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.

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.

GM-LDM: Latent Diffusion Model for Brain Biomarker Identification through Functional Data-Driven Gray Matter Synthesis

Generative models based on deep learning have shown significant potential in medical imaging, particularly for modality transformation and multimodal fusion in MRI-based brain imaging. This study introduces GM-LDM, a novel framework that leverages the latent diffusion model (LDM) to enhance the efficiency and precision of MRI generation tasks. GM-LDM integrates a 3D autoencoder, pre-trained on the large-scale ABCD MRI dataset, achieving statistical consistency through KL divergence loss. We employ a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based encoder-decoder as the denoising network to optimize generation quality. The framework flexibly incorporates conditional data, such as functional network connectivity (FNC) data, enabling personalized brain imaging, biomarker identification, and functional-to-structural information translation for brain diseases like schizophrenia.

A Tutorial on MRI Reconstruction: From Modern Methods to Clinical Implications

MRI is an indispensable clinical tool, offering a rich variety of tissue contrasts to support broad diagnostic and research applications. Clinical exams routinely acquire multiple structural sequences that provide complementary information for differential diagnosis, while research protocols often incorporate advanced functional, diffusion, spectroscopic, and relaxometry sequences to capture multidimensional insights into tissue structure and composition. However, these capabilities come at the cost of prolonged scan times, which reduce patient throughput, increase susceptibility to motion artifacts, and may require trade-offs in image quality or diagnostic scope. Over the last two decades, advances in image reconstruction algorithms--alongside improvements in hardware and pulse sequence design--have made it possible to accelerate acquisitions while preserving diagnostic quality. Central to this progress is the ability to incorporate prior information to regularize the solutions to the reconstruction problem. In this tutorial, we overview the basics of MRI reconstruction and highlight state-of-the-art approaches, beginning with classical methods that rely on explicit hand-crafted priors, and then turning to deep learning methods that leverage a combination of learned and crafted priors to further push the performance envelope. We also explore the translational aspects and eventual clinical implications of these methods. We conclude by discussing future directions to address remaining challenges in MRI reconstruction. The tutorial is accompanied by a Python toolbox (https://github.com/tutorial-MRI-recon/tutorial) to demonstrate select methods discussed in the article.

Insights Informed Generative AI for Design: Incorporating Real-world Data for Text-to-Image Output

Generative AI, specifically text-to-image models, have revolutionized interior architectural design by enabling the rapid translation of conceptual ideas into visual representations from simple text prompts. While generative AI can produce visually appealing images they often lack actionable data for designers In this work, we propose a novel pipeline that integrates DALL-E 3 with a materials dataset to enrich AI-generated designs with sustainability metrics and material usage insights. After the model generates an interior design image, a post-processing module identifies the top ten materials present and pairs them with carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) values from a general materials dictionary. This approach allows designers to immediately evaluate environmental impacts and refine prompts accordingly. We evaluate the system through three user tests: (1) no mention of sustainability to the user prior to the prompting process with generative AI, (2) sustainability goals communicated to the user before prompting, and (3) sustainability goals communicated along with quantitative CO2e data included in the generative AI outputs. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that the introduction of sustainability metrics in the third test leads to more informed design decisions, however, it can also trigger decision fatigue and lower overall satisfaction. Nevertheless, the majority of participants reported incorporating sustainability principles into their workflows in the third test, underscoring the potential of integrated metrics to guide more ecologically responsible practices. Our findings showcase the importance of balancing design freedom with practical constraints, offering a clear path toward holistic, data-driven solutions in AI-assisted architectural design.

SpecCLIP: Aligning and Translating Spectroscopic Measurements for Stars

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language understanding through vast datasets and large-scale parameterization. Inspired by this success, we present SpecCLIP, a foundation model framework that extends LLM-inspired methodologies to stellar spectral analysis. Stellar spectra, akin to structured language, encode rich physical and chemical information about stars. By training foundation models on large-scale spectral datasets, our goal is to learn robust and informative embeddings that support diverse downstream applications. As a proof of concept, SpecCLIP involves pre-training on two spectral types--LAMOST low-resolution and Gaia XP--followed by contrastive alignment using the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) framework, adapted to associate spectra from different instruments. This alignment is complemented by auxiliary decoders that preserve spectrum-specific information and enable translation (prediction) between spectral types, with the former achieved by maximizing mutual information between embeddings and input spectra. The result is a cross-spectrum framework enabling intrinsic calibration and flexible applications across instruments. We demonstrate that fine-tuning these models on moderate-sized labeled datasets improves adaptability to tasks such as stellar-parameter estimation and chemical-abundance determination. SpecCLIP also enhances the accuracy and precision of parameter estimates benchmarked against external survey data. Additionally, its similarity search and cross-spectrum prediction capabilities offer potential for anomaly detection. Our results suggest that contrastively trained foundation models enriched with spectrum-aware decoders can advance precision stellar spectroscopy.

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.

How Well Does GPT-4o Understand Vision? Evaluating Multimodal Foundation Models on Standard Computer Vision Tasks

Multimodal foundation models, such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress, but it is not clear where exactly these models stand in terms of understanding vision. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of popular multimodal foundation models (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet and its variants, etc). The main challenges to performing this are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these challenges by translating standard vision tasks into equivalent text-promptable and API-compatible tasks via prompt chaining to create a standardized benchmarking framework. We observe that 1) the models are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. However, 2) they are respectable generalists; this is remarkable as they are presumably trained on primarily image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) While the prompt-chaining techniques affect performance, better models exhibit less sensitivity to prompt variations. 5) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks, 6) reasoning models, e.g. o3, show improvements in geometric tasks, and 7) a preliminary analysis of models with native image generation, like the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit quirks like hallucinations and spatial misalignments.

Angio-Diff: Learning a Self-Supervised Adversarial Diffusion Model for Angiographic Geometry Generation

Vascular diseases pose a significant threat to human health, with X-ray angiography established as the gold standard for diagnosis, allowing for detailed observation of blood vessels. However, angiographic X-rays expose personnel and patients to higher radiation levels than non-angiographic X-rays, which are unwanted. Thus, modality translation from non-angiographic to angiographic X-rays is desirable. Data-driven deep approaches are hindered by the lack of paired large-scale X-ray angiography datasets. While making high-quality vascular angiography synthesis crucial, it remains challenging. We find that current medical image synthesis primarily operates at pixel level and struggles to adapt to the complex geometric structure of blood vessels, resulting in unsatisfactory quality of blood vessel image synthesis, such as disconnections or unnatural curvatures. To overcome this issue, we propose a self-supervised method via diffusion models to transform non-angiographic X-rays into angiographic X-rays, mitigating data shortages for data-driven approaches. Our model comprises a diffusion model that learns the distribution of vascular data from diffusion latent, a generator for vessel synthesis, and a mask-based adversarial module. To enhance geometric accuracy, we propose a parametric vascular model to fit the shape and distribution of blood vessels. The proposed method contributes a pipeline and a synthetic dataset for X-ray angiography. We conducted extensive comparative and ablation experiments to evaluate the Angio-Diff. The results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in synthetic angiography image quality and more accurately synthesizes the geometric structure of blood vessels. The code is available at https://github.com/zfw-cv/AngioDiff.

MATE: LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Translation Environment for Accessibility Applications

Accessibility remains a critical concern in today's society, as many technologies are not developed to support the full range of user needs. Existing multi-agent systems (MAS) often cannot provide comprehensive assistance for users in need due to the lack of customization stemming from closed-source designs. Consequently, individuals with disabilities frequently encounter significant barriers when attempting to interact with digital environments. We introduce MATE, a multimodal accessibility MAS, which performs the modality conversions based on the user's needs. The system is useful for assisting people with disabilities by ensuring that data will be converted to an understandable format. For instance, if the user cannot see well and receives an image, the system converts this image to its audio description. MATE can be applied to a wide range of domains, industries, and areas, such as healthcare, and can become a useful assistant for various groups of users. The system supports multiple types of models, ranging from LLM API calling to using custom machine learning (ML) classifiers. This flexibility ensures that the system can be adapted to various needs and is compatible with a wide variety of hardware. Since the system is expected to run locally, it ensures the privacy and security of sensitive information. In addition, the framework can be effectively integrated with institutional technologies (e.g., digital healthcare service) for real-time user assistance. Furthermore, we introduce ModCon-Task-Identifier, a model that is capable of extracting the precise modality conversion task from the user input. Numerous experiments show that ModCon-Task-Identifier consistently outperforms other LLMs and statistical models on our custom data. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/AlgazinovAleksandr/Multi-Agent-MATE.