies, significantly enhancing patient outcomes across various medical domains. Despite its advancements, integrating ultrasound technology with robotic systems for automated scans presents challenges, including limited command understanding and dynamic execution capabilities. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel Ultrasound Embodied Intelligence system that synergistically combines ultrasound robots with large language models (LLMs) and domain-specific knowledge augmentation, enhancing ultrasound robots' intelligence and operational efficiency. Our approach employs a dual strategy: firstly, integrating LLMs with ultrasound robots to interpret doctors' verbal instructions into precise motion planning through a comprehensive understanding of ultrasound domain knowledge, including APIs and operational manuals; secondly, incorporating a dynamic execution mechanism, allowing for real-time adjustments to scanning plans based on patient movements or procedural errors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through extensive experiments, including ablation studies and comparisons across various models, showcasing significant improvements in executing medical procedures from verbal commands. Our findings suggest that the proposed system improves the efficiency and quality of ultrasound scans and paves the way for further advancements in autonomous medical scanning technologies, with the potential to transform non-invasive diagnostics and streamline medical workflows., Comment: This work has been accepted by MICCAI 2024

Density functional theory (DFT) has been a cornerstone in computational chemistry, physics, and materials science for decades, benefiting from advancements in computational power and theoretical methods. This paper introduces a novel, cloud-native application, Accelerated DFT, which offers an order of magnitude acceleration in DFT simulations. By integrating state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure and redesigning algorithms for graphic processing units (GPUs), Accelerated DFT achieves high-speed calculations without sacrificing accuracy. It provides an accessible and scalable solution for the increasing demands of DFT calculations in scientific communities. The implementation details, examples, and benchmark results illustrate how Accelerated DFT can significantly expedite scientific discovery across various domains.

The increasing realism of synthetic speech, driven by advancements in text-to-speech models, raises ethical concerns regarding impersonation and disinformation. Audio watermarking offers a promising solution via embedding human-imperceptible watermarks into AI-generated audios. However, the robustness of audio watermarking against common/adversarial perturbations remains understudied. We present AudioMarkBench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the robustness of audio watermarking against watermark removal and watermark forgery. AudioMarkBench includes a new dataset created from Common-Voice across languages, biological sexes, and ages, 3 state-of-the-art watermarking methods, and 15 types of perturbations. We benchmark the robustness of these methods against the perturbations in no-box, black-box, and white-box settings. Our findings highlight the vulnerabilities of current watermarking techniques and emphasize the need for more robust and fair audio watermarking solutions. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/moyangkuo/AudioMarkBench., Comment: To appear in NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks, 2024

The surgical intervention is crucial to patient healthcare, and many studies have developed advanced algorithms to provide understanding and decision-making assistance for surgeons. Despite great progress, these algorithms are developed for a single specific task and scenario, and in practice require the manual combination of different functions, thus limiting the applicability. Thus, an intelligent and versatile surgical assistant is expected to accurately understand the surgeon's intentions and accordingly conduct the specific tasks to support the surgical process. In this work, by leveraging advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs), we propose a Versatile Surgery Assistant (VS-Assistant) that can accurately understand the surgeon's intention and complete a series of surgical understanding tasks, e.g., surgical scene analysis, surgical instrument detection, and segmentation on demand. Specifically, to achieve superior surgical multimodal understanding, we devise a mixture of projectors (MOP) module to align the surgical MLLM in VS-Assistant to balance the natural and surgical knowledge. Moreover, we devise a surgical Function-Calling Tuning strategy to enable the VS-Assistant to understand surgical intentions, and thus make a series of surgical function calls on demand to meet the needs of the surgeons. Extensive experiments on neurosurgery data confirm that our VS-Assistant can understand the surgeon's intention more accurately than the existing MLLM, resulting in overwhelming performance in textual analysis and visual tasks. Source code and models will be made public.

Ultrasound robots are increasingly used in medical diagnostics and early disease screening. However, current ultrasound robots lack the intelligence to understand human intentions and instructions, hindering autonomous ultrasound scanning. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Ultrasound Embodied Intelligence system that equips ultrasound robots with the large language model (LLM) and domain knowledge, thereby improving the efficiency of ultrasound robots. Specifically, we first design an ultrasound operation knowledge database to add expertise in ultrasound scanning to the LLM, enabling the LLM to perform precise motion planning. Furthermore, we devise a dynamic ultrasound scanning strategy based on a \textit{think-observe-execute} prompt engineering, allowing LLMs to dynamically adjust motion planning strategies during the scanning procedures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system significantly improves ultrasound scan efficiency and quality from verbal commands. This advancement in autonomous medical scanning technology contributes to non-invasive diagnostics and streamlined medical workflows., Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables

Cooperative perception is essential to enhance the efficiency and safety of future transportation systems, requiring extensive data sharing among vehicles on the road, which raises significant privacy concerns. Federated learning offers a promising solution by enabling data privacy-preserving collaborative enhancements in perception, decision-making, and planning among connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). However, federated learning is impeded by significant challenges arising from data heterogeneity across diverse clients, potentially diminishing model accuracy and prolonging convergence periods. This study introduces a specialized federated learning framework for CP, termed the federated dynamic weighted aggregation (FedDWA) algorithm, facilitated by dynamic adjusting loss (DALoss) function. This framework employs dynamic client weighting to direct model convergence and integrates a novel loss function that utilizes Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) to counteract the detrimental effects of non-independently and identically distributed (Non-IID) and unbalanced data. Utilizing the BEV transformer as the primary model, our rigorous testing on the OpenV2V dataset, augmented with FedBEVT data, demonstrates significant improvements in the average intersection over union (IoU). These results highlight the substantial potential of our federated learning framework to address data heterogeneity challenges in CP, thereby enhancing the accuracy of environmental perception models and facilitating more robust and efficient collaborative learning solutions in the transportation sector., Comment: accepted by IEEE RA-L

Vehicle license plate recognition is a crucial task in intelligent traffic management systems. However, the challenge of achieving accurate recognition persists due to motion blur from fast-moving vehicles. Despite the widespread use of image synthesis approaches in existing deblurring and recognition algorithms, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios remains unproven. To address this, we introduce the first large-scale license plate deblurring dataset named License Plate Blur (LPBlur), captured by a dual-camera system and processed through a post-processing pipeline to avoid misalignment issues. Then, we propose a License Plate Deblurring Generative Adversarial Network (LPDGAN) to tackle the license plate deblurring: 1) a Feature Fusion Module to integrate multi-scale latent codes; 2) a Text Reconstruction Module to restore structure through textual modality; 3) a Partition Discriminator Module to enhance the model's perception of details in each letter. Extensive experiments validate the reliability of the LPBlur dataset for both model training and testing, showcasing that our proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art motion deblurring methods in realistic license plate deblurring scenarios. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/haoyGONG/LPDGAN., Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2024

Recent advancements in Surgical Visual Question Answering (Surgical-VQA) and related region grounding have shown great promise for robotic and medical applications, addressing the critical need for automated methods in personalized surgical mentorship. However, existing models primarily provide simple structured answers and struggle with complex scenarios due to their limited capability in recognizing long-range dependencies and aligning multimodal information. In this paper, we introduce Surgical-LVLM, a novel personalized large vision-language model tailored for complex surgical scenarios. Leveraging the pre-trained large vision-language model and specialized Visual Perception LoRA (VP-LoRA) blocks, our model excels in understanding complex visual-language tasks within surgical contexts. In addressing the visual grounding task, we propose the Token-Interaction (TIT) module, which strengthens the interaction between the grounding module and the language responses of the Large Visual Language Model (LVLM) after projecting them into the latent space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Surgical-LVLM on several benchmarks, including EndoVis-17-VQLA, EndoVis-18-VQLA, and a newly introduced EndoVis Conversations dataset, which sets new performance standards. Our work contributes to advancing the field of automated surgical mentorship by providing a context-aware solution.

Real-time 6 DOF localization of bronchoscopes is crucial for enhancing intervention quality. However, current vision-based technologies struggle to balance between generalization to unseen data and computational speed. In this study, we propose a Depth-based Dual-Loop framework for real-time Visually Navigated Bronchoscopy (DD-VNB) that can generalize across patient cases without the need of re-training. The DD-VNB framework integrates two key modules: depth estimation and dual-loop localization. To address the domain gap among patients, we propose a knowledge-embedded depth estimation network that maps endoscope frames to depth, ensuring generalization by eliminating patient-specific textures. The network embeds view synthesis knowledge into a cycle adversarial architecture for scale-constrained monocular depth estimation. For real-time performance, our localization module embeds a fast ego-motion estimation network into the loop of depth registration. The ego-motion inference network estimates the pose change of the bronchoscope in high frequency while depth registration against the pre-operative 3D model provides absolute pose periodically. Specifically, the relative pose changes are fed into the registration process as the initial guess to boost its accuracy and speed. Experiments on phantom and in-vivo data from patients demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework: 1) monocular depth estimation outperforms SOTA, 2) localization achieves an accuracy of Absolute Tracking Error (ATE) of 4.7 $\pm$ 3.17 mm in phantom and 6.49 $\pm$ 3.88 mm in patient data, 3) with a frame-rate approaching video capture speed, 4) without the necessity of case-wise network retraining. The framework's superior speed and accuracy demonstrate its promising clinical potential for real-time bronchoscopic navigation.

Bronchoscopy plays a significant role in the early diagnosis and treatment of lung diseases. This process demands physicians to maneuver the flexible endoscope for reaching distal lesions, particularly requiring substantial expertise when examining the airways of the upper lung lobe. With the development of artificial intelligence and robotics, reinforcement learning (RL) method has been applied to the manipulation of interventional surgical robots. However, unlike human physicians who utilize multimodal information, most of the current RL methods rely on a single modality, limiting their performance. In this paper, we propose BronchoCopilot, a multimodal RL agent designed to acquire manipulation skills for autonomous bronchoscopy. BronchoCopilot specifically integrates images from the bronchoscope camera and estimated robot poses, aiming for a higher success rate within challenging airway environment. We employ auxiliary reconstruction tasks to compress multimodal data and utilize attention mechanisms to achieve an efficient latent representation of this data, serving as input for the RL module. This framework adopts a stepwise training and fine-tuning approach to mitigate the challenges of training difficulty. Our evaluation in the realistic simulation environment reveals that BronchoCopilot, by effectively harnessing multimodal information, attains a success rate of approximately 90\% in fifth generation airways with consistent movements. Additionally, it demonstrates a robust capacity to adapt to diverse cases.

Visual hallucination (VH) means that a multi-modal LLM (MLLM) imagines incorrect details about an image in visual question answering. Existing studies find VH instances only in existing image datasets, which results in biased understanding of MLLMs' performance under VH due to limited diversity of such VH instances. In this work, we propose a tool called VHTest to generate a diverse set of VH instances. Specifically, VHTest finds some initial VH instances in existing image datasets (e.g., COCO), generates a text description for each VH mode, and uses a text-to-image generative model (e.g., DALL-E-3) to generate VH images based on the text descriptions. We collect a benchmark dataset with 1,200 VH instances in 8 VH modes using VHTest. We find that existing MLLMs such as GPT-4V, LLaVA-1.5, and MiniGPT-v2 hallucinate for a large fraction of the instances in our benchmark. Moreover, we find that fine-tuning an MLLM using our benchmark dataset reduces its likelihood to hallucinate without sacrificing its performance on other benchmarks. Our benchmarks are publicly available: https://github.com/wenhuang2000/VHTest., Comment: To appear in ACL Findings, 2024

Foundation model has become the backbone of the AI ecosystem. In particular, a foundation model can be used as a general-purpose feature extractor to build various downstream classifiers. However, foundation models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks and a backdoored foundation model is a single-point-of-failure of the AI ecosystem, e.g., multiple downstream classifiers inherit the backdoor vulnerabilities simultaneously. In this work, we propose Mudjacking, the first method to patch foundation models to remove backdoors. Specifically, given a misclassified trigger-embedded input detected after a backdoored foundation model is deployed, Mudjacking adjusts the parameters of the foundation model to remove the backdoor. We formulate patching a foundation model as an optimization problem and propose a gradient descent based method to solve it. We evaluate Mudjacking on both vision and language foundation models, eleven benchmark datasets, five existing backdoor attacks, and thirteen adaptive backdoor attacks. Our results show that Mudjacking can remove backdoor from a foundation model while maintaining its utility., Comment: To appear in USENIX Security Symposium, 2024

Localizing the bronchoscope in real time is essential for ensuring intervention quality. However, most existing methods struggle to balance between speed and generalization. To address these challenges, we present BronchoTrack, an innovative real-time framework for accurate branch-level localization, encompassing lumen detection, tracking, and airway association.To achieve real-time performance, we employ a benchmark lightweight detector for efficient lumen detection. We are the first to introduce multi-object tracking to bronchoscopic localization, mitigating temporal confusion in lumen identification caused by rapid bronchoscope movement and complex airway structures. To ensure generalization across patient cases, we propose a training-free detection-airway association method based on a semantic airway graph that encodes the hierarchy of bronchial tree structures.Experiments on nine patient datasets demonstrate BronchoTrack's localization accuracy of 85.64 \%, while accessing up to the 4th generation of airways.Furthermore, we tested BronchoTrack in an in-vivo animal study using a porcine model, where it successfully localized the bronchoscope into the 8th generation airway.Experimental evaluation underscores BronchoTrack's real-time performance in both satisfying accuracy and generalization, demonstrating its potential for clinical applications.

The discovery of new catalysts is essential for the design of new and more efficient chemical processes in order to transition to a sustainable future. We introduce an AI-guided computational screening framework unifying linguistic reasoning with quantum-chemistry based feedback from 3D atomistic representations. Our approach formulates catalyst discovery as an uncertain environment where an agent actively searches for highly effective catalysts via the iterative combination of large language model (LLM)-derived hypotheses and atomistic graph neural network (GNN)-derived feedback. Identified catalysts in intermediate search steps undergo structural evaluation based on spatial orientation, reaction pathways, and stability. Scoring functions based on adsorption energies and reaction energy barriers steer the exploration in the LLM's knowledge space toward energetically favorable, high-efficiency catalysts. We introduce planning methods that automatically guide the exploration without human input, providing competitive performance against expert-enumerated chemical descriptor-based implementations. By integrating language-guided reasoning with computational chemistry feedback, our work pioneers AI-accelerated, trustworthy catalyst discovery., Comment: 9 pages, accepted by ICML 2024, final version

Traditional rigid endoscopes have challenges in flexibly treating tumors located deep in the brain, and low operability and fixed viewing angles limit its development. This study introduces a novel dual-segment flexible robotic endoscope MicroNeuro, designed to perform biopsies with dexterous surgical manipulation deep in the brain. Taking into account the uncertainty of the control model, an image-based visual servoing with online robot Jacobian estimation has been implemented to enhance motion accuracy. Furthermore, the application of model predictive control with constraints significantly bolsters the flexible robot's ability to adaptively track mobile objects and resist external interference. Experimental results underscore that the proposed control system enhances motion stability and precision. Phantom testing substantiates its considerable potential for deployment in neurosurgery., Comment: Accepted by IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024, 7 pages, 9 figures

Precisely determining the contact force during safe interaction in Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery (MIRS) is still an open research challenge. Inspired by post-operative qualitative analysis from surgical videos, the use of cross-modality data driven deep neural network models has been one of the newest approaches to predict sensorless force trends. However, these methods required for large and variable datasets which are not currently available. In this paper, we present a new vision-haptic dataset (DaFoEs) with variable soft environments for the training of deep neural models. In order to reduce the bias from a single dataset, we present a pipeline to generalize different vision and state data inputs for mixed dataset training, using a previously validated dataset with different setup. Finally, we present a variable encoder-decoder architecture to predict the forces done by the laparoscopic tool using single input or sequence of inputs. For input sequence, we use a recurrent decoder, named with the prefix R, and a new temporal sampling to represent the acceleration of the tool. During our training, we demonstrate that single dataset training tends to overfit to the training data domain, but has difficulties on translating the results across new domains. However, dataset mixing presents a good translation with a mean relative estimated force error of 5% and 12% for the recurrent and non-recurrent models respectively. Our method, also marginally increase the effectiveness of transformers for force estimation up to a maximum of ~15%, as the volume of available data is increase by 150%. In conclusion, we demonstrate that mixing experimental set ups for vision-state force estimation in MIRS is a possible approach towards the general solution of the problem.

Surgical phase recognition is crucial to providing surgery understanding in smart operating rooms. Despite great progress in automatic surgical phase recognition, most existing methods are still restricted by two problems. First, these methods cannot capture discriminative visual features for each frame and motion information with simple 2D networks. Second, the frame-by-frame recognition paradigm degrades the performance due to unstable predictions within each phase, termed as phase shaking. To address these two challenges, we propose a Surgical Phase LocAlization Network, named SurgPLAN, to facilitate a more accurate and stable surgical phase recognition with the principle of temporal detection. Specifically, we first devise a Pyramid SlowFast (PSF) architecture to serve as the visual backbone to capture multi-scale spatial and temporal features by two branches with different frame sampling rates. Moreover, we propose a Temporal Phase Localization (TPL) module to generate the phase prediction based on temporal region proposals, which ensures accurate and consistent predictions within each surgical phase. Extensive experiments confirm the significant advantages of our SurgPLAN over frame-by-frame approaches in terms of both accuracy and stability.

In surgical procedures, correct instrument counting is essential. Instance segmentation is a location method that locates not only an object's bounding box but also each pixel's specific details. However, obtaining mask-level annotations is labor-intensive in instance segmentation. To address this issue, we propose a novel yet effective weakly-supervised surgical instrument instance segmentation approach, named Point-based Weakly-supervised Instance Segmentation (PWISeg). PWISeg adopts an FCN-based architecture with point-to-box and point-to-mask branches to model the relationships between feature points and bounding boxes, as well as feature points and segmentation masks on FPN, accomplishing instrument detection and segmentation jointly in a single model. Since mask level annotations are hard to available in the real world, for point-to-mask training, we introduce an unsupervised projection loss, utilizing the projected relation between predicted masks and bboxes as supervision signal. On the other hand, we annotate a few pixels as the key pixel for each instrument. Based on this, we further propose a key pixel association loss and a key pixel distribution loss, driving the point-to-mask branch to generate more accurate segmentation predictions. To comprehensively evaluate this task, we unveil a novel surgical instrument dataset with manual annotations, setting up a benchmark for further research. Our comprehensive research trial validated the superior performance of our PWISeg. The results show that the accuracy of surgical instrument segmentation is improved, surpassing most methods of instance segmentation via weakly supervised bounding boxes. This improvement is consistently observed in our proposed dataset and when applied to the public HOSPI-Tools dataset., Comment: This work has been submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2024 for possible publication

In minimally invasive surgery, surgical instrument localization is a crucial task for endoscopic videos, which enables various applications for improving surgical outcomes. However, annotating the instrument localization in endoscopic videos is tedious and labor-intensive. In contrast, obtaining the category information is easy and efficient in real-world applications. To fully utilize the category information and address the localization problem, we propose a weakly supervised localization framework named WS-YOLO for surgical instruments. By leveraging the instrument category information as the weak supervision, our WS-YOLO framework adopts an unsupervised multi-round training strategy for the localization capability training. We validate our WS-YOLO framework on the Endoscopic Vision Challenge 2023 dataset, which achieves remarkable performance in the weakly supervised surgical instrument localization. The source code is available at https://github.com/Breezewrf/WS-YOLO., Comment: Accepted by ICRA 2024 Workshop on C4 Surgical Robotic Systems in the Embodied AI Era; Surgical Tool Localization in Endoscopic Videos Challenge of MICCAI2023

Online multi-object tracking (MOT) plays a pivotal role in autonomous systems. The state-of-the-art approaches usually employ a tracking-by-detection method, and data association plays a critical role. This paper proposes a learning and graph-optimized (LEGO) modular tracker to improve data association performance in the existing literature. The proposed LEGO tracker integrates graph optimization and self-attention mechanisms, which efficiently formulate the association score map, facilitating the accurate and efficient matching of objects across time frames. To further enhance the state update process, the Kalman filter is added to ensure consistent tracking by incorporating temporal coherence in the object states. Our proposed method utilizing LiDAR alone has shown exceptional performance compared to other online tracking approaches, including LiDAR-based and LiDAR-camera fusion-based methods. LEGO ranked 1st at the time of submitting results to KITTI object tracking evaluation ranking board and remains 2nd at the time of submitting this paper, among all online trackers in the KITTI MOT benchmark for cars1