State-of-the-art crowd counting and localization are primarily modeled using two paradigms: density maps and point regression. Given the field's security ramifications, there is active interest in model robustness against adversarial attacks. Recent studies have demonstrated transferability across density-map-based approaches via adversarial patches, but cross-paradigm attacks (i.e., across both density map-based models and point regression-based models) remain unexplored. We introduce a novel adversarial framework that compromises both density map and point regression architectural paradigms through a comprehensive multi-task loss optimization. For point-regression models, we employ scene-density-specific high-confidence logit suppression; for density-map approaches, we use peak-targeted density map suppression. Both are combined with model-agnostic perceptual constraints to ensure that perturbations are effective and imperceptible to the human eye. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack, achieving on average a 7X increase in Mean Absolute Error compared to clean images while maintaining competitive visual quality, and successfully transferring across seven state-of-the-art crowd models with transfer ratios ranging from 0.55 to 1.69. Our approach strikes a balance between attack effectiveness and imperceptibility compared to state-of-the-art transferable attack strategies. The source code is available at https://github.com/simurgh7/CrowdGen

Pin sites represent the interface where a metal pin or wire from the external environment passes through the skin into the internal environment of the limb. These pins or wires connect an external fixator to the bone to stabilize the bone segments in a patient with trauma or deformity. Because these pin sites represent an opportunity for external skin flora to enter the internal environment of the limb, infections of the pin site are common. These pin site infections are painful, annoying, and cause increased morbidity to the patients. Improving the identification and management of pin site infections would greatly enhance the patient experience when external fixators are used. For this, this paper collects and produces a dataset on pin sites wound infections and proposes a deep learning (DL) method to classify pin sites images based on their appearance: Group A displayed signs of inflammation or infection, while Group B showed no evident complications. Unlike studies that primarily focus on open wounds, our research includes potential interventions at the metal pin/skin interface. Our attention-based deep learning model addresses this complexity by emphasizing relevant regions and minimizing distractions from the pins. Moreover, we introduce an Efficient Redundant Reconstruction Convolution (ERRC) method to enhance the richness of feature maps while reducing the number of parameters. Our model outperforms baseline methods with an AUC of 0.975 and an F1-score of 0.927, requiring only 5.77 M parameters. These results highlight the potential of DL in differentiating pin sites only based on visual signs of infection, aligning with healthcare professional assessments, while further validation with more data remains essential.

This paper presents an online path planning algorithm for safe autonomous manipulation of a flexibly constrained object in an unknown environment. Methods for real time identification and characterization of perceived flexible constraints and global stiffness are presented. Used in tandem, these methods allow a robot to simultaneously explore, characterize, and manipulate an elastic system safely. Navigation without a-priori knowledge of the system is achieved using constraint exploration based on local force and position information. The perceived constraint stiffness is considered at multiple poses along an object's (system) trajectory. Using stiffness eigenvector information, global stiffness behavior is characterized and identified using an atlas of simple mechanical constraints, such as hinges and planar constraints. Validation of these algorithms is carried out by simulation and experimentally. The ability to recognize several common simple mechanical constraints (such as a flexible hinge) in real time, and to subsequently identify relevant screw parameters is demonstrated. These results suggest the feasibility of simultaneous global constrain/stiffness exploration and safe manipulation of flexibly constrained objects. We believe that this approach will eventually enable safe cooperative manipulation in applications such as organ retraction and manipulation during surgery

Scalable control of pneumatic and fluidic networks remains fundamentally constrained by architectures that require continuous power input, dense external control hardware, and fixed routing topologies. Current valve arrays rely on such continuous actuation and mechanically fixed routing, imposing substantial thermal and architectural overhead. Here, we introduce the Switchable-polarity ElectroPermanent Magnet (S-EPM), a fundamentally new bistable magnetic architecture that deterministically reverses its external magnetic polarity through transient electrical excitation. By reconfiguring internal flux pathways within a composite magnet assembly, the S-EPM establishes two stable, opposing magnetic configurations without requiring sustained power. We integrate this architecture into a compact pinch-valve to robustly control pneumatic and liquid media. This state-encoded magnetic control enables logic-embedded fluidic networks, including decoders, hierarchical distribution modules, and a nonvolatile six-port routing array. These systems provide address-based routing and programmable compositional control, offering features like individual port isolation that are impossible with standard mechanically coupled rotary valves. By embedding functionality in persistent magnetic states rather than continuous power or static plumbing, this work establishes a scalable foundation for digital fluidics and autonomous laboratory platforms.

Diffusion models are increasingly used for robot learning, but current designs face a clear trade-off. Action-chunking diffusion policies like ManiCM are fast to run, yet they only predict short segments of motion. This makes them reactive, but unable to capture time-dependent motion primitives, such as following a spring-damper-like behavior with built-in dynamic profiles of acceleration and deceleration. Recently, Movement Primitive Diffusion (MPD) partially addresses this limitation by parameterizing full trajectories using Probabilistic Dynamic Movement Primitives (ProDMPs), thereby enabling the generation of temporally structured motions. Nevertheless, MPD integrates the motion decoder directly into a multi-step diffusion process, resulting in prohibitively high inference latency that limits its applicability in real-time control settings. We propose FODMP (Fast One-step Diffusion of Movement Primitives), a new framework that distills diffusion models into the ProDMPs trajectory parameter space and generates motion using a single-step decoder. FODMP retains the temporal structure of movement primitives while eliminating the inference bottleneck through single-step consistency distillation. This enables robots to execute time-dependent primitives at high inference speed, suitable for closed-loop vision-based control. On standard manipulation benchmarks (MetaWorld, ManiSkill), FODMP runs up to 10 times faster than MPD and 7 times faster than action-chunking diffusion policies, while matching or exceeding their success rates. Beyond speed, by generating fast acceleration-deceleration motion primitives, FODMP allows the robot to intercept and securely catch a fast-flying ball, whereas action-chunking diffusion policy and MPD respond too slowly for real-time interception.

Until recently, the success of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) has primarily relied on billion-sample datasets, posing a significant barrier to progress. Latest works have begun to close this gap by improving supervision quality, but each addresses only a subset of the weaknesses in contrastive pretraining. We present GoldiCLIP, a framework built on a Goldilocks principle of finding the right balance of supervision signals. Our multifaceted training framework synergistically combines three key innovations: (1) a text-conditioned self-distillation method to align both text-agnostic and text-conditioned features; (2) an encoder integrated decoder with Visual Question Answering (VQA) objective that enables the encoder to generalize beyond the caption-like queries; and (3) an uncertainty-based weighting mechanism that automatically balances all heterogeneous losses. Trained on just 30 million images, 300x less data than leading methods, GoldiCLIP achieves state-of-the-art among data-efficient approaches, improving over the best comparable baseline by 2.2 points on MSCOCO retrieval, 2.0 on fine-grained retrieval, and 5.9 on question-based retrieval, while remaining competitive with billion-scale models. Project page: https://petsi.uk/goldiclip.

Computed tomography image segmentation of complex abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) often fails because the models assign internal focus to irrelevant structures or do not focus on thin, low-contrast targets. Where the model looks is the primary training signal, and thus we propose an Explainable AI (XAI) guided encoder shaping framework. Our method computes a dense, attribution-based encoder focus map ("XAI field") from the final encoder block and uses it in two complementary ways: (i) we align the predicted probability mass to the XAI field to promote agreement between focus and output; and (ii) we route the field into a lightweight refinement pathway and a confidence prior that modulates logits at inference, suppressing distractors while preserving subtle structures. The objective terms serve only as control signals; the contribution is the integration of attribution guidance into representation and decoding. We evaluate clinically validated challenging cases curated for failure-prone scenarios. Compared to a base SAM setup, our implementation yields substantial improvements. The observed gains suggest that explicitly optimizing encoder focus via XAI guidance is a practical and effective principle for reliable segmentation in complex scenarios.

In this paper, we uncover the hidden potential of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) to significantly enhance generative tasks. Through an in-depth analysis of the denoising process, we demonstrate that introducing a single learned scaling parameter can significantly improve the performance of DiT blocks. Building on this insight, we propose Calibri, a parameter-efficient approach that optimally calibrates DiT components to elevate generative quality. Calibri frames DiT calibration as a black-box reward optimization problem, which is efficiently solved using an evolutionary algorithm and modifies just ~100 parameters. Experimental results reveal that despite its lightweight design, Calibri consistently improves performance across various text-to-image models. Notably, Calibri also reduces the inference steps required for image generation, all while maintaining high-quality outputs.

To fully capture the meaning of a sentence, semantic representations should encode aspect, which describes the internal temporal structure of events. In graph-based meaning representation frameworks such as Uniform Meaning Representations (UMR), aspect lets one know how events unfold over time, including distinctions such as states, activities, and completed events. Despite its importance, aspect remains sparsely annotated across semantic meaning representation frameworks. This has, in turn, hindered not only current manual annotation, but also the development of automatic systems capable of predicting aspectual information. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset of English sentences annotated with UMR aspect labels over Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs that lack the feature. We describe the annotation scheme and guidelines used to label eventive predicates according to the UMR aspect lattice, as well as the annotation pipeline used to ensure consistency and quality across annotators through a multi-step adjudication process. To demonstrate the utility of our dataset for future automation, we present baseline experiments using three modeling approaches. Our results establish initial benchmarks for automatic UMR aspect prediction and provide a foundation for integrating aspect into semantic meaning representations more broadly.

Controlling video and audio generation requires diverse modalities, from depth and pose to camera trajectories and audio transformations, yet existing approaches either train a single monolithic model for a fixed set of controls or introduce costly architectural changes for each new modality. We introduce AVControl, a lightweight, extendable framework built on LTX-2, a joint audio-visual foundation model, where each control modality is trained as a separate LoRA on a parallel canvas that provides the reference signal as additional tokens in the attention layers, requiring no architectural changes beyond the LoRA adapters themselves. We show that simply extending image-based in-context methods to video fails for structural control, and that our parallel canvas approach resolves this. On the VACE Benchmark, we outperform all evaluated baselines on depth- and pose-guided generation, inpainting, and outpainting, and show competitive results on camera control and audio-visual benchmarks. Our framework supports a diverse set of independently trained modalities: spatially-aligned controls such as depth, pose, and edges, camera trajectory with intrinsics, sparse motion control, video editing, and, to our knowledge, the first modular audio-visual controls for a joint generation model. Our method is both compute- and data-efficient: each modality requires only a small dataset and converges within a few hundred to a few thousand training steps, a fraction of the budget of monolithic alternatives. We publicly release our code and trained LoRA checkpoints.

Routing has emerged as a promising strategy for balancing performance and cost in large language model (LLM) systems that combine lightweight models with powerful but expensive large models. Recent studies show that \emph{probe routing}, which predicts the correctness of a small model using its hidden states, provides an effective solution in text-only LLMs. However, we observe that these probes degrade substantially when applied to multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). Through empirical analysis, we find that the presence of visual inputs weakens the separability of correctness signals in hidden states, making them harder to extract using standard probe designs. To address this challenge, we introduce two complementary approaches for improving probe routing in MLLMs. First, we propose the \emph{Attention Probe}, which aggregates hidden states from the preceding layer based on attention scores to recover distributed correctness signals. Second, we present the \emph{KL-Regularized LoRA Probe (ReLope)}, which inserts a lightweight LoRA adapter and applies a KL regularizer to learn routing-aware representations. Comprehensive experiments show that our methods consistently outperform baselines, suggesting that improving the quality of hidden states is key to effective routing in MLLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Spinozaaa/ReLope.

Effective problem solving with Large Language Models (LLMs) can be enhanced when they are paired with external search algorithms. By viewing the space of diverse ideas and their follow-up possibilities as a tree structure, the search algorithm can navigate such a search space and guide the LLM toward better solutions more efficiently. While the search algorithm enables an effective balance between exploitation and exploration of a tree-structured space, the need for an external component can complicate the overall problem-solving process. We therefore pose the following question: Can LLMs or their underlying Transformer architectures approximate a search algorithm? To answer this question, we first introduce a simplified framework in which tree extensions and feedback signals are externally specified, allowing for controlled evaluation of search capabilities. We call this setting unknown tree search with bandit feedback. Within this setting, we show that Transformers are theoretically expressive enough to implement distinct search strategies and can be trained from scratch to approximate those strategies. Our Transformer models exhibit the possibility of generalizing to unseen conditions such as longer horizons or deeper trees. Furthermore, we demonstrate that continued task-focused training unlocks the complete capabilities of a pretrained LLM, by fine-tuning the LLM on search trajectories.

Clinical documentation is a critical factor for patient safety, diagnosis, and continuity of care. The administrative burden of EHRs is a significant factor in physician burnout. This is a critical issue for low-resource languages, including Finnish. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a domain-aligned natural language processing (NLP); large language model for medical transcription in Finnish by fine-tuning LLaMA 3.1-8B on a small validated corpus of simulated clinical conversations by students at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. The fine-tuning process for medical transcription used a controlled preprocessing and optimization approach. The fine-tuning effectiveness was evaluated by sevenfold cross-validation. The evaluation metrics for fine-tuned LLaMA 3.1-8B were BLEU = 0.1214, ROUGE-L = 0.4982, and BERTScore F1 = 0.8230. The results showed a low n-gram overlap but a strong semantic similarity with reference transcripts. This study indicate that fine-tuning can be an effective approach for translation of medical discourse in spoken Finnish and support the feasibility of fine-tuning a privacy-oriented domain-specific large language model for clinical documentation in Finnish. Beside that provide directions for future work.

Dynamic scene reconstruction from casual videos has seen recent remarkable progress. Numerous approaches have attempted to overcome the ill-posedness of the task by distilling priors from 2D foundational models and by imposing hand-crafted regularization on the optimized motion. However, these methods struggle to reconstruct scenes from extreme novel viewpoints, especially when highly articulated motions are present. In this paper, we present DRoPS, a novel approach that leverages a static pre-scan of the dynamic object as an explicit geometric and appearance prior. While existing state-of-the-art methods fail to fully exploit the pre-scan, DRoPS leverages our novel setup to effectively constrain the solution space and ensure geometrical consistency throughout the sequence. The core of our novelty is twofold: first, we establish a grid-structured and surface-aligned model by organizing Gaussian primitives into pixel grids anchored to the object surface. Second, by leveraging the grid structure of our primitives, we parameterize motion using a CNN conditioned on those grids, injecting strong implicit regularization and correlating the motion of nearby points. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the current state of the art in rendering quality and 3D tracking accuracy.

Systematic reviews traditionally have taken considerable amounts of human time and energy to complete, in part due to the extensive number of titles and abstracts that must be reviewed for potential inclusion. Recently, researchers have begun to explore how to use large language models (LLMs) to make this process more efficient. However, research to date has shown inconsistent results. We posit this is because prompting alone may not provide sufficient context for the model(s) to perform well. In this study, we fine-tune a small 1.2 billion parameter open-weight LLM specifically for study screening in the context of a systematic review in which humans rated more than 8500 titles and abstracts for potential inclusion. Our results showed strong performance improvements from the fine-tuned model, with the weighted F1 score improving 80.79% compared to the base model. When run on the full dataset of 8,277 studies, the fine-tuned model had 86.40% agreement with the human coder, a 91.18% true positive rate, a 86.38% true negative rate, and perfect agreement across multiple inference runs. Taken together, our results show that there is promise for fine-tuning LLMs for title and abstract screening in large-scale systematic reviews.

Synthetic cardiac MRI (CMRI) generation has emerged as a promising strategy to overcome the scarcity of annotated medical imaging data. Recent advances in GANs, VAEs, diffusion probabilistic models, and flow-matching techniques aim to generate anatomically accurate images while addressing challenges such as limited labeled datasets, vendor variability, and risks of privacy leakage through model memorization. Maskconditioned generation improves structural fidelity by guiding synthesis with segmentation maps, while diffusion and flowmatching models offer strong boundary preservation and efficient deterministic transformations. Cross-domain generalization is further supported through vendor-style conditioning and preprocessing steps like intensity normalization. To ensure privacy, studies increasingly incorporate membership inference attacks, nearest-neighbor analyses, and differential privacy mechanisms. Utility evaluations commonly measure downstream segmentation performance, with evidence showing that anatomically constrained synthetic data can enhance accuracy and robustness across multi-vendor settings. This review aims to compare existing CMRI generation approaches through the lenses of fidelity, utility, and privacy, highlighting current limitations and the need for integrated, evaluation-driven frameworks for reliable clinical workflows.

Standard vision models treat objects as independent points in Euclidean space, unable to capture hierarchical structure like parts within wholes. We introduce Worldline Slot Attention, which models objects as persistent trajectories through spacetime worldlines, where each object has multiple slots at different hierarchy levels sharing the same spatial position but differing in temporal coordinates. This architecture consistently fails without geometric structure: Euclidean worldlines achieve 0.078 level accuracy, below random chance (0.33), while Lorentzian worldlines achieve 0.479-0.661 across three datasets: a 6x improvement replicated over 20+ independent runs. Lorentzian geometry also outperforms hyperbolic embeddings showing visual hierarchies require causal structure (temporal dependency) rather than tree structure (radial branching). Our results demonstrate that hierarchical object discovery requires geometric structure encoding asymmetric causality, an inductive bias absent from Euclidean space but natural to Lorentzian light cones, achieved with only 11K parameters. The code is available at: https://github.com/iclrsubmissiongram/loco.

Weather data, comprising multiple variables, poses significant challenges due to its high dimensionality and multimodal nature. Creating low-dimensional embeddings requires compressing this data into a compact, shared latent space. This compression is required to improve the efficiency and performance of downstream tasks, such as forecasting or extreme-weather detection. Self-supervised learning, particularly contrastive learning, offers a way to generate low-dimensional, robust embeddings from unlabelled data, enabling downstream tasks when labelled data is scarce. Despite initial exploration of contrastive learning in weather data, particularly with the ERA5 dataset, the current literature does not extensively examine its benefits relative to alternative compression methods, notably autoencoders. Moreover, current work on contrastive learning does not investigate how these models can incorporate sparse data, which is more common in real-world data collection. It is critical to explore and understand how contrastive learning contributes to creating more robust embeddings for sparse weather data, thereby improving performance on downstream tasks. Our work extensively explores contrastive learning on the ERA5 dataset, aligning sparse samples with complete ones via a contrastive loss term to create SPARse-data augmented conTRAstive spatiotemporal embeddings (SPARTA). We introduce a temporally aware batch sampling strategy and a cycle-consistency loss to improve the structure of the latent space. Furthermore, we propose a novel graph neural network fusion technique to inject domain-specific physical knowledge. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that contrastive learning is a feasible and advantageous compression method for sparse geoscience data, thereby enhancing performance in downstream tasks.

AI safety is an increasingly urgent concern as the capabilities and adoption of AI systems grow. Existing evolutionary models of AI governance have primarily examined incentives for safe development and effective regulation, typically representing users' trust as a one-shot adoption choice rather than as a dynamic, evolving process shaped by repeated interactions. We instead model trust as reduced monitoring in a repeated, asymmetric interaction between users and AI developers, where checking AI behaviour is costly. Using evolutionary game theory, we study how user trust strategies and developer choices between safe (compliant) and unsafe (non-compliant) AI co-evolve under different levels of monitoring cost and institutional regimes. We complement the infinite-population replicator analysis with stochastic finite-population dynamics and reinforcement learning (Q-learning) simulations. Across these approaches, we find three robust long-run regimes: no adoption with unsafe development, unsafe but widely adopted systems, and safe systems that are widely adopted. Only the last is desirable, and it arises when penalties for unsafe behaviour exceed the extra cost of safety and users can still afford to monitor at least occasionally. Our results formally support governance proposals that emphasise transparency, low-cost monitoring, and meaningful sanctions, and they show that neither regulation alone nor blind user trust is sufficient to prevent evolutionary drift towards unsafe or low-adoption outcomes.

In the design and safety analysis of advanced reactor systems, constructing input files for system-level thermal-hydraulics codes such as the System Analysis Module (SAM) remains a labor-intensive task. Analysts must extract and reconcile design data from heterogeneous engineering documents and manually translate it into solver-specific syntax. In this paper, we present AutoSAM, an agentic framework that automates SAM input file generation. The framework combines a large language model agent with retrieval-augmented generation over the solver's user guide and theory manual, together with specialized tools for analyzing PDFs, images, spreadsheets, and text files. AutoSAM ingests unstructured engineering documents, including system diagrams, design reports, and data tables, extracts simulation-relevant parameters into a human-auditable intermediate representation, and synthesizes validated, solver-compatible input decks. Its multimodal retrieval pipeline integrates scientific text extraction, vision-based figure interpretation, semantic embedding, and query answering. We evaluate AutoSAM on four case studies of increasing complexity: a single-pipe steady-state model, a solid-fuel channel with temperature reactivity feedback, the Advanced Burner Test Reactor core, and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment primary loop. Across all cases, the agent produces runnable SAM models consistent with expected thermal-hydraulic behavior while explicitly identifying missing data and labeling assumed values. The framework achieves 100% utilization of structured inputs, about 88% extraction from PDF text, and 100% completeness in vision-based geometric extraction. These results demonstrate a practical path toward prompt-driven reactor modeling, in which analysts provide system descriptions and supporting documentation while the agent translates them into transparent, and executable, SAM simulations.

Quantifying human movement (kinematics) and musculoskeletal forces (kinetics) at scale, such as estimating quadriceps force during a sit-to-stand movement, could transform prediction, treatment, and monitoring of mobility-related conditions. However, quantifying kinematics and kinetics traditionally requires costly, time-intensive analysis in specialized laboratories, limiting clinical translation. Scalable, accurate tools for biomechanical assessment are needed. We introduce OpenCap Monocular, an algorithm that estimates 3D skeletal kinematics and kinetics from a single smartphone video. The method refines 3D human pose estimates from a monocular pose estimation model (WHAM) via optimization, computes kinematics of a biomechanically constrained skeletal model, and estimates kinetics via physics-based simulation and machine learning. We validated OpenCap Monocular against marker-based motion capture and force plate data for walking, squatting, and sit-to-stand tasks. OpenCap Monocular achieved low kinematic error (4.8° mean absolute error for rotational degrees of freedom; 3.4 cm for pelvis translations), outperforming a regression-only computer vision baseline by 48% in rotational accuracy (p = 0.036) and 69% in translational accuracy (p < 0.001). OpenCap Monocular also estimated ground reaction forces during walking with accuracy comparable to, or better than, our prior two-camera OpenCap system. We demonstrate that the algorithm estimates important kinetic outcomes with clinically meaningful accuracy in applications related to frailty and knee osteoarthritis, including estimating knee extension moment during sit-to-stand transitions and knee adduction moment during walking. OpenCap Monocular is deployed via a smartphone app, web app, and secure cloud computing (https://opencap.ai), enabling free, accessible single-smartphone biomechanical assessments.

The classic duck-rabbit illusion reveals that when visual evidence is ambiguous, the human brain must decide what it sees. But where exactly do human observers draw the line between ''duck'' and ''rabbit'', and do machine classifiers draw it in the same place? We use semantically ambiguous images as interpretability probes to expose how vision models represent the boundaries between concepts. We present a psychophysically-informed framework that interpolates between concepts in the CLIP embedding space to generate continuous spectra of ambiguous images, allowing us to precisely measure where and how humans and machine classifiers place their semantic boundaries. Using this framework, we show that machine classifiers are more biased towards seeing ''rabbit'', whereas humans are more aligned with the CLIP embedding used for synthesis, and the guidance scale seems to affect human sensitivity more strongly than machine classifiers. Our framework demonstrates how controlled ambiguity can serve as a diagnostic tool to bridge the gap between human psychophysical analysis, image classification, and generative image models, offering insight into human-model alignment, robustness, model interpretability, and image synthesis methods.

Spatial reasoning focuses on locating target objects based on spatial relations in 3D scenes, which plays a crucial role in developing intelligent embodied agents. Due to the limited availability of 3D scene-language paired data, it is challenging to train models with strong reasoning ability from scratch. Previous approaches have attempted to inject 3D scene representations into the input space of Large Language Models (LLMs) and leverage the pretrained comprehension and reasoning abilities for spatial reasoning. However, models encoding absolute positions struggle to extract spatial relations from prematurely fused features, while methods explicitly encoding all spatial relations (which is quadratic in the number of objects) as input tokens suffer from poor scalability. To address these limitations, we propose QuatRoPE, a novel positional embedding method with an input length that is linear to the number of objects, and explicitly calculates pairwise spatial relations through the dot product in attention layers. QuatRoPE's holistic vector encoding of 3D coordinates guarantees a high degree of spatial consistency, maintaining fidelity to the scene's geometric integrity. Additionally, we introduce the Isolated Gated RoPE Extension (IGRE), which effectively limits QuatRoPE's influence to object-related tokens, thereby minimizing interference with the LLM's existing positional embeddings and maintaining the LLM's original capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. The code and data are available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/QuatRoPE.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized real-time rendering with its state-of-the-art novel view synthesis, but its utility for accurate geometric measurement remains underutilized. Compared to multi-view stereo (MVS) point clouds or meshes, 3DGS rendered views present superior visual quality and completeness. However, current point measurement methods still rely on demanding stereoscopic workstations or direct picking on often-incomplete and inaccurate 3D meshes. As a novel view synthesizer, 3DGS renders exact source views and smoothly interpolates in-between views. This allows users to intuitively pick congruent points across different views while operating 3DGS models. By triangulating these congruent points, one can precisely generate 3D point measurements. This approach mimics traditional stereoscopic measurement but is significantly less demanding: it requires neither a stereo workstation nor specialized operator stereoscopic capability. Furthermore, it enables multi-view intersection (more than two views) for higher measurement accuracy. We implemented a web-based application to demonstrate this proof-of-concept (PoC). Using several UAV aerial datasets, we show this PoC allows users to successfully perform highly accurate point measurements, achieving accuracy matching or exceeding traditional stereoscopic methods on standard hardware. Specifically, our approach significantly outperforms direct mesh-based measurements. Quantitatively, our method achieves RMSEs in the 1-2 cm range on well-defined points. More critically, on challenging thin structures where mesh-based RMSE was 0.062 m, our method achieved 0.037 m. On sharp corners poorly reconstructed in the mesh, our method successfully measured all points with a 0.013 m RMSE, whereas the mesh method failed entirely. Code is available at: https://github.com/GDAOSU/3dgs_measurement_tool.

Analog design often slows down because even small changes to device sizes or biases require expensive simulation cycles, and high-quality solutions typically occupy only a narrow part of a very large search space. While existing optimizers reduce some of this burden, they largely operate without the kind of judgment designers use when deciding where to search next. This paper presents an actor-critic optimization framework (ACOF) for analog sizing that brings that form of guidance into the loop. Rather than treating optimization as a purely black-box search problem, ACOF separates the roles of proposal and evaluation: an actor suggests promising regions of the design space, while a critic reviews those choices, enforces design legality, and redirects the search when progress is hampered. This structure preserves compatibility with standard simulator-based flows while making the search process more deliberate, stable, and interpretable. Across our test circuits, ACOF improves the top-10 figure of merit by an average of 38.9% over the strongest competing baseline and reduces regret by an average of 24.7%, with peak gains of 70.5% in FoM and 42.2% lower regret on individual circuits. By combining iterative reasoning with simulation-driven search, the framework offers a more transparent path toward automated analog sizing across challenging design spaces.

3D object understanding and generation methods produce impressive results, yet they often overlook a pervasive source of information in real-world scenes: repeated objects. We introduce the task of lookalike object detection in indoor scenes, which leverages repeated and complementary cues from identical and near-identical object pairs. Given an input scene, the task is to classify pairs of objects as identical, similar or different using multiview images as input. To address this, we present Lookalike3D, a multiview image transformer that effectively distinguishes such object pairs by harnessing strong semantic priors from large image foundation models. To support this task, we collected the 3DTwins dataset, containing 76k manually annotated identical, similar and different pairs of objects based on ScanNet++, and show an improvement of 104% IoU over baselines. We demonstrate how our method improves downstream tasks such as enabling joint 3D object reconstruction and part co-segmentation, turning repeated and lookalike objects into a powerful cue for consistent, high-quality 3D perception. Our code, dataset and models will be made publicly available.

Tiny palm-sized aerial robots possess exceptional agility and cost-effectiveness in navigating confined and cluttered environments. However, their limited payload capacity directly constrains the sensing suite on-board the robot, thereby limiting critical navigational tasks in Global Positioning System (GPS)-denied wild scenes. Common methods for obstacle avoidance use cameras and LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR), which become ineffective in visually degraded conditions such as low visibility, dust, fog or darkness. Other sensors, such as RAdio Detection And Ranging (RADAR), have high power consumption, making them unsuitable for tiny aerial robots. Inspired by bats, we propose Saranga, a low-power ultrasound-based perception stack that localizes obstacles using a dual sonar array. We present two key solutions to combat the low Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio of $-4.9$ decibels: physical noise reduction and a deep learning based denoising method. Firstly, we present a practical way to block propeller induced ultrasound noise on the weak echoes. The second solution is to train a neural network to utilize the \textcolor{black}{long horizon of ultrasound echoes} for finding signal patterns under high amounts of uncorrelated noise where classical methods were insufficient. We generalize to the real world by using a synthetic data generation pipeline and limited real noise data for training. We enable a palm-sized aerial robot to navigate in visually degraded conditions of dense fog, darkness, and snow in a cluttered environment with thin and transparent obstacles using only on-board sensing and computation. We provide extensive real world results to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

Recent advances in multimodal vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled joint reasoning over visual and textual information, yet their application to planetary science remains largely unexplored. A key hindrance is the absence of large-scale datasets that pair real planetary imagery with detailed scientific descriptions. In this work, we introduce LLaVA-LE (Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Lunar Exploration), a vision-language model specialized for lunar surface and subsurface characterization. To enable this capability, we curate a new large-scale multimodal lunar dataset, LUCID (LUnar Caption Image Dataset) consisting of 96k high-resolution panchromatic images paired with detailed captions describing lunar terrain characteristics, and 81k question-answer (QA) pairs derived from approximately 20k images in the LUCID dataset. Leveraging this dataset, we fine-tune LLaVA using a two-stage training curriculum: (1) concept alignment for domain-specific terrain description, and (2) instruction-tuned visual question answering. We further design evaluation benchmarks spanning multiple levels of reasoning complexity relevant to lunar terrain analysis. Evaluated against GPT and Gemini judges, LLaVA-LE achieves a 3.3x overall performance gain over Base LLaVA and 2.1x over our Stage 1 model, with a reasoning score of 1.070, exceeding the judge's own reference score, highlighting the effectiveness of domain-specific multimodal data and instruction tuning to advance VLMs in planetary exploration. Code is available at https://github.com/OSUPCVLab/LLaVA-LE.

Random cropping is one of the most common data augmentation techniques in computer vision, yet the role of its inherent randomness in training differentially private machine learning models has thus far gone unexplored. We observe that when sensitive content in an image is spatially localized, such as a face or license plate, random cropping can probabilistically exclude that content from the model's input. This introduces a third source of stochasticity in differentially private training with stochastic gradient descent, in addition to gradient noise and minibatch sampling. This additional randomness amplifies differential privacy without requiring changes to model architecture or training procedure. We formalize this effect by introducing a patch-level neighboring relation for vision data and deriving tight privacy bounds for differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) when combined with random cropping. Our analysis quantifies the patch inclusion probability and shows how it composes with minibatch sampling to yield a lower effective sampling rate. Empirically, we validate that patch-level amplification improves the privacy-utility trade-off across multiple segmentation architectures and datasets. Our results demonstrate that aligning privacy accounting with domain structure and additional existing sources of randomness can yield stronger guarantees at no additional cost.

In-context Learning enables training-free adaptation via demonstrations but remains highly sensitive to example selection and formatting. In unified multimodal models spanning understanding and generation, this sensitivity is exacerbated by cross-modal interference and varying cognitive demands. Consequently, In-context Learning efficacy is often non-monotonic and highly task-dependent. To diagnose these behaviors, we introduce a six-level capability-oriented taxonomy that categorizes the functional role of demonstrations from basic perception to high-order discernment. Guided by this cognitive framework, we construct UniICL-760K, a large-scale corpus featuring curated 8-shot In-context Learning episodes across 15 subtasks, alongside UniICL-Bench for rigorous, controlled evaluation. As an architectural intervention to stabilize few-shot adaptation, we propose the Context-Adaptive Prototype Modulator, a lightweight, plug-and-play module. Evaluations on UniICL-Bench show that our approach yields highly competitive unified results, outperforming larger-parameter multimodal large language model baselines on most understanding In-context Learning tasks. Data and code will be available soon at https://github.com/xuyicheng-zju/UniICL.