COMO: Closed-Loop Optical Molecule Recognition with Minimum Risk Training

Optical chemical structure recognition (OCSR) translates molecular images into machine-readable representations like SMILES strings or molecular graphs, but remains challenging in real-world documents due to inexhaustible variations in chemical structures, shorthand conventions, and visual noise. Most existing deep-learning-based approaches rely on teacher forcing with token-level Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). This training paradigm suffers from exposure bias, as models are trained under ground-truth prefixes but must condition on their own previous predictions during inference. Moreover, token-level MLE objectives hinder the optimization towards molecular-level evaluation criteria such as chemical validity and structural similarity. Here we introduce Minimum Risk Training (MRT) to OCSR and propose COMO (Closed-loop Optical Molecule recOgnition), a closed-loop framework that mitigates exposure bias by directly optimizing over molecule-level, non-differentiable objectives, by iteratively sampling and evaluating the model's own predictions. Experiments on ten benchmarks including synthetic and real-world chemical diagrams from patent and scientific literature demonstrate that COMO substantially outperforms existing rule-based and learning-based methods with less training data. Ablation studies further show that MRT is architecture-agnostic, demonstrating its potential for broad application to end-to-end OCSR systems.

Image-to-Image Translation Framework Embedded with Rotation Symmetry Priors

Image-to-image translation (I2I) is a fundamental task in computer vision, focused on mapping an input image from a source domain to a corresponding image in a target domain while preserving domain-invariant features and adapting domain-specific attributes. Despite the remarkable success of deep learning-based I2I approaches, the lack of paired data and unsupervised learning framework still hinder their effectiveness. In this work, we address the challenge by incorporating transformation symmetry priors into image-to-image translation networks. Specifically, we introduce rotation group equivariant convolutions to achieve rotation equivariant I2I framework, a novel contribution, to the best of our knowledge, along this research direction. This design ensures the preservation of rotation symmetry, one of the most intrinsic and domain-invariant properties of natural and scientific images, throughout the network. Furthermore, we conduct a systematic study on image symmetry priors on real dataset and propose a novel transformation learnable equivariant convolutions (TL-Conv) that adaptively learns transformation groups, enhancing symmetry preservation across diverse datasets. We also provide a theoretical analysis of the equivariance error of TL-Conv, proving that it maintains exact equivariance in continuous domains and provide a bound for the error in discrete cases. Through extensive experiments across a range of I2I tasks, we validate the effectiveness and superior performance of our approach, highlighting the potential of equivariant networks in enhancing generation quality and its broad applicability. Our code is available at https://github.com/tanfy929/Equivariant-I2I

SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecture

Recent large vision-language models (VLMs) remain fundamentally constrained by a persistent dichotomy: understanding and generation are treated as distinct problems, leading to fragmented architectures, cascaded pipelines, and misaligned representation spaces. We argue that this divide is not merely an engineering artifact, but a structural limitation that hinders the emergence of native multimodal intelligence. Hence, we introduce SenseNova-U1, a native unified multimodal paradigm built upon NEO-unify, in which understanding and generation evolve as synergistic views of a single underlying process. We launch two native unified variants, SenseNova-U1-8B-MoT and SenseNova-U1-A3B-MoT, built on dense (8B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B) understanding baselines, respectively. Designed from first principles, they rival top-tier understanding-only VLMs across text understanding, vision-language perception, knowledge reasoning, agentic decision-making, and spatial intelligence. Meanwhile, they deliver strong semantic consistency and visual fidelity, excelling in conventional or knowledge-intensive any-to-image (X2I) synthesis, complex text-rich infographic generation, and interleaved vision-language generation, with or without think patterns. Beyond performance, we show detailed model design, data preprocessing, pre-/post-training, and inference strategies to support community research. Last but not least, preliminary evidence demonstrates that our models extend beyond perception and generation, performing strongly in vision-language-action (VLA) and world model (WM) scenarios. This points toward a broader roadmap where models do not translate between modalities, but think and act across them in a native manner. Multimodal AI is no longer about connecting separate systems, but about building a unified one and trusting the necessary capabilities to emerge from within.

Weighted Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Segmentation of Maxillary Sinus in Panoramic X-ray Images

Accurate segmentation of maxillary sinus in panoramic X-ray images is essential for dental diagnosis and surgical planning; however, this task remains relatively underexplored in dental imaging research. Structural overlap, ambiguous anatomical boundaries inherent to two-dimensional panoramic projections, and the limited availability of large scale clinical datasets with reliable pixel-level annotations make the development and evaluation of segmentation models challenging. To address these challenges, we propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework that effectively leverages both labeled and unlabeled panoramic radiographs, where knowledge distillation is utilized to train a student model with reliable structural information distilled from a teacher model. Specifically, we introduce a weighted knowledge distillation loss to suppress unreliable distillation signals caused by structural discrepancies between teacher and student predictions. To further enhance the quality of pseudo labels generated by the teacher network, we introduce SinusCycle-GAN which is a refinement network based on unpaired image-to-image translation. This refinement process improves the precision of boundaries and reduces noise propagation when learning from unlabeled data during semi-supervised training. To evaluate the proposed method, we collected clinical panoramic X-ray images from 2,511 patients, and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation models, achieving the Dice score of 96.35\% while reducing boundary error. The results indicate that the proposed semi-supervised framework provides robust and anatomically consistent segmentation performance under limited labeled data conditions, highlighting its potential for broader dental image analysis applications.

STAGE: Tackling Semantic Drift in Multimodal Federated Graph Learning

Federated graph learning (FGL) enables collaborative training on graph data across multiple clients. As graph data increasingly contain multimodal node attributes such as text and images, multimodal federated graph learning (MM-FGL) has become an important yet substantially harder setting. The key challenge is that clients from different modality domains may not share a common semantic space: even for the same concept, their local encoders can produce inconsistent representations before collaboration begins. This makes direct parameter coordination unreliable and further causes two downstream problems: forcing heterogeneous client representations into a naively shared semantic space may create false semantic agreement, and graph message passing may amplify residual inconsistency across neighborhoods. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{STAGE}, a protocol-first framework for MM-FGL. Instead of relying on direct parameter averaging, STAGE builds a shared semantic space that first translates heterogeneous multimodal features into comparable representations and then regulates how these representations propagate over local graph structures. In this way, STAGE not only improves cross-client semantic calibration, but also reduces the risk of inconsistency amplification during graph learning. Extensive experiments on 8 multimodal-attributed graphs across 5 graph-centric and modality-centric tasks show that STAGE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing per-round communication payload.

Certified geometric robustness -- Super-DeepG

Safety-critical applications are required to perform as expected in normal operations. Image processing functions are often required to be insensitive to small geometric perturbations such as rotation, scaling, shearing or translation. This paper addresses the formal verification of neural networks against geometric perturbations on their image dataset. Our method Super-DeepG improves the reasoning used in linear relaxation techniques and Lipschitz optimization, and provides an implementation that leverages GPU hardware. By doing so, Super-DeepG achieves both precision and computational efficiency of robustness certification, to an extent that outperforms prior work. Super-DeepG is shared as an open-source tool on GitHub.

Bridging visual saliency and large language models for explainable deep learning in medical imaging

The opaque nature of deep learning models remains a significant barrier to their clinical adoption in medical imaging. This paper presents a multimodal explainability framework that bridges the gap between convolutional neural network (CNN) predictions and clinically actionable insights for brain tumor classification, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to deliver human-interpretable diagnostic narratives. The proposed framework operates through three coupled stages. First, nine CNN architectures are extended with a dual-output hybrid formulation that simultaneously optimises a classification head and a segmentation head, enabling spatially richer feature learning. Second, visual saliency attribution methods, namely Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and ScoreCAM, are applied to generate class-discriminative heatmaps, which are subsequently refined into binary tumor masks via an adaptive percentile thresholding pipeline. Third, the resulting masks are mapped onto the Harvard-Oxford cortical atlas to translate pixel-level evidence into named neuroanatomical structures, and the extracted findings are encoded into a structured JSON file that conditions three LLMs (Grok3, Mistral, and LLaMA) to generate coherent, radiological-style diagnostic reports. Evaluated on a dataset of 4,834 contrast-enhanced T1-weighted brain MRI images spanning three tumor classes, InceptionResNetV2 achieved the highest classification performance and Grad-CAM++ yielded the best segmentation overlap. Among the language models, Grok3 led in lexical diversity and coherence, while LLaMA achieved the highest readability score. By integrating visual, anatomical, and linguistic modalities into a unified pipeline, the framework produces explanations that are technically grounded and meaningfully interpretable, advancing the transparency and clinical accountability of artificial intelligence assisted brain tumor diagnosis.

Tracing Like a Clinician: Anatomy-Guided Spatial Priors for Cephalometric Landmark Detection

When orthodontists trace cephalometric radiographs, they follow a structured workflow: identify the soft tissue profile, partition the skull into anatomical regions, trace contours, and locate landmarks using geometric definitions -- yet no automated system replicates this reasoning. We present a five-phase anatomy-guided initialization pipeline that translates this clinical workflow into computational operations, producing confidence-weighted spatial attention priors for a downstream HRNet-W32 detector. On 1,502 radiographs from three sources spanning 7+ imaging devices, the system achieves 1.04 mm mean radial error on 25 landmarks -- surpassing prior state-of-the-art (1.23 mm on 19 landmarks) by 15.4%, with twelve landmarks below 1 mm. A three-way controlled ablation reveals two striking findings. First, removing anatomical priors does not merely slow convergence -- it destroys generalization: both models converge to ~1.03 mm on validation, but diverge to 1.94 vs. 1.04 mm on the test set. Second, replacing anatomical priors with random-position Gaussians produces even worse generalization (2.24 mm), confirming that the improvement derives from anatomically correct positioning, not additional input channels. Clinical domain knowledge encoded as spatial priors provides an inductive bias that architecture and data augmentation alone do not provide.

An Elastic Shape Variational Autoencoder for Skeleton Pose Trajectories

Deep generative models provide flexible frameworks for modeling complex, structured data such as images, videos, 3D objects, and texts. However, when applied to sequences of human skeletons, standard variational autoencoders (VAEs) often allocate substantial capacity to nuisance factors-such as camera orientation, subject scale, viewpoint, and execution speed-rather than the intrinsic geometry of shapes and their motion. We propose the Elastic Shape - Variational Autoencoder (ES-VAE), a geometry-aware generative model for skeletal trajectories that leverages the transported square-root velocity field (TSRVF) representation on Kendall's shape manifold. This representation inherently removes rigid translations, rotations, and global scaling of shapes, and temporal rate variability of sequences, isolating the underlying shape dynamics. The ES-VAE encoder maps skeletal sequences to a low-dimensional latent space incorporating the Riemannian logarithm map, while the decoder reconstructs sequences using the corresponding exponential map. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ES-VAE on two datasets. First, we analyze skeletal gait cycles to predict clinical mobility scores and classify subjects into healthy and post-stroke groups. Second, we evaluate action recognition on the NTU RGB+D dataset. Across both settings, ES-VAE consistently outperforms standard VAEs and a range of sequence modeling baselines, including temporal convolutional networks, transformers, and graph convolutional networks. More broadly, ES-VAE provides a principled framework for learning generative models of longitudinal data on pose shape manifolds, offering improved latent representation and downstream performance compared to existing deep learning approaches.

Frequency Diverse Arrays: Fundamentals, Key Insights, and Future Directions

Frequency diverse arrays (FDA) have attracted sustained interest as a promising architecture for introducing range-dependent responses into array systems. Unlike conventional phased arrays (PA), whose transmit behavior is primarily angle-dependent, FDA employs inter-element frequency offsets to generate time-and range-dependent phase structures, thereby producing a joint time-range-angle array response. Despite extensive research, the physical meaning of FDA-induced degrees of freedom remains debated, particularly in relation to range-angle coupling, the feasibility of time-invariant focusing, and the distinction between frequency-driven and waveform-driven range selectivity. This paper reexamines FDA from a structural and manifold-based perspective. A central contribution is the introduction of an irreducibility criterion, which distinguishes genuine range-domain physical degrees of freedom from effects that can be reproduced by equivalent signal-processing transformations. Based on this perspective, PA, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), FDA, and FDA-MIMO are comparatively interpreted according to the physical origin of their effective degrees of freedom, including spatial phase, waveform orthogonality, frequency gradients, and their interaction. The paper further clarifies the role of frequency across different array paradigms, contrasts FDA with time-coding-based architectures, and explains how key FDA properties such as manifold expansion, range--angle coupling, time variation, and multi-frequency diversity translate into system capabilities. Building on these structural insights, the paper connects FDA to a broad range of radar and communication functionalities, including parameter estimation, target detection, imaging, physical-layer security, and integrated sensing and communication.