A Pathology Foundation Model for Gastric Cancer with Real-World Validation

Gastric cancer remains a major cause of cancer mortality, yet its histological and molecular heterogeneity complicates diagnosis and risk stratification. General-purpose pathology foundation models (PFMs) often plateau on fine-grained endpoints central to gastric cancer care, and few have undergone rigorous prospective validation or clinical reader studies. We present GRACE, a Gastric-specific foundation model for Real-world Assessment and Clinical dEcision support. GRACE was developed from multicenter gastric pathology datasets totaling 48,364 primarily HE-stained whole-slide images from 37,493 patients. When evaluated on 28 clinically relevant tasks, GRACE consistently outperformed representative pancancer PFMs, achieving a macro-AUC of 0.9188, with strong performance for precancerous lesion diagnosis (macro-AUC 0.9322), tumor histopathological assessment (macro-AUC 0.9119), molecular profiling (macro-AUC 0.8682), and prognostic prediction. Beyond benchmarking, GRACE's translational value was substantiated through a rigorous evidence chain. Under safety-gated criteria requiring 100% NPV for rule-out and 100% PPV for rule-in, GRACE streamlined review for up to 69.6% of malignancy-diagnosis cases and triaged 46.8% of MMR-IHC follow-up requests. This translational feasibility was further strengthened by a randomized crossover reader study of pathologist-AI collaboration. With GRACE assistance, diagnostic accuracy improved from 82.0% to 89.9%, yielding nearly twofold higher adjusted odds of a correct diagnosis (OR 1.987) alongside concurrent gains in sensitivity and specificity. AI assistance also reduced diagnostic time by 14.9%, elevated diagnostic confidence by 9.0%, and markedly improved inter-rater agreement. When calibrated to maintain non-inferior performance to senior pathologists, the AI-assisted workflow could triage 60.7% of atrophy and 82.7% of intestinal metaplasia cases.

Combining Cartesian and non-Cartesian acceleration techniques with SPARKLING for 1mm isotropic whole-brain MPRAGE in a minute

Purpose: T1-weighted MPRAGE remains a cornerstone of clinical anatomical imaging, yet its long acquisition times constrain routine use. Established acceleration techniques, namely Parallel Imaging (PI) and Compressed Sensing (CS), tend to introduce substantial noise and blurring when pushed to high acceleration factors. Although they rely on fundamentally different redundancies, combining them synergistically remains an open challenge. Methods: The GoLF-SPARKLING framework was extended to jointly exploit two acceleration mechanisms: GRAPPA-based PI in the central k-space region and variable-density CS in the periphery, with independent acceleration factors in each zone. To preserve smooth signal evolution throughout the inversion-recovery period and avoid modulation artifacts, the acquisition trajectory was reordered accordingly. The resulting method was evaluated prospectively in vivo at 1mm isotropic resolution and benchmarked against Wave-CAIPI and Poisson-disk sampling. Results: The proposed hybrid approach produced sharper, less noisy, and more stable whole-brain images in approximately one minute than either acceleration strategy alone. Purely PI-based reconstructions were degraded by high g-factor noise, while purely CS-based reconstructions exhibited pronounced blurring. Furthermore, this method yielded lower average volumetric errors in downstream automated brain segmentation than state-of-the-art acceleration techniques, demonstrating its clinical utility. Conclusion: By jointly leveraging PI and CS, GoLF-SPARKLING achieves high acceleration factors that enable sub-minute, high-quality anatomical MRI. This translates into greater clinical throughput and more reliable imaging in patients who are challenging to scan.

Authentication of Copy Detection Patterns via Cross-Camera Dual-Synthetic Referencing

Copy Detection Patterns (CDPs) are structures printed on physical objects to enable cost-effective authentication. Verification is achieved by comparing a captured image with the digital template from which the CDP was printed. In practice, printer stochasticity and camera distortions hinder this comparison, limiting robustness against counterfeiting. Prior work addressed camera effects by synthesising reference images in the verification camera domain, but it ignored printing variability. We introduce an enrolment-based cross-camera dual-synthetic referencing framework. Each printed CDP is first captured by a controlled enrolment camera, and a deep-learning-based translator jointly exploits the digital template and the enrolled capture to generate a high-quality reference for the verification image. We provide an information-theoretic justification showing that the dual reference is more informative than template-based references. Experiments on heterogeneous mobile cameras demonstrate improved authentication performance, robustness to machine-learning-based copy attacks, and reliable verification from small CDP regions and on low-end devices.

Exploring Adversarial Robustness and Safety Alignment in Multilingual Multi-Modal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models integrate visual perception into language reasoning, introducing a continuous attack surface susceptible to adversarial attacks. Prior work on MLLM robustness has focused largely on English-centric tasks, leaving multilingual behaviour unexplored. We address this gap through a systematic study of adversarial robustness and multimodal safety across 12 diverse languages, evaluating open-source MLLMs that acquire multilingual capability through instruction tuning. Gradient-based attacks reveal a transferable multilingual vulnerability: adversarial images optimized in one language continue to induce failure in others, demonstrating strong cross-lingual transferability. Multilingual safety further varies with how effectively a model retrieves or interprets harmful instructions. When harmful intent is issued through text, languages with stronger linguistic grounding more often elicit misuse-enabling responses, while weaker languages produce fewer unsafe outputs. When embedded in the image as typographic content, English scripts are reliably recognised and followed, whereas non-English scripts are rarely parsed by the vision encoder. Lower-resource languages may therefore appear safer, but this is an artefact of comprehension and visual-grounding failures rather than genuine alignment, a phenomenon we term safety-by-failure. In contrast, MLLMs that build multilingual capability throughout their training stages rather than only at instruction tuning, such as Qwen3-VL, exhibit genuine cross-lingual safety, maintaining active refusal across languages rather than masking comprehension failure. Shallow multilingual adaptation, such as fine-tuning on translated instruction data, may produce surface-level understanding that creates illusory safety in low-resource languages; deeper integration across training stages leads to genuine multilingual safety alignment.

Symmetry-Aware 9D Pose Estimation with Sim(3)-Consistent Feature and Spherical Inception Convolution

Object pose estimation is a fundamental problem for an agent system to perceive or manipulate objects in images or videos. However, current instance-level methods struggle with generalization to unseen objects. Category-level methods seek to address this, but remain constrained by the complexities of learning in the non-linear Sim(3) space and intra-class variations. To address these challenges, We propose an effective method for category-level object pose estimation with two key innovations: (1) A translation/size estimator, featuring a semantic-guided symmetry-aware module that leverages robust generalization capabilities of a large vision model (LVM) to infer symmetry points, resulting in accurate translation and size without shape priors. This result serves as a precomputed cue for rotation estimation, thereby reducing the difficulty of learning in the non-linear Sim(3) space and laying a robust foundation for tackling the inherently more challenging rotation estimation. (2) A feature fusion module, based on our proposed spherical large-kernel inception convolution, fuses semantic features from the LVM with systematically computed geometric features to extract essential pose features from intra-class variations by modeling long-range dependencies without excessive computational cost. Built on these innovations, we achieve SOTA on benchmarks and real-world scenes, while developing a robust robotic picking system capable of handling diverse objects. Our code will be available at the project page: {\hypersetup{urlcolor=blue}https://panfei-cheng.github.io/SSH-Pose}.

CAD-to-CT Registration of Cylindrical Objects via Ellipse-Based Axis Estimation

Accurate registration of CAD models to CT scans is essential for establishing ground truth geometry in volumetric imaging. Obtaining reliable object masks is of growing importance in machine learning settings; as recent architectures grow more capable, huge datasets are required to fully utilise their capabilities. Traditional intensity-based methods fail when CT grayscale values lack calibration references, while point-based algorithms (e.g., ICP, RANSAC) require feature correspondence unavailable between idealized CAD geometry and noisy volumetric CT data. We propose a two-stage geometric registration method for cylindrical objects (ionization chambers) that takes advantage of the distinctive geometric features of the objects. First, we estimate the 3D rotation axis by detecting elliptical cross-sections across CT slices, fitting ellipses to edge-detected contours, and performing PCA on the fitted ellipse centers after RANSAC outlier removal. Second, we voxelize the CAD model, orient it along the detected axis, and maximize volumetric overlap with the CT scan through translational adjustment. This approach achieves robust registration with tilt and orientation errors below $0.1^\circ$ without intensity calibration or feature matching. Once registered, the aligned CAD model provides ground truth geometry for applications including machine learning-based object localization and automated analysis in industrial CT workflows.

Phase-Aware Wavelet-Based-Scattering Encoder-Decoder for Dense Predictions

Scattering transforms achieve Lipschitz stability and translation invariance, but dense prediction tasks require preserving spatial structure lost in global averaging. We propose Phase-Aware Scattering Encoder-Decoder, which restores this information by explicitly preserving phase in skip connections. On image denoising (BSD68), breaking translation invariance improves PSNR by $+2.17$~dB; phase preservation adds $+1.03$~dB. A novel spatial shuffling ablation ($-1.26$~dB penalty) demonstrates phase encodes location-dependent structure. We conduct a preliminary extensibility study on a second dense prediction task (ISIC skin lesion segmentation), with full cross-validation as ongoing work. This work advances principled wavelet-deep learning integration, showing how phase information complements scattering's stability-expressiveness trade-off in pixel-level prediction.

Component-Aware Structure-Preserving Style Transfer for Satellite Visual Sim2Real Data Construction

For camera-based satellite visual sensing, Sim2Real data construction requires images that approach real-domain sensor appearance while retaining the annotations inherited from simulation. Real sensor images of satellite targets with reliable pose labels and component-level masks are difficult to acquire at scale, whereas synthetic rendering provides exact geometric annotations but suffers from a visible appearance gap. This paper presents a component-aware structure-preserving style transfer framework for satellite visual synthetic-to-real data construction. The method builds weakly paired real--synthetic samples from calibrated real acquisition, ArUco-based camera-pose measurement, CAD rendering, and component masks. It then extracts part-wise real-domain style codes from unlabeled real images and injects them into corresponding synthetic satellite regions through mask-aligned modulation. To keep the generated images usable for downstream sensor-data supervision, adversarial training is combined with local contrastive consistency, self-regularization, and edge-preserving constraints. Experiments are conducted on 5,000 rendered satellite images and 100 real images captured in a calibrated setup. The real images provide target-domain appearance references and final evaluation images, while the downstream GDRNet pose estimator is trained only on synthetic or translated synthetic images. Compared with representative image-translation baselines, the proposed method achieves the lowest image distribution discrepancy, with an FID of 54.32 and a KID of 0.048. When the translated data are used to train GDRNet in this target-domain adaptation setting, the ADD pass rate improves to 0.260 and the AUC improves to 0.611. These results indicate that component-level appearance transfer can improve annotation-preserving satellite visual Sim2Real data generation in the considered calibrated setup.

Where to Look: Can Foundation Models Reach a Target Viewpoint Through Active Exploration?

Humans can reproduce the viewpoint specified by a target image through active head and body motion, yet spatial intelligence in foundation models has largely been studied as passive understanding of pre-collected observations. We introduce Target Viewpoint Reproduction (TVR) -- an active task where an agent adjusts its viewpoint in a 3D environment until its observation matches a given target image -- and TVRBench, an indoor-simulation benchmark spanning scene scale and target-view visual richness. TVR is far from solved: on the evaluation split, the strongest open-source and closed-source models reach only 7.8% and 12.0% success. Fine-grained analysis identifies two consistent bottlenecks: off-the-shelf models struggle with multi-turn visual history, and performance drops sharply when viewpoint reproduction requires body translation rather than in-place rotation, exposing a gap in mapping spatial discrepancies to embodied movement. To study reducing this gap, we build a unified TVR post-training framework covering expert-trajectory SFT, rationale-supervised CoT-SFT, offline Single-turn GRPO, and on-policy Multi-turn GRPO from live simulator rollouts. Visual-action SFT supplies the main gain, raising a 9B open-source model to 50.8% success; Multi-turn GRPO provides targeted multi-room refinement and reaches 51.4% overall, while CoT supervision and Single-turn GRPO degrade closed-loop performance. These results establish TVRBench as a testbed for measuring and training foundation models that actively perceive and act in 3D environments. Our code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/TVRBench.

Retrieval-Augmented Long-Context Translation for Cultural Image Captioning: Gators submission for AmericasNLP 2026 shared task

We present the University of Florida Gators submission to the AmericasNLP 2026 shared task on cultural image captioning for Indigenous languages. Our two-stage pipeline generates a Spanish intermediate caption with Qwen2.5-VL, then produces the target-language caption using retrieval-augmented many-shot prompting with Gemini 2.5 Flash. We achieve 164.1%, 131.7%, and 122.6% improvements over the shared task baseline for Bribri, Guaraní, and Orizaba Nahuatl captioning, respectively, in our dev set evaluation and maintain >150% improvements for the Bribri and Orizaba Nahuatl languages in the test set evaluation. We find retrieval is highly language-dependent, beneficial only for large, in-domain corpora, and that synthetic data augmentation accounts for around 28 chrF++ of the dev set Guaraní performance gain. Our submission is the overall winner of the shared task, placing second out of five finalist submissions in human evaluations of target-language captions.