WHU-STree: A Multi-modal Benchmark Dataset for Street Tree Inventory

Street trees are vital to urban livability, providing ecological and social benefits. Establishing a detailed, accurate, and dynamically updated street tree inventory has become essential for optimizing these multifunctional assets within space-constrained urban environments. Given that traditional field surveys are time-consuming and labor-intensive, automated surveys utilizing Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS) offer a more efficient solution. However, existing MMS-acquired tree datasets are limited by small-scale scene, limited annotation, or single modality, restricting their utility for comprehensive analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce WHU-STree, a cross-city, richly annotated, and multi-modal urban street tree dataset. Collected across two distinct cities, WHU-STree integrates synchronized point clouds and high-resolution images, encompassing 21,007 annotated tree instances across 50 species and 2 morphological parameters. Leveraging the unique characteristics, WHU-STree concurrently supports over 10 tasks related to street tree inventory. We benchmark representative baselines for two key tasks--tree species classification and individual tree segmentation. Extensive experiments and in-depth analysis demonstrate the significant potential of multi-modal data fusion and underscore cross-domain applicability as a critical prerequisite for practical algorithm deployment. In particular, we identify key challenges and outline potential future works for fully exploiting WHU-STree, encompassing multi-modal fusion, multi-task collaboration, cross-domain generalization, spatial pattern learning, and Multi-modal Large Language Model for street tree asset management. The WHU-STree dataset is accessible at: https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/WHU-STree.

Data Scaling Laws for Radiology Foundation Models

Foundation vision encoders such as CLIP and DINOv2, trained on web-scale data, exhibit strong transfer performance across tasks and datasets. However, medical imaging foundation models remain constrained by smaller datasets, limiting our understanding of how data scale and pretraining paradigms affect performance in this setting. In this work, we systematically study continual pretraining of two vision encoders, MedImageInsight (MI2) and RAD-DINO representing the two major encoder paradigms CLIP and DINOv2, on up to 3.5M chest x-rays from a single institution, holding compute and evaluation protocols constant. We evaluate on classification (radiology findings, lines and tubes), segmentation (lines and tubes), and radiology report generation. While prior work has primarily focused on tasks related to radiology findings, we include lines and tubes tasks to counterbalance this bias and evaluate a model's ability to extract features that preserve continuity along elongated structures. Our experiments show that MI2 scales more effectively for finding-related tasks, while RAD-DINO is stronger on tube-related tasks. Surprisingly, continually pretraining MI2 with both reports and structured labels using UniCL improves performance, underscoring the value of structured supervision at scale. We further show that for some tasks, as few as 30k in-domain samples are sufficient to surpass open-weights foundation models. These results highlight the utility of center-specific continual pretraining, enabling medical institutions to derive significant performance gains by utilizing in-domain data.

CECT-Mamba: a Hierarchical Contrast-enhanced-aware Model for Pancreatic Tumor Subtyping from Multi-phase CECT

Contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CECT) is the primary imaging technique that provides valuable spatial-temporal information about lesions, enabling the accurate diagnosis and subclassification of pancreatic tumors. However, the high heterogeneity and variability of pancreatic tumors still pose substantial challenges for precise subtyping diagnosis. Previous methods fail to effectively explore the contextual information across multiple CECT phases commonly used in radiologists' diagnostic workflows, thereby limiting their performance. In this paper, we introduce, for the first time, an automatic way to combine the multi-phase CECT data to discriminate between pancreatic tumor subtypes, among which the key is using Mamba with promising learnability and simplicity to encourage both temporal and spatial modeling from multi-phase CECT. Specifically, we propose a dual hierarchical contrast-enhanced-aware Mamba module incorporating two novel spatial and temporal sampling sequences to explore intra and inter-phase contrast variations of lesions. A similarity-guided refinement module is also imposed into the temporal scanning modeling to emphasize the learning on local tumor regions with more obvious temporal variations. Moreover, we design the space complementary integrator and multi-granularity fusion module to encode and aggregate the semantics across different scales, achieving more efficient learning for subtyping pancreatic tumors. The experimental results on an in-house dataset of 270 clinical cases achieve an accuracy of 97.4% and an AUC of 98.6% in distinguishing between pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) and pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs), demonstrating its potential as a more accurate and efficient tool.

Neural Collapse-Inspired Multi-Label Federated Learning under Label-Distribution Skew

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, the performance of deep learning often deteriorates in FL due to decentralized and heterogeneous data. This challenge is further amplified in multi-label scenarios, where data exhibit complex characteristics such as label co-occurrence, inter-label dependency, and discrepancies between local and global label relationships. While most existing FL research primarily focuses on single-label classification, many real-world applications, particularly in domains such as medical imaging, often involve multi-label settings. In this paper, we address this important yet underexplored scenario in FL, where clients hold multi-label data with skewed label distributions. Neural Collapse (NC) describes a geometric structure in the latent feature space where features of each class collapse to their class mean with vanishing intra-class variance, and the class means form a maximally separated configuration. Motivated by this theory, we propose a method to align feature distributions across clients and to learn high-quality, well-clustered representations. To make the NC-structure applicable to multi-label settings, where image-level features may contain multiple semantic concepts, we introduce a feature disentanglement module that extracts semantically specific features. The clustering of these disentangled class-wise features is guided by a predefined shared NC structure, which mitigates potential conflicts between client models due to diverse local data distributions. In addition, we design regularisation losses to encourage compact clustering in the latent feature space. Experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets across eight diverse settings demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods, validating its effectiveness in this challenging FL scenario.

3D Aware Region Prompted Vision Language Model

We present Spatial Region 3D (SR-3D) aware vision-language model that connects single-view 2D images and multi-view 3D data through a shared visual token space. SR-3D supports flexible region prompting, allowing users to annotate regions with bounding boxes, segmentation masks on any frame, or directly in 3D, without the need for exhaustive multi-frame labeling. We achieve this by enriching 2D visual features with 3D positional embeddings, which allows the 3D model to draw upon strong 2D priors for more accurate spatial reasoning across frames, even when objects of interest do not co-occur within the same view. Extensive experiments on both general 2D vision language and specialized 3D spatial benchmarks demonstrate that SR-3D achieves state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its effectiveness for unifying 2D and 3D representation space on scene understanding. Moreover, we observe applicability to in-the-wild videos without sensory 3D inputs or ground-truth 3D annotations, where SR-3D accurately infers spatial relationships and metric measurements.

StyleSculptor: Zero-Shot Style-Controllable 3D Asset Generation with Texture-Geometry Dual Guidance

Creating 3D assets that follow the texture and geometry style of existing ones is often desirable or even inevitable in practical applications like video gaming and virtual reality. While impressive progress has been made in generating 3D objects from text or images, creating style-controllable 3D assets remains a complex and challenging problem. In this work, we propose StyleSculptor, a novel training-free approach for generating style-guided 3D assets from a content image and one or more style images. Unlike previous works, StyleSculptor achieves style-guided 3D generation in a zero-shot manner, enabling fine-grained 3D style control that captures the texture, geometry, or both styles of user-provided style images. At the core of StyleSculptor is a novel Style Disentangled Attention (SD-Attn) module, which establishes a dynamic interaction between the input content image and style image for style-guided 3D asset generation via a cross-3D attention mechanism, enabling stable feature fusion and effective style-guided generation. To alleviate semantic content leakage, we also introduce a style-disentangled feature selection strategy within the SD-Attn module, which leverages the variance of 3D feature patches to disentangle style- and content-significant channels, allowing selective feature injection within the attention framework. With SD-Attn, the network can dynamically compute texture-, geometry-, or both-guided features to steer the 3D generation process. Built upon this, we further propose the Style Guided Control (SGC) mechanism, which enables exclusive geometry- or texture-only stylization, as well as adjustable style intensity control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StyleSculptor outperforms existing baseline methods in producing high-fidelity 3D assets.

Image Realness Assessment and Localization with Multimodal Features

A reliable method of quantifying the perceptual realness of AI-generated images and identifying visually inconsistent regions is crucial for practical use of AI-generated images and for improving photorealism of generative AI via realness feedback during training. This paper introduces a framework that accomplishes both overall objective realness assessment and local inconsistency identification of AI-generated images using textual descriptions of visual inconsistencies generated by vision-language models trained on large datasets that serve as reliable substitutes for human annotations. Our results demonstrate that the proposed multimodal approach improves objective realness prediction performance and produces dense realness maps that effectively distinguish between realistic and unrealistic spatial regions.

ChartGaze: Enhancing Chart Understanding in LVLMs with Eye-Tracking Guided Attention Refinement

Charts are a crucial visual medium for communicating and representing information. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made progress on chart question answering (CQA), the task remains challenging, particularly when models attend to irrelevant regions of the chart. In this work, we present ChartGaze, a new eye-tracking dataset that captures human gaze patterns during chart reasoning tasks. Through a systematic comparison of human and model attention, we find that LVLMs often diverge from human gaze, leading to reduced interpretability and accuracy. To address this, we propose a gaze-guided attention refinement that aligns image-text attention with human fixations. Our approach improves both answer accuracy and attention alignment, yielding gains of up to 2.56 percentage points across multiple models. These results demonstrate the promise of incorporating human gaze to enhance both the reasoning quality and interpretability of chart-focused LVLMs.

LLMs for energy and macronutrients estimation using only text data from 24-hour dietary recalls: a parameter-efficient fine-tuning experiment using a 10-shot prompt

BACKGROUND: Most artificial intelligence tools used to estimate nutritional content rely on image input. However, whether large language models (LLMs) can accurately predict nutritional values based solely on text descriptions of foods consumed remains unknown. If effective, this approach could enable simpler dietary monitoring without the need for photographs. METHODS: We used 24-hour dietary recalls from adolescents aged 12-19 years in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). An open-source quantized LLM was prompted using a 10-shot, chain-of-thought approach to estimate energy and five macronutrients based solely on text strings listing foods and their quantities. We then applied parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to evaluate whether predictive accuracy improved. NHANES-calculated values served as the ground truth for energy, proteins, carbohydrates, total sugar, dietary fiber and total fat. RESULTS: In a pooled dataset of 11,281 adolescents (49.9% male, mean age 15.4 years), the vanilla LLM yielded poor predictions. The mean absolute error (MAE) was 652.08 for energy and the Lin's CCC <0.46 across endpoints. In contrast, the fine-tuned model performed substantially better, with energy MAEs ranging from 171.34 to 190.90 across subsets, and Lin's CCC exceeding 0.89 for all outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: When prompted using a chain-of-thought approach and fine-tuned with PEFT, open-source LLMs exposed solely to text input can accurately predict energy and macronutrient values from 24-hour dietary recalls. This approach holds promise for low-burden, text-based dietary monitoring tools.

Intelligent Vacuum Thermoforming Process

Ensuring consistent quality in vacuum thermoforming presents challenges due to variations in material properties and tooling configurations. This research introduces a vision-based quality control system to predict and optimise process parameters, thereby enhancing part quality with minimal data requirements. A comprehensive dataset was developed using visual data from vacuum-formed samples subjected to various process parameters, supplemented by image augmentation techniques to improve model training. A k-Nearest Neighbour algorithm was subsequently employed to identify adjustments needed in process parameters by mapping low-quality parts to their high-quality counterparts. The model exhibited strong performance in adjusting heating power, heating time, and vacuum time to reduce defects and improve production efficiency.