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Phi Le Nguyen

Phi Le Nguyen contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Computer Vision Machine Learning

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preprint2026arXiv

Med-StepBench: A Hierarchical Reasoning Framework for Evaluating Hallucinations in Medical Vision-Language Models

Large vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong performance in medical image understanding, but frequently generate clinically plausible yet incorrect statements, raising significant safety concerns. Existing medical hallucination benchmarks primarily focus on 2D imaging with one-shot diagnostic questions, offering limited insight into whether predictions are grounded in correct localization and abnormality identification, allowing critical reasoning errors to remain hidden behind seemingly correct diagnoses. We introduce Med-StepBench, the first large-scale benchmark for step-wise hallucination detection in 3D oncological PET/CT, comprising over 12,000 images and more than 1,000,000 image-statement pairs across volumetric and multi-view 2D data, which decomposes clinical reasoning into four expert-designed diagnostic stages. Using clinician-verified annotations, we perform the first step-level evaluation of general-purpose and medical VLMs, revealing systematic failure modes obscured by aggregate accuracy metrics. Furthermore, we show that current VLMs are highly susceptible to adversarial yet clinically plausible intermediate explanations, which significantly amplify hallucinations despite contradictory visual evidence. Together, our findings highlight fundamental limitations in grounding multi-step clinical reasoning and establish Med-StepBench as a rigorous benchmark for developing safer and more reliable medical VLMs.

preprint2026arXiv

Tree SAE: Learning Hierarchical Feature Structures in Sparse Autoencoders

Learning hierarchical features in Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) is essential for capturing the structured nature of real-world data and mitigating issues like feature absorption or splitting. Existing works attempt to identify hierarchical relationships within independent feature sets by relying on activation coverage, the assumption that child feature should only activate when its parent feature activates. However, we demonstrate that this condition alone is insufficient; that is, it often produces false positives where parent and child concepts are semantically unrelated. To address this, we introduce a novel reconstruction condition that enforces a deeper functional link between hierarchical levels. By combining both activation and reconstruction constraints, we propose the Tree SAE, a model designed to learn hierarchical structures directly from within the feature set. Our results demonstrate that Tree SAEs significantly surpass the existing SAEs at learning hierarchical pairs while maintaining competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on several key benchmarks. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of our Tree SAE in mapping the geometry of child feature subspaces and uncovering the complex hierarchical concept structures encoded within large language models.

preprint2022arXiv

A Novel Approach for Pill-Prescription Matching with GNN Assistance and Contrastive Learning

Medication mistaking is one of the risks that can result in unpredictable consequences for patients. To mitigate this risk, we develop an automatic system that correctly identifies pill-prescription from mobile images. Specifically, we define a so-called pill-prescription matching task, which attempts to match the images of the pills taken with the pills' names in the prescription. We then propose PIMA, a novel approach using Graph Neural Network (GNN) and contrastive learning to address the targeted problem. In particular, GNN is used to learn the spatial correlation between the text boxes in the prescription and thereby highlight the text boxes carrying the pill names. In addition, contrastive learning is employed to facilitate the modeling of cross-modal similarity between textual representations of pill names and visual representations of pill images. We conducted extensive experiments and demonstrated that PIMA outperforms baseline models on a real-world dataset of pill and prescription images that we constructed. Specifically, PIMA improves the accuracy from 19.09% to 46.95% compared to other baselines. We believe our work can open up new opportunities to build new clinical applications and improve medication safety and patient care.

preprint2022arXiv

FedDRL: Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Adaptive Aggregation for Non-IID Data in Federated Learning

The uneven distribution of local data across different edge devices (clients) results in slow model training and accuracy reduction in federated learning. Naive federated learning (FL) strategy and most alternative solutions attempted to achieve more fairness by weighted aggregating deep learning models across clients. This work introduces a novel non-IID type encountered in real-world datasets, namely cluster-skew, in which groups of clients have local data with similar distributions, causing the global model to converge to an over-fitted solution. To deal with non-IID data, particularly the cluster-skewed data, we propose FedDRL, a novel FL model that employs deep reinforcement learning to adaptively determine each client's impact factor (which will be used as the weights in the aggregation process). Extensive experiments on a suite of federated datasets confirm that the proposed FedDRL improves favorably against FedAvg and FedProx methods, e.g., up to 4.05% and 2.17% on average for the CIFAR-100 dataset, respectively.

preprint2022arXiv

Image-based Contextual Pill Recognition with Medical Knowledge Graph Assistance

Identifying pills given their captured images under various conditions and backgrounds has been becoming more and more essential. Several efforts have been devoted to utilizing the deep learning-based approach to tackle the pill recognition problem in the literature. However, due to the high similarity between pills' appearance, misrecognition often occurs, leaving pill recognition a challenge. To this end, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach named PIKA that leverages external knowledge to enhance pill recognition accuracy. Specifically, we address a practical scenario (which we call contextual pill recognition), aiming to identify pills in a picture of a patient's pill intake. Firstly, we propose a novel method for modeling the implicit association between pills in the presence of an external data source, in this case, prescriptions. Secondly, we present a walk-based graph embedding model that transforms from the graph space to vector space and extracts condensed relational features of the pills. Thirdly, a final framework is provided that leverages both image-based visual and graph-based relational features to accomplish the pill identification task. Within this framework, the visual representation of each pill is mapped to the graph embedding space, which is then used to execute attention over the graph representation, resulting in a semantically-rich context vector that aids in the final classification. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use external prescription data to establish associations between medicines and to classify them using this aiding information. The architecture of PIKA is lightweight and has the flexibility to incorporate into any recognition backbones. The experimental results show that by leveraging the external knowledge graph, PIKA can improve the recognition accuracy from 4.8% to 34.1% in terms of F1-score, compared to baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

SAFL: A Self-Attention Scene Text Recognizer with Focal Loss

In the last decades, scene text recognition has gained worldwide attention from both the academic community and actual users due to its importance in a wide range of applications. Despite achievements in optical character recognition, scene text recognition remains challenging due to inherent problems such as distortions or irregular layout. Most of the existing approaches mainly leverage recurrence or convolution-based neural networks. However, while recurrent neural networks (RNNs) usually suffer from slow training speed due to sequential computation and encounter problems as vanishing gradient or bottleneck, CNN endures a trade-off between complexity and performance. In this paper, we introduce SAFL, a self-attention-based neural network model with the focal loss for scene text recognition, to overcome the limitation of the existing approaches. The use of focal loss instead of negative log-likelihood helps the model focus more on low-frequency samples training. Moreover, to deal with the distortions and irregular texts, we exploit Spatial TransformerNetwork (STN) to rectify text before passing to the recognition network. We perform experiments to compare the performance of the proposed model with seven benchmarks. The numerical results show that our model achieves the best performance.

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