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Haofeng Zhang

Haofeng Zhang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Geometry-aware Prototype Learning for Cross-domain Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation

Cross-domain few-shot medical image segmentation (CD-FSMIS) requires a model to generalise simultaneously to novel anatomical categories and unseen imaging domains from only a handful of annotated examples. Existing prototypical approaches inevitably entangle anatomical structure with domain-specific appearance variations, and thus lack a stable reference for reliable matching under domain shift. We observe that the geometric structure of human anatomy constitutes a reliable, domain-transferable prior that has been overlooked. Building on this insight, we propose GeoProto, a geometry-aware CD-FSMIS framework that enriches prototypical matching with explicit structural priors. The core component, Geometry-Aware Prototype Enrichment (GAPE), augments each local appearance prototype with a learned geometric offset encoding its ordinal position within the organ's interior topology. This offset is derived from an auxiliary Ordinal Shape Branch (OSB) trained under an ordinally consistent objective that enforces monotonic variation of geometric embeddings across interior strata, requiring no annotation beyond standard segmentation masks. Extensive experiments across seven datasets spanning three evaluation settings (cross-modality, cross-sequence, and cross-context) demonstrate that GeoProto achieves state-of-the-art performance.

preprint2026arXiv

Utility-Oriented Visual Evidence Selection for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Visual evidence selection is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), yet existing methods typically rely on semantic relevance or surface-level similarity, which are often misaligned with the actual utility of visual evidence for downstream reasoning. We reformulate multimodal evidence selection from an information-theoretic perspective by defining evidence utility as the information gain induced on a model's output distribution. To overcome the intractability of answer-space optimization, we introduce a latent notion of evidence helpfulness and theoretically show that, under mild assumptions, ranking evidence by information gain on this latent variable is equivalent to answer-space utility. We further propose a training-free, surrogate-accelerated framework that efficiently estimates evidence utility using lightweight multimodal models. Experiments on MRAG-Bench and Visual-RAG across multiple model families demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art RAG baselines while achieving substantial reductions in computational cost.

preprint2022arXiv

Cardiac Adipose Tissue Segmentation via Image-Level Annotations

Automatically identifying the structural substrates underlying cardiac abnormalities can potentially provide real-time guidance for interventional procedures. With the knowledge of cardiac tissue substrates, the treatment of complex arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia can be further optimized by detecting arrhythmia substrates to target for treatment (i.e., adipose) and identifying critical structures to avoid. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a real-time imaging modality that aids in addressing this need. Existing approaches for cardiac image analysis mainly rely on fully supervised learning techniques, which suffer from the drawback of workload on labor-intensive annotation process of pixel-wise labeling. To lessen the need for pixel-wise labeling, we develop a two-stage deep learning framework for cardiac adipose tissue segmentation using image-level annotations on OCT images of human cardiac substrates. In particular, we integrate class activation mapping with superpixel segmentation to solve the sparse tissue seed challenge raised in cardiac tissue segmentation. Our study bridges the gap between the demand on automatic tissue analysis and the lack of high-quality pixel-wise annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to address cardiac tissue segmentation on OCT images via weakly supervised learning techniques. Within an in-vitro human cardiac OCT dataset, we demonstrate that our weakly supervised approach on image-level annotations achieves comparable performance as fully supervised methods trained on pixel-wise annotations.

preprint2022arXiv

Evaluating Aleatoric Uncertainty via Conditional Generative Models

Aleatoric uncertainty quantification seeks for distributional knowledge of random responses, which is important for reliability analysis and robustness improvement in machine learning applications. Previous research on aleatoric uncertainty estimation mainly targets closed-formed conditional densities or variances, which requires strong restrictions on the data distribution or dimensionality. To overcome these restrictions, we study conditional generative models for aleatoric uncertainty estimation. We introduce two metrics to measure the discrepancy between two conditional distributions that suit these models. Both metrics can be easily and unbiasedly computed via Monte Carlo simulation of the conditional generative models, thus facilitating their evaluation and training. We demonstrate numerically how our metrics provide correct measurements of conditional distributional discrepancies and can be used to train conditional models competitive against existing benchmarks.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning to Hash Naturally Sorts

Learning to hash pictures a list-wise sorting problem. Its testing metrics, e.g., mean-average precision, count on a sorted candidate list ordered by pair-wise code similarity. However, scarcely does one train a deep hashing model with the sorted results end-to-end because of the non-differentiable nature of the sorting operation. This inconsistency in the objectives of training and test may lead to sub-optimal performance since the training loss often fails to reflect the actual retrieval metric. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing Naturally-Sorted Hashing (NSH). We sort the Hamming distances of samples' hash codes and accordingly gather their latent representations for self-supervised training. Thanks to the recent advances in differentiable sorting approximations, the hash head receives gradients from the sorter so that the hash encoder can be optimized along with the training procedure. Additionally, we describe a novel Sorted Noise-Contrastive Estimation (SortedNCE) loss that selectively picks positive and negative samples for contrastive learning, which allows NSH to mine data semantic relations during training in an unsupervised manner. Our extensive experiments show the proposed NSH model significantly outperforms the existing unsupervised hashing methods on three benchmarked datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Prediction Intervals for Simulation Metamodeling

Simulation metamodeling refers to the construction of lower-fidelity models to represent input-output relations using few simulation runs. Stochastic kriging, which is based on Gaussian process, is a versatile and common technique for such a task. However, this approach relies on specific model assumptions and could encounter scalability challenges. In this paper, we study an alternative metamodeling approach using prediction intervals to capture the uncertainty of simulation outputs. We cast the metamodeling task as an empirical constrained optimization framework to train prediction intervals that attain accurate prediction coverage and narrow width. We specifically use neural network to represent these intervals and discuss procedures to approximately solve this optimization problem. We also present an adaptation of conformal prediction tools as another approach to construct prediction intervals for metamodeling. Lastly, we present a validation machinery and show how our method can enjoy a distribution-free finite-sample guarantee on the prediction performance. We demonstrate and compare our proposed approaches with existing methods including stochastic kriging through numerical examples.

preprint2022arXiv

Zero-Shot Logit Adjustment

Semantic-descriptor-based Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) poses challenges in recognizing novel classes in the test phase. The development of generative models enables current GZSL techniques to probe further into the semantic-visual link, culminating in a two-stage form that includes a generator and a classifier. However, existing generation-based methods focus on enhancing the generator's effect while neglecting the improvement of the classifier. In this paper, we first analyze of two properties of the generated pseudo unseen samples: bias and homogeneity. Then, we perform variational Bayesian inference to back-derive the evaluation metrics, which reflects the balance of the seen and unseen classes. As a consequence of our derivation, the aforementioned two properties are incorporated into the classifier training as seen-unseen priors via logit adjustment. The Zero-Shot Logit Adjustment further puts semantic-based classifiers into effect in generation-based GZSL. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art when combined with the basic generator, and it can improve various generative Zero-Shot Learning frameworks. Our codes are available on https://github.com/cdb342/IJCAI-2022-ZLA.

preprint2021arXiv

Co-Seg: An Image Segmentation Framework Against Label Corruption

Supervised deep learning performance is heavily tied to the availability of high-quality labels for training. Neural networks can gradually overfit corrupted labels if directly trained on noisy datasets, leading to severe performance degradation at test time. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework, namely Co-Seg, to collaboratively train segmentation networks on datasets which include low-quality noisy labels. Our approach first trains two networks simultaneously to sift through all samples and obtain a subset with reliable labels. Then, an efficient yet easily-implemented label correction strategy is applied to enrich the reliable subset. Finally, using the updated dataset, we retrain the segmentation network to finalize its parameters. Experiments in two noisy labels scenarios demonstrate that our proposed model can achieve results comparable to those obtained from supervised learning trained on the noise-free labels. In addition, our framework can be easily implemented in any segmentation algorithm to increase its robustness to noisy labels.

preprint2021arXiv

Learning Prediction Intervals for Regression: Generalization and Calibration

We study the generation of prediction intervals in regression for uncertainty quantification. This task can be formalized as an empirical constrained optimization problem that minimizes the average interval width while maintaining the coverage accuracy across data. We strengthen the existing literature by studying two aspects of this empirical optimization. First is a general learning theory to characterize the optimality-feasibility tradeoff that encompasses Lipschitz continuity and VC-subgraph classes, which are exemplified in regression trees and neural networks. Second is a calibration machinery and the corresponding statistical theory to optimally select the regularization parameter that manages this tradeoff, which bypasses the overfitting issues in previous approaches in coverage attainment. We empirically demonstrate the strengths of our interval generation and calibration algorithms in terms of testing performances compared to existing benchmarks.