Where Do Images Come From? Analyzing Captions to Geographically Profile Datasets

Recent studies show that text-to-image models often fail to generate geographically representative images, raising concerns about the representativeness of their training data and motivating the question: which parts of the world do these training examples come from? We geographically profile large-scale multimodal datasets by mapping image-caption pairs to countries based on location information extracted from captions using LLMs. Studying English captions from three widely used datasets (Re-LAION, DataComp1B, and Conceptual Captions) across $20$ common entities (e.g., house, flag), we find that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada account for $48.0\%$ of samples, while South American and African countries are severely under-represented with only $1.8\%$ and $3.8\%$ of images, respectively. We observe a strong correlation between a country's GDP and its representation in the data ($ρ= 0.82$). Examining non-English subsets for $4$ languages from the Re-LAION dataset, we find that representation skews heavily toward countries where these languages are predominantly spoken. Additionally, we find that higher representation does not necessarily translate to greater visual or semantic diversity. Finally, analyzing country-specific images generated by Stable Diffusion v1.3 trained on Re-LAION, we show that while generations appear realistic, they are severely limited in their coverage compared to real-world images.

Geometric Image Editing via Effects-Sensitive In-Context Inpainting with Diffusion Transformers

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved image editing. However, challenges persist in handling geometric transformations, such as translation, rotation, and scaling, particularly in complex scenes. Existing approaches suffer from two main limitations: (1) difficulty in achieving accurate geometric editing of object translation, rotation, and scaling; (2) inadequate modeling of intricate lighting and shadow effects, leading to unrealistic results. To address these issues, we propose GeoEdit, a framework that leverages in-context generation through a diffusion transformer module, which integrates geometric transformations for precise object edits. Moreover, we introduce Effects-Sensitive Attention, which enhances the modeling of intricate lighting and shadow effects for improved realism. To further support training, we construct RS-Objects, a large-scale geometric editing dataset containing over 120,000 high-quality image pairs, enabling the model to learn precise geometric editing while generating realistic lighting and shadows. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that GeoEdit consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality, geometric accuracy, and realism.

Controlled disagreement improves generalization in decentralized training

Decentralized training is often regarded as inferior to centralized training because the consensus errors between workers are thought to undermine convergence and generalization, even with homogeneous data distributions. This work challenges this view by introducing decentralized SGD with Adaptive Consensus (DSGD-AC), which intentionally preserves non-vanishing consensus errors through a time-dependent scaling mechanism. We prove that these errors are not random noise but systematically align with the dominant Hessian subspace, acting as structured perturbations that guide optimization toward flatter minima. Across image classification and machine translation benchmarks, DSGD-AC consistently surpasses both standard DSGD and centralized SGD in test accuracy and solution flatness. Together, these results establish consensus errors as a useful implicit regularizer and open a new perspective on the design of decentralized learning algorithms.

SCAR: Satellite Imagery-Based Calibration for Aerial Recordings

We introduce SCAR, a method for long-term auto-calibration refinement of aerial visual-inertial systems that exploits georeferenced satellite imagery as a persistent global reference. SCAR estimates both intrinsic and extrinsic parameters by aligning aerial images with 2D--3D correspondences derived from publicly available orthophotos and elevation models. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on dedicated calibration maneuvers or manually surveyed ground control points, our method leverages external geospatial data to detect and correct calibration degradation under field deployment conditions. We evaluate our approach on six large-scale aerial campaigns conducted over two years under diverse seasonal and environmental conditions. Across all sequences, SCAR consistently outperforms established baselines (Kalibr, COLMAP, VINS-Mono), reducing median reprojection error by a large margin, and translating these calibration gains into substantially lower visual localization rotation errors and higher pose accuracy. These results demonstrate that SCAR provides accurate, robust, and reproducible calibration over long-term aerial operations without the need for manual intervention.

Statistical Opportunities in Neuroimaging

Neuroimaging has profoundly enhanced our understanding of the human brain by characterizing its structure, function, and connectivity through modalities like MRI, fMRI, EEG, and PET. These technologies have enabled major breakthroughs across the lifespan, from early brain development to neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. Despite these advances, the brain is a complex, multiscale system, and neuroimaging measurements are correspondingly high-dimensional. This creates major statistical challenges, including measurement noise, motion-related artifacts, substantial inter-subject and site/scanner variability, and the sheer scale of modern studies. This paper explores statistical opportunities and challenges in neuroimaging across four key areas: (i) brain development from birth to age 20, (ii) the adult and aging brain, (iii) neurodegeneration and neuropsychiatric disorders, and (iv) brain encoding and decoding. After a quick tutorial on major imaging technologies, we review cutting-edge studies, underscore data and modeling challenges, and highlight research opportunities for statisticians. We conclude by emphasizing that close collaboration among statisticians, neuroscientists, and clinicians is essential for translating neuroimaging advances into improved diagnostics, deeper mechanistic insight, and more personalized treatments.

OmniCT: Towards a Unified Slice-Volume LVLM for Comprehensive CT Analysis

Computed Tomography (CT) is one of the most widely used and diagnostically information-dense imaging modalities, covering critical organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, and colon. Clinical interpretation relies on both slice-driven local features (e.g., sub-centimeter nodules, lesion boundaries) and volume-driven spatial representations (e.g., tumor infiltration, inter-organ anatomical relations). However, existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain fragmented in CT slice versus volumetric understanding: slice-driven LVLMs show strong generalization but lack cross-slice spatial consistency, while volume-driven LVLMs explicitly capture volumetric semantics but suffer from coarse granularity and poor compatibility with slice inputs. The absence of a unified modeling paradigm constitutes a major bottleneck for the clinical translation of medical LVLMs. We present OmniCT, a powerful unified slice-volume LVLM for CT scenarios, which makes three contributions: (i) Spatial Consistency Enhancement (SCE): volumetric slice composition combined with tri-axial positional embedding that introduces volumetric consistency, and an MoE hybrid projection enables efficient slice-volume adaptation; (ii) Organ-level Semantic Enhancement (OSE): segmentation and ROI localization explicitly align anatomical regions, emphasizing lesion- and organ-level semantics; (iii) MedEval-CT: the largest slice-volume CT dataset and hybrid benchmark integrates comprehensive metrics for unified evaluation. OmniCT consistently outperforms existing methods with a substantial margin across diverse clinical tasks and satisfies both micro-level detail sensitivity and macro-level spatial reasoning. More importantly, it establishes a new paradigm for cross-modal medical imaging understanding.

Lung Nodule Image Synthesis Driven by Two-Stage Generative Adversarial Networks

The limited sample size and insufficient diversity of lung nodule CT datasets severely restrict the performance and generalization ability of detection models. Existing methods generate images with insufficient diversity and controllability, suffering from issues such as monotonous texture features and distorted anatomical structures. Therefore, we propose a two-stage generative adversarial network (TSGAN) to enhance the diversity and spatial controllability of synthetic data by decoupling the morphological structure and texture features of lung nodules. In the first stage, StyleGAN is used to generate semantic segmentation mask images, encoding lung nodules and tissue backgrounds to control the anatomical structure of lung nodule images; The second stage uses the DL-Pix2Pix model to translate the mask map into CT images, employing local importance attention to capture local features, while utilizing dynamic weight multi-head window attention to enhance the modeling capability of lung nodule texture and background. Compared to the original dataset, the accuracy improved by 4.6% and mAP by 4% on the LUNA16 dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that TSGAN can enhance the quality of synthetic images and the performance of detection models.

Towards reconstructing experimental sparse-view X-ray CT data with diffusion models

Diffusion-based image generators are promising priors for ill-posed inverse problems like sparse-view X-ray Computed Tomography (CT). As most studies consider synthetic data, it is not clear whether training data mismatch (``domain shift'') or forward model mismatch complicate their successful application to experimental data. We measured CT data from a physical phantom resembling the synthetic Shepp-Logan phantom and trained diffusion priors on synthetic image data sets with different degrees of domain shift towards it. Then, we employed the priors in a Decomposed Diffusion Sampling scheme on sparse-view CT data sets with increasing difficulty leading to the experimental data. Our results reveal that domain shift plays a nuanced role: while severe mismatch causes model collapse and hallucinations, diverse priors outperform well-matched but narrow priors. Forward model mismatch pulls the image samples away from the prior manifold, which causes artifacts but can be mitigated with annealed likelihood schedules that also increase computational efficiency. Overall, we demonstrate that performance gains do not immediately translate from synthetic to experimental data, and future development must validate against real-world benchmarks.

DCDM: Divide-and-Conquer Diffusion Models for Consistency-Preserving Video Generation

Recent video generative models have demonstrated impressive visual fidelity, yet they often struggle with semantic, geometric, and identity consistency. In this paper, we propose a system-level framework, termed the Divide-and-Conquer Diffusion Model (DCDM), to address three key challenges: (1) intra-clip world knowledge consistency, (2) inter-clip camera consistency, and (3) inter-shot element consistency. DCDM decomposes video consistency modeling under these scenarios into three dedicated components while sharing a unified video generation backbone. For intra-clip consistency, DCDM leverages a large language model to parse input prompts into structured semantic representations, which are subsequently translated into coherent video content by a diffusion transformer. For inter-clip camera consistency, we propose a temporal camera representation in the noise space that enables precise and stable camera motion control, along with a text-to-image initialization mechanism to further enhance controllability. For inter-shot consistency, DCDM adopts a holistic scene generation paradigm with windowed cross-attention and sparse inter-shot self-attention, ensuring long-range narrative coherence while maintaining computational efficiency. We validate our framework on the test set of the CVM Competition at AAAI'26, and the results demonstrate that the proposed strategies effectively address these challenges.

Mitigating Long-Tail Bias via Prompt-Controlled Diffusion Augmentation

Semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote-sensing imagery is critical for urban mapping and land-cover monitoring, yet training data typically exhibits severe long-tailed pixel imbalance. In the dataset LoveDA, this challenge is compounded by an explicit Urban/Rural split with distinct appearance and inconsistent class-frequency statistics across domains. We present a prompt-controlled diffusion augmentation framework that synthesizes paired label--image samples with explicit control of both domain and semantic composition. Stage~A uses a domain-aware, masked ratio-conditioned discrete diffusion model to generate layouts that satisfy user-specified class-ratio targets while respecting learned co-occurrence structure. Stage~B translates layouts into photorealistic, domain-consistent images using Stable Diffusion with ControlNet guidance. Mixing the resulting ratio and domain-controlled synthetic pairs with real data yields consistent improvements across multiple segmentation backbones, with gains concentrated on minority classes and improved Urban and Rural generalization, demonstrating controllable augmentation as a practical mechanism to mitigate long-tail bias in remote-sensing segmentation. Source codes, pretrained models, and synthetic datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/Buddhi19/SyntheticGen.git}{Github}