Researcher profile

Nima Tajbakhsh

Nima Tajbakhsh contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate

Trust snapshot

Quick read

Trust 21 - EmergingVerification L1Unclaimed author
6works
0followers
3topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Decide how to stay connected

Follow researcher0

Identity and collaboration

How to connect with this researcher

Claiming links this public author record to a researcher profile and unlocks direct collaboration workflows.

Log in to claim

Direct collaboration

Open a focused conversation when the fit is right

Claim this author entity first to unlock direct invitations.

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent work, topics, institutions and collaborators without jumping out to a separate graph page.

Building this graph slice

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Star Elastic: Many-in-One Reasoning LLMs with Efficient Budget Control

Training a family of large language models (LLMs), either from scratch or via iterative compression, is prohibitively expensive and inefficient, requiring separate training runs for each model in the family. In this paper, we introduce Star Elastic, a novel LLM post-training method that adds N nested submodels to a given parent reasoning model using the compute of one run (N-fold savings) via a single post-training job. Beyond reducing training costs, Star Elastic also addresses a fundamental limitation of efficient reasoning: the rigidity of static architectures, which forces the allocation of constant resources regardless of token difficulty. By unlocking elastic budget control, Star Elastic enables a novel inference scheme that uses different submodels for each reasoning phase (thinking and answering). Star Elastic supports (1) nesting along the SSM, embedding channel, MoE, and FFN axes, (2) learning nested submodels via an end-to-end trainable router, and (3) curriculum-based knowledge distillation. Building on the Nemotron Elastic framework, we apply Star Elastic to the NVIDIA Nemotron Nano models, with a particular focus on hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures: from Nemotron Nano v3 (30B/3.6A), we generate 23B (2.8A) and 12B (2.0A) variants with 160B training tokens. All nested models match or outperform independently trained baselines of comparable size and achieve a 360x reduction versus pretraining from scratch and a 7x reduction over state-of-the-art compression. Crucially, elastic budget control advances the accuracy-latency Pareto frontier, achieving up to 16% higher accuracy and 1.9x lower latency via dynamic per-phase model selection. We further extend Star Elastic to quantized regimes via Quantization-Aware Distillation (QAD), producing nested NVFP4 and FP8 elastic checkpoints that preserve zero-shot slicing while delivering smaller deployment footprints.

preprint2020arXiv

Computer Aided Detection for Pulmonary Embolism Challenge (CAD-PE)

Rationale: Computer aided detection (CAD) algorithms for Pulmonary Embolism (PE) algorithms have been shown to increase radiologists' sensitivity with a small increase in specificity. However, CAD for PE has not been adopted into clinical practice, likely because of the high number of false positives current CAD software produces. Objective: To generate a database of annotated computed tomography pulmonary angiographies, use it to compare the sensitivity and false positive rate of current algorithms and to develop new methods that improve such metrics. Methods: 91 Computed tomography pulmonary angiography scans were annotated by at least one radiologist by segmenting all pulmonary emboli visible on the study. 20 annotated CTPAs were open to the public in the form of a medical image analysis challenge. 20 more were kept for evaluation purposes. 51 were made available post-challenge. 8 submissions, 6 of them novel, were evaluated on the 20 evaluation CTPAs. Performance was measured as per embolus sensitivity vs. false positives per scan curve. Results: The best algorithms achieved a per-embolus sensitivity of 75% at 2 false positives per scan (fps) or of 70% at 1 fps, outperforming the state of the art. Deep learning approaches outperformed traditional machine learning ones, and their performance improved with the number of training cases. Significance: Through this work and challenge we have improved the state-of-the art of computer aided detection algorithms for pulmonary embolism. An open database and an evaluation benchmark for such algorithms have been generated, easing the development of further improvements. Implications on clinical practice will need further research.

preprint2020arXiv

Embracing Imperfect Datasets: A Review of Deep Learning Solutions for Medical Image Segmentation

The medical imaging literature has witnessed remarkable progress in high-performing segmentation models based on convolutional neural networks. Despite the new performance highs, the recent advanced segmentation models still require large, representative, and high quality annotated datasets. However, rarely do we have a perfect training dataset, particularly in the field of medical imaging, where data and annotations are both expensive to acquire. Recently, a large body of research has studied the problem of medical image segmentation with imperfect datasets, tackling two major dataset limitations: scarce annotations where only limited annotated data is available for training, and weak annotations where the training data has only sparse annotations, noisy annotations, or image-level annotations. In this article, we provide a detailed review of the solutions above, summarizing both the technical novelties and empirical results. We further compare the benefits and requirements of the surveyed methodologies and provide our recommended solutions. We hope this survey article increases the community awareness of the techniques that are available to handle imperfect medical image segmentation datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

ErrorNet: Learning error representations from limited data to improve vascular segmentation

Deep convolutional neural networks have proved effective in segmenting lesions and anatomies in various medical imaging modalities. However, in the presence of small sample size and domain shift problems, these models often produce masks with non-intuitive segmentation mistakes. In this paper, we propose a segmentation framework called ErrorNet, which learns to correct these segmentation mistakes through the repeated process of injecting systematic segmentation errors to the segmentation result based on a learned shape prior, followed by attempting to predict the injected error. During inference, ErrorNet corrects the segmentation mistakes by adding the predicted error map to the initial segmentation result. ErrorNet has advantages over alternatives based on domain adaptation or CRF-based post processing, because it requires neither domain-specific parameter tuning nor any data from the target domains. We have evaluated ErrorNet using five public datasets for the task of retinal vessel segmentation. The selected datasets differ in size and patient population, allowing us to evaluate the effectiveness of ErrorNet in handling small sample size and domain shift problems. Our experiments demonstrate that ErrorNet outperforms a base segmentation model, a CRF-based post processing scheme, and a domain adaptation method, with a greater performance gain in the presence of the aforementioned dataset limitations.

preprint2020arXiv

Extreme Consistency: Overcoming Annotation Scarcity and Domain Shifts

Supervised learning has proved effective for medical image analysis. However, it can utilize only the small labeled portion of data; it fails to leverage the large amounts of unlabeled data that is often available in medical image datasets. Supervised models are further handicapped by domain shifts, when the labeled dataset, despite being large enough, fails to cover different protocols or ethnicities. In this paper, we introduce \emph{extreme consistency}, which overcomes the above limitations, by maximally leveraging unlabeled data from the same or a different domain in a teacher-student semi-supervised paradigm. Extreme consistency is the process of sending an extreme transformation of a given image to the student network and then constraining its prediction to be consistent with the teacher network's prediction for the untransformed image. The extreme nature of our consistency loss distinguishes our method from related works that yield suboptimal performance by exercising only mild prediction consistency. Our method is 1) auto-didactic, as it requires no extra expert annotations; 2) versatile, as it handles both domain shift and limited annotation problems; 3) generic, as it is readily applicable to classification, segmentation, and detection tasks; and 4) simple to implement, as it requires no adversarial training. We evaluate our method for the tasks of lesion and retinal vessel segmentation in skin and fundus images. Our experiments demonstrate a significant performance gain over both modern supervised networks and recent semi-supervised models. This performance is attributed to the strong regularization enforced by extreme consistency, which enables the student network to learn how to handle extreme variants of both labeled and unlabeled images. This enhances the network's ability to tackle the inevitable same- and cross-domain data variability during inference.

preprint2020arXiv

UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation

The state-of-the-art models for medical image segmentation are variants of U-Net and fully convolutional networks (FCN). Despite their success, these models have two limitations: (1) their optimal depth is apriori unknown, requiring extensive architecture search or inefficient ensemble of models of varying depths; and (2) their skip connections impose an unnecessarily restrictive fusion scheme, forcing aggregation only at the same-scale feature maps of the encoder and decoder sub-networks. To overcome these two limitations, we propose UNet++, a new neural architecture for semantic and instance segmentation, by (1) alleviating the unknown network depth with an efficient ensemble of U-Nets of varying depths, which partially share an encoder and co-learn simultaneously using deep supervision; (2) redesigning skip connections to aggregate features of varying semantic scales at the decoder sub-networks, leading to a highly flexible feature fusion scheme; and (3) devising a pruning scheme to accelerate the inference speed of UNet++. We have evaluated UNet++ using six different medical image segmentation datasets, covering multiple imaging modalities such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and electron microscopy (EM), and demonstrating that (1) UNet++ consistently outperforms the baseline models for the task of semantic segmentation across different datasets and backbone architectures; (2) UNet++ enhances segmentation quality of varying-size objects -- an improvement over the fixed-depth U-Net; (3) Mask RCNN++ (Mask R-CNN with UNet++ design) outperforms the original Mask R-CNN for the task of instance segmentation; and (4) pruned UNet++ models achieve significant speedup while showing only modest performance degradation. Our implementation and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/MrGiovanni/UNetPlusPlus.