A Survey on 3D Reconstruction Techniques in Plant Phenotyping: From Classical Methods to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), and Beyond

Plant phenotyping plays a pivotal role in understanding plant traits and their interactions with the environment, making it crucial for advancing precision agriculture and crop improvement. 3D reconstruction technologies have emerged as powerful tools for capturing detailed plant morphology and structure, offering significant potential for accurate and automated phenotyping. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the 3D reconstruction techniques for plant phenotyping, covering classical reconstruction methods, emerging Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), and the novel 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) approach. Classical methods, which often rely on high-resolution sensors, are widely adopted due to their simplicity and flexibility in representing plant structures. However, they face challenges such as data density, noise, and scalability. NeRF, a recent advancement, enables high-quality, photorealistic 3D reconstructions from sparse viewpoints, but its computational cost and applicability in outdoor environments remain areas of active research. The emerging 3DGS technique introduces a new paradigm in reconstructing plant structures by representing geometry through Gaussian primitives, offering potential benefits in both efficiency and scalability. We review the methodologies, applications, and performance of these approaches in plant phenotyping and discuss their respective strengths, limitations, and future prospects (https://github.com/JiajiaLi04/3D-Reconstruction-Plants). Through this review, we aim to provide insights into how these diverse 3D reconstruction techniques can be effectively leveraged for automated and high-throughput plant phenotyping, contributing to the next generation of agricultural technology.

Fast Autoregressive Models for Continuous Latent Generation

Autoregressive models have demonstrated remarkable success in sequential data generation, particularly in NLP, but their extension to continuous-domain image generation presents significant challenges. Recent work, the masked autoregressive model (MAR), bypasses quantization by modeling per-token distributions in continuous spaces using a diffusion head but suffers from slow inference due to the high computational cost of the iterative denoising process. To address this, we propose the Fast AutoRegressive model (FAR), a novel framework that replaces MAR's diffusion head with a lightweight shortcut head, enabling efficient few-step sampling while preserving autoregressive principles. Additionally, FAR seamlessly integrates with causal Transformers, extending them from discrete to continuous token generation without requiring architectural modifications. Experiments demonstrate that FAR achieves $2.3\times$ faster inference than MAR while maintaining competitive FID and IS scores. This work establishes the first efficient autoregressive paradigm for high-fidelity continuous-space image generation, bridging the critical gap between quality and scalability in visual autoregressive modeling.

VLLFL: A Vision-Language Model Based Lightweight Federated Learning Framework for Smart Agriculture

In modern smart agriculture, object detection plays a crucial role by enabling automation, precision farming, and monitoring of resources. From identifying crop health and pest infestations to optimizing harvesting processes, accurate object detection enhances both productivity and sustainability. However, training object detection models often requires large-scale data collection and raises privacy concerns, particularly when sensitive agricultural data is distributed across farms. To address these challenges, we propose VLLFL, a vision-language model-based lightweight federated learning framework (VLLFL). It harnesses the generalization and context-aware detection capabilities of the vision-language model (VLM) and leverages the privacy-preserving nature of federated learning. By training a compact prompt generator to boost the performance of the VLM deployed across different farms, VLLFL preserves privacy while reducing communication overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that VLLFL achieves 14.53% improvement in the performance of VLM while reducing 99.3% communication overhead. Spanning tasks from identifying a wide variety of fruits to detecting harmful animals in agriculture, the proposed framework offers an efficient, scalable, and privacy-preserving solution specifically tailored to agricultural applications.

Real-Time Roadway Obstacle Detection for Electric Scooters Using Deep Learning and Multi-Sensor Fusion

The increasing adoption of electric scooters (e-scooters) in urban areas has coincided with a rise in traffic accidents and injuries, largely due to their small wheels, lack of suspension, and sensitivity to uneven surfaces. While deep learning-based object detection has been widely used to improve automobile safety, its application for e-scooter obstacle detection remains unexplored. This study introduces a novel ground obstacle detection system for e-scooters, integrating an RGB camera, and a depth camera to enhance real-time road hazard detection. Additionally, the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) measures linear vertical acceleration to identify surface vibrations, guiding the selection of six obstacle categories: tree branches, manhole covers, potholes, pine cones, non-directional cracks, and truncated domes. All sensors, including the RGB camera, depth camera, and IMU, are integrated within the Intel RealSense Camera D435i. A deep learning model powered by YOLO detects road hazards and utilizes depth data to estimate obstacle proximity. Evaluated on the seven hours of naturalistic riding dataset, the system achieves a high mean average precision (mAP) of 0.827 and demonstrates excellent real-time performance. This approach provides an effective solution to enhance e-scooter safety through advanced computer vision and data fusion. The dataset is accessible at https://zenodo.org/records/14583718, and the project code is hosted on https://github.com/Zeyang-Zheng/Real-Time-Roadway-Obstacle-Detection-for-Electric-Scooters.

Multimodal Data Integration for Sustainable Indoor Gardening: Tracking Anyplant with Time Series Foundation Model

Indoor gardening within sustainable buildings offers a transformative solution to urban food security and environmental sustainability. By 2030, urban farming, including Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) and vertical farming, is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.2% from 2024 to 2030, according to market reports. This growth is fueled by advancements in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, sustainable innovations such as smart growing systems, and the rising interest in green interior design. This paper presents a novel framework that integrates computer vision, machine learning (ML), and environmental sensing for the automated monitoring of plant health and growth. Unlike previous approaches, this framework combines RGB imagery, plant phenotyping data, and environmental factors such as temperature and humidity, to predict plant water stress in a controlled growth environment. The system utilizes high-resolution cameras to extract phenotypic features, such as RGB, plant area, height, and width while employing the Lag-Llama time series model to analyze and predict water stress. Experimental results demonstrate that integrating RGB, size ratios, and environmental data significantly enhances predictive accuracy, with the Fine-tuned model achieving the lowest errors (MSE = 0.420777, MAE = 0.595428) and reduced uncertainty. These findings highlight the potential of multimodal data and intelligent systems to automate plant care, optimize resource consumption, and align indoor gardening with sustainable building management practices, paving the way for resilient, green urban spaces.

Selective Complementary Feature Fusion and Modal Feature Compression Interaction for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Efficient modal feature fusion strategy is the key to achieve accurate segmentation of brain glioma. However, due to the specificity of different MRI modes, it is difficult to carry out cross-modal fusion with large differences in modal features, resulting in the model ignoring rich feature information. On the other hand, the problem of multi-modal feature redundancy interaction occurs in parallel networks due to the proliferation of feature dimensions, further increase the difficulty of multi-modal feature fusion at the bottom end. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a noval complementary feature compression interaction network (CFCI-Net), which realizes the complementary fusion and compression interaction of multi-modal feature information with an efficient mode fusion strategy. Firstly, we propose a selective complementary feature fusion (SCFF) module, which adaptively fuses rich cross-modal feature information by complementary soft selection weights. Secondly, a modal feature compression interaction (MFCI) transformer is proposed to deal with the multi-mode fusion redundancy problem when the feature dimension surges. The MFCI transformer is composed of modal feature compression (MFC) and modal feature interaction (MFI) to realize redundancy feature compression and multi-mode feature interactive learning. %In MFI, we propose a hierarchical interactive attention mechanism based on multi-head attention. Evaluations on the BraTS2019 and BraTS2020 datasets demonstrate that CFCI-Net achieves superior results compared to state-of-the-art models. Code: https://github.com/CDmm0/CFCI-Net

Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAs

We introduce Phi-4-Mini and Phi-4-Multimodal, compact yet highly capable language and multimodal models. Phi-4-Mini is a 3.8-billion-parameter language model trained on high-quality web and synthetic data, significantly outperforming recent open-source models of similar size and matching the performance of models twice its size on math and coding tasks requiring complex reasoning. This achievement is driven by a carefully curated synthetic data recipe emphasizing high-quality math and coding datasets. Compared to its predecessor, Phi-3.5-Mini, Phi-4-Mini features an expanded vocabulary size of 200K tokens to better support multilingual applications, as well as group query attention for more efficient long-sequence generation. Phi-4-Multimodal is a multimodal model that integrates text, vision, and speech/audio input modalities into a single model. Its novel modality extension approach leverages LoRA adapters and modality-specific routers to allow multiple inference modes combining various modalities without interference. For example, it now ranks first in the OpenASR leaderboard to date, although the LoRA component of the speech/audio modality has just 460 million parameters. Phi-4-Multimodal supports scenarios involving (vision + language), (vision + speech), and (speech/audio) inputs, outperforming larger vision-language and speech-language models on a wide range of tasks. Additionally, we experiment to further train Phi-4-Mini to enhance its reasoning capabilities. Despite its compact 3.8-billion-parameter size, this experimental version achieves reasoning performance on par with or surpassing significantly larger models, including DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B.

DesignDiffusion: High-Quality Text-to-Design Image Generation with Diffusion Models

In this paper, we present DesignDiffusion, a simple yet effective framework for the novel task of synthesizing design images from textual descriptions. A primary challenge lies in generating accurate and style-consistent textual and visual content. Existing works in a related task of visual text generation often focus on generating text within given specific regions, which limits the creativity of generation models, resulting in style or color inconsistencies between textual and visual elements if applied to design image generation. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end, one-stage diffusion-based framework that avoids intricate components like position and layout modeling. Specifically, the proposed framework directly synthesizes textual and visual design elements from user prompts. It utilizes a distinctive character embedding derived from the visual text to enhance the input prompt, along with a character localization loss for enhanced supervision during text generation. Furthermore, we employ a self-play Direct Preference Optimization fine-tuning strategy to improve the quality and accuracy of the synthesized visual text. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DesignDiffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance in design image generation.

ART: Anonymous Region Transformer for Variable Multi-Layer Transparent Image Generation

Multi-layer image generation is a fundamental task that enables users to isolate, select, and edit specific image layers, thereby revolutionizing interactions with generative models. In this paper, we introduce the Anonymous Region Transformer (ART), which facilitates the direct generation of variable multi-layer transparent images based on a global text prompt and an anonymous region layout. Inspired by Schema theory suggests that knowledge is organized in frameworks (schemas) that enable people to interpret and learn from new information by linking it to prior knowledge.}, this anonymous region layout allows the generative model to autonomously determine which set of visual tokens should align with which text tokens, which is in contrast to the previously dominant semantic layout for the image generation task. In addition, the layer-wise region crop mechanism, which only selects the visual tokens belonging to each anonymous region, significantly reduces attention computation costs and enables the efficient generation of images with numerous distinct layers (e.g., 50+). When compared to the full attention approach, our method is over 12 times faster and exhibits fewer layer conflicts. Furthermore, we propose a high-quality multi-layer transparent image autoencoder that supports the direct encoding and decoding of the transparency of variable multi-layer images in a joint manner. By enabling precise control and scalable layer generation, ART establishes a new paradigm for interactive content creation.

Diffusion Models without Classifier-free Guidance

This paper presents Model-guidance (MG), a novel objective for training diffusion model that addresses and removes of the commonly used Classifier-free guidance (CFG). Our innovative approach transcends the standard modeling of solely data distribution to incorporating the posterior probability of conditions. The proposed technique originates from the idea of CFG and is easy yet effective, making it a plug-and-play module for existing models. Our method significantly accelerates the training process, doubles the inference speed, and achieve exceptional quality that parallel and even surpass concurrent diffusion models with CFG. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, scalability on different models and datasets. Finally, we establish state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet 256 benchmarks with an FID of 1.34. Our code is available at https://github.com/tzco/Diffusion-wo-CFG.