CTA-Flux: Integrating Chinese Cultural Semantics into High-Quality English Text-to-Image Communities

We proposed the Chinese Text Adapter-Flux (CTA-Flux). An adaptation method fits the Chinese text inputs to Flux, a powerful text-to-image (TTI) generative model initially trained on the English corpus. Despite the notable image generation ability conditioned on English text inputs, Flux performs poorly when processing non-English prompts, particularly due to linguistic and cultural biases inherent in predominantly English-centric training datasets. Existing approaches, such as translating non-English prompts into English or finetuning models for bilingual mappings, inadequately address culturally specific semantics, compromising image authenticity and quality. To address this issue, we introduce a novel method to bridge Chinese semantic understanding with compatibility in English-centric TTI model communities. Existing approaches relying on ControlNet-like architectures typically require a massive parameter scale and lack direct control over Chinese semantics. In comparison, CTA-flux leverages MultiModal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) to control the Flux backbone directly, significantly reducing the number of parameters while enhancing the model's understanding of Chinese semantics. This integration significantly improves the generation quality and cultural authenticity without extensive retraining of the entire model, thus maintaining compatibility with existing text-to-image plugins such as LoRA, IP-Adapter, and ControlNet. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that CTA-flux supports Chinese and English prompts and achieves superior image generation quality, visual realism, and faithful depiction of Chinese semantics.

You Only Pose Once: A Minimalist's Detection Transformer for Monocular RGB Category-level 9D Multi-Object Pose Estimation

Accurately recovering the full 9-DoF pose of unseen instances within specific categories from a single RGB image remains a core challenge for robotics and automation. Most existing solutions still rely on pseudo-depth, CAD models, or multi-stage cascades that separate 2D detection from pose estimation. Motivated by the need for a simpler, RGB-only alternative that learns directly at the category level, we revisit a longstanding question: Can object detection and 9-DoF pose estimation be unified with high performance, without any additional data? We show that they can with our method, YOPO, a single-stage, query-based framework that treats category-level 9-DoF estimation as a natural extension of 2D detection. YOPO augments a transformer detector with a lightweight pose head, a bounding-box-conditioned translation module, and a 6D-aware Hungarian matching cost. The model is trained end-to-end only with RGB images and category-level pose labels. Despite its minimalist design, YOPO sets a new state of the art on three benchmarks. On the REAL275 dataset, it achieves 79.6% $\rm{IoU}_{50}$ and 54.1% under the $10^\circ$$10{\rm{cm}}$ metric, surpassing prior RGB-only methods and closing much of the gap to RGB-D systems. The code, models, and additional qualitative results can be found on our project.

Vibration-Based Energy Metric for Restoring Needle Alignment in Autonomous Robotic Ultrasound

Precise needle alignment is essential for percutaneous needle insertion in robotic ultrasound-guided procedures. However, inherent challenges such as speckle noise, needle-like artifacts, and low image resolution make robust needle detection difficult, particularly when visibility is reduced or lost. In this paper, we propose a method to restore needle alignment when the ultrasound imaging plane and the needle insertion plane are misaligned. Unlike many existing approaches that rely heavily on needle visibility in ultrasound images, our method uses a more robust feature by periodically vibrating the needle using a mechanical system. Specifically, we propose a vibration-based energy metric that remains effective even when the needle is fully out of plane. Using this metric, we develop a control strategy to reposition the ultrasound probe in response to misalignments between the imaging plane and the needle insertion plane in both translation and rotation. Experiments conducted on ex-vivo porcine tissue samples using a dual-arm robotic ultrasound-guided needle insertion system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results show the translational error of 0.41$\pm$0.27 mm and the rotational error of 0.51$\pm$0.19 degrees.

Camera Pose Refinement via 3D Gaussian Splatting

Camera pose refinement aims at improving the accuracy of initial pose estimation for applications in 3D computer vision. Most refinement approaches rely on 2D-3D correspondences with specific descriptors or dedicated networks, requiring reconstructing the scene again for a different descriptor or fully retraining the network for each scene. Some recent methods instead infer pose from feature similarity, but their lack of geometry constraints results in less accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel camera pose refinement framework leveraging 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), referred to as GS-SMC. Given the widespread usage of 3DGS, our method can employ an existing 3DGS model to render novel views, providing a lightweight solution that can be directly applied to diverse scenes without additional training or fine-tuning. Specifically, we introduce an iterative optimization approach, which refines the camera pose using epipolar geometric constraints among the query and multiple rendered images. Our method allows flexibly choosing feature extractors and matchers to establish these constraints. Extensive empirical evaluations on the 7-Scenes and the Cambridge Landmarks datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art camera pose refinement approaches, achieving 53.3% and 56.9% reductions in median translation and rotation errors on 7-Scenes, and 40.7% and 53.2% on Cambridge.

Large-scale Multi-sequence Pretraining for Generalizable MRI Analysis in Versatile Clinical Applications

Multi-sequence Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) offers remarkable versatility, enabling the distinct visualization of different tissue types. Nevertheless, the inherent heterogeneity among MRI sequences poses significant challenges to the generalization capability of deep learning models. These challenges undermine model performance when faced with varying acquisition parameters, thereby severely restricting their clinical utility. In this study, we present PRISM, a foundation model PRe-trained with large-scale multI-Sequence MRI. We collected a total of 64 datasets from both public and private sources, encompassing a wide range of whole-body anatomical structures, with scans spanning diverse MRI sequences. Among them, 336,476 volumetric MRI scans from 34 datasets (8 public and 26 private) were curated to construct the largest multi-organ multi-sequence MRI pretraining corpus to date. We propose a novel pretraining paradigm that disentangles anatomically invariant features from sequence-specific variations in MRI, while preserving high-level semantic representations. We established a benchmark comprising 44 downstream tasks, including disease diagnosis, image segmentation, registration, progression prediction, and report generation. These tasks were evaluated on 32 public datasets and 5 private cohorts. PRISM consistently outperformed both non-pretrained models and existing foundation models, achieving first-rank results in 39 out of 44 downstream benchmarks with statistical significance improvements. These results underscore its ability to learn robust and generalizable representations across unseen data acquired under diverse MRI protocols. PRISM provides a scalable framework for multi-sequence MRI analysis, thereby enhancing the translational potential of AI in radiology. It delivers consistent performance across diverse imaging protocols, reinforcing its clinical applicability.

Explainable Image Classification with Reduced Overconfidence for Tissue Characterisation

The deployment of Machine Learning models intraoperatively for tissue characterisation can assist decision making and guide safe tumour resections. For image classification models, pixel attribution methods are popular to infer explainability. However, overconfidence in deep learning model's predictions translates to overconfidence in pixel attribution. In this paper, we propose the first approach which incorporates risk estimation into a pixel attribution method for improved image classification explainability. The proposed method iteratively applies a classification model with a pixel attribution method to create a volume of PA maps. This volume is used for the first time, to generate a pixel-wise distribution of PA values. We introduce a method to generate an enhanced PA map by estimating the expectation values of the pixel-wise distributions. In addition, the coefficient of variation (CV) is used to estimate pixel-wise risk of this enhanced PA map. Hence, the proposed method not only provides an improved PA map but also produces an estimation of risk on the output PA values. Performance evaluation on probe-based Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (pCLE) data and ImageNet verifies that our improved explainability method outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Beyond flattening: a geometrically principled positional encoding for vision transformers with Weierstrass elliptic functions

Vision Transformers have demonstrated remarkable success in computer vision tasks, yet their reliance on learnable one-dimensional positional embeddings fundamentally disrupts the inherent two-dimensional spatial structure of images through patch flattening procedures. Traditional positional encoding approaches lack geometric constraints and fail to establish monotonic correspondence between Euclidean spatial distances and sequential index distances, thereby limiting the model's capacity to leverage spatial proximity priors effectively. We propose Weierstrass Elliptic Function Positional Encoding (WEF-PE), a mathematically principled approach that directly addresses two-dimensional coordinates through natural complex domain representation, where the doubly periodic properties of elliptic functions align remarkably with translational invariance patterns commonly observed in visual data. Our method exploits the non-linear geometric nature of elliptic functions to encode spatial distance relationships naturally, while the algebraic addition formula enables direct derivation of relative positional information between arbitrary patch pairs from their absolute encodings. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that WEF-PE achieves superior performance across diverse scenarios, including 63.78\% accuracy on CIFAR-100 from-scratch training with ViT-Tiny architecture, 93.28\% on CIFAR-100 fine-tuning with ViT-Base, and consistent improvements on VTAB-1k benchmark tasks. Theoretical analysis confirms the distance-decay property through rigorous mathematical proof, while attention visualization reveals enhanced geometric inductive bias and more coherent semantic focus compared to conventional approaches.The source code implementing the methods described in this paper is publicly available on GitHub.

HERMES: Human-to-Robot Embodied Learning from Multi-Source Motion Data for Mobile Dexterous Manipulation

Leveraging human motion data to impart robots with versatile manipulation skills has emerged as a promising paradigm in robotic manipulation. Nevertheless, translating multi-source human hand motions into feasible robot behaviors remains challenging, particularly for robots equipped with multi-fingered dexterous hands characterized by complex, high-dimensional action spaces. Moreover, existing approaches often struggle to produce policies capable of adapting to diverse environmental conditions. In this paper, we introduce HERMES, a human-to-robot learning framework for mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation. First, HERMES formulates a unified reinforcement learning approach capable of seamlessly transforming heterogeneous human hand motions from multiple sources into physically plausible robotic behaviors. Subsequently, to mitigate the sim2real gap, we devise an end-to-end, depth image-based sim2real transfer method for improved generalization to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, to enable autonomous operation in varied and unstructured environments, we augment the navigation foundation model with a closed-loop Perspective-n-Point (PnP) localization mechanism, ensuring precise alignment of visual goals and effectively bridging autonomous navigation and dexterous manipulation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HERMES consistently exhibits generalizable behaviors across diverse, in-the-wild scenarios, successfully performing numerous complex mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks. Project Page:https://gemcollector.github.io/HERMES/.

SATURN: Autoregressive Image Generation Guided by Scene Graphs

State-of-the-art text-to-image models excel at photorealistic rendering but often struggle to capture the layout and object relationships implied by complex prompts. Scene graphs provide a natural structural prior, yet previous graph-guided approaches have typically relied on heavy GAN or diffusion pipelines, which lag behind modern autoregressive architectures in both speed and fidelity. We introduce SATURN (Structured Arrangement of Triplets for Unified Rendering Networks), a lightweight extension to VAR-CLIP that translates a scene graph into a salience-ordered token sequence, enabling a frozen CLIP-VQ-VAE backbone to interpret graph structure while fine-tuning only the VAR transformer. On the Visual Genome dataset, SATURN reduces FID from 56.45% to 21.62% and increases the Inception Score from 16.03 to 24.78, outperforming prior methods such as SG2IM and SGDiff without requiring extra modules or multi-stage training. Qualitative results further confirm improvements in object count fidelity and spatial relation accuracy, showing that SATURN effectively combines structural awareness with state-of-the-art autoregressive fidelity.