Pocket-Dentist: On-Device Dental Image Understanding via Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

Evaluations of dental vision-language models remain fragmented across datasets, task definitions and metrics, and often ignore their computational cost. This limits their widespread deployment for dental screening outside specialist centres, where timely inference, limited hardware, and local handling of patient images are vital for practical, privacy-preserving clinical prescreening. Here we present Pocket-Dentist, an efficiency-aware benchmark for dental multimodal question answering that brings together three datasets spanning approximately 1,159 patients, five task types and seven metrics. Across typical 14 VLMs, our results reveals an interesting observation: compact VLMs (e.g., 2B-parameter models) outperform larger VLMs in accuracy while requiring substantially lower computational costs in dental image understanding. Deployed locally on an iPhone 17 Pro, our finetuned compact VLM Pocket-Dentist-2B processed each sample in 4.31 s, reducing latency by 4.9-fold and memory use by 2.3-fold compared with a 7B baseline.

Ev-Layout: A Large-scale Event-based Multi-modal Dataset for Indoor Layout Estimation and Tracking

This paper presents Ev-Layout, a novel large-scale event-based multi-modal dataset designed for indoor layout estimation and tracking. Ev-Layout makes key contributions to the community by: Utilizing a hybrid data collection platform (with a head-mounted display and VR interface) that integrates both RGB and bio-inspired event cameras to capture indoor layouts in motion. Incorporating time-series data from inertial measurement units (IMUs) and ambient lighting conditions recorded during data collection to highlight the potential impact of motion speed and lighting on layout estimation accuracy. The dataset consists of 2.5K sequences, including over 771.3K RGB images and 10 billion event data points. Of these, 39K images are annotated with indoor layouts, enabling research in both event-based and video-based indoor layout estimation. Based on the dataset, we propose an event-based layout estimation pipeline with a novel event-temporal distribution feature module to effectively aggregate the spatio-temporal information from events. Additionally, we introduce a spatio-temporal feature fusion module that can be easily integrated into a transformer module for fusion purposes. Finally, we conduct benchmarking and extensive experiments on the Ev-Layout dataset, demonstrating that our approach significantly improves the accuracy of dynamic indoor layout estimation compared to existing event-based methods.