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Qicheng Lao

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8 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

iDPA: Instance Decoupled Prompt Attention for Incremental Medical Object Detection

Huahui Yi
Wei Xu 0046
Ziyuan Qin 0001
Xi Chen
Xiaohu Wu
Kang Li 0004
Qicheng Lao

Existing prompt-based approaches have demonstrated impressive performance in continual learning, leveraging pre-trained large-scale models for classification tasks; however, the tight coupling between foreground-background information and the coupled attention between prompts and image-text tokens present significant challenges in incremental medical object detection tasks, due to the conceptual gap between medical and natural domains. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the iDPA framework, which comprises two main components: 1) Instance-level Prompt Generation (IPG), which decouples fine-grained instance-level knowledge from images and generates prompts that focus on dense predictions, and 2) Decoupled Prompt Attention (DPA), which decouples the original prompt attention, enabling a more direct and efficient transfer of prompt information while reducing memory usage and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. We collect 13 clinical, cross-modal, multi-organ, and multi-category datasets, referred to as ODinM-13, and experiments demonstrate that iDPA outperforms existing SOTA methods, with FAP improvements of f 5. 44%, 4. 83%, 12. 88%, and 4. 59% in full data, 1-shot, 10-shot, and 50-shot settings, respectively.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Voronoi-grid-based Pareto Front Learning and Its Application to Collaborative Federated Learning

Mengmeng Chen
Xiaohu Wu
Qiqi Liu
Tiantian He 0001
Yew-Soon Ong
Yaochu Jin
Qicheng Lao
Han Yu 0001

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) exists extensively in machine learning, and aims to find a set of Pareto-optimal solutions, called the Pareto front, e. g. , it is fundamental for multiple avenues of research in federated learning (FL). Pareto-Front Learning (PFL) is a powerful method implemented using Hypernetworks (PHNs) to approximate the Pareto front. This method enables the acquisition of a mapping function from a given preference vector to the solutions on the Pareto front. However, most existing PFL approaches still face two challenges: (a) sampling rays in high-dimensional spaces; (b) failing to cover the entire Pareto Front which has a convex shape. Here, we introduce a novel PFL framework, called as PHN-HVVS, which decomposes the design space into Voronoi grids and deploys a genetic algorithm (GA) for Voronoi grid partitioning within high-dimensional space. We put forward a new loss function, which effectively contributes to more extensive coverage of the resultant Pareto front and maximizes the HV Indicator. Experimental results on multiple MOO machine learning tasks demonstrate that PHN-HVVS outperforms the baselines significantly in generating Pareto front. Also, we illustrate that PHN-HVVS advances the methodologies of several recent problems in the FL field. The code is available at https: //github. com/buptcmm/phnhvvs.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Free-Rider and Conflict Aware Collaboration Formation for Cross-Silo Federated Learning

Mengmeng Chen
Xiaohu Wu
Xiaoli Tang
Tiantian He
Yew-Soon Ong
Qiqi Liu
Qicheng Lao
Han Yu

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that allows multiple FL participants (FL-PTs) to collaborate on training models without sharing private data. Due to data heterogeneity, negative transfer may occur in the FL training process. This necessitates FL-PT selection based on their data complementarity. In cross-silo FL, organizations that engage in business activities are key sources of FL-PTs. The resulting FL ecosystem has two features: (i) self-interest, and (ii) competition among FL-PTs. This requires the desirable FL-PT selection strategy to simultaneously mitigate the problems of free riders and conflicts of interest among competitors. To this end, we propose an optimal FL collaboration formation strategy -FedEgoists- which ensures that: (1) a FL-PT can benefit from FL if and only if it benefits the FL ecosystem, and (2) a FL-PT will not contribute to its competitors or their supporters. It provides an efficient clustering solution to group FL-PTs into coalitions, ensuring that within each coalition, FL-PTs share the same interest. We theoretically prove that the FL-PT coalitions formed are optimal since no coalitions can collaborate together to improve the utility of any of their members. Extensive experiments on widely adopted benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FedEgoists compared to nine state-of-the-art baseline methods, and its ability to establish efficient collaborative networks in cross-silos FL with FL-PTs that engage in business activities.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

One-to-Normal: Anomaly Personalization for Few-shot Anomaly Detection

Yiyue Li
Shaoting Zhang
Kang Li
Qicheng Lao

Traditional Anomaly Detection (AD) methods have predominantly relied on unsupervised learning from extensive normal data. Recent AD methods have evolved with the advent of large pre-trained vision-language models, enhancing few-shot anomaly detection capabilities. However, these latest AD methods still exhibit limitations in accuracy improvement. One contributing factor is their direct comparison of a query image's features with those of few-shot normal images. This direct comparison often leads to a loss of precision and complicates the extension of these techniques to more complex domains—an area that remains underexplored in a more refined and comprehensive manner. To address these limitations, we introduce the anomaly personalization method, which performs a personalized one-to-normal transformation of query images using an anomaly-free customized generation model, ensuring close alignment with the normal manifold. Moreover, to further enhance the stability and robustness of prediction results, we propose a triplet contrastive anomaly inference strategy, which incorporates a comprehensive comparison between the query and generated anomaly-free data pool and prompt information. Extensive evaluations across eleven datasets in three domains demonstrate our model's effectiveness compared to the latest AD methods. Additionally, our method has been proven to transfer flexibly to other AD methods, with the generated image data effectively improving the performance of other AD methods.

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JBHI Journal 2023 Journal Article

Anatomically Guided Cross-Domain Repair and Screening for Ultrasound Fetal Biometry

Jun Gao
Qicheng Lao
Paul Liu
Huahui Yi
Qingbo Kang
Zekun Jiang
Xiaohu Wu
Kang Li

Ultrasound based estimation of fetal biometry is extensively used to diagnose prenatal abnormalities and to monitor fetal growth, for which accurate segmentation of the fetal anatomy is a crucial prerequisite. Although deep neural network-based models have achieved encouraging results on this task, inevitable distribution shifts in ultrasound images can still result in severe performance drop in real world deployment scenarios. In this article, we propose a complete ultrasound fetal examination system to deal with this troublesome problem by repairing and screening the anatomically implausible results. Our system consists of three main components: A routine segmentation network, a fetal anatomical key points guided repair network, and a shape-coding based selective screener. Guided by the anatomical key points, our repair network has stronger cross-domain repair capabilities, which can substantially improve the outputs of the segmentation network. By quantifying the distance between an arbitrary segmentation mask to its corresponding anatomical shape class, the proposed shape-coding based selective screener can then effectively reject the entire implausible results that cannot be fully repaired. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework has strong anatomical guarantee and outperforms other methods in three different cross-domain scenarios.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

MEDICAL IMAGE UNDERSTANDING WITH PRETRAINED VISION LANGUAGE MODELS: A COMPREHENSIVE STUDY

Ziyuan Qin 0001
Huahui Yi
Qicheng Lao
Kang Li 0004

The large-scale pre-trained vision language models (VLM) have shown remarkable domain transfer capability on natural images. However, it remains unknown whether this capability can also apply to the medical image domain. This paper thoroughly studies the knowledge transferability of pre-trained VLMs to the medical domain, where we show that well-designed medical prompts are the key to elicit knowledge from pre-trained VLMs. We demonstrate that by prompting with expressive attributes that are shared between domains, the VLM can carry the knowledge across domains and improve its generalization. This mechanism empowers VLMs to recognize novel objects with fewer or without image samples. Furthermore, to avoid the laborious manual designing process, we develop three approaches for automatic generation of medical prompts, which can inject expert-level medical knowledge and image-specific information into the prompts for fine-grained grounding. We conduct extensive experiments on thirteen different medical datasets across various modalities, showing that our well-designed prompts greatly improve the zero-shot performance compared to the default prompts, and our fine-tuned models surpass the supervised models by a significant margin.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Hypothesis Disparity Regularized Mutual Information Maximization

Qicheng Lao
Xiang Jiang
Mohammad Havaei

We propose a hypothesis disparity regularized mutual information maximization (HDMI) approach to tackle unsupervised hypothesis transfer—as an effort towards unifying hypothesis transfer learning (HTL) and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA)—where the knowledge from a source domain is transferred solely through hypotheses and adapted to the target domain in an unsupervised manner. In contrast to the prevalent HTL and UDA approaches that typically use a single hypothesis, HDMI employs multiple hypotheses to leverage the underlying distributions of the source and target hypotheses. To better utilize the crucial relationship among different hypotheses— as opposed to unconstrained optimization of each hypothesis independently—while adapting to the unlabeled target domain through mutual information maximization, HDMI incorporates a hypothesis disparity regularization that coordinates the target hypotheses jointly learn better target representations while preserving more transferable source knowledge with better-calibrated prediction uncertainty. HDMI achieves stateof-the-art adaptation performance on benchmark datasets for UDA in the context of HTL, without the need to access the source data during the adaptation.

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Implicit Class-Conditioned Domain Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Xiang Jiang 0001
Qicheng Lao
Stan Matwin
Mohammad Havaei

We present an approach for unsupervised domain adaptation{—}with a strong focus on practical considerations of within-domain class imbalance and between-domain class distribution shift{—}from a class-conditioned domain alignment perspective. Current methods for class-conditioned domain alignment aim to explicitly minimize a loss function based on pseudo-label estimations of the target domain. However, these methods suffer from pseudo-label bias in the form of error accumulation. We propose a method that removes the need for explicit optimization of model parameters from pseudo-labels. Instead, we present a sampling-based implicit alignment approach, where the sample selection is implicitly guided by the pseudo-labels. Theoretical analysis reveals the existence of a domain-discriminator shortcut in misaligned classes, which is addressed by the proposed approach to facilitate domain-adversarial learning. Empirical results and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach, especially in the presence of within-domain class imbalance and between-domain class distribution shift.

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