Alexander Jaus
Publications
The autoPET3 Challenge -- Automated Lesion Segmentation in Whole-Body PET/CT - Multitracer Multicenter Generalization
We report the design and results of the third autoPET challenge (MICCAI 2024), which benchmarked automated lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT under a compositional generalization setting. Training data comprised 1,014 [18F]-FDG PET/CT studies from the University Hospital Tübingen and 597 [18F]/[68Ga]-PSMA PET/CT studies from the LMU University Hospital Munich, constituting the largest publicly available annotated PSMA PET/CT dataset to date. The held-out test set of 200 studies covered four tracer-center combinations, two of which represented unseen compositional pairings. A complementary data-centric award category isolated the contribution of data handling strategies by restricting participants to a fixed baseline model. Seventeen teams submitted 27 algorithms, predominantly nnU-Net-based 3D networks with PET/CT channel concatenation. The top-ranked algorithm achieved a mean DSC of 0.66, FNV of 3.18 mL, and FPV of 2.78 mL across all four test conditions, improving DSC by 8% and reducing the false-negative volume by 5 mL relative to the provided baseline. Ranking was stable across bootstrap resampling and alternative ranking schemes for the top tier. Beyond the benchmark, we provide an in-depth analysis of segmentation performance at the patient and lesion level. Three main conclusions can be drawn: (1) in-domain multitracer PET/CT segmentation is sufficient and probably approaching reader agreement; (2) compositional generalization to unseen tracer-center combinations remains an open problem mainly driven by systematic volume overestimation; (3) heterogeneity and case difficulty drive performance variation substantially more than the choice of algorithm among top-ranked teams.
IMPACT-Scribe: Interactive Temporal Action Segmentation with Boundary Scribbles and Query Planning
Dense temporal annotation of procedural activity videos is vital for action understanding and embodied intelligence but remains labor-intensive due to reactive tools. Each correction is treated as an isolated edit, limiting reuse of information on annotator uncertainty and model reliability. We introduce IMPACT-Scribe, a correction-driven framework for dense labeling that uses each correction to improve future human-machine collaboration. IMPACT-Scribe combines uncertainty-aware boundary scribble supervision, local proposal modeling, cost-aware query planning, structured propagation, and correction-driven adaptation. Experiments and a human study show that this closed-loop design improves labeling quality per effort, enhances boundary accuracy, and fosters better human-machine interaction over time. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/BanzQians/IMPACT_AS.
IMPACT-HOI: Supervisory Control for Onset-Anchored Partial HOI Event Construction
We present IMPACT-HOI, a mixed-initiative framework for annotating egocentric procedural video by constructing structured event graphs for Human-Object Interactions (HOI), motivated by the need for high-quality structured supervision for learning robot manipulation from human demonstration. IMPACT-HOI frames this task as the incremental resolution of a partially specified, onset-anchored event state. A trust-calibrated controller selects among direct queries, human-confirmed suggestions, and conservative completions based on empirical annotator behavior and evidence quality. A risk-bounded execution protocol, utilizing atomic rollback, ensures that human-confirmed decisions are preserved against conflicting automated updates. A user study with 9 participants shows a 13.5% reduction in manual annotation actions, a 46.67% event match rate, and zero confirmed-field violations under the studied protocol. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/541741106/IMPACT_HOI.
IMPACT-CYCLE: A Contract-Based Multi-Agent System for Claim-Level Supervisory Correction of Long-Video Semantic Memory
Correcting errors in long-video understanding is disproportionately costly: existing multimodal pipelines produce opaque, end-to-end outputs that expose no intermediate state for inspection, forcing annotators to revisit raw video and reconstruct temporal logic from scratch. The core bottleneck is not generation quality alone, but the absence of a supervisory interface through which human effort can be proportional to the scope of each error. We present IMPACT-CYCLE, a supervisory multi-agent system that reformulates long-video understanding as iterative claim-level maintenance of a shared semantic memory -- a structured, versioned state encoding typed claims, a claim dependency graph, and a provenance log. Role-specialized agents operating under explicit authority contracts decompose verification into local object-relation correctness, cross-temporal consistency, and global semantic coherence, with corrections confined to structurally dependent claims. When automated evidence is insufficient, the system escalates to human arbitration as the supervisory authority with final override rights; dependency-closure re-verification then ensures correction cost remains proportional to error scope. Experiments on VidOR show substantially improved downstream reasoning (VQA: 0.71 to 0.79) and a 4.8x reduction in human arbitration cost, with workload significantly lower than manual annotation. Code will be released at https://github.com/MKong17/IMPACT_CYCLE.