Image-to-image translation is the process of converting an image from one domain to another using deep learning techniques.
Despite significant progress in computational pathology, many AI models remain black-box and difficult to interpret, posing a major barrier to clinical adoption due to limited transparency and explainability. This has motivated continued interest in engineered image-based biomarkers, which offer greater interpretability but are often proposed based on anecdotal evidence or fragmented prior literature rather than systematic biological validation. We introduce SAGE (Structured Agentic system for hypothesis Generation and Evaluation), an agentic AI system designed to identify interpretable, engineered pathology biomarkers by grounding them in biological evidence. SAGE integrates literature-anchored reasoning with multimodal data analysis to correlate image-derived features with molecular biomarkers, such as gene expression, and clinically relevant outcomes. By coordinating specialized agents for biological contextualization and empirical hypothesis validation, SAGE prioritizes transparent, biologically supported biomarkers and advances the clinical translation of computational pathology.
This work presents a finite-time stable pose estimator (FTS-PE) for rigid bodies undergoing rotational and translational motion in three dimensions, using measurements from onboard sensors that provide position vectors to inertially-fixed points and body velocities. The FTS-PE is a full-state observer for the pose (position and orientation) and velocities and is obtained through a Lyapunov analysis that shows its stability in finite time and its robustness to bounded measurement noise. Further, this observer is designed directly on the state space, the tangent bundle of the Lie group of rigid body motions, SE(3), without using local coordinates or (dual) quaternion representations. Therefore, it can estimate arbitrary rigid body motions without encountering singularities or the unwinding phenomenon and be readily applied to autonomous vehicles. A version of this observer that does not need translational velocity measurements and uses only point clouds and angular velocity measurements from rate gyros, is also obtained. It is discretized using the framework of geometric mechanics for numerical and experimental implementations. The numerical simulations compare the FTS-PE with a dual-quaternion extended Kalman filter and our previously developed variational pose estimator (VPE). The experimental results are obtained using point cloud images and rate gyro measurements obtained from a Zed 2i stereo depth camera sensor. These results validate the stability and robustness of the FTS-PE.
Wide-field high-resolution microscopy requires fast scanning and accurate image mosaicking to cover large fields of view without compromising image quality. However, conventional galvanometric scanning, particularly under sinusoidal driving, can introduce nonuniform spatial sampling, leading to geometric inconsistencies and brightness variations across the scanned field. To address these challenges, we present an image mosaicking framework for wide-field microscopic imaging that is applicable to both linear and sinusoidal galvanometric scanning strategies. The proposed approach combines a translation-based geometric mosaicking model with region-of-interest (ROI) based brightness correction and seam-aware feathering to improve radiometric consistency across large fields of view. The method relies on calibrated scan parameters and synchronized scan--camera control, without requiring image-content-based registration. Using the proposed framework, wide-field mosaicked images were successfully reconstructed under both linear and sinusoidal scanning strategies, achieving a field of view of up to $2.5 \times 2.5~\mathrm{cm}^2$ with a total acquisition time of approximately $6~\mathrm{s}$ per dataset. Quantitative evaluation shows that both scanning strategies demonstrate improved image quality, including enhanced brightness uniformity, increased contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and reduced seam-related artifacts after image processing, while preserving a lateral resolution of $7.81~μ\mathrm{m}$. Overall, the presented framework provides a practical and efficient solution for scan-based wide-field microscopic mosaicking.
Increasing convolutional depth has been central to advances in image recognition, yet deeper networks do not uniformly yield higher accuracy, stable optimization, or efficient computation. We present a controlled comparative study of three canonical convolutional neural network architectures - VGG, ResNet, and GoogLeNet - to isolate how depth influences classification performance, convergence behavior, and computational efficiency. By standardizing training protocols and explicitly distinguishing between nominal and effective depth, we show that the benefits of depth depend critically on architectural mechanisms that constrain its effective manifestation during training rather than on nominal depth alone. Although plain deep networks exhibit early accuracy saturation and optimization instability, residual and inception-based architectures consistently translate additional depth into improved accuracy at lower effective depth and favorable accuracy-compute trade-offs. These findings demonstrate that effective depth, not nominal depth, is the operative quantity governing depth's role as a productive scaling dimension in convolutional networks.
Accurate 3D pose estimation of drones is essential for security and surveillance systems. However, existing methods often rely on prior drone information such as physical sizes or 3D meshes. At the same time, current datasets are small-scale, limited to single models, and collected under constrained environments, which makes reliable validation of generalization difficult. We present DroneKey++, a prior-free framework that jointly performs keypoint detection, drone classification, and 3D pose estimation. The framework employs a keypoint encoder for simultaneous keypoint detection and classification, and a pose decoder that estimates 3D pose using ray-based geometric reasoning and class embeddings. To address dataset limitations, we construct 6DroneSyn, a large-scale synthetic benchmark with over 50K images covering 7 drone models and 88 outdoor backgrounds, generated using 360-degree panoramic synthesis. Experiments show that DroneKey++ achieves MAE 17.34 deg and MedAE 17.1 deg for rotation, MAE 0.135 m and MedAE 0.242 m for translation, with inference speeds of 19.25 FPS (CPU) and 414.07 FPS (GPU), demonstrating both strong generalization across drone models and suitability for real-time applications. The dataset is publicly available.
Autonomous GUI agents interact with environments by perceiving interfaces and executing actions. As a virtual sandbox, the GUI World model empowers agents with human-like foresight by enabling action-conditioned prediction. However, existing text- and pixel-based approaches struggle to simultaneously achieve high visual fidelity and fine-grained structural controllability. To this end, we propose Code2World, a vision-language coder that simulates the next visual state via renderable code generation. Specifically, to address the data scarcity problem, we construct AndroidCode by translating GUI trajectories into high-fidelity HTML and refining synthesized code through a visual-feedback revision mechanism, yielding a corpus of over 80K high-quality screen-action pairs. To adapt existing VLMs into code prediction, we first perform SFT as a cold start for format layout following, then further apply Render-Aware Reinforcement Learning which uses rendered outcome as the reward signal by enforcing visual semantic fidelity and action consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Code2World-8B achieves the top-performing next UI prediction, rivaling the competitive GPT-5 and Gemini-3-Pro-Image. Notably, Code2World significantly enhances downstream navigation success rates in a flexible manner, boosting Gemini-2.5-Flash by +9.5% on AndroidWorld navigation. The code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/Code2World.
Accurate compensation of brain deformation is a critical challenge for reliable image-guided neurosurgery, as surgical manipulation and tumor resection induce tissue motion that misaligns preoperative planning images with intraoperative anatomy and longitudinal studies. In this systematic review, we synthesize recent AI-driven approaches developed between January 2020 and April 2025 for modeling and correcting brain deformation. A comprehensive literature search was conducted in PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science, with predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria focused on computational methods applied to brain deformation compensation for neurosurgical imaging, resulting in 41 studies meeting these criteria. We provide a unified analysis of methodological strategies, including deep learning-based image registration, direct deformation field regression, synthesis-driven multimodal alignment, resection-aware architectures addressing missing correspondences, and hybrid models that integrate biomechanical priors. We also examine dataset utilization, reported evaluation metrics, validation protocols, and how uncertainty and generalization have been assessed across studies. While AI-based deformation models demonstrate promising performance and computational efficiency, current approaches exhibit limitations in out-of-distribution robustness, standardized benchmarking, interpretability, and readiness for clinical deployment. Our review highlights these gaps and outlines opportunities for future research aimed at achieving more robust, generalizable, and clinically translatable deformation compensation solutions for neurosurgical guidance. By organizing recent advances and critically evaluating evaluation practices, this work provides a comprehensive foundation for researchers and clinicians engaged in developing and applying AI-based brain deformation methods.
Multi-image spatial reasoning remains challenging for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While single-view perception is inherently 2D, reasoning over multiple views requires building a coherent scene understanding across viewpoints. In particular, we study perspective taking, where a model must build a coherent 3D understanding from multi-view observations and use it to reason from a new, language-specified viewpoint. We introduce CAMCUE, a pose-aware multi-image framework that uses camera pose as an explicit geometric anchor for cross-view fusion and novel-view reasoning. CAMCUE injects per-view pose into visual tokens, grounds natural-language viewpoint descriptions to a target camera pose, and synthesizes a pose-conditioned imagined target view to support answering. To support this setting, we curate CAMCUE-DATA with 27,668 training and 508 test instances pairing multi-view images and poses with diverse target-viewpoint descriptions and perspective-shift questions. We also include human-annotated viewpoint descriptions in the test split to evaluate generalization to human language. CAMCUE improves overall accuracy by 9.06% and predicts target poses from natural-language viewpoint descriptions with over 90% rotation accuracy within 20° and translation accuracy within a 0.5 error threshold. This direct grounding avoids expensive test-time search-and-match, reducing inference time from 256.6s to 1.45s per example and enabling fast, interactive use in real-world scenarios.
Infrared small targets are typically tiny and locally salient, which belong to high-frequency components (HFCs) in images. Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection is challenging, since there are many HFCs along with targets, such as bright corners, broken clouds, and other clutters. Current learning-based methods rely on the powerful capabilities of deep networks, but neglect explicit modeling and discriminative representation learning of various HFCs, which is important to distinguish targets from other HFCs. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a dynamic high-frequency convolution (DHiF) to translate the discriminative modeling process into the generation of a dynamic local filter bank. Especially, DHiF is sensitive to HFCs, owing to the dynamic parameters of its generated filters being symmetrically adjusted within a zero-centered range according to Fourier transformation properties. Combining with standard convolution operations, DHiF can adaptively and dynamically process different HFC regions and capture their distinctive grayscale variation characteristics for discriminative representation learning. DHiF functions as a drop-in replacement for standard convolution and can be used in arbitrary SIRST detection networks without significant decrease in computational efficiency. To validate the effectiveness of our DHiF, we conducted extensive experiments across different SIRST detection networks on real-scene datasets. Compared to other state-of-the-art convolution operations, DHiF exhibits superior detection performance with promising improvement. Codes are available at https://github.com/TinaLRJ/DHiF.
While large language models have become the prevailing approach for agentic reasoning and planning, their success in symbolic domains does not readily translate to the physical world. Spatial intelligence, the ability to perceive 3D structure, reason about object relationships, and act under physical constraints, is an orthogonal capability that proves important for embodied agents. Existing surveys address either agentic architectures or spatial domains in isolation. None provide a unified framework connecting these complementary capabilities. This paper bridges that gap. Through a thorough review of over 2,000 papers, citing 742 works from top-tier venues, we introduce a unified three-axis taxonomy connecting agentic capabilities with spatial tasks across scales. Crucially, we distinguish spatial grounding (metric understanding of geometry and physics) from symbolic grounding (associating images with text), arguing that perception alone does not confer agency. Our analysis reveals three key findings mapped to these axes: (1) hierarchical memory systems (Capability axis) are important for long-horizon spatial tasks. (2) GNN-LLM integration (Task axis) is a promising approach for structured spatial reasoning. (3) World models (Scale axis) are essential for safe deployment across micro-to-macro spatial scales. We conclude by identifying six grand challenges and outlining directions for future research, including the need for unified evaluation frameworks to standardize cross-domain assessment. This taxonomy provides a foundation for unifying fragmented research efforts and enabling the next generation of spatially-aware autonomous systems in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and geospatial intelligence.