A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers

Scientific Large Language Models (Sci-LLMs) are transforming how knowledge is represented, integrated, and applied in scientific research, yet their progress is shaped by the complex nature of scientific data. This survey presents a comprehensive, data-centric synthesis that reframes the development of Sci-LLMs as a co-evolution between models and their underlying data substrate. We formulate a unified taxonomy of scientific data and a hierarchical model of scientific knowledge, emphasizing the multimodal, cross-scale, and domain-specific challenges that differentiate scientific corpora from general natural language processing datasets. We systematically review recent Sci-LLMs, from general-purpose foundations to specialized models across diverse scientific disciplines, alongside an extensive analysis of over 270 pre-/post-training datasets, showing why Sci-LLMs pose distinct demands -- heterogeneous, multi-scale, uncertainty-laden corpora that require representations preserving domain invariance and enabling cross-modal reasoning. On evaluation, we examine over 190 benchmark datasets and trace a shift from static exams toward process- and discovery-oriented assessments with advanced evaluation protocols. These data-centric analyses highlight persistent issues in scientific data development and discuss emerging solutions involving semi-automated annotation pipelines and expert validation. Finally, we outline a paradigm shift toward closed-loop systems where autonomous agents based on Sci-LLMs actively experiment, validate, and contribute to a living, evolving knowledge base. Collectively, this work provides a roadmap for building trustworthy, continually evolving artificial intelligence (AI) systems that function as a true partner in accelerating scientific discovery.

WXSOD: A Benchmark for Robust Salient Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions

Salient object detection (SOD) in complex environments remains a challenging research topic. Most existing methods perform well in natural scenes with negligible noise, and tend to leverage multi-modal information (e.g., depth and infrared) to enhance accuracy. However, few studies are concerned with the damage of weather noise on SOD performance due to the lack of dataset with pixel-wise annotations. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel Weather-eXtended Salient Object Detection (WXSOD) dataset. It consists of 14,945 RGB images with diverse weather noise, along with the corresponding ground truth annotations and weather labels. To verify algorithm generalization, WXSOD contains two test sets, i.e., a synthesized test set and a real test set. The former is generated by adding weather noise to clean images, while the latter contains real-world weather noise. Based on WXSOD, we propose an efficient baseline, termed Weather-aware Feature Aggregation Network (WFANet), which adopts a fully supervised two-branch architecture. Specifically, the weather prediction branch mines weather-related deep features, while the saliency detection branch fuses semantic features extracted from the backbone with weather features for SOD. Comprehensive comparisons against 17 SOD methods shows that our WFANet achieves superior performance on WXSOD. The code and benchmark results will be made publicly available at https://github.com/C-water/WXSOD

Intention-Aware Diffusion Model for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Predicting pedestrian motion trajectories is critical for the path planning and motion control of autonomous vehicles. Recent diffusion-based models have shown promising results in capturing the inherent stochasticity of pedestrian behavior for trajectory prediction. However, the absence of explicit semantic modelling of pedestrian intent in many diffusion-based methods may result in misinterpreted behaviors and reduced prediction accuracy. To address the above challenges, we propose a diffusion-based pedestrian trajectory prediction framework that incorporates both short-term and long-term motion intentions. Short-term intent is modelled using a residual polar representation, which decouples direction and magnitude to capture fine-grained local motion patterns. Long-term intent is estimated through a learnable, token-based endpoint predictor that generates multiple candidate goals with associated probabilities, enabling multimodal and context-aware intention modelling. Furthermore, we enhance the diffusion process by incorporating adaptive guidance and a residual noise predictor that dynamically refines denoising accuracy. The proposed framework is evaluated on the widely used ETH, UCY, and SDD benchmarks, demonstrating competitive results against state-of-the-art methods.

Remote Sensing Image Intelligent Interpretation with the Language-Centered Perspective: Principles, Methods and Challenges

The mainstream paradigm of remote sensing image interpretation has long been dominated by vision-centered models, which rely on visual features for semantic understanding. However, these models face inherent limitations in handling multi-modal reasoning, semantic abstraction, and interactive decision-making. While recent advances have introduced Large Language Models (LLMs) into remote sensing workflows, existing studies primarily focus on downstream applications, lacking a unified theoretical framework that explains the cognitive role of language. This review advocates a paradigm shift from vision-centered to language-centered remote sensing interpretation. Drawing inspiration from the Global Workspace Theory (GWT) of human cognition, We propose a language-centered framework for remote sensing interpretation that treats LLMs as the cognitive central hub integrating perceptual, task, knowledge and action spaces to enable unified understanding, reasoning, and decision-making. We first explore the potential of LLMs as the central cognitive component in remote sensing interpretation, and then summarize core technical challenges, including unified multimodal representation, knowledge association, and reasoning and decision-making. Furthermore, we construct a global workspace-driven interpretation mechanism and review how language-centered solutions address each challenge. Finally, we outline future research directions from four perspectives: adaptive alignment of multimodal data, task understanding under dynamic knowledge constraints, trustworthy reasoning, and autonomous interaction. This work aims to provide a conceptual foundation for the next generation of remote sensing interpretation systems and establish a roadmap toward cognition-driven intelligent geospatial analysis.

Intention Enhanced Diffusion Model for Multimodal Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Predicting pedestrian motion trajectories is critical for path planning and motion control of autonomous vehicles. However, accurately forecasting crowd trajectories remains a challenging task due to the inherently multimodal and uncertain nature of human motion. Recent diffusion-based models have shown promising results in capturing the stochasticity of pedestrian behavior for trajectory prediction. However, few diffusion-based approaches explicitly incorporate the underlying motion intentions of pedestrians, which can limit the interpretability and precision of prediction models. In this work, we propose a diffusion-based multimodal trajectory prediction model that incorporates pedestrians' motion intentions into the prediction framework. The motion intentions are decomposed into lateral and longitudinal components, and a pedestrian intention recognition module is introduced to enable the model to effectively capture these intentions. Furthermore, we adopt an efficient guidance mechanism that facilitates the generation of interpretable trajectories. The proposed framework is evaluated on two widely used human trajectory prediction benchmarks, ETH and UCY, on which it is compared against state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance.

Generative molecule evolution using 3D pharmacophore for efficient Structure-Based Drug Design

Recent advances in generative models, particularly diffusion and auto-regressive models, have revolutionized fields like computer vision and natural language processing. However, their application to structure-based drug design (SBDD) remains limited due to critical data constraints. To address the limitation of training data for models targeting SBDD tasks, we propose an evolutionary framework named MEVO, which bridges the gap between billion-scale small molecule dataset and the scarce protein-ligand complex dataset, and effectively increase the abundance of training data for generative SBDD models. MEVO is composed of three key components: a high-fidelity VQ-VAE for molecule representation in latent space, a diffusion model for pharmacophore-guided molecule generation, and a pocket-aware evolutionary strategy for molecule optimization with physics-based scoring function. This framework efficiently generate high-affinity binders for various protein targets, validated with predicted binding affinities using free energy perturbation (FEP) methods. In addition, we showcase the capability of MEVO in designing potent inhibitors to KRAS$^{\textrm{G12D}}$, a challenging target in cancer therapeutics, with similar affinity to the known highly active inhibitor evaluated by FEP calculations. With high versatility and generalizability, MEVO offers an effective and data-efficient model for various tasks in structure-based ligand design.

From Coarse to Nuanced: Cross-Modal Alignment of Fine-Grained Linguistic Cues and Visual Salient Regions for Dynamic Emotion Recognition

Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER) aims to identify human emotions from temporally evolving facial movements and plays a critical role in affective computing. While recent vision-language approaches have introduced semantic textual descriptions to guide expression recognition, existing methods still face two key limitations: they often underutilize the subtle emotional cues embedded in generated text, and they have yet to incorporate sufficiently effective mechanisms for filtering out facial dynamics that are irrelevant to emotional expression. To address these gaps, We propose GRACE, Granular Representation Alignment for Cross-modal Emotion recognition that integrates dynamic motion modeling, semantic text refinement, and token-level cross-modal alignment to facilitate the precise localization of emotionally salient spatiotemporal features. Our method constructs emotion-aware textual descriptions via a Coarse-to-fine Affective Text Enhancement (CATE) module and highlights expression-relevant facial motion through a motion-difference weighting mechanism. These refined semantic and visual signals are aligned at the token level using entropy-regularized optimal transport. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves recognition performance, particularly in challenging settings with ambiguous or imbalanced emotion classes, establishing new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in terms of both UAR and WAR.

Joint Beamforming and Position Optimization for Fluid STAR-RIS-NOMA Assisted Wireless Communication Systems

To address the limitations of traditional reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) in spatial control capability, this paper introduces the concept of the fluid antenna system (FAS) and proposes a fluid simultaneously transmitting and reflecting RIS (FSTAR-RIS) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) multi-user communication system. In this system, each FSTAR-RIS element is capable of flexible mobility and can dynamically adjust its position in response to environmental variations, thereby enabling simultaneous service to users in both the transmission and reflection zones. This significantly enhances the system's spatial degrees of freedom (DoF) and service adaptability. To maximize the system's weighted sum-rate, we formulate a non-convex optimization problem that jointly optimizes the base station beamforming, the transmission/reflection coefficients of the FSTAR-RIS, and the element positions. An alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is developed, incorporating successive convex approximation (SCA), semi-definite relaxation (SDR), and majorization-minimization (MM) techniques. In particular, to address the complex channel coupling introduced by the coexistence of direct and FSTAR-RIS paths, the MM framework is employed in the element position optimization subproblem, enabling an efficient iterative solution strategy. Simulation results validate that the proposed system achieves up to a 27% increase in total sum rate compared to traditional STAR-RIS systems and requires approximately 50% fewer RIS elements to attain the same performance, highlighting its effectiveness for cost-efficient large-scale deployment.

Bridging Data Gaps of Rare Conditions in ICU: A Multi-Disease Adaptation Approach for Clinical Prediction

Artificial Intelligence has revolutionised critical care for common conditions. Yet, rare conditions in the intensive care unit (ICU), including recognised rare diseases and low-prevalence conditions in the ICU, remain underserved due to data scarcity and intra-condition heterogeneity. To bridge such gaps, we developed KnowRare, a domain adaptation-based deep learning framework for predicting clinical outcomes for rare conditions in the ICU. KnowRare mitigates data scarcity by initially learning condition-agnostic representations from diverse electronic health records through self-supervised pre-training. It addresses intra-condition heterogeneity by selectively adapting knowledge from clinically similar conditions with a developed condition knowledge graph. Evaluated on two ICU datasets across five clinical prediction tasks (90-day mortality, 30-day readmission, ICU mortality, remaining length of stay, and phenotyping), KnowRare consistently outperformed existing state-of-the-art models. Additionally, KnowRare demonstrated superior predictive performance compared to established ICU scoring systems, including APACHE IV and IV-a. Case studies further demonstrated KnowRare's flexibility in adapting its parameters to accommodate dataset-specific and task-specific characteristics, its generalisation to common conditions under limited data scenarios, and its rationality in selecting source conditions. These findings highlight KnowRare's potential as a robust and practical solution for supporting clinical decision-making and improving care for rare conditions in the ICU.

Performance Analysis of OAMP Detection for ODDM Modulation in Satellite Communications

Towards future 6G wireless networks, low earth orbit (LEO) satellites have been widely considered as a promising component to enhance the terrestrial communications. To ensure the link reliability of high-mobility satellite communication scenarios, the emerging orthogonal delay-Doppler division multiplexing (ODDM) modulation has attracted significant research attention. In this paper, we study the diversity gain achieved by ODDM modulation along with the mathematical analysis and numerical simulations. Additionally, we propose an orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP) algorithm based detector to harvest the diversity gain promised by ODDM modulation. By operating the linear and non-linear estimator iteratively, the orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP) detector can utilize the sparsity of the effective delay-Doppler (DD) domain channel and extract the full diversity. Simulation results reveal the relationship between diversity gain and system parameters, and demonstrate that our proposed detector can achieve better performance than the conventional message passing methods with significantly reduced complexity.