Medical vision-language pre-training (VLP) offers significant potential for advancing medical image understanding by leveraging paired image-report data. However, existing methods are limited by False Negatives (FaNe) induced by semantically similar texts and insufficient fine-grained cross-modal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose FaNe, a semantic-enhanced VLP framework. To mitigate false negatives, we introduce a semantic-aware positive pair mining strategy based on text-text similarity with adaptive normalization. Furthermore, we design a text-conditioned sparse attention pooling module to enable fine-grained image-text alignment through localized visual representations guided by textual cues. To strengthen intra-modal discrimination, we develop a hard-negative aware contrastive loss that adaptively reweights semantically similar negatives. Extensive experiments on five downstream medical imaging benchmarks demonstrate that FaNe achieves state-of-the-art performance across image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, validating the effectiveness of our framework.

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims to improve illumination while preserving high-quality color and texture. However, existing methods often fail to extract reliable feature representations due to severely degraded pixel-level information under low-light conditions, resulting in poor texture restoration, color inconsistency, and artifact. To address these challenges, we propose LightQANet, a novel framework that introduces quantized and adaptive feature learning for low-light enhancement, aiming to achieve consistent and robust image quality across diverse lighting conditions. From the static modeling perspective, we design a Light Quantization Module (LQM) to explicitly extract and quantify illumination-related factors from image features. By enforcing structured light factor learning, LQM enhances the extraction of light-invariant representations and mitigates feature inconsistency across varying illumination levels. From the dynamic adaptation perspective, we introduce a Light-Aware Prompt Module (LAPM), which encodes illumination priors into learnable prompts to dynamically guide the feature learning process. LAPM enables the model to flexibly adapt to complex and continuously changing lighting conditions, further improving image enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple low-light datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering superior qualitative and quantitative results across various challenging lighting scenarios.

Recent advancements in deep learning for image classification predominantly rely on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Transformer-based architectures. However, these models face notable challenges in medical imaging, particularly in capturing intricate texture details and contextual features. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) represent a novel class of architectures that enhance nonlinear transformation modeling, offering improved representation of complex features. In this work, we present MedKAN, a medical image classification framework built upon KAN and its convolutional extensions. MedKAN features two core modules: the Local Information KAN (LIK) module for fine-grained feature extraction and the Global Information KAN (GIK) module for broad contextual representation learning. By combining these modules, MedKAN achieves robust feature modeling and fusion. To address diverse computational needs, we introduce three scalable variants-MedKAN-S, MedKAN-B, and MedKAN-L. Experimental results on nine public medical imaging datasets demonstrate that MedKAN achieves superior performance compared to CNN- and Transformer-based models, highlighting its effectiveness and generalizability in medical image analysis. Code: https://github.com/SeriYann/MedKAN

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims to improve low-illumination images. However, existing methods face two challenges: (1) uncertainty in restoration from diverse brightness degradations; (2) loss of texture and color information caused by noise suppression and light enhancement. In this paper, we propose a novel enhancement approach, CodeEnhance, by leveraging discrete codebook priors and image refinement to address these challenges. In particular, we reframe LLIE as learning an image-to-code mapping from low-light images to discrete codebook, which has been learned from high-quality images. To enhance this process, a Semantic Embedding Module (SEM) is introduced to integrate semantic information with low-level features, and a Codebook Shift (CS) mechanism, designed to adapt the pre-learned codebook to better suit the distinct characteristics of our low-light dataset. Additionally, we present an Interactive Feature Transformation (IFT) module to refine texture and color information during image reconstruction, allowing for interactive enhancement based on user preferences. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that the incorporation of prior knowledge and controllable information transfer significantly enhances LLIE performance in terms of quality and fidelity. The proposed CodeEnhance exhibits superior robustness to various degradations, including uneven illumination, noise, and color distortion. The code can be obtained from https://github.com/csxuwu/CodeEnhance or https://www.scholat.com/laizhihui.cn .

Removing unwanted reflections from images is a fundamental yet challenging problem in low-level computer vision. Recent deep learning-based Single Image Reflection Removal (SIRR) methods have made significant progress. However, separating reflections from transmission content remains difficult, particularly in complex scenes where the two exhibit high visual similarity. Upon careful analysis, we find that reflections predominantly reside in the high-frequency components of an image. These reflections tend to distort fine details in the high-frequency range, while the low-frequency information remains relatively less affected. This observation motivates us to explore a frequency-aware approach for SIRR by leveraging the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The wavelet decomposition enables us to distinguish and isolate reflective artifacts in the frequency domain while preserving the transmission information. Building on this insight, we propose a novel Wavelet-guided Deep Unfolding Network (WDUNet) that leverages the strengths of wavelet decomposition and deep unfolding techniques to improve interpretability and generalization in SIRR. Specifically, we formulate an optimization-based reflection removal model using DWT and convolutional dictionaries. The proposed model is optimized via a proximal gradient algorithm and then unfolded into a neural network architecture, where all parameters are learned end-to-end during training. By combining wavelet domain analysis with deep unfolding, WDUNet enhances both the interpretability and generalization of SIRR methods. Additionally, we design and integrate the Low-frequency Parameter Estimation Module (LPEM) and High-frequency Parameter Estimation Module (HPEM) modules into WDUNet, allowing the network to automatically learn and optimize the models' hyperparameters. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that WDUNet consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both objective evaluation metrics and subjective visual quality.

Hash learning aims to map multimedia data into Hamming space, in which the data point is represented by low-dimensional binary codes and the similarity relationships are preserved. Despite existing hash learning methods have been effectively used in data retrieval tasks for its merits of low memory cost and high computational efficiency, there still remain two major technical challenges. Firstly, due to the discrete constraints of hash codes, traditional hash methods typically use relaxation strategy to learn real-value features and then quantize them into binary codes through a sign function, resulting in significant quantization errors. Secondly, hash codes are usually low-dimensional, which would be inadequate to preserve either the information of each data point or the relationship between two. These two challenges would greatly limit the retrieval performance of learned hash codes. To solve these problems, we introduce a novel quantization method called scaling factor quantization to enhance hash learning. Unlike traditional hashing methods, we propose to map the data into two parts, i.e., hash codes and scaling factors, to learn the representative codes for the use of retrieval. Specifically, we design a multi-output branch network structure, i.e., Deep Scaling factor Quantization Network (DSQN) and an iterative training strategy for DSQN to learn the two parts of mapping. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the hash codes and scaling factors learned by DSQN significantly improve retrieval accuracy compared to existing hash learning methods.

Available subspace clustering methods often contain two stages, finding low-dimensional subspaces of data and then conducting clustering in the subspaces. Therefore, how to find the subspaces that better represent the original data becomes a research challenge. However, most of the reported methods are based on the premise that the contributions of different features are equal, which may not be ideal for real scenarios, i.e., the contributions of the important features may be overwhelmed by a large amount of redundant features. In this study, a weighted subspace fuzzy clustering (WSFC) model with a locality preservation mechanism is presented, which can adaptively capture the importance of different features, achieve an optimal lower-dimensional subspace, and perform fuzzy clustering simultaneously. Since each feature can be well quantified in terms of its importance, the proposed model exhibits the sparsity and robustness of fuzzy clustering. The intrinsic geometrical structures of data can also be preserved while enhancing the interpretability of clustering tasks. Extensive experimental results show that WSFC can allocate appropriate weights to different features according to data distributions and clustering tasks and achieve superior performance compared to other clustering models on real-world datasets.

Deep learning models have made extraordinary progress in recent years, but image recognition in low-light conditions has not been studied much. Due to its application prospects, low-light image recognition has still received focuses. Low-light image recognition is still challenging because of the crucial feature information that is hard to mine and learned by a deep learning model. Compared with enhancing the image's brightness before recognition, recognizing low-light images by end-to-end mode straightly has a more practical sense. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end model named Attention-Capsule Network (ACNet) for low-light image recognition tasks. The proposed model is extend from capsule structure, and its key component is the Global-Local Attention (GLA) module. The GLA module is designed to effectively and comprehensively combine important information. It mines global perception information by global block and gets local detail information from the particular local union. This strategy can significantly improve the performance of the proposed model. In addition, this paper proposes a directional learning loss, which guides the model to extract key features of images by optimizing the error between reconstructed images and normal-light images. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed attention-capsule Network model for low-light image recognition.