FSP-Diff: Full-Spectrum Prior-Enhanced DualDomain Latent Diffusion for Ultra-Low-Dose Spectral CT Reconstruction

Spectral computed tomography (CT) with photon-counting detectors holds immense potential for material discrimination and tissue characterization. However, under ultra-low-dose conditions, the sharply degraded signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in energy-specific projections poses a significant challenge, leading to severe artifacts and loss of structural details in reconstructed images. To address this, we propose FSP-Diff, a full-spectrum prior-enhanced dual-domain latent diffusion framework for ultra-low-dose spectral CT reconstruction. Our framework integrates three core strategies: 1) Complementary Feature Construction: We integrate direct image reconstructions with projection-domain denoised results. While the former preserves latent textural nuances amidst heavy noise, the latter provides a stable structural scaffold to balance detail fidelity and noise suppression. 2) Full-Spectrum Prior Integration: By fusing multi-energy projections into a high-SNR full-spectrum image, we establish a unified structural reference that guides the reconstruction across all energy bins. 3) Efficient Latent Diffusion Synthesis: To alleviate the high computational burden of high-dimensional spectral data, multi-path features are embedded into a compact latent space. This allows the diffusion process to facilitate interactive feature fusion in a lower-dimensional manifold, achieving accelerated reconstruction while maintaining fine-grained detail restoration. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that FSP-Diff significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both image quality and computational efficiency, underscoring its potential for clinically viable ultra-low-dose spectral CT imaging.

One-Shot Crowd Counting With Density Guidance For Scene Adaptaion

Crowd scenes captured by cameras at different locations vary greatly, and existing crowd models have limited generalization for unseen surveillance scenes. To improve the generalization of the model, we regard different surveillance scenes as different category scenes, and introduce few-shot learning to make the model adapt to the unseen surveillance scene that belongs to the given exemplar category scene. To this end, we propose to leverage local and global density characteristics to guide the model of crowd counting for unseen surveillance scenes. Specifically, to enable the model to adapt to the varying density variations in the target scene, we propose the multiple local density learner to learn multi prototypes which represent different density distributions in the support scene. Subsequently, these multiple local density similarity matrixes are encoded. And they are utilized to guide the model in a local way. To further adapt to the global density in the target scene, the global density features are extracted from the support image, then it is used to guide the model in a global way. Experiments on three surveillance datasets shows that proposed method can adapt to the unseen surveillance scene and outperform recent state-of-the-art methods in the few-shot crowd counting.

WristMIR: Coarse-to-Fine Region-Aware Retrieval of Pediatric Wrist Radiographs with Radiology Report-Driven Learning

Retrieving wrist radiographs with analogous fracture patterns is challenging because clinically important cues are subtle, highly localized and often obscured by overlapping anatomy or variable imaging views. Progress is further limited by the scarcity of large, well-annotated datasets for case-based medical image retrieval. We introduce WristMIR, a region-aware pediatric wrist radiograph retrieval framework that leverages dense radiology reports and bone-specific localization to learn fine-grained, clinically meaningful image representations without any manual image-level annotations. Using MedGemma-based structured report mining to generate both global and region-level captions, together with pre-processed wrist images and bone-specific crops of the distal radius, distal ulna, and ulnar styloid, WristMIR jointly trains global and local contrastive encoders and performs a two-stage retrieval process: (1) coarse global matching to identify candidate exams, followed by (2) region-conditioned reranking aligned to a predefined anatomical bone region. WristMIR improves retrieval performance over strong vision-language baselines, raising image-to-text Recall@5 from 0.82% to 9.35%. Its embeddings also yield stronger fracture classification (AUROC 0.949, AUPRC 0.953). In region-aware evaluation, the two-stage design markedly improves retrieval-based fracture diagnosis, increasing mean $F_1$ from 0.568 to 0.753, and radiologists rate its retrieved cases as more clinically relevant, with mean scores rising from 3.36 to 4.35. These findings highlight the potential of anatomically guided retrieval to enhance diagnostic reasoning and support clinical decision-making in pediatric musculoskeletal imaging. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/quin-med-harvard-edu/WristMIR.

Recovering 3D Shapes from Ultra-Fast Motion-Blurred Images

We consider the problem of 3D shape recovery from ultra-fast motion-blurred images. While 3D reconstruction from static images has been extensively studied, recovering geometry from extreme motion-blurred images remains challenging. Such scenarios frequently occur in both natural and industrial settings, such as fast-moving objects in sports (e.g., balls) or rotating machinery, where rapid motion distorts object appearance and makes traditional 3D reconstruction techniques like Multi-View Stereo (MVS) ineffective. In this paper, we propose a novel inverse rendering approach for shape recovery from ultra-fast motion-blurred images. While conventional rendering techniques typically synthesize blur by averaging across multiple frames, we identify a major computational bottleneck in the repeated computation of barycentric weights. To address this, we propose a fast barycentric coordinate solver, which significantly reduces computational overhead and achieves a speedup of up to 4.57x, enabling efficient and photorealistic simulation of high-speed motion. Crucially, our method is fully differentiable, allowing gradients to propagate from rendered images to the underlying 3D shape, thereby facilitating shape recovery through inverse rendering. We validate our approach on two representative motion types: rapid translation and rotation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method enables efficient and realistic modeling of ultra-fast moving objects in the forward simulation. Moreover, it successfully recovers 3D shapes from 2D imagery of objects undergoing extreme translational and rotational motion, advancing the boundaries of vision-based 3D reconstruction. Project page: https://maxmilite.github.io/rec-from-ultrafast-blur/

SPD-Faith Bench: Diagnosing and Improving Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Large Language Models

Chain-of-Thought reasoning is widely used to improve the interpretability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), yet the faithfulness of the generated reasoning traces remains unclear. Prior work has mainly focused on perceptual hallucinations, leaving reasoning level unfaithfulness underexplored. To isolate faithfulness from linguistic priors, we introduce SPD-Faith Bench, a diagnostic benchmark based on fine-grained image difference reasoning that enforces explicit visual comparison. Evaluations on state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal two systematic failure modes, perceptual blindness and perception-reasoning dissociation. We trace these failures to decaying visual attention and representation shifts in the residual stream. Guided by this analysis, we propose SAGE, a train-free visual evidence-calibrated framework that improves visual routing and aligns reasoning with perception. Our results highlight the importance of explicitly evaluating faithfulness beyond response correctness. Our benchmark and codes are available at https://github.com/Johanson-colab/SPD-Faith-Bench.

Out of the box age estimation through facial imagery: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Vision-Language Models vs. out-of-the-box Traditional Architectures

Facial age estimation is critical for content moderation, age verification, and deepfake detection, yet no prior benchmark has systematically compared modern vision-language models (VLMs) against specialized age estimation architectures. We present the first large-scale cross-paradigm benchmark, evaluating \textbf{34 models} -- 22 specialized architectures with publicly available pretrained weights and 12 general-purpose VLMs -- across \textbf{8 standard datasets} (UTKFace, IMDB-WIKI, MORPH, AFAD, CACD, FG-NET, APPA-REAL, AgeDB) totaling 1{,}100 test images per model. Our key finding is striking: \emph{zero-shot VLMs significantly outperform most specialized models}, achieving an average MAE of 5.65 years compared to 9.88 for non-LLM models. The best VLM (Gemini~3 Flash Preview, MAE~4.32) outperforms the best non-LLM model (MiVOLO, MAE~5.10) by 15\%. Only MiVOLO, which uniquely combines face and body features via Vision Transformers, competes with VLMs. We further analyze age verification at the 18-year threshold, revealing that non-LLM models exhibit 60--100\% false adult rates on minors while VLMs achieve 13--25\%, and demonstrate that coarse age binning (8--9 classes) consistently degrades MAE beyond 13 years. Our stratified analysis across 14 age groups reveals that all models struggle most at extreme ages ($<$5 and 65+). These findings challenge the assumption that task-specific architectures are necessary for age estimation and suggest that the field should redirect toward distilling VLM capabilities into efficient specialized models.

Which private attributes do VLMs agree on and predict well?

Visual Language Models (VLMs) are often used for zero-shot detection of visual attributes in the image. We present a zero-shot evaluation of open-source VLMs for privacy-related attribute recognition. We identify the attributes for which VLMs exhibit strong inter-annotator agreement, and discuss the disagreement cases of human and VLM annotations. Our results show that when evaluated against human annotations, VLMs tend to predict the presence of privacy attributes more often than human annotators. In addition to this, we find that in cases of high inter-annotator agreement between VLMs, they can complement human annotation by identifying attributes overlooked by human annotators. This highlights the potential of VLMs to support privacy annotations in large-scale image datasets.

Building Damage Detection using Satellite Images and Patch-Based Transformer Methods

Rapid building damage assessment is critical for post-disaster response. Damage classification models built on satellite imagery provide a scalable means of obtaining situational awareness. However, label noise and severe class imbalance in satellite data create major challenges. The xBD dataset offers a standardized benchmark for building-level damage across diverse geographic regions. In this study, we evaluate Vision Transformer (ViT) model performance on the xBD dataset, specifically investigating how these models distinguish between types of structural damage when training on noisy, imbalanced data. In this study, we specifically evaluate DINOv2-small and DeiT for multi-class damage classification. We propose a targeted patch-based pre-processing pipeline to isolate structural features and minimize background noise in training. We adopt a frozen-head fine-tuning strategy to keep computational requirements manageable. Model performance is evaluated through accuracy, precision, recall, and macro-averaged F1 scores. We show that small ViT architectures with our novel training method achieves competitive macro-averaged F1 relative to prior CNN baselines for disaster classification.

MMLSv2: A Multimodal Dataset for Martian Landslide Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

We present MMLSv2, a dataset for landslide segmentation on Martian surfaces. MMLSv2 consists of multimodal imagery with seven bands: RGB, digital elevation model, slope, thermal inertia, and grayscale channels. MMLSv2 comprises 664 images distributed across training, validation, and test splits. In addition, an isolated test set of 276 images from a geographically disjoint region from the base dataset is released to evaluate spatial generalization. Experiments conducted with multiple segmentation models show that the dataset supports stable training and achieves competitive performance, while still posing challenges in fragmented, elongated, and small-scale landslide regions. Evaluation on the isolated test set leads to a noticeable performance drop, indicating increased difficulty and highlighting its value for assessing model robustness and generalization beyond standard in-distribution settings. Dataset will be available at: https://github.com/MAIN-Lab/MMLS_v2

Securing Dual-Use Pathogen Data of Concern

Training data is an essential input into creating competent artificial intelligence (AI) models. AI models for biology are trained on large volumes of data, including data related to biological sequences, structures, images, and functions. The type of data used to train a model is intimately tied to the capabilities it ultimately possesses--including those of biosecurity concern. For this reason, an international group of more than 100 researchers at the recent 50th anniversary Asilomar Conference endorsed data controls to prevent the use of AI for harmful applications such as bioweapons development. To help design such controls, we introduce a five-tier Biosecurity Data Level (BDL) framework for categorizing pathogen data. Each level contains specific data types, based on their expected ability to contribute to capabilities of concern when used to train AI models. For each BDL tier, we propose technical restrictions appropriate to its level of risk. Finally, we outline a novel governance framework for newly created dual-use pathogen data. In a world with widely accessible computational and coding resources, data controls may be among the most high-leverage interventions available to reduce the proliferation of concerning biological AI capabilities.