Chaoqi Chen

dblp:230/4601 · DBLP profile ↗
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36ranked-venue papers
14as first author
32since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-0052-3819ORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 30 · 13 first-author · 26 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 19 · 6 first-author · 17 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 3 · 1 first-author · 3 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 2 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 4D Point Cloud Segmentation via Active Test-Time Adaptation
abstract
4D point cloud segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving with continuous LiDAR streams. While test-time adaptation (TTA) is the standard approach for handling dynamic environments, current methods suffer from catastrophic error accumulation due to over-reliance on pseudo-labels. Active learning could provide reliable annotations for critical samples, but combining it with TTA faces severe challenges: realtime processing requirements and expensive 3D labeling costs. In this paper, we propose ATTA-4DSeg, the first framework to achieve efficient active test-time adaptation for 4D point cloud segmentation under extreme budget constraints. Our key insight is a self-reinforcing loop: oracle annotations refine adaptation prototypes, which then guide the selection of subsequent high-value samples from regions with severe distribution shifts, maximizing each annotation’s impact. Specifically, we propose three key innovations: (1) dual-prototype comparison that precisely localizes distribution shift boundaries to narrow annotation scope, (2) Class-Inverse Budget Allocation (CIBA) ensuring balanced adaptation across all categories, coupled with hybrid uncertainty scoring combining voxel-level geometry and point-wise variance for optimal sample selection, and (3) a refinement strategy leveraging sparse oracle annotations to improve predictions on unlabeled points, maximizing annotation utility. Extensive experiments show ATTA-4DSeg improves mIoU by 18.87%, 19.92%, and 3.6% on three domain adaptation benchmarks using only 1% annotation budget. Our method operates 2.28× faster than state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, our approach reaches 90% of fully-supervised performance using only 5% annotation budget.
Mingrong Gong, Chaoqi Chen, Luyao Tang, Sergio Escalera
AAAI2
2026 Organ-Aware Routing Mixture-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation for Fetal Ultrasound Reporting
abstract
Fetal ultrasound screening is a uniquely complex diagnostic task involving the simultaneous assessment of multiple fetal organs—each with its own anatomical and clinical context—within a single examination. Automating report generation for such cases poses a significant challenge: unlike existing methods that focus on single-organ radiology tasks (e.g., chest X-rays), fetal ultrasound requires reasoning over a structured, multiple-to-multiple setting, i.e., multi-organ images corresponding to a multi-section report. In this paper, we introduce FetusR, the first large-scale dataset for multi-organ fetal ultrasound reporting, containing 15,594 real-world cases with rich organ-wise annotations. To address the intrinsic image-report alignment, we propose Organ-Aware Routing Mixture-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation (ORM-RAG) inspired by the Mixture-of-Experts paradigm. Our method decomposes the complex alignment problem into multiple one-to-one sub-retrieval tasks. Specifically, ORM-RAG integrates (1) an organ-aware mixture-of-retrieval module that partitions the retrieval space into organ-specific corpora for independent retrieval, and (2) a dynamic routing mechanism that selectively aggregates high-confidence organ-specific reports while filtering uncertain ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across both textual similarity and clinical accuracy metrics. Our work opens a new direction for long-form, structured report generation in real-world, multi-organ medical imaging scenarios.
Bin Pu, Rongbin Li, Xinpeng Ding, Lei Zhao 0013, Chaoqi Chen, Shengli Li 0001, Kenli Li 0001
AAAI6
2026 Decompose and Attribute: Boosting Generalizable Open-Set Object Detection via Objectness Score
abstract
Open-set object detection (OSOD) aims to recognize known object categories while localizing previously unseen instances. However, real-world scenarios often involve co-occurring domain shifts and novel object categories. Existing OSOD methods typically overlook domain shifts, relying on source-trained representations that entangle domain-specific style with semantic content, thereby hindering generalization to both unseen domains and novel categories. To address this challenge, we propose a unified framework, termed DecOmpose and ATtribute (DOAT), which disentangles domain-specific style from semantic structure, thereby facilitating generalizable object detection. DOAT employs wavelet-based feature decomposition to separate style information from high-frequency structural details, thus enabling an explicit separation of domain and category shifts. To account for domain shift, the low-frequency components are perturbed within a style subspace to simulate diverse domain appearances. For unknown object discovery, the high-frequency components are utilized to estimate objectness scores via an attribution mechanism that fuses wavelet energy with semantic distance to known-category prototypes. Extensive experiments on standard open-set benchmarks have demonstrated the superior generalization performance of DOAT.
Lichen Wei, Luyao Tang, Chaoqi Chen, Zheyuan Cai, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding
AAAI4
2026 TG-Field: Geometry-Aware Radiative Gaussian Fields for Tomographic Reconstruction
abstract
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized 3D scene representation with superior efficiency and quality. While recent adaptations for computed tomography (CT) show promise, they struggle with severe artifacts under highly sparse-view projections and dynamic motions. To address these challenges, we propose Tomographic Geometry Field (TG-Field), a geometry-aware Gaussian deformation framework tailored for both static and dynamic CT reconstruction. A multi-resolution hash encoder is employed to capture local spatial priors, regularizing primitive parameters under ultra-sparse settings. We further extend the framework to dynamic reconstruction by introducing time-conditioned representations and a spatiotemporal attention block to adaptively aggregate features, thereby resolving spatiotemporal ambiguities and enforcing temporal coherence. In addition, a motion-flow network models fine-grained respiratory motion to track local anatomical deformations. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that TG-Field consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy under highly sparse-view conditions.
Yuxiang Zhong, Chaoqi Chen, Senyou An, Hui Huang 0004
AAAI3
2025 Out-of-Distribution Detection with Prototypical Outlier Proxy
abstract
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a crucial task for deploying deep learning models in the wild. One of the major challenges is that well-trained deep models tend to perform over-confidence on unseen test data. Recent research attempts to leverage real or synthetic outliers to mitigate the issue, which may significantly increase computational costs and be biased toward specific outlier characteristics. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework, Prototypical Outlier Proxy (POP), which introduces virtual OOD prototypes to reshape the decision boundaries between ID and OOD data. Specifically, we transform the learnable classifier into a fixed one and augment it with a set of prototypical weight vectors. Then, we introduce a hierarchical similarity boundary loss to impose adaptive penalties depending on the degree of misclassification. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of POP. Notably, POP achieves average FPR95 reductions of 7.70%, 6.30%, and 5.42% over the second-best methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-200, respectively. Moreover, compared to the recent method NPOS, which relies on outlier synthesis, POP trains 7.2 times faster and performs inference 19.5 times faster.
Mingrong Gong, Chaoqi Chen, Qingqiang Sun, Hui Huang 0004
AAAI2
2025 Single-View Graph Contrastive Learning with Soft Neighborhood Awareness
abstract
Most graph contrastive learning (GCL) methods heavily rely on cross-view contrast, thus facing several concomitant challenges, such as the complexity of designing effective augmentations, the potential for information loss between views, and increased computational costs. To mitigate reliance on cross-view contrasts, we propose SIGNA, a novel single-view graph contrastive learning framework. Regarding the inconsistency between structural connection and semantic similarity of neighborhoods, we resort to soft neighborhood awareness for GCL. Specifically, we leverage dropout to obtain structurally-related yet randomly-noised embedding pairs for neighbors, which serve as potential positive samples. At each epoch, the role of partial neighbors is switched from positive to negative, leading to probabilistic neighborhood contrastive learning effect. Moreover, we propose a normalized Jensen-Shannon divergence estimator for a better effect of contrastive learning. Experiments on diverse node-level tasks demonstrate that our simple single-view GCL framework consistently outperforms existing methods by margins of up to 21.74% (PPI). In particular, with soft neighborhood awareness, SIGNA can adopt MLPs instead of complicated GCNs as the encoder in transductive learning tasks, thus speeding up its inference process by 109× to 331×.
Qingqiang Sun, Chaoqi Chen, Ziyue Qiao, Xubin Zheng
AAAI2
2025 On the Cross-type Homophily of Heterogeneous Graphs: Understanding and Unleashing
abstract
Homophily, the tendency of similar nodes to connect, is a fundamental phenomenon in network science and a critical factor in the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs). While existing studies primarily explore homophily in homogeneous graphs, where nodes share the same type, real-world networks are often more accurately modeled as heterogeneous graphs (HGs) with diverse node types and intricate cross-type interactions. This structural diversity complicates the analysis of homophily, as traditional homophily metrics fail to account for distinct label spaces across node types. To address this limitation, we introduce the Cross-Type Homophily Ratio (CHR), a novel metric that quantifies homophily based on the similarity of target information across different node types. Additionally, we propose Cross-Type Homophily-guided Graph Editing (CTHGE), a novel method for improving heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) performance by optimizing cross-type connectivity using Cross-Type Homophily Ratio. Extensive experiments on five HG datasets with nine HGNNs validate the effectiveness of CTHGE, which delivers a maximum relative performance improvement of over 25% for HGNNs on node classification tasks, offering a fresh perspective on cross-type homophily in HGs learning.
Ziyue Qiao, Chaoqi Chen, Zhengyi Yang 0001, Lun Du, Qingqiang Sun
CIKM3
2025 OCRT: Boosting Foundation Models in the Open World with Object-Concept-Relation Triad
abstract
Although foundation models (FMs) claim to be powerful, their generalization ability significantly decreases when faced with distribution shifts, weak supervision, or malicious attacks in the open world. On the other hand, most domain generalization or adversarial fine-tuning methods are task-related or model-specific, ignoring the universality in practical applications and the transferability between FMs. This paper delves into the problem of generalizing FMs to the out-of-domain data. We propose a novel framework, the Object-Concept-Relation Triad (OCRT), that enables FMs to extract sparse, high-level concepts and intricate relational structures from raw visual inputs. The key idea is to bind objects in visual scenes and a set of object-centric representations through unsupervised decoupling and iterative refinement. To be specific, we project the object-centric representations onto a semantic concept space that the model can readily interpret and estimate their importance to filter out irrelevant elements. Then, a concept-based graph, which has a flexible degree, is constructed to incorporate the set of concepts and their corresponding importance, enabling the extraction of high-order factors from informative concepts and facilitating relational reasoning among these concepts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OCRT can substantially boost the generalizability and robustness of SAM and CLIP across multiple downstream tasks. Code
Luyao Tang, Chaoqi Chen, Zeyu Zhang 0006, Yue Huang 0001, Kun Zhang 0001
CVPR3
2025 DIVE: Taming DINO for Subject-Driven Video Editing
abstract
Building on the success of diffusion models in image generation and editing, video editing has recently gained substantial attention. However, maintaining temporal consistency and motion alignment still remains challenging. To address these issues, this paper proposes DINO-guided Video Editing (DIVE), a framework designed to facilitate subject-driven editing in source videos conditioned on either target text prompts or reference images with specific identities. The core of DIVE lies in leveraging the powerful semantic features extracted from a pretrained DINOv2 model as implicit correspondences to guide the editing process. Specifically, to ensure temporal motion consistency, DIVE employs DINO features to align with the motion trajectory of the source video. For precise subject editing, DIVE incorporates the DINO features of reference images into a pretrained text-to-image model to learn Low-Rank Adaptations (LoRAs), effectively registering the target subject's identity. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world videos demonstrate that our framework can achieve high-quality editing results with robust motion consistency, highlighting the potential of DINO to contribute to video editing. Project page: https://dino-video-editing.github.io
Yi Huang 0035, Wei Xiong 0008, He Zhang 0004, Chaoqi Chen, Jianzhuang Liu, Mingfu Yan, Shifeng Chen
ICCV4
2025 Dissecting Generalized Category Discovery: Multiplex Consensus under Self-Deconstruction
Luyao Tang, Kunze Huang, Chaoqi Chen, Chenxin Li, Xiaotong Tu, Xinghao Ding, Yue Huang 0001
ICCV3
2025 ASGS: Single-Domain Generalizable Open-Set Object Detection via Adaptive Subgraph Searching
Luyao Tang, Chaoqi Chen, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding
ICCV4
2024 Mixstyle-Entropy: Whole Process Domain Generalization with Causal Intervention and Perturbation
Luyao Tang, Chaoqi Chen, Xinghao Ding, Yue Huang 0001
BMVC3
2024 Reconstruct and Match: Out-of-Distribution Robustness via Topological Homogeneity
abstract
Since deep learning models are usually deployed in non-stationary environments, it is imperative to improve their robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. A common approach to mitigate distribution shift is to regularize internal representations or predictors learned from in-distribution (ID) data to be domain invariant. Past studies have primarily learned pairwise invariances, ignoring the intrinsic structure and high-order dependencies of the data. Unlike machines, human recognizes objects by first dividing them into major components and then identifying the topological relation of these components. Motivated by this, we propose Reconstruct and Match (REMA), a general learning framework for object recognition tasks to endow deep models with the capability of capturing the topological homogeneity of objects without human prior knowledge or fine-grained annotations. To identify major components from objects, REMA introduces a selective slot-based reconstruction module to dynamically map dense pixels into a sparse and discrete set of slot vectors in an unsupervised manner. Then, to model high-order dependencies among these components, we propose a hypergraph-based relational reasoning module that models the intricate relations of nodes (slots) with structural constraints. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that REMA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in OOD generalization and test-time adaptation settings.
Chaoqi Chen, Luyao Tang, Hui Huang 0004
NeurIPS1
2024 Multi-domain pseudo-reference quality evaluation for infrared and visible image fusion
abstract
Abstract Infrared and visible image fusion involves merging the advantages of infrared and visible images to generate a composite image that encompasses thermal radiation as well as intricate texture details. Infrared and visible image fusion has garnered increasing attention, with numerous fusion methods proposed. However, how to fairly perceive the performance of fused image remains a contentious topic. This paper is dedicated to solving this problem from two perspectives (e.g., subjective and objective aspects). Firstly, an infrared and visible fusion image quality assessment dataset was constructed, including 60 pairs of infrared and visible images captured in various scenes, along with 540 fusion images with different types and degrees of distortions. Additionally, a subjective evaluation dataset of 16,200 subjective scores by 30 participants was further provided for the fused image. Secondly, to overcome the challenging assessment for infrared and visible fusion images without a real reference image, an interesting multi‐domain pseudo‐reference image quality assessment model (MPIQAM) is proposed, by comprehensively considering the thermal radiation information distortion, texture information distortion, and overall naturalness of the fused image. The proposed MPIQAM was compared with 18 mainstream objective metrics, and the experimental findings showcased a commendable level of competitiveness.
Xiangchao Meng, Chaoqi Chen, Qiang Liu 0035, Feng Shao 0001
IET Image Process.2
2024 A Survey on Graph Neural Networks and Graph Transformers in Computer Vision: A Task-Oriented Perspective
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained momentum in graph representation learning and boosted the state of the art in a variety of areas, such as data mining (e.g., social network analysis and recommender systems), computer vision (e.g., object detection and point cloud learning), and natural language processing (e.g., relation extraction and sequence learning), to name a few. With the emergence of Transformers in natural language processing and computer vision, graph Transformers embed a graph structure into the Transformer architecture to overcome the limitations of local neighborhood aggregation while avoiding strict structural inductive biases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of GNNs and graph Transformers in computer vision from a task-oriented perspective. Specifically, we divide their applications in computer vision into five categories according to the modality of input data, i.e., 2D natural images, videos, 3D data, vision + language, and medical images. In each category, we further divide the applications according to a set of vision tasks. Such a task-oriented taxonomy allows us to examine how each task is tackled by different GNN-based approaches and how well these approaches perform. Based on the necessary preliminaries, we provide the definitions and challenges of the tasks, in-depth coverage of the representative approaches, as well as discussions regarding insights, limitations, and future directions.
Chaoqi Chen, Yushuang Wu, Qiyuan Dai 0001, Mutian Xu, Sibei Yang, Xiaoguang Han 0001, Yizhou Yu
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.1
2024 WaveDM: Wavelet-Based Diffusion Models for Image Restoration
abstract
Latest diffusion-based methods for many image restoration tasks outperform traditional models, but they encounter the long-time inference problem. To tackle it, this paper proposes a Wavelet-Based Diffusion Model (WaveDM). WaveDM learns the distribution of clean images in the wavelet domain conditioned on the wavelet spectrum of degraded images after wavelet transform, which is more time-saving in each step of sampling than modeling in the spatial domain. To ensure restoration performance, a unique training strategy is proposed where the low-frequency and high-frequency spectrums are learned using distinct modules. In addition, an Efficient Conditional Sampling (ECS) strategy is developed from experiments, which reduces the number of total sampling steps to around 5. Evaluations on twelve benchmark datasets including image raindrop removal, rain steaks removal, dehazing, defocus deblurring, demoiréing, and denoising demonstrate that WaveDM achieves state-of-the-art performance with the efficiency that is comparable to traditional one-pass methods and over 100× faster than existing image restoration methods using vanilla diffusion models. The code is available athttps://github.com/stayalive16/WaveDM
Yi Huang 0035, Jiancheng Huang, Jianzhuang Liu, Mingfu Yan, Jiaxi Lv, Chaoqi Chen, Shifeng Chen
IEEE Trans. Multim.7
2023 Activate and Reject: Towards Safe Domain Generalization under Category Shift
abstract
Albeit the notable performance on in-domain test points, it is non-trivial for deep neural networks to attain satisfactory accuracy when deploying in the open world, where novel domains and object classes often occur. In this paper, we study a practical problem of Domain Generalization under Category Shift (DGCS), which aims to simultaneously detect unknown-class samples and classify known-class samples in the target domains. Compared to prior DG works, we face two new challenges: 1) how to learn the concept of "unknown " during training with only source known- class samples, and 2) how to adapt the source-trained model to unseen environments for safe model deployment. To this end, we propose a novel Activate and Reject (ART) framework to reshape the model’s decision boundary to accommodate unknown classes and conduct post hoc modification to further discriminate known and unknown classes using unlabeled test data. Specifically, during training, we promote the response to the unknown by optimizing the unknown probability and then smoothing the overall output to mitigate the overconfidence issue. At test time, we introduce a step-wise online adaptation method that predicts the label by virtue of the cross-domain nearest neighbor and class prototype information without updating the network’s parameters or using threshold-based mechanisms. Experiments reveal that ART consistently improves the generalization capability of deep networks on different vision tasks. For image classification, ART improves the H-score by 6.1% on average compared to the previous best method. For object detection and semantic segmentation, we establish new benchmarks and achieve competitive performance.
Chaoqi Chen, Luyao Tang, Leitian Tao, Yue Huang 0001, Xiaoguang Han 0001, Yizhou Yu
ICCV1
2023 Towards Higher-order Topological Consistency for Unsupervised Network Alignment
abstract
Network alignment task, which aims to identify corresponding nodes in different networks, is of great significance for many subsequent applications. Without the need for labeled anchor links, unsupervised alignment methods have been attracting more and more attention. However, the topological consistency assumptions defined by existing methods are generally low-order and less accurate because only the edge-indiscriminative topological pattern is considered, which is especially risky in an unsupervised setting. To reposition the focus of the alignment process from low-order to higher-order topological consistency, in this paper, we propose a fully unsupervised network alignment framework named HTC. The proposed higher-order topological consistency is formulated based on edge orbits, which is merged into the information aggregation process of a graph convolutional network so that the alignment consistencies are transformed into the similarity of node embeddings. Furthermore, the encoder is trained to be multi-orbit-aware and then is refined to identify more trusted anchor links. Node correspondence is comprehensively evaluated by integrating all different orders of consistency. In addition to sound theoretical analysis, the superiority of the proposed method is also empirically demonstrated through extensive experimental evaluation. On three pairs of real-world datasets and two pairs of synthetic datasets, our HTC consistently outperforms a wide variety of unsupervised and supervised methods with the least or comparable time consumption. It also exhibits robustness to structural noise as a result of our multiorbit-aware training mechanism.
Qingqiang Sun, Xuemin Lin 0001, Ying Zhang 0001, Wenjie Zhang 0001, Chaoqi Chen
ICDE5
2023 Domain Generalization via Implicit Domain Augmentation
Zhijie Rao, Chaoqi Chen, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding
ICONIP (8)3
2023 CODA: Generalizing to Open and Unseen Domains with Compaction and Disambiguation
abstract
The generalization capability of machine learning systems degenerates notably when the test distribution drifts from the training distribution. Recently, Domain Generalization (DG) has been gaining momentum in enabling machine learning models to generalize to unseen domains. However, most DG methods assume that training and test data share an identical label space, ignoring the potential unseen categories in many real-world applications. In this paper, we delve into a more general but difficult problem termed Open Test-Time DG (OTDG), where both domain shift and open class may occur on the unseen test data. We propose Compaction and Disambiguation (CODA), a novel two-stage framework for learning compact representations and adapting to open classes in the wild. To meaningfully regularize the model's decision boundary, CODA introduces virtual unknown classes and optimizes a new training objective to insert unknowns into the latent space by compacting the embedding space of source known classes. To adapt target samples to the source model, we then disambiguate the decision boundaries between known and unknown classes with a test-time training objective, mitigating the adaptivity gap and catastrophic forgetting challenges. Experiments reveal that CODA can significantly outperform the previous best method on standard DG datasets and harmonize the classification accuracy between known and unknown classes.
Chaoqi Chen, Luyao Tang, Yue Huang 0001, Xiaoguang Han 0001, Yizhou Yu
NeurIPS1
2023 Relation Matters: Foreground-Aware Graph-Based Relational Reasoning for Domain Adaptive Object Detection
abstract
Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) focuses on improving the generalization ability of object detectors via knowledge transfer. Recent advances in DAOD strive to change the emphasis of the adaptation process from global to local in virtue of fine-grained feature alignment methods. However, both the global and local alignment approaches fail to capture the topological relations among different foreground objects as the explicit dependencies and interactions between and within domains are neglected. In this case, only seeking one-vs-one alignment does not necessarily ensure the precise knowledge transfer. Moreover, conventional alignment-based approaches may be vulnerable to catastrophic overfitting regarding those less transferable regions (e.g., backgrounds) due to the accumulation of inaccurate localization results in the target domain. To remedy these issues, we first formulate DAOD as an open-set domain adaptation problem, in which the foregrounds and backgrounds are seen as the "known classes" and "unknown class" respectively. Accordingly, we propose a new and general framework for DAOD, named Foreground-aware Graph-based Relational Reasoning (FGRR), which incorporates graph structures into the detection pipeline to explicitly model the intra- and inter-domain foreground object relations on both pixel and semantic spaces, thereby endowing the DAOD model with the capability of relational reasoning beyond the popular alignment-based paradigm. FGRR first identifies the foreground pixels and regions by searching reliable correspondence and cross-domain similarity regularization respectively. The inter-domain visual and semantic correlations are hierarchically modeled via bipartite graph structures, and the intra-domain relations are encoded via graph attention mechanisms. Through message-passing, each node aggregates semantic and contextual information from the same and opposite domain to substantially enhance its expressive power. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed FGRR exceeds the state-of-the-art performance on four DAOD benchmarks.
Chaoqi Chen, Jiongcheng Li, Xiaoguang Han 0001, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding, Yizhou Yu
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.1
2023 A Unified Visual Information Preservation Framework for Self-supervised Pre-Training in Medical Image Analysis
abstract
Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) in computer vision are primarily comparative, whose goal is to preserve invariant and discriminative semantics in latent representations by comparing siamese image views. However, the preserved high-level semantics do not contain enough local information, which is vital in medical image analysis (e.g., image-based diagnosis and tumor segmentation). To mitigate the locality problem of comparative SSL, we propose to incorporate the task of pixel restoration for explicitly encoding more pixel-level information into high-level semantics. We also address the preservation of scale information, a powerful tool in aiding image understanding but has not drawn much attention in SSL. The resulting framework can be formulated as a multi-task optimization problem on the feature pyramid. Specifically, we conduct multi-scale pixel restoration and siamese feature comparison in the pyramid. In addition, we propose non-skip U-Net to build the feature pyramid and develop sub-crop to replace multi-crop in 3D medical imaging. The proposed unified SSL framework (PCRLv2) surpasses its self-supervised counterparts on various tasks, including brain tumor segmentation (BraTS 2018), chest pathology identification (ChestX-ray, CheXpert), pulmonary nodule detection (LUNA), and abdominal organ segmentation (LiTS), sometimes outperforming them by large margins with limited annotations. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/RL4M/PCRLv2.
Chixiang Lu, Chaoqi Chen, Sibei Yang, Yizhou Yu
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.3
2023 GraphSKT: Graph-Guided Structured Knowledge Transfer for Domain Adaptive Lesion Detection
abstract
Adversarial-based adaptation has dominated the area of domain adaptive detection over the past few years. Despite their general efficacy for various tasks, the learned representations may not capture the intrinsic topological structures of the whole images and thus are vulnerable to distributional shifts especially in real-world applications, such as geometric distortions across imaging devices in medical images. In this case, forcefully matching data distributions across domains cannot ensure precise knowledge transfer and are prone to result in the negative transfer. In this paper, we explore the problem of domain adaptive lesion detection from the perspective of relational reasoning, and propose a Graph-Structured Knowledge Transfer (GraphSKT) framework to perform hierarchical reasoning by modeling both the intra- and inter-domain topological structures. To be specific, we utilize cross-domain correspondence to mine meaningful foreground regions for representing graph nodes and explicitly endow each node with contextual information. Then, the intra- and inter-domain graphs are built on the top of instance-level features to achieve a high-level understanding of the lesion and whole medical image, and transfer the structured knowledge from source to target domains. The contextual and semantic information is propagated through graph nodes methodically, enhancing the expressive power of learned features for the lesion detection tasks. Extensive experiments on two types of challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed GraphSKT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for detection of polyps in colonoscopy images and of mass in mammographic images.
Chaoqi Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Junwen Pan, Cheng Bian, Zhicheng Zhang 0005
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging1
2022 Compound Domain Generalization via Meta-Knowledge Encoding
abstract
Domain generalization (DG) aims to improve the generalization performance for an unseen target domain by using the knowledge of multiple seen source domains. Mainstream DG methods typically assume that the domain label of each source sample is known a priori, which is challenged to be satisfied in many real-world applications. In this paper, we study a practical problem of compound DG, which relaxes the discrete domain assumption to the mixed source domains setting. On the other hand, current DG algorithms prioritize the focus on semantic invariance across domains (one-vs-one), while paying less attention to the holistic semantic structure (many-vs-many). Such holistic semantic structure, referred to as meta-knowledge here, is crucial for learning generalizable representations. To this end, we present COmpound domain generalization via Meta-knowledge ENcoding (COMEN), a general approach to automatically discover and model latent domains in two steps. Firstly, we introduce Style-induced Domain-specific Normalization (SDNorm) to re-normalize the multi-modal underlying distributions, thereby dividing the mixture of source domains into latent clusters. Secondly, we harness the prototype representations, the centroids of classes, to perform relational modeling in the embedding space with two parallel and complementary modules, which explicitly encode the semantic structure for the out-of-distribution generalization. Experiments on four standard DG benchmarks reveal that COMEN exceeds the state-of-the-art performance without the need of domain supervision.
Chaoqi Chen, Jiongcheng Li, Xiaoguang Han 0001, Yizhou Yu
CVPR1
2022 Mix and Reason: Reasoning over Semantic Topology with Data Mixing for Domain Generalization
abstract
Domain generalization (DG) enables generalizing a learning machine from multiple seen source domains to an unseen target one. The general objective of DG methods is to learn semantic representations that are independent of domain labels, which is theoretically sound but empirically challenged due to the complex mixture of common and domain-specific factors. Although disentangling the representations into two disjoint parts has been gaining momentum in DG, the strong presumption over the data limits its efficacy in many real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose Mix and Reason (MiRe), a new DG framework that learns semantic representations via enforcing the structural invariance of semantic topology. MiRe consists of two key components, namely, Category-aware Data Mixing (CDM) and Adaptive Semantic Topology Refinement (ASTR). CDM mixes two images from different domains in virtue of activation maps generated by two complementary classification losses, making the classifier focus on the representations of semantic objects. ASTR introduces relation graphs to represent semantic topology, which is progressively refined via the interactions between local feature aggregation and global cross-domain relational reasoning. Experiments on multiple DG benchmarks validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed MiRe.
Chaoqi Chen, Luyao Tang, Feng Liu 0036, Gangming Zhao, Yue Huang 0001, Yizhou Yu
NeurIPS1
2022 Act Like a Radiologist: Towards Reliable Multi-View Correspondence Reasoning for Mammogram Mass Detection
abstract
Mammogram mass detection is crucial for diagnosing and preventing the breast cancers in clinical practice. The complementary effect of multi-view mammogram images provides valuable information about the breast anatomical prior structure and is of great significance in digital mammography interpretation. However, unlike radiologists who can utilize the natural reasoning ability to identify masses based on multiple mammographic views, how to endow the existing object detection models with the capability of multi-view reasoning is vital for decision-making in clinical diagnosis but remains the boundary to explore. In this paper, we propose an anatomy-aware graph convolutional network (AGN), which is tailored for mammogram mass detection and endows existing detection methods with multi-view reasoning ability. The proposed AGN consists of three steps. First, we introduce a bipartite graph convolutional network (BGN) to model the intrinsic geometric and semantic relations of ipsilateral views. Second, considering that the visual asymmetry of bilateral views is widely adopted in clinical practice to assist the diagnosis of breast lesions, we propose an inception graph convolutional network (IGN) to model the structural similarities of bilateral views. Finally, based on the constructed graphs, the multi-view information is propagated through nodes methodically, which equips the features learned from the examined view with multi-view reasoning ability. Experiments on two standard benchmarks reveal that AGN significantly exceeds the state-of-the-art performance. Visualization results show that AGN provides interpretable visual cues for clinical diagnosis.
Fandong Zhang, Chaoqi Chen, Yizhou Wang 0001, Yizhou Yu
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.3
2022 Diagnose Like a Radiologist: Hybrid Neuro-Probabilistic Reasoning for Attribute-Based Medical Image Diagnosis
abstract
During clinical practice, radiologists often use attributes, e.g., morphological and appearance characteristics of a lesion, to aid disease diagnosis. Effectively modeling attributes as well as all relationships involving attributes could boost the generalization ability and verifiability of medical image diagnosis algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid neuro-probabilistic reasoning algorithm for verifiable attribute-based medical image diagnosis. There are two parallel branches in our hybrid algorithm, a Bayesian network branch performing probabilistic causal relationship reasoning and a graph convolutional network branch performing more generic relational modeling and reasoning using a feature representation. Tight coupling between these two branches is achieved via a cross-network attention mechanism and the fusion of their classification results. We have successfully applied our hybrid reasoning algorithm to two challenging medical image diagnosis tasks. On the LIDC-IDRI benchmark dataset for benign-malignant classification of pulmonary nodules in CT images, our method achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 95.36% and an AUC of 96.54%. Our method also achieves a 3.24% accuracy improvement on an in-house chest X-ray image dataset for tuberculosis diagnosis. Our ablation study indicates that our hybrid algorithm achieves a much better generalization performance than a pure neural network architecture under very limited training data.
Gangming Zhao, Quanlong Feng, Chaoqi Chen, Yizhou Yu
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.3
2021 I3Net: Implicit Instance-Invariant Network for Adapting One-Stage Object Detectors
abstract
Recent works on two-stage cross-domain detection have widely explored the local feature patterns to achieve more accurate adaptation results. These methods heavily rely on the region proposal mechanisms and ROI-based instance-level features to design fine-grained feature alignment modules with respect to the foreground objects. However, for one-stage detectors, it is hard or even impossible to obtain explicit instance-level features in the detection pipelines. Motivated by this, we propose an Implicit Instance-Invariant Network (I3Net), which is tailored for adapting one-stage detectors and implicitly learns instance-invariant features via exploiting the natural characteristics of deep features in different layers. Specifically, we facilitate the adaptation from three aspects: (1) Dynamic and Class-Balanced Reweighting (DCBR) strategy, which considers the coexistence of intra-domain and intra-class variations to assign larger weights to those sample-scarce categories and easy-to-adapt samples; (2) Category-aware Object Pattern Matching (COPM) module, which boosts the cross-domain foreground objects matching guided by the categorical information and suppresses the uninformative background features; (3) Regularized Joint Category Alignment (RJCA) module, which jointly enforces the category alignment at different domain-specific layers with a consistency regularization. Experiments reveal that I3Net exceeds the state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.
Chaoqi Chen, Zebiao Zheng, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding, Yizhou Yu
CVPR1
2021 Dual Bipartite Graph Learning: A General Approach for Domain Adaptive Object Detection
abstract
Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) relieves the reliance on large-scale annotated data by transferring the knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to a new unlabeled target domain. Recent DAOD approaches resort to local feature alignment in virtue of domain adversarial training in conjunction with the ad-hoc detection pipelines to achieve feature adaptation. However, these methods are limited to adapt the specific types of object detectors and do not explore the cross-domain topological relations. In this paper, we first formulate DAOD as an open-set domain adaptation problem in which foregrounds (pixel or region) can be seen as the “known class”, while backgrounds (pixel or region) are referred to as the “unknown class”. To this end, we present a new and general perspective for DAOD named Dual Bipartite Graph Learning (DBGL), which captures the cross-domain interactions on both pixel-level and semantic-level via increasing the distinction between foregrounds and backgrounds and modeling the cross-domain dependencies among different semantic categories. Experiments reveal that the proposed DBGL in conjunction with one-stage and two-stage detectors exceeds the state-of-the-art performance on standard DAOD benchmarks.
Chaoqi Chen, Jiongcheng Li, Zebiao Zheng, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding, Yizhou Yu
ICCV1
2021 AgroSeek: a system for computational analysis of environmental metagenomic data and associated metadata
abstract
BACKGROUND: Metagenomics is gaining attention as a powerful tool for identifying how agricultural management practices influence human and animal health, especially in terms of potential to contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance. However, the ability to compare the distribution and prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) across multiple studies and environments is currently impossible without a complete re-analysis of published datasets. This challenge must be addressed for metagenomics to realize its potential for helping guide effective policy and practice measures relevant to agricultural ecosystems, for example, identifying critical control points for mitigating the spread of antibiotic resistance. RESULTS: Here we introduce AgroSeek, a centralized web-based system that provides computational tools for analysis and comparison of metagenomic data sets tailored specifically to researchers and other users in the agricultural sector interested in tracking and mitigating the spread of ARGs. AgroSeek draws from rich, user-provided metagenomic data and metadata to facilitate analysis, comparison, and prediction in a user-friendly fashion. Further, AgroSeek draws from publicly-contributed data sets to provide a point of comparison and context for data analysis. To incorporate metadata into our analysis and comparison procedures, we provide flexible metadata templates, including user-customized metadata attributes to facilitate data sharing, while maintaining the metadata in a comparable fashion for the broader user community and to support large-scale comparative and predictive analysis. CONCLUSION: AgroSeek provides an easy-to-use tool for environmental metagenomic analysis and comparison, based on both gene annotations and associated metadata, with this initial demonstration focusing on control of antibiotic resistance in agricultural ecosystems. Agroseek creates a space for metagenomic data sharing and collaboration to assist policy makers, stakeholders, and the public in decision-making. AgroSeek is publicly-available at https://agroseek.cs.vt.edu/ .
Kyle Akers, Ishi Keenum, Lauren Wind, Suraj Gupta, Chaoqi Chen, Reem Aldaihani, Amy Pruden, Liqing Zhang 0002, Katharine F. Knowlton, Kang Xia, Lenwood S. Heath
BMC Bioinform.6
2021 Hard class rectification for domain adaptation
Changxing Jing, Huangxing Lin, Chaoqi Chen, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding, Yang Zou 0003
Knowl. Based Syst.4
2021 Curriculum Feature Alignment Domain Adaptation for Epithelium-Stroma Classification in Histopathological Images
abstract
In recent years, deep learning methods have received more attention in epithelial-stroma (ES) classification tasks. Traditional deep learning methods assume that the training and test data have the same distribution, an assumption that is seldom satisfied in complex imaging procedures. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) transfers knowledge from a labelled source domain to a completely unlabeled target domain, and is more suitable for ES classification tasks to avoid tedious annotation. However, existing UDA methods for this task ignore the semantic alignment across domains. In this paper, we propose a Curriculum Feature Alignment Network (CFAN) to gradually align discriminative features across domains through selecting effective samples from the target domain and minimizing intra-class differences. Specifically, we developed the Curriculum Transfer Strategy (CTS) and Adaptive Centroid Alignment (ACA) steps to train our model iteratively. We validated the method using three independent public ES datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better performance in ES classification compared with commonly used deep learning methods and existing deep domain adaptation methods.
Qi Qi 0005, Chaoqi Chen, Weiping Xie, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding, Yizhou Yu
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics3
2020 Harmonizing Transferability and Discriminability for Adapting Object Detectors
abstract
Recent advances in adaptive object detection have achieved compelling results in virtue of adversarial feature adaptation to mitigate the distributional shifts along the detection pipeline. Whilst adversarial adaptation significantly enhances the transferability of feature representations, the feature discriminability of object detectors remains less investigated. Moreover, transferability and discriminability may come at a contradiction in adversarial adaptation given the complex combinations of objects and the differentiated scene layouts between domains. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Transferability Calibration Network (HTCN) that hierarchically (local-region/image/instance) calibrates the transferability of feature representations for harmonizing transferability and discriminability. The proposed model consists of three components: (1) Importance Weighted Adversarial Training with input Interpolation (IWAT-I), which strengthens the global discriminability by re-weighting the interpolated image-level features; (2) Context-aware Instance-Level Alignment (CILA) module, which enhances the local discriminability by capturing the underlying complementary effect between the instance-level feature and the global context information for the instance-level feature alignment; (3) local feature masks that calibrate the local transferability to provide semantic guidance for the following discriminative pattern alignment. Experimental results show that HTCN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
Chaoqi Chen, Zebiao Zheng, Xinghao Ding, Yue Huang 0001, Qi Dou 0001
CVPR1
2020 Multiple-source domain adaptation with generative adversarial nets
Chaoqi Chen, Weiping Xie, Yi Wen 0003, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding
Knowl. Based Syst.1
2019 Progressive Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
abstract
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) transfers knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a fully-unlabeled target domain. To tackle this task, recent approaches resort to discriminative domain transfer in virtue of pseudo-labels to enforce the class-level distribution alignment across the source and target domains. These methods, however, are vulnerable to the error accumulation and thus incapable of preserving cross-domain category consistency, as the pseudo-labeling accuracy is not guaranteed explicitly. In this paper, we propose the Progressive Feature Alignment Network (PFAN) to align the discriminative features across domains progressively and effectively, via exploiting the intra-class variation in the target domain. To be specific, we first develop an Easy-to-Hard Transfer Strategy (EHTS) and an Adaptive Prototype Alignment (APA) step to train our model iteratively and alternatively. Moreover, upon observing that a good domain adaptation usually requires a non-saturated source classifier, we consider a simple yet efficient way to retard the convergence speed of the source classification loss by further involving a temperature variate into the soft-max function. The extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed PFAN exceeds the state-of-the-art performance on three UDA datasets.
Chaoqi Chen, Weiping Xie, Wenbing Huang 0001, Yu Rong 0001, Xinghao Ding, Yue Huang 0001, Tingyang Xu, Junzhou Huang
CVPR1
2018 Weakly-Supervised Man-Made Object Recognition in Underwater Optimal Image Through Deep Domain Adaptation
Chaoqi Chen, Weiping Xie, Yue Huang 0001, Xinghao Ding
ICONIP (5)1