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Minghui Chen

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8 papers

2 author rows

JBHI Journal 2026 Journal Article

A Segmentation-Guided Feature Alignment and Fusion Network for Glioma IDH Genotyping

Minghui Chen
Guohua Zhao
Lei Yang
Haowen Zhu
Hongwei Xu
Huiqin Jiang
Ling Ma

Isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) is a pivotal molecular marker for glioma diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning. Multi-modal deep learning methods, which integrate features from multiple magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences, have become a powerful solution for non-invasive IDH genotyping. However, existing methods still have limitations in feature extraction and fusion, which constrains their robustness. In this work, we propose a novel segmentation-guided feature alignment and fusion network (SFAF-Net) for glioma IDH genotyping, with three key innovations: 1) The Segmentation-guided Feature Alignment (SFA) module leverages tumor segmentation supervision to facilitate cross-modal feature alignment; 2) The Redundancy-Attenuated Fusion (RAF) module implements similarity-based selective fusion of modality pairs to reduce feature redundancy; 3) A randomized modality dropout mechanism within RAF enhances model robustness against input variations. Comprehensive experiments conducted on public and private datasets demonstrate that SFAF-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse MRI sequences. Moreover, SFAF-Net supports an arbitrary number of input sequences, enabling flexible adaptation to diverse clinical scanning protocols in personalized diagnosis.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Test-time Prompt Intervention

Chenxu Yang
Qingyi Si
Mz Dai
Dingyu Yao
Mingyu Zheng
Minghui Chen
Zheng Lin
Weiping Wang

Test-time compute has led to remarkable success in the large language model (LLM) community, particularly for complex tasks, where longer chains of thought (CoTs) are generated to enhance reasoning capabilities. However, growing evidence reveals that such reasoning models often produce CoTs plagued by excessive redundancy, including repetitive verification steps and unnecessary reasoning shifts. The root cause lies in post-training of them that overly rely on outcome reward paradigms, as the data of process reward paradigms, which regulate intermediate reasoning steps, is difficult to construct at scale. To address this, we propose PI, a novel framework for Test-time Prompt Intervention. PI provides an interface to dynamically guide and regulate reasoning paths during inference through timely (When module) and proper (How module) interventions and post-intervention sampling (Which module). This allows human problem-solving expertise and cognitive science principles to be seamlessly integrated into LLMs’ reasoning processes, enhancing controllability and interpretability. Extensive experiments across multiple models and datasets demonstrate that PI significantly shortens CoTs while reducing hallucination, yielding more concise and reliable reasoning.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Can Textual Gradient Work in Federated Learning?

Minghui Chen
Ruinan Jin
Wenlong Deng
Yuanyuan Chen 0012
Zhi Huang
Han Yu 0001
Xiaoxiao Li

Recent studies highlight the promise of LLM-based prompt optimization, especially with TextGrad, which automates ``differentiation'' via texts and backpropagates textual feedback provided by LLMs. This approach facilitates training in various real-world applications that do not support numerical gradient propagation or loss calculation. It opens new avenues for optimization in decentralized, resource-constrained environments, suggesting that users of black-box LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) could enhance components of LLM agentic systems (such as prompt optimization) through collaborative paradigms like federated learning (FL). In this paper, we systematically explore the potential and challenges of incorporating textual gradient into FL. Our contributions are fourfold. **Firstly**, we introduce a novel FL paradigm, Federated Textual Gradient (FedTextGrad), that allows FL clients to upload their locally optimized prompts derived from textual gradients, while the FL server aggregates the received prompts through text summarization. Unlike traditional FL frameworks, which are designed for numerical aggregation, FedTextGrad is specifically tailored for handling textual data, expanding the applicability of FL to a broader range of problems that lack well-defined numerical loss functions. **Secondly**, building on this design, we conduct extensive experiments to explore the feasibility of federated textual gradients. Our findings highlight the importance of properly tuning key factors (e.g., local steps) in FL training to effectively integrate textual gradients. **Thirdly**, we highlight a major challenge in federated textual gradient aggregation: retaining essential information from distributed prompt updates. Concatenation often produces prompts that exceed the LLM API’s context window, while summarization can degrade performance by generating overly condensed or complex text that lacks key context. **Last but not least**, in response to this issue, we improve the vanilla variant of FedTextGrad by providing actionable guidance to the LLM when summarizing client prompts by leveraging the Uniform Information Density principle. Such a design reduces the complexity of the aggregated global prompt, thereby better incentivizing the LLM's reasoning ability. Through this principled study, we enable the adoption of textual gradients in FL for optimizing LLMs, identify important issues, and pinpoint future directions, thereby opening up a new research area that warrants further investigation.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Categorical Attention: Fine-grained Language-guided Noise Filtering Network for Occluded Person Re-Identification

Minghui Chen
Dayan Wu
Chenxu Yang
Qinghang Su
Zheng Lin

Person Re-Identification (ReID) aims to match individuals across different camera views, but occlusions in real-world scenarios, such as vehicles or crowds, hinder feature extraction and matching. Current occluded ReID methodologies typically leverage visual augmentation techniques in an attempt to mitigate the disruptive effects of occlusion-induced noise. However, relying solely on visual data fail to effectively filter out occlusion noise. In this paper, we introduce the Fine-grained Language-guided Noise Filtering Network (FLaN-Net) for occluded ReID. FLaN-Net innovatively employs categorical attention mechanism to generate adaptive tokens that capture the following three distinct types of visual information: comprehensive descriptions of individuals, detailed visible attributes, and characteristics of occluding objects. Subsequently, a cross-attention mechanism aligns these prompts with the image, guiding the model to focus on relevant regions. To generate robust and discriminative features for occluded pedestrians, we further introduce a dynamic weighting fusion module that integrates visual, textual, and cross-attention features based on their reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that FLaN-Net outperforms existing methods on occluded ReID benchmarks, offering a robust solution for challenging real-world conditions.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

DARE the Extreme: Revisiting Delta-Parameter Pruning For Fine-Tuned Models

Wenlong Deng
Yize Zhao
Vala Vakilian
Minghui Chen
Xiaoxiao Li
Christos Thrampoulidis

Storing open-source fine-tuned models separately introduces redundancy and increases response times in applications utilizing multiple models. Delta-parameter pruning (DPP), particularly the random drop and rescale (DARE) method proposed by Yu et al., addresses this by pruning the majority of delta parameters—the differences between fine-tuned and pre-trained model weights—while typically maintaining minimal performance loss. However, DARE fails when either the pruning rate or the magnitude of the delta parameters is large. We highlight two key reasons for this failure: (1) an excessively large rescaling factor as pruning rates increase, and (2) high mean and variance in the delta parameters. To push DARE’s limits, we introduce DAREx (DARE the eXtreme), which features two algorithmic improvements: (1) DAREx-q, a rescaling factor modification that significantly boosts performance at high pruning rates (e.g., > 30% on COLA and SST2 for encoder models, with even greater gains in decoder models), and (2) DAREx-L2, which combines DARE with AdamR, an in-training method that applies appropriate delta regularization before DPP. We also demonstrate that DAREx-q can be seamlessly combined with vanilla parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques like LoRA and can facilitate structural DPP. Additionally, we revisit the application of importance-based pruning techniques within DPP, demonstrating that they outperform random-based methods when delta parameters are large. Through this comprehensive study, we develop a pipeline for selecting the most appropriate DPP method under various practical scenarios.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Local Superior Soups: A Catalyst for Model Merging in Cross-Silo Federated Learning

Minghui Chen
Meirui Jiang
Xin Zhang
Qi Dou
Zehua Wang
Xiaoxiao Li

Federated learning (FL) is a learning paradigm that enables collaborative training of models using decentralized data. Recently, the utilization of pre-trained weight initialization in FL has been demonstrated to effectively improve model performance. However, the evolving complexity of current pre-trained models, characterized by a substantial increase in parameters, markedly intensifies the challenges associated with communication rounds required for their adaptation to FL. To address these communication cost issues and increase the performance of pre-trained model adaptation in FL, we propose an innovative model interpolation-based local training technique called ``Local Superior Soups. ''Our method enhances local training across different clients, encouraging the exploration of a connected low-loss basin within a few communication rounds through regularized model interpolation. This approach acts as a catalyst for the seamless adaptation of pre-trained models in in FL. We demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency across diverse widely-used FL datasets.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

VITA: A Multi-Source Vicinal Transfer Augmentation Method for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Minghui Chen
Cheng Wen
Feng Zheng
Fengxiang He
Ling Shao

Invariance to diverse types of image corruption, such as noise, blurring, or colour shifts, is essential to establish robust models in computer vision. Data augmentation has been the major approach in improving the robustness against common corruptions. However, the samples produced by popular augmentation strategies deviate significantly from the underlying data manifold. As a result, performance is skewed toward certain types of corruption. To address this issue, we propose a multi-source vicinal transfer augmentation (VITA) method for generating diverse on-manifold samples. The proposed VITA consists of two complementary parts: tangent transfer and integration of multi-source vicinal samples. The tangent transfer creates initial augmented samples for improving corruption robustness. The integration employs a generative model to characterize the underlying manifold built by vicinal samples, facilitating the generation of on-manifold samples. Our proposed VITA significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art augmentation methods, demonstrated in extensive experiments on corruption benchmarks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Benchmarks for Corruption Invariant Person Re-identification

Minghui Chen
Zhiqiang Wang
Feng Zheng

When deploying person re-identification (ReID) model in safety-critical applications, it is pivotal to understanding the robustness of the model against a diverse array of image corruptions. However, current evaluations of person ReID only consider the performance on clean datasets and ignore images in various corrupted scenarios. In this work, we comprehensively establish five ReID benchmarks for learning corruption invariant representation. In the field of ReID, we are the first to conduct an exhaustive study on corruption invariant learning in single- and cross-modality datasets, including Market-1501, CUHK03, MSMT17, RegDB, SYSU-MM01. After reproducing and examining the robustness performance of 21 recent ReID methods, we have some observations: 1) transformer-based models are more robust towards corrupted images, compared with CNN-based models, 2) increasing the probability of random erasing (a commonly used augmentation method) hurts model corruption robustness, 3) cross-dataset generalization improves with corruption robustness increases. By analyzing the above observations, we propose a strong baseline on both single- and cross-modality ReID datasets which achieves improved robustness against diverse corruptions. Our codes are available on https: //github. com/MinghuiChen43/CIL-ReID.

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