Yifeng Wang

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Deeply Seeking Boundary for Lunar Regolith Segmentation

• Yifeng Wang
• Lingxin Wang
• Lu Zhang
• Yang Li
• Chao Xu
• Weiwei Zhang
• Junyue Tang
• Yanhong Zheng

The sharp, intricate contours of lunar regolith particles hold critical clues to the Moon's geological evolution and inform engineering applications from habitat construction to spacecraft design, making their precise segmentation a task of significant scientific and engineering value. However, this task exposes a weakness in deep learning models known as spectral bias, an inherent tendency to learn smooth, low-frequency functions which causes them to systematically erase the very high-frequency boundary details that are of primary interest. To resolve this conflict, we propose a framework to deeply seek object boundaries. First, we propose High-Frequency Initialized LoRA (HiFi-LoRA) to counteract spectral bias. By initializing the LoRA adaptation matrices as the optimal low-rank approximation of a high-pass filter, it fundamentally enhances the model's high-frequency perception and injects a strong preference for edges. Second, we propose the Wavelet Energy Modulation (WEM) regularizer. It guides the model to learn the intrinsic correlation between contour complexity and mask area, forcing the model to build a geometric understanding of contour morphology upon its high-frequency perception, thereby enabling the generation of boundary details commensurate with the object's scale. Experimentally, we constructed the Lunar Regolith Segmentation Dataset (LRSD), the first large-scale benchmark with expert-annotated contours. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method sets a new state of the art on this challenging benchmark, not only achieving top performance on regional metrics like mIoU and DSC but, more critically, drastically outperforming existing models on boundary accuracy. This work not only provides a powerful computational tool for lunar science but also offers a robust and synergistic design pattern for other fine-grained segmentation challenges.

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Spectral Property-Driven Data Augmentation for Hyperspectral Single-Source Domain Generalization

• Taiqin Chen
• Yifeng Wang
• Xiaochen Feng
• Zhilin Zhu
• Hao Sha
• Yingjian Li
• Yongbing Zhang

While hyperspectral images (HSI) benefit from numerous spectral channels that provide rich information for classification, the increased dimensionality and sensor variability make them more sensitive to distributional discrepancies across domains, which in turn can affect classification performance. To tackle this issue, hyperspectral single-source domain generalization (SDG) typically employs data augmentation to simulate potential domain shifts and enhance model robustness under the condition of single-source domain training data availability. However, blind augmentation may produce samples misaligned with real-world scenarios, while excessive emphasis on realism can suppress diversity, highlighting a tradeoff between realism and diversity that limits generalization to target domains. To address this challenge, we propose a spectral property-driven data augmentation (SPDDA) that explicitly accounts for the inherent properties of HSI, namely the device-dependent variation in the number of spectral channels and the mixing of adjacent channels. Specifically, SPDDA employs a spectral diversity module that resamples data from the source domain along the spectral dimension to generate samples with varying spectral channels, and constructs a channel-wise adaptive spectral mixer by modeling inter-channel similarity, thereby avoiding fixed augmentation patterns. To further enhance the realism of the augmented samples, we propose a spatial-spectral co-optimization mechanism, which jointly optimizes a spatial fidelity constraint and a spectral continuity self-constraint. Moreover, the weight of the spectral self-constraint is adaptively adjusted based on the spatial counterpart, thus preventing over-smoothing in the spectral dimension and preserving spatial structure. Extensive experiments conducted on three remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate that SPDDA outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AutoAL: Automated Active Learning with Differentiable Query Strategy Search

• Yifeng Wang
• Xueying Zhan
• Siyu Huang

As deep learning continues to evolve, the need for data efficiency becomes increasingly important. Considering labeling large datasets is both time-consuming and expensive, active learning (AL) provides a promising solution to this challenge by iteratively selecting the most informative subsets of examples to train deep neural networks, thereby reducing the labeling cost. However, the effectiveness of different AL algorithms can vary significantly across data scenarios, and determining which AL algorithm best fits a given task remains a challenging problem. This work presents the first differentiable AL strategy search method, named AutoAL, which is designed on top of existing AL sampling strategies. AutoAL consists of two neural nets, named SearchNet and FitNet, which are optimized concurrently under a differentiable bi-level optimization framework. For any given task, SearchNet and FitNet are iteratively co-optimized using the labeled data, learning how well a set of candidate AL algorithms perform on that task. With the optimal AL strategies identified, SearchNet selects a small subset from the unlabeled pool for querying their annotations, enabling efficient training of the task model. Experimental results demonstrate that AutoAL consistently achieves superior accuracy compared to all candidate AL algorithms and other selective AL approaches, showcasing its potential for adapting and integrating multiple existing AL methods across diverse tasks and domains.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Category Prompt Mamba Network for Nuclei Segmentation and Classification

• Ye Zhang
• Zijie Fang
• Yifeng Wang
• Lingbo Zhang
• Xianchao Guan
• Yongbing Zhang

Nuclei segmentation and classification provide an essential basis for tumor immune microenvironment analysis. The previous nuclei segmentation and classification models require splitting large images into smaller patches for training, leading to two significant issues. First, nuclei at the borders of adjacent patches often misalign during inference. Second, this patch-based approach significantly increases the model's training and inference time. Recently, Mamba has garnered attention for its ability to model large-scale images with linear time complexity and low memory consumption. It offers a promising solution for training nuclei segmentation and classification models on full-sized images. However, the Mamba orientation-based scanning method lacks account for category-specific features, resulting in suboptimal performance in scenarios with imbalanced class distributions. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel scanning strategy based on category probability sorting, which independently ranks and scans features for each category according to confidence from high to low. This approach enhances the feature representation of uncertain samples and mitigates the issues caused by imbalanced distributions. Extensive experiments conducted on four public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, delivering superior performance in nuclei segmentation and classification tasks.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

HEROS-GAN: Honed-Energy Regularized and Optimal Supervised GAN for Enhancing Accuracy and Range of Low-Cost Accelerometers

• Yifeng Wang
• Yi Zhao

Low-cost accelerometers play a crucial role in modern society due to their advantages of small size, ease of integration, wearability, and mass production, making them widely applicable in automotive systems, aerospace, and wearable technology. However, this widely used sensor suffers from severe accuracy and range limitations. To this end, we propose a honed-energy regularized and optimal supervised GAN (HEROS-GAN), which transforms low-cost sensor signals into high-cost equivalents, thereby overcoming the precision and range limitations of low-cost accelerometers. Due to the lack of frame-level paired low-cost and high-cost signals for training, we propose an Optimal Transport Supervision (OTS), which leverages optimal transport theory to explore potential consistency between unpaired data, thereby maximizing supervisory information. Moreover, we propose a Modulated Laplace Energy (MLE), which injects appropriate energy into the generator to encourage it to break range limitations, enhance local changes, and enrich signal details. Given the absence of a dedicated dataset, we specifically establish a Low-cost Accelerometer Signal Enhancement Dataset (LASED) containing tens of thousands of samples, which is the first dataset serving to improve the accuracy and range of accelerometers and is released in Github. Experimental results demonstrate that a GAN combined with either OTS or MLE alone can surpass the previous signal enhancement SOTA methods by an order of magnitude. Integrating both OTS and MLE, the HEROS-GAN achieves remarkable results, which doubles the accelerometer range while reducing signal noise by two orders of magnitude, establishing a benchmark in the accelerometer signal processing.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

OT-StainNet: Optimal Transport Driven Semantic Matching for Weakly Paired H&E-to-IHC Stain Transfer

• Xianchao Guan
• Yifeng Wang
• Ye Zhang
• Zheng Zhang
• Yongbing Zhang

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) examination is essential for characterizing tumor subtypes, providing prognostic information, and developing personalized treatment plans. However, IHC staining preparation is more complex and expensive compared to Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining, limiting its widespread clinical application. Transforming H&E images into IHC images presents a promising solution. In this paper, we propose OT-StainNet, a novel virtual IHC staining method. OT-StainNet employs a pre-trained diffusion model with richer prior knowledge as the generator and fine-tunes it with LoRA adapters through adversarial training. Given that adjacent images of the same tissue stained with H&E and IHC are not precisely aligned at the pixel level, existing methods struggle to fully utilize the supervisory information from weakly paired IHC images. To address this issue, we propose an optimal transport-driven semantic matching (OTSM) mechanism, establishing accurate semantic correspondences between H&E-IHC image pairs. By leveraging the real IHC features obtained through the OTSM mechanism, we design a semantic consistency constraint (SCC) to ensure that the correlations among virtual IHC features remain consistent with those among real IHC features, thereby preserving valuable correlation information during stain transfer. We validate OT-StainNet using four types of IHC staining across two datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automation

• Mengkang Hu
• Yuhang Zhou
• Wendong Fan
• Yuzhou Nie
• Ziyu Ye
• Bowei Xia
• Tao Sun
• Zhaoxuan Jin

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems show promise for automating real-world tasks but struggle to transfer across domains due to their domain-specific nature. Current approaches face two critical shortcomings: they require complete architectural redesign and full retraining of all components when applied to new domains. We introduce Workforce, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decouples strategic planning from specialized execution through a modular architecture comprising: (i) a domain-agnostic Planner for task decomposition, (ii) a Coordinator for subtask management, and (iii) specialized Workers with domain-specific tool-calling capabilities. This decoupling enables cross-domain transferability during both inference and training phases: During inference, Workforce seamlessly adapts to new domains by adding or modifying worker agents; For training, we introduce Optimized Workforce Learning (OWL), which improves generalization across domains by optimizing a domain-agnostic planner with reinforcement learning from real-world feedback. To validate our approach, we evaluate Workforce on the GAIA benchmark, covering various realistic, multi-domain agentic tasks. Experimental results demonstrate Workforce achieves open-source state-of-the-art performance ( 69. 70% ), outperforming commercial systems like OpenAI's Deep Research by 2. 34%. More notably, our OWL-trained 32B model achieves 52. 73% accuracy ( +16. 37% ) and demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-4o on challenging tasks. To summarize, by enabling scalable generalization and modular domain transfer, our work establishes a foundation for the next generation of general-purpose AI assistants. Our code is available at Anonymous URL, and our data is available at Anonymous URL.

IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Scale and Direction Guided GAN for Inertial Sensor Signal Enhancement

• Yifeng Wang
• Yi Zhao

Inertial sensors, serving as attitude and motion sensing components, are extensively used in various portable devices spanning consumer electronics, sports health, aerospace, etc. However, the severe intrinsic errors of inertial sensors greatly restrict their capability to implement advanced functions, such as motion tracking and semantic recognition. Although generative models hold significant potential for signal enhancement, unsupervised or weakly-supervised generative methods may not achieve ideal generation results due to the absence of guidance from paired data. To address this, we propose a scale and direction-guided generative adversarial network (SDG-GAN), which provides dual guidance mechanisms for GAN with unpaired data across two practical application scenarios. In the unsupervised scenario where only unpaired signals of varying quality are available, our scale-guided GAN (SG-GAN) forces the generator to learn high-quality signal characteristics at different scales simultaneously via the proposed self-supervised zoom constraint, thereby facilitating multi-scale interactive learning. In the weakly-supervised scenario, where additional experimental equipment can provide some motion information, our direction-guided GAN (DG-GAN) introduces auxiliary tasks to supervise signal generation while avoiding interference from auxiliary tasks on the main generation task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both the unsupervised SG-GAN and the weakly-supervised DG-GAN significantly outperform all comparison methods, including fully-supervised approaches. The combined SDG-GAN achieves remarkable results, enabling unimaginable tasks based on the original inertial signal, such as 3D motion tracking.

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Wavelet Dynamic Selection Network for Inertial Sensor Signal Enhancement

• Yifeng Wang
• Yi Zhao

As attitude and motion sensing components, inertial sensors are widely used in various portable devices, covering consumer electronics, sports health, aerospace, etc. But the severe intrinsic errors of inertial sensors heavily restrain their function implementation, especially the advanced functionality, including motion trajectory recovery and motion semantic recognition, which attracts considerable attention. As a mainstream signal processing method, wavelet is hailed as the mathematical microscope of signal due to the plentiful and diverse wavelet basis functions. However, complicated noise types and application scenarios of inertial sensors make selecting wavelet basis perplexing. To this end, we propose a wavelet dynamic selection network (WDSNet), which intelligently selects the appropriate wavelet basis for variable inertial signals. In addition, existing deep learning architectures excel at extracting features from input data but neglect to learn the characteristics of target categories, which is essential to enhance the category awareness capability, thereby improving the selection of wavelet basis. Therefore, we propose a category representation mechanism (CRM), which enables the network to extract and represent category features without increasing trainable parameters. Furthermore, CRM transforms the common fully connected network into category representations, which provide closer supervision to the feature extractor than the far and trivial one-hot classification labels. We call this process of imposing interpretability on a network and using it to supervise the feature extractor the feature supervision mechanism, and its effectiveness is demonstrated experimentally and theoretically in this paper. The enhanced inertial signal can perform impracticable tasks with regard to the original signal, such as trajectory reconstruction. Both quantitative and visual results show that WDSNet outperforms the existing methods. Remarkably, WDSNet, as a weakly-supervised method, achieves the state-of-the-art performance of all the compared fully-supervised methods.

JBHI Journal 2023 Journal Article

dMIL-Transformer: Multiple Instance Learning Via Integrating Morphological and Spatial Information for Lymph Node Metastasis Classification

• Yang Chen
• Zhuchen Shao
• Hao Bian
• Zijie Fang
• Yifeng Wang
• Yuanhao Cai
• Haoqian Wang
• Guojun Liu

Automated classification of lymph node metastasis (LNM) plays an important role in the diagnosis and prognosis. However, it is very challenging to achieve satisfactory performance in LNM classification, because both the morphology and spatial distribution of tumor regions should be taken into account. To address this problem, this article proposes a two-stage dMIL-Transformer framework, which integrates both the morphological and spatial information of the tumor regions based on the theory of multiple instance learning (MIL). In the first stage, a double Max-Min MIL (dMIL) strategy is devised to select the suspected top-K positive instances from each input histopathology image, which contains tens of thousands of patches (primarily negative). The dMIL strategy enables a better decision boundary for selecting the critical instances compared with other methods. In the second stage, a Transformer-based MIL aggregator is designed to integrate all the morphological and spatial information of the selected instances from the first stage. The self-attention mechanism is further employed to characterize the correlation between different instances and learn the bag-level representation for predicting the LNM category. The proposed dMIL-Transformer can effectively deal with the thorny classification in LNM with great visualization and interpretability. We conduct various experiments over three LNM datasets, and achieve 1. 79%-7. 50% performance improvement compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

YNICL Journal 2023 Journal Article

The thalamus is the causal hub of intervention in patients with major depressive disorder: Evidence from the Granger causality analysis

• Chengxiao Yang
• Kunchen Xiao
• Yujia Ao
• Qian Cui
• Xiujuan Jing
• Yifeng Wang

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Histopathology Images Based on Dataset Synthesis and Feature Consistency Constraint

• Zijie Fang
• Yang Chen
• Yifeng Wang
• Zhi Wang
• Xiangyang Ji
• Yongbing Zhang

Tissue segmentation is a critical task in computational pathology due to its desirable ability to indicate the prognosis of cancer patients. Currently, numerous studies attempt to use image-level labels to achieve pixel-level segmentation to reduce the need for fine annotations. However, most of these methods are based on class activation map, which suffers from inaccurate segmentation boundaries. To address this problem, we propose a novel weakly-supervised tissue segmentation framework named PistoSeg, which is implemented under a fully-supervised manner by transferring tissue category labels to pixel-level masks. Firstly, a dataset synthesis method is proposed based on Mosaic transformation to generate synthesized images with pixel-level masks. Next, considering the difference between synthesized and real images, this paper devises an attention-based feature consistency, which directs the training process of a proposed pseudo-mask refining module. Finally, the refined pseudo-masks are used to train a precise segmentation model for testing. Experiments based on WSSS4LUAD and BCSS-WSSS validate that PistoSeg outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The code is released at https://github.com/Vison307/PistoSeg.

AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Unpaired Multi-Domain Stain Transfer for Kidney Histopathological Images

• Yiyang Lin
• Bowei Zeng
• Yifeng Wang
• Yang Chen
• Zijie Fang
• Jian Zhang
• Xiangyang Ji
• Haoqian Wang

As an essential step in the pathological diagnosis, histochemical staining can show specific tissue structure information and, consequently, assist pathologists in making accurate diagnoses. Clinical kidney histopathological analyses usually employ more than one type of staining: H&E, MAS, PAS, PASM, etc. However, due to the interference of colors among multiple stains, it is not easy to perform multiple staining simultaneously on one biological tissue. To address this problem, we propose a network based on unpaired training data to virtually generate multiple types of staining from one staining. Our method can preserve the content of input images while transferring them to multiple target styles accurately. To efficiently control the direction of stain transfer, we propose a style guided normalization (SGN). Furthermore, a multiple style encoding (MSE) is devised to represent the relationship among different staining styles dynamically. An improved one-hot label is also proposed to enhance the generalization ability and extendibility of our method. Vast experiments have demonstrated that our model can achieve superior performance on a tiny dataset. The results exhibit not only good performance but also great visualization and interpretability. Especially, our method also achieves satisfactory results over cross-tissue, cross-staining as well as cross-task. We believe that our method will significantly influence clinical stain transfer and reduce the workload greatly for pathologists. Our code and Supplementary materials are available at https: //github. com/linyiyang98/UMDST.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification

• Zhuchen Shao
• Hao Bian
• Yang Chen
• Yifeng Wang
• Jian Zhang
• Xiangyang Ji
• Yongbing Zhang

Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to solve the weakly supervised classification in whole slide image (WSI) based pathology diagnosis. However, the current MIL methods are usually based on independent and identical distribution hypothesis, thus neglect the correlation among different instances. To address this problem, we proposed a new framework, called correlated MIL, and provided a proof for convergence. Based on this framework, we devised a Transformer based MIL (TransMIL), which explored both morphological and spatial information. The proposed TransMIL can effectively deal with unbalanced/balanced and binary/multiple classification with great visualization and interpretability. We conducted various experiments for three different computational pathology problems and achieved better performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art methods. The test AUC for the binary tumor classification can be up to 93. 09% over CAMELYON16 dataset. And the AUC over the cancer subtypes classification can be up to 96. 03% and 98. 82% over TCGA-NSCLC dataset and TCGA-RCC dataset, respectively. Implementation is available at: https: //github. com/szc19990412/TransMIL.

YNIMG Journal 2018 Journal Article

Frequency dependent hub role of the dorsal and ventral right anterior insula

• Yifeng Wang
• Lixia Zhu
• Qijun Zou
• Qian Cui
• Wei Liao
• Xujun Duan
• Bharat Biswal
• Huafu Chen