ProMist-5K: A Comprehensive Dataset for Digital Emulation of Cinematic Pro-Mist Filter Effects

Pro-Mist filters are widely used in cinematography for their ability to create soft halation, lower contrast, and produce a distinctive, atmospheric style. These effects are difficult to reproduce digitally due to the complex behavior of light diffusion. We present ProMist-5K, a dataset designed to support cinematic style emulation. It is built using a physically inspired pipeline in a scene-referred linear space and includes 20,000 high-resolution image pairs across four configurations, covering two filter densities (1/2 and 1/8) and two focal lengths (20mm and 50mm). Unlike general style datasets, ProMist-5K focuses on realistic glow and highlight diffusion effects. Multiple blur layers and carefully tuned weighting are used to model the varying intensity and spread of optical diffusion. The dataset provides a consistent and controllable target domain that supports various image translation models and learning paradigms. Experiments show that the dataset works well across different training settings and helps capture both subtle and strong cinematic appearances. ProMist-5K offers a practical and physically grounded resource for film-inspired image transformation, bridging the gap between digital flexibility and traditional lens aesthetics. The dataset is available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/yingtielei/promist5k.

Wide-field high-resolution microscopy via high-speed galvo scanning and real-time mosaicking

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.

SAGE: Agentic Framework for Interpretable and Clinically Translatable Computational Pathology Biomarker Discovery

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.

Lost in Space? Vision-Language Models Struggle with Relative Camera Pose Estimation

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well in 2D perception and semantic reasoning compared to their limited understanding of 3D spatial structure. We investigate this gap using relative camera pose estimation (RCPE), a fundamental vision task that requires inferring relative camera translation and rotation from a pair of images. We introduce VRRPI-Bench, a benchmark derived from unlabeled egocentric videos with verbalized annotations of relative camera motion, reflecting realistic scenarios with simultaneous translation and rotation around a shared object. We further propose VRRPI-Diag, a diagnostic benchmark that isolates individual motion degrees of freedom. Despite the simplicity of RCPE, most VLMs fail to generalize beyond shallow 2D heuristics, particularly for depth changes and roll transformations along the optical axis. Even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-5 ($0.64$) fall short of classic geometric baselines ($0.97$) and human performance ($0.92$). Moreover, VLMs exhibit difficulty in multi-image reasoning, with inconsistent performance (best $59.7\%$) when integrating spatial cues across frames. Our findings reveal limitations in grounding VLMs in 3D and multi-view spatial reasoning.

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.

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.

PMPBench: A Paired Multi-Modal Pan-Cancer Benchmark for Medical Image Synthesis

Contrast medium plays a pivotal role in radiological imaging, as it amplifies lesion conspicuity and improves detection for the diagnosis of tumor-related diseases. However, depending on the patient's health condition or the medical resources available, the use of contrast medium is not always feasible. Recent work has explored AI-based image translation to synthesize contrast-enhanced images directly from non-contrast scans, aims to reduce side effects and streamlines clinical workflows. Progress in this direction has been constrained by data limitations: (1) existing public datasets focus almost exclusively on brain-related paired MR modalities; (2) other collections include partially paired data but suffer from missing modalities/timestamps and imperfect spatial alignment; (3) explicit labeling of CT vs. CTC or DCE phases is often absent; (4) substantial resources remain private. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first public, fully paired, pan-cancer medical imaging dataset spanning 11 human organs. The MR data include complete dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) sequences covering all three phases (DCE1-DCE3), while the CT data provide paired non-contrast and contrast-enhanced acquisitions (CTC). The dataset is curated for anatomical correspondence, enabling rigorous evaluation of 1-to-1, N-to-1, and N-to-N translation settings (e.g., predicting DCE phases from non-contrast inputs). Built upon this resource, we establish a comprehensive benchmark. We report results from representative baselines of contemporary image-to-image translation. We release the dataset and benchmark to catalyze research on safe, effective contrast synthesis, with direct relevance to multi-organ oncology imaging workflows. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/YifanChen02/PMPBench.

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.

Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation with Latent Diffusion for Pathology Image Classification

Deep learning models in computational pathology often fail to generalize across cohorts and institutions due to domain shift. Existing approaches either fail to leverage unlabeled data from the target domain or rely on image-to-image translation, which can distort tissue structures and compromise model accuracy. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) framework that utilizes a latent diffusion model trained on unlabeled data from both the source and target domains to generate morphology-preserving and target-aware synthetic images. By conditioning the diffusion model on foundation model features, cohort identity, and tissue preparation method, we preserve tissue structure in the source domain while introducing target-domain appearance characteristics. The target-aware synthetic images, combined with real, labeled images from the source cohort, are subsequently used to train a downstream classifier, which is then tested on the target cohort. The effectiveness of the proposed SSDA framework is demonstrated on the task of lung adenocarcinoma prognostication. The proposed augmentation yielded substantially better performance on the held-out test set from the target cohort, without degrading source-cohort performance. The approach improved the weighted F1 score on the target-cohort held-out test set from 0.611 to 0.706 and the macro F1 score from 0.641 to 0.716. Our results demonstrate that target-aware diffusion-based synthetic data augmentation provides a promising and effective approach for improving domain generalization in computational pathology.

PAINT: Pathology-Aware Integrated Next-Scale Transformation for Virtual Immunohistochemistry

Virtual immunohistochemistry (IHC) aims to computationally synthesize molecular staining patterns from routine Hematoxylin and Eosin (H\&E) images, offering a cost-effective and tissue-efficient alternative to traditional physical staining. However, this task is particularly challenging: H\&E morphology provides ambiguous cues about protein expression, and similar tissue structures may correspond to distinct molecular states. Most existing methods focus on direct appearance synthesis to implicitly achieve cross-modal generation, often resulting in semantic inconsistencies due to insufficient structural priors. In this paper, we propose Pathology-Aware Integrated Next-Scale Transformation (PAINT), a visual autoregressive framework that reformulates the synthesis process as a structure-first conditional generation task. Unlike direct image translation, PAINT enforces a causal order by resolving molecular details conditioned on a global structural layout. Central to this approach is the introduction of a Spatial Structural Start Map (3S-Map), which grounds the autoregressive initialization in observed morphology, ensuring deterministic, spatially aligned synthesis. Experiments on the IHC4BC and MIST datasets demonstrate that PAINT outperforms state-of-the-art methods in structural fidelity and clinical downstream tasks, validating the potential of structure-guided autoregressive modeling.