SparseC-AFM: a deep learning method for fast and accurate characterization of MoS$_2$ with C-AFM

The increasing use of two-dimensional (2D) materials in nanoelectronics demands robust metrology techniques for electrical characterization, especially for large-scale production. While atomic force microscopy (AFM) techniques like conductive AFM (C-AFM) offer high accuracy, they suffer from slow data acquisition speeds due to the raster scanning process. To address this, we introduce SparseC-AFM, a deep learning model that rapidly and accurately reconstructs conductivity maps of 2D materials like MoS$_2$ from sparse C-AFM scans. Our approach is robust across various scanning modes, substrates, and experimental conditions. We report a comparison between (a) classic flow implementation, where a high pixel density C-AFM image (e.g., 15 minutes to collect) is manually parsed to extract relevant material parameters, and (b) our SparseC-AFM method, which achieves the same operation using data that requires substantially less acquisition time (e.g., under 5 minutes). SparseC-AFM enables efficient extraction of critical material parameters in MoS$_2$, including film coverage, defect density, and identification of crystalline island boundaries, edges, and cracks. We achieve over 11x reduction in acquisition time compared to manual extraction from a full-resolution C-AFM image. Moreover, we demonstrate that our model-predicted samples exhibit remarkably similar electrical properties to full-resolution data gathered using classic-flow scanning. This work represents a significant step toward translating AI-assisted 2D material characterization from laboratory research to industrial fabrication. Code and model weights are available at github.com/UNITES-Lab/sparse-cafm.

UniLGL: Learning Uniform Place Recognition for FOV-limited/Panoramic LiDAR Global Localization

Existing LGL methods typically consider only partial information (e.g., geometric features) from LiDAR observations or are designed for homogeneous LiDAR sensors, overlooking the uniformity in LGL. In this work, a uniform LGL method is proposed, termed UniLGL, which simultaneously achieves spatial and material uniformity, as well as sensor-type uniformity. The key idea of the proposed method is to encode the complete point cloud, which contains both geometric and material information, into a pair of BEV images (i.e., a spatial BEV image and an intensity BEV image). An end-to-end multi-BEV fusion network is designed to extract uniform features, equipping UniLGL with spatial and material uniformity. To ensure robust LGL across heterogeneous LiDAR sensors, a viewpoint invariance hypothesis is introduced, which replaces the conventional translation equivariance assumption commonly used in existing LPR networks and supervises UniLGL to achieve sensor-type uniformity in both global descriptors and local feature representations. Finally, based on the mapping between local features on the 2D BEV image and the point cloud, a robust global pose estimator is derived that determines the global minimum of the global pose on SE(3) without requiring additional registration. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed uniform LGL, extensive benchmarks are conducted in real-world environments, and the results show that the proposed UniLGL is demonstratively competitive compared to other State-of-the-Art LGL methods. Furthermore, UniLGL has been deployed on diverse platforms, including full-size trucks and agile Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), to enable high-precision localization and mapping as well as multi-MAV collaborative exploration in port and forest environments, demonstrating the applicability of UniLGL in industrial and field scenarios.

Single-to-mix Modality Alignment with Multimodal Large Language Model for Document Image Machine Translation

Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT) aims to translate text within document images, facing generalization challenges due to limited training data and the complex interplay between visual and textual information. To address these challenges, we introduce M4Doc, a novel single-to-mix modality alignment framework leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). M4Doc aligns an image-only encoder with the multimodal representations of an MLLM, pre-trained on large-scale document image datasets. This alignment enables a lightweight DIMT model to learn crucial visual-textual correlations during training. During inference, M4Doc bypasses the MLLM, maintaining computational efficiency while benefiting from its multimodal knowledge. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in translation quality, especially in cross-domain generalization and challenging document image scenarios.

Neural Concept Verifier: Scaling Prover-Verifier Games via Concept Encodings

While Prover-Verifier Games (PVGs) offer a promising path toward verifiability in nonlinear classification models, they have not yet been applied to complex inputs such as high-dimensional images. Conversely, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) effectively translate such data into interpretable concepts but are limited by their reliance on low-capacity linear predictors. In this work, we introduce the Neural Concept Verifier (NCV), a unified framework combining PVGs with concept encodings for interpretable, nonlinear classification in high-dimensional settings. NCV achieves this by utilizing recent minimally supervised concept discovery models to extract structured concept encodings from raw inputs. A prover then selects a subset of these encodings, which a verifier -- implemented as a nonlinear predictor -- uses exclusively for decision-making. Our evaluations show that NCV outperforms CBM and pixel-based PVG classifier baselines on high-dimensional, logically complex datasets and also helps mitigate shortcut behavior. Overall, we demonstrate NCV as a promising step toward performative, verifiable AI.

Spatial-Temporal Graph Mamba for Music-Guided Dance Video Synthesis

We propose a novel spatial-temporal graph Mamba (STG-Mamba) for the music-guided dance video synthesis task, i.e., to translate the input music to a dance video. STG-Mamba consists of two translation mappings: music-to-skeleton translation and skeleton-to-video translation. In the music-to-skeleton translation, we introduce a novel spatial-temporal graph Mamba (STGM) block to effectively construct skeleton sequences from the input music, capturing dependencies between joints in both the spatial and temporal dimensions. For the skeleton-to-video translation, we propose a novel self-supervised regularization network to translate the generated skeletons, along with a conditional image, into a dance video. Lastly, we collect a new skeleton-to-video translation dataset from the Internet, containing 54,944 video clips. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STG-Mamba achieves significantly better results than existing methods.

EC-Flow: Enabling Versatile Robotic Manipulation from Action-Unlabeled Videos via Embodiment-Centric Flow

Current language-guided robotic manipulation systems often require low-level action-labeled datasets for imitation learning. While object-centric flow prediction methods mitigate this issue, they remain limited to scenarios involving rigid objects with clear displacement and minimal occlusion. In this work, we present Embodiment-Centric Flow (EC-Flow), a framework that directly learns manipulation from action-unlabeled videos by predicting embodiment-centric flow. Our key insight is that incorporating the embodiment's inherent kinematics significantly enhances generalization to versatile manipulation scenarios, including deformable object handling, occlusions, and non-object-displacement tasks. To connect the EC-Flow with language instructions and object interactions, we further introduce a goal-alignment module by jointly optimizing movement consistency and goal-image prediction. Moreover, translating EC-Flow to executable robot actions only requires a standard robot URDF (Unified Robot Description Format) file to specify kinematic constraints across joints, which makes it easy to use in practice. We validate EC-Flow on both simulation (Meta-World) and real-world tasks, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance in occluded object handling (62% improvement), deformable object manipulation (45% improvement), and non-object-displacement tasks (80% improvement) than prior state-of-the-art object-centric flow methods. For more information, see our project website at https://ec-flow1.github.io .

Motion-Aware Adaptive Pixel Pruning for Efficient Local Motion Deblurring

Local motion blur in digital images originates from the relative motion between dynamic objects and static imaging systems during exposure. Existing deblurring methods face significant challenges in addressing this problem due to their inefficient allocation of computational resources and inadequate handling of spatially varying blur patterns. To overcome these limitations, we first propose a trainable mask predictor that identifies blurred regions in the image. During training, we employ blur masks to exclude sharp regions. For inference optimization, we implement structural reparameterization by converting $3\times 3$ convolutions to computationally efficient $1\times 1$ convolutions, enabling pixel-level pruning of sharp areas to reduce computation. Second, we develop an intra-frame motion analyzer that translates relative pixel displacements into motion trajectories, establishing adaptive guidance for region-specific blur restoration. Our method is trained end-to-end using a combination of reconstruction loss, reblur loss, and mask loss guided by annotated blur masks. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on both local and global blur datasets while reducing FLOPs by 49\% compared to SOTA models (e.g., LMD-ViT). The source code is available at https://github.com/shangwei5/M2AENet.

NeoBabel: A Multilingual Open Tower for Visual Generation

Text-to-image generation advancements have been predominantly English-centric, creating barriers for non-English speakers and perpetuating digital inequities. While existing systems rely on translation pipelines, these introduce semantic drift, computational overhead, and cultural misalignment. We introduce NeoBabel, a novel multilingual image generation framework that sets a new Pareto frontier in performance, efficiency and inclusivity, supporting six languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, French, Hindi, and Persian. The model is trained using a combination of large-scale multilingual pretraining and high-resolution instruction tuning. To evaluate its capabilities, we expand two English-only benchmarks to multilingual equivalents: m-GenEval and m-DPG. NeoBabel achieves state-of-the-art multilingual performance while retaining strong English capability, scoring 0.75 on m-GenEval and 0.68 on m-DPG. Notably, it performs on par with leading models on English tasks while outperforming them by +0.11 and +0.09 on multilingual benchmarks, even though these models are built on multilingual base LLMs. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our targeted alignment training for preserving and extending crosslingual generalization. We further introduce two new metrics to rigorously assess multilingual alignment and robustness to code-mixed prompts. Notably, NeoBabel matches or exceeds English-only models while being 2-4x smaller. We release an open toolkit, including all code, model checkpoints, a curated dataset of 124M multilingual text-image pairs, and standardized multilingual evaluation protocols, to advance inclusive AI research. Our work demonstrates that multilingual capability is not a trade-off but a catalyst for improved robustness, efficiency, and cultural fidelity in generative AI.

BronchoGAN: Anatomically consistent and domain-agnostic image-to-image translation for video bronchoscopy

The limited availability of bronchoscopy images makes image synthesis particularly interesting for training deep learning models. Robust image translation across different domains -- virtual bronchoscopy, phantom as well as in-vivo and ex-vivo image data -- is pivotal for clinical applications. This paper proposes BronchoGAN introducing anatomical constraints for image-to-image translation being integrated into a conditional GAN. In particular, we force bronchial orifices to match across input and output images. We further propose to use foundation model-generated depth images as intermediate representation ensuring robustness across a variety of input domains establishing models with substantially less reliance on individual training datasets. Moreover our intermediate depth image representation allows to easily construct paired image data for training. Our experiments showed that input images from different domains (e.g. virtual bronchoscopy, phantoms) can be successfully translated to images mimicking realistic human airway appearance. We demonstrated that anatomical settings (i.e. bronchial orifices) can be robustly preserved with our approach which is shown qualitatively and quantitatively by means of improved FID, SSIM and dice coefficients scores. Our anatomical constraints enabled an improvement in the Dice coefficient of up to 0.43 for synthetic images. Through foundation models for intermediate depth representations, bronchial orifice segmentation integrated as anatomical constraints into conditional GANs we are able to robustly translate images from different bronchoscopy input domains. BronchoGAN allows to incorporate public CT scan data (virtual bronchoscopy) in order to generate large-scale bronchoscopy image datasets with realistic appearance. BronchoGAN enables to bridge the gap of missing public bronchoscopy images.

DocShaDiffusion: Diffusion Model in Latent Space for Document Image Shadow Removal

Document shadow removal is a crucial task in the field of document image enhancement. However, existing methods tend to remove shadows with constant color background and ignore color shadows. In this paper, we first design a diffusion model in latent space for document image shadow removal, called DocShaDiffusion. It translates shadow images from pixel space to latent space, enabling the model to more easily capture essential features. To address the issue of color shadows, we design a shadow soft-mask generation module (SSGM). It is able to produce accurate shadow mask and add noise into shadow regions specially. Guided by the shadow mask, a shadow mask-aware guided diffusion module (SMGDM) is proposed to remove shadows from document images by supervising the diffusion and denoising process. We also propose a shadow-robust perceptual feature loss to preserve details and structures in document images. Moreover, we develop a large-scale synthetic document color shadow removal dataset (SDCSRD). It simulates the distribution of realistic color shadows and provides powerful supports for the training of models. Experiments on three public datasets validate the proposed method's superiority over state-of-the-art. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.