DroneKey++: A Size Prior-free Method and New Benchmark for Drone 3D Pose Estimation from Sequential Images

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.

Code2World: A GUI World Model via Renderable Code Generation

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.

A General Model for Retinal Segmentation and Quantification

Retinal imaging is fast, non-invasive, and widely available, offering quantifiable structural and vascular signals for ophthalmic and systemic health assessment. This accessibility creates an opportunity to study how quantitative retinal phenotypes relate to ocular and systemic diseases. However, such analyses remain difficult at scale due to the limited availability of public multi-label datasets and the lack of a unified segmentation-to-quantification pipeline. We present RetSAM, a general retinal segmentation and quantification framework for fundus imaging. It delivers robust multi-target segmentation and standardized biomarker extraction, supporting downstream ophthalmologic studies and oculomics correlation analyses. Trained on over 200,000 fundus images, RetSAM supports three task categories and segments five anatomical structures, four retinal phenotypic patterns, and more than 20 distinct lesion types. It converts these segmentation results into over 30 standardized biomarkers that capture structural morphology, vascular geometry, and degenerative changes. Trained with a multi-stage strategy using both private and public fundus data, RetSAM achieves superior segmentation performance on 17 public datasets. It improves on prior best methods by 3.9 percentage points in DSC on average, with up to 15 percentage points on challenging multi-task benchmarks, and generalizes well across diverse populations, imaging devices, and clinical settings. The resulting biomarkers enable systematic correlation analyses across major ophthalmic diseases, including diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, and pathologic myopia. Together, RetSAM transforms fundus images into standardized, interpretable quantitative phenotypes, enabling large-scale ophthalmic research and translation.

A Systematic Review on Data-Driven Brain Deformation Modeling for Image-Guided Neurosurgery

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.

Predicting Camera Pose from Perspective Descriptions for Spatial Reasoning

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.

Where to Attend: A Principled Vision-Centric Position Encoding with Parabolas

We propose Parabolic Position Encoding (PaPE), a parabola-based position encoding for vision modalities in attention-based architectures. Given a set of vision tokens-such as images, point clouds, videos, or event camera streams-our objective is to encode their positions while accounting for the characteristics of vision modalities. Prior works have largely extended position encodings from 1D-sequences in language to nD-structures in vision, but only with partial account of vision characteristics. We address this gap by designing PaPE from principles distilled from prior work: translation invariance, rotation invariance (PaPE-RI), distance decay, directionality, and context awareness. We evaluate PaPE on 8 datasets that span 4 modalities. We find that either PaPE or PaPE-RI achieves the top performance on 7 out of 8 datasets. Extrapolation experiments on ImageNet-1K show that PaPE extrapolates remarkably well, improving in absolute terms by up to 10.5% over the next-best position encoding. Code is available at https://github.com/DTU-PAS/parabolic-position-encoding.

Dynamic High-frequency Convolution for Infrared Small Target Detection

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.

Advanced Geometric Correction Algorithms for 3D Medical Reconstruction: Comparison of Computed Tomography and Macroscopic Imaging

This paper introduces a hybrid two-stage registration framework for reconstructing three-dimensional (3D) kidney anatomy from macroscopic slices, using CT-derived models as the geometric reference standard. The approach addresses the data-scarcity and high-distortion challenges typical of macroscopic imaging, where fully learning-based registration (e.g., VoxelMorph) often fails to generalize due to limited training diversity and large nonrigid deformations that exceed the capture range of unconstrained convolutional filters. In the proposed pipeline, the Optimal Cross-section Matching (OCM) algorithm first performs constrained global alignment: translation, rotation, and uniform scaling to establish anatomically consistent slice initialization. Next, a lightweight deep-learning refinement network, inspired by VoxelMorph, predicts residual local deformations between consecutive slices. The core novelty of this architecture lies in its hierarchical decomposition of the registration manifold. This hybrid OCM+DL design integrates explicit geometric priors with the flexible learning capacity of neural networks, ensuring stable optimization and plausible deformation fields even with few training examples. Experiments on an original dataset of 40 kidneys demonstrated better results compared to single-stage baselines. The pipeline maintains physical calibration via Hough-based grid detection and employs Bezier-based contour smoothing for robust meshing and volume estimation. Although validated on kidney data, the proposed framework generalizes to other soft-tissue organs reconstructed from optical or photographic cross-sections. By decoupling interpretable global optimization from data-efficient deep refinement, the method advances the precision, reproducibility, and anatomical realism of multimodal 3D reconstructions for surgical planning, morphological assessment, and medical education.

Toward Autonomous Laboratory Safety Monitoring with Vision Language Models: Learning to See Hazards Through Scene Structure

Laboratories are prone to severe injuries from minor unsafe actions, yet continuous safety monitoring -- beyond mandatory pre-lab safety training -- is limited by human availability. Vision language models (VLMs) offer promise for autonomous laboratory safety monitoring, but their effectiveness in realistic settings is unclear due to the lack of visual evaluation data, as most safety incidents are documented primarily as unstructured text. To address this gap, we first introduce a structured data generation pipeline that converts textual laboratory scenarios into aligned triples of (image, scene graph, ground truth), using large language models as scene graph architects and image generation models as renderers. Our experiments on the synthetic dataset of 1,207 samples across 362 unique scenarios and seven open- and closed-source models show that VLMs perform effectively given textual scene graph, but degrade substantially in visual-only settings indicating difficulty in extracting structured object relationships directly from pixels. To overcome this, we propose a post-training context-engineering approach, scene-graph-guided alignment, to bridge perceptual gaps in VLMs by translating visual inputs into structured scene graphs better aligned with VLM reasoning, improving hazard detection performance in visual only settings.

From Perception to Action: Spatial AI Agents and World Models

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.