Socratic agents for autonomous scientific discovery in high-dimensional physical systems

The automation of scientific discovery has reached an inflection point. While AI systems now operate instruments, optimize parameters and generate hypotheses, most remain procedural: they execute workflows fixed by human designers. True autonomous science demands epistemic autonomy--the capacity to construct, challenge and revise physical explanations in response to evidence. Here we introduce AHOIS, a multi-agent AI scientist that embeds Socratic midwifery into closed-loop experimentation. A physics-critic agent interrogates hypotheses through causal questioning, constraint checking, counterexample generation and falsification-criteria formulation. We evaluate AHOIS on a real multimode-fibre optical platform, a high-dimensional system with complex wave transformations, indirect detection, environmental drift and multi-modal acquisition. Without prior encoding schemes, classifiers or speckle models, the system autonomously proposed and validated a random-interference encoding hypothesis, discovered task-adaptive sparse-measurement strategies, diagnosed distinct failure modes (encoding instability, fluorescence contamination and detector noise) and translated a published imaging protocol into an executable workflow on a non-original configuration. The discovered encoding yielded 16x16 measurements with effective rank 56.9 and classification accuracies of 76.97% on MNIST and 83.17% on Fashion-MNIST. Ablations show that Socratic interrogation improves physical consistency, hypothesis completeness, uncertainty calibration and experimental-plan validity. These results establish a route from workflow automation towards evidence-grounded, self-correcting autonomous discovery in complex physical environments.

OctoSense: Self-Supervised Learning for Multimodal Robot Perception

We present OctoSense, an open-source sensor platform with stereo RGB and event cameras, LiDAR, a thermal camera, an inertial measurement unit, RTK-corrected global positioning system, and proprioception (CAN bus data from a car, and joint angles for a quadruped robot). The eponymous OctoSense dataset contains 59 hours of time-synchronized driving data across different types of environments at different times of the day, including situations with highly degraded sensors. We demonstrate multi-modal self-supervised learning using such real-world robotics data, where sensors have different representations, frequencies, latencies and noise. Our approach, a "late-fusion" masked autoencoder, (i) uses modality-specific tokenizers to account for different spatiotemporal characteristics of these sensors, and (ii) caches modality-specific tokens at inference time to process new measurements as they come. This architecture (i) is fast (6.68 ms and 112 ms on NVIDIA 5090 and Orin NX respectively, to compute the representation), (ii) performs better than existing image-only foundation models on tasks such as estimation of optical flow, depth, semantic segmentation, and ego-motion (translation, rotation, and steering angle), and (iii) predicts robustly at nighttime or in situations where sensory data is degraded. See our project page for links to the dataset, code, and supplementary videos: https://abisulco.com/octosense/.

Prob-BBDM: a Probabilistic Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model for MRI sequence image-to-image translation

AI-driven image-to-image synthesis is rapidly advancing, with growing applications in medical imaging. Multi-modal image analysis plays a crucial role in optimizing examination quality, yet acquiring multiple imaging modalities in clinical settings remains resource-intensive and time-consuming, especially for 3D imaging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel image-to-image translation model based on Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models (BBDM), which synthesizes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences from 2D axial slices. Our approach integrates a variational encoder-guided diffusion mechanism, leveraging probabilistic image distributions to enhance synthesis quality. Evaluated on the BraTS 2021 dataset, our Probabilistic-BBDM (Prob-BBDM) achieves superior performance across multiple translation tasks, reaching up to 88.46% SSIM and 26.09 dB PSNR, with consistent improvements over baselines. Notably, our diffusion process requires only 4 steps, making it computationally efficient while maintaining high-quality synthesis. To further validate generalizability, we test Prob-BBDM on an external third-party dataset, demonstrating consistent performance across domains. Additionally, we assess the clinical utility of the synthesized slices by using them as input to a pre-trained segmentation model. Tumor segmentation yields a Dice score of 88.71% and an HD95 of 3.49 mm, confirming that the synthesized slices preserve critical diagnostic information. These results highlight the potential of Prob-BBDM for high-quality, efficient, and generalizable MRI synthesis, offering a promising step toward improved medical image translation.

UniTranslator: A Unified Multi-modal Framework for End-to-end In-Image Machine Translation

In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate scene text in an image and render the translated text back into the original regions while preserving the overall visual appearance. Recent unified multimodal models provide a promising solution by combining visual-text understanding and image generation within a single framework. However, directly adapting such models to IIMT remains challenging. In particular, they often suffer from understanding-generation conflicts, where the translation inferred during understanding is inconsistent with the text supervision used in generation, and spatial position misalignment, where the rendered text does not accurately match the target text regions. To address these issues, we present UniTranslator, a unified multimodal framework for IIMT that tightly couples translation understanding and text editing. Specifically, we introduce an Understand-Generation Alignment Module (UGAM) to bridge the representation gap between understanding and generation, encouraging semantic consistency between translated content prediction and text rendering. We further propose a Spatial Mask Decoder (SMD) with pixel-level supervision over text regions to improve spatial grounding, geometric alignment, and layout controllability during generation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniTranslator achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse language directions and complex real-world layouts. Moreover, our results reveal a strong mutual reinforcement effect between translation understanding and image generation, highlighting the advantage of unified translation multimodal learning. Code is available at https://github.com/SeerRay-Lab/Unitranslator.

S1-Omni-Image: A Unified Model for Scientific Image Understanding, Generation, and Editing

We present S1-Omni-Image, an open-weight unified multimodal model for scientific image understanding, generation, and editing. Unlike general-purpose image generation models, scientific image tasks require not only high-fidelity synthesis, but also robust understanding of scientific semantics, structural relations, domain knowledge, and task intent. To this end, S1-Omni-Image builds on the scientific multimodal reasoning backbone S1-VL-32B and couples its understanding capability with an image generation module under a unified think-before-generate paradigm. Given a user instruction, the model first produces a task-oriented reasoning trace, a textual answer, and a task special token; their hidden states are then injected into the generation module to condition image generation or editing. S1-Omni-Image supports scientific image understanding, generation, and editing in a unified framework. For generation, it focuses on scientific illustrations and text rendering, including logical diagrams, relational comparisons, data charts, and realistic scientific visualizations. For editing, it casts segmentation and other domain-specific vision tasks as native image editing problems, enabling multi-turn illustration editing, medical and geographic image segmentation, medical image translation, and scientific image super-resolution. We construct SciGenEdit, a 314K-sample training dataset, and release the model weights, inference code, and SciGenEdit-10K. Experiments show that S1-Omni-Image substantially improves scientific image generation and editing while preserving the scientific image understanding capability inherited from S1-VL-32B. It outperforms open-source models on GenExam and TechImage-Bench, achieves state-of-the-art results on four editing benchmarks including MSD, cigRockSEM, SynthRAD2025, and IXI, and maintains stable performance on scientific image understanding evaluations.

Noise-Aware Boundary-Enhanced Generative Learning for Ultrasound Speckle Reduction

Ultrasound is a non-invasive, real-time, and cost-effective imaging technique widely used in clinical diagnosis. However, its diagnostic efficacy is often compromised by inherent speckle noise that degrades image quality and obscures underlying anatomical structures. Existing speckle reduction methods tend to over-smooth tissue boundaries and generalize poorly to heterogeneous noise levels. To address these limitations, we propose a Noise-Aware Boundary-Enhanced Generative Learning (NBGL) framework for ultrasound speckle reduction, which simultaneously preserves annotated anatomical boundaries and adapts to varying noise levels. The NBGL framework consists of a speckle reduction branch and a boundary enhancement branch. The former leverages generative learning to suppress speckle noise, while the latter learns boundary-sensitive representations to preserve target anatomical structures. Furthermore, a noise-aware interaction weight generation (NIWG) module estimates the speckle noise level via 3D Laplacian filtering and a median absolute deviation estimator, and translates it into an adaptive interaction weight. This weight is incorporated into a weighted feature-wise linear modulation (wFiLM) module to adaptively modulate cross-branch feature coupling, thereby improving robustness to varying noise levels. Extensive evaluations on 141 3D transvaginal ultrasound volumes demonstrate that NBGL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in speckle reduction and structural preservation across six noise levels, while maintaining consistency with annotated anatomical boundaries.

Promise and challenges of heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT scans using contrastive unpaired image translation: a feasibility study

Purpose: To evaluate the feasibility and challenges of heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT scans using contrastive unpaired image translation and deep learning-based segmentation. Approach: We developed ChameleonNet, a framework utilizing the Contrastive Unpaired Translation (CUT) network with decoupled contrastive learning (DCL) loss to synthesize non-contrast CT from contrast CT scans. Using annotations of four heart chambers (left atrium (LA), left ventricle (LV), right atrium (RA), and right ventricle (RV)) from contrast scans, we trained a Hausdorff distance loss-enhanced nnU-Net on synthesized non-contrast images. The translation model was trained with 35,538 contrast-enhanced and 37,197 non-contrast CT slices. The segmentation model was trained with 292 synthesized non-contrast scans. Performance was evaluated using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 95th Hausdorff distance (HD95) on 36 synthesized non-contrast scans, and volume agreement on 36 real non-contrast CT scans was assessed using Pearson correlation, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean percentage error (MPE). Results: The segmentation model achieved DSC of 0.94 (0.01), 0.91 (0.04), 0.92 (0.03), 0.93 (0.02), and HD95 of 3.63 (1.49), 5.74 (4.08), 5.18 (1.77), 5.51 (3.21) mm on synthesized non-contrast images for LA, LV, RA, and RV, respectively. On real non-contrast CT scans, Pearson correlations were 0.93, 0.82, 0.87, and 0.89 (all p<0.001), with MAPE ranging from 9.22% to 20.79%, and MPE ranging from -12.52% to 4.67%. Conclusions: ChameleonNet demonstrated feasibility for heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT without manual non-contrast annotations. However, volume errors, particularly for LV and RV, indicate that further refinement and validation are needed before clinical use.

Transferable Attack against Face Swapping in an Extended Space

Although deep Face Swapping (FS) models may benefit the entertainment industry, they pose severe threats to privacy and security. Existing protections, including deepfake detection and adversarial perturbation, are either passive responses or ineffective to unseen subject-agnostic FS models. In this paper, we propose a transferable attack against subject-agnostic FS models named Additive Identity attack based on a Relighting function (AIR). AIR leverages reillumination and additive perturbations to mislead the identity extraction modules in subject-agnostic FS models. By using these two types of perturbations simultaneously, the attack space is extended such that stronger but more visually natural adversarial examples can be identified. To further enhance the visual quality while preserving the effectiveness of the attack, an adaptive translation-invariant operation and an illumination control scheme are designed for AIR. Unlike other methods, AIR does not require a surrogate FS model to achieve high transferability. In addition, a mathematical proof is given for the extension of the attack space. Extensive experiments using 1000 image pairs across various state-of-the-art subject-agnostic FS models, including GAN and diffusion-based FS models, show that AIR surpasses all existing attacks in terms of both attack success rate and image quality.

BoxCtrl: 3D-Aware Visual Prompting for Geometric Image Editing

As instruction-based editing models and multimodal large language models advance, diverse image editing tasks have become feasible. However, achieving precise and consistent geometric image editing, such as translating, scaling, and rotating in 3D space, remains a major challenge. In this work, we introduce BoxCtrl, a 3D-aware visual prompting framework. Unlike text-only or coarse 2D-guided approaches, our method introduces informative RGB 3D bounding boxes projected onto 2D images as visual prompts. The three orthogonal faces of each box are painted with distinct RGB colors, simultaneously encoding position, size, and orientation to provide a compact, intuitive in-context visual example. The key to BoxCtrl's success lies in these well-designed bounding boxes, which decouple geometric control from appearance control. This enables the model to learn consistent correspondences between faces of the same color in the latent space, leading to a precise understanding of geometric intentions and accurate editing results. We introduce a two-stage training paradigm: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL). To address paired data scarcity, we construct a large-scale synthetic dataset for SFT, equipping the model with fundamental editing capabilities. To bridge the synthetic-to-real domain gap, we incorporate an online RL stage leveraging unpaired real-world data. Guided by a reward function evaluating geometric accuracy and visual fidelity, our SFT-RL strategy significantly enhances geometric precision while maintaining photorealistic quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BoxCtrl achieves state-of-the-art performance across translation, rotation, scaling, and composite editing tasks.

Unsupervised Susceptibility Distortion Correction of EPI without Calibration Scans via Image Translation-Based Registration

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) utilizes echo-planar imaging (EPI) to capture blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals with high temporal resolution. However, EPI is inherently sensitive to magnetic field inhomogeneities, resulting in susceptibility-induced geometric distortions along the phase-encoding (PE) direction. To correct these distortions, conventional approaches rely on additional calibration scans, such as field maps or reverse PE acquisitions, which are not always available in practice. To overcome this limitation, we propose SACRED, a calibration scan-free susceptibility distortion correction framework that corrects geometric distortions via image translation-based registration using only a routinely acquired anatomical T1-weighted (T1w) image and a unidirectional PE BOLD image. SACRED employs an invertible neural network as the image translation backbone to bridge the contrast gap between BOLD and T1w images while enforcing structural consistency through a modality independent neighborhood descriptor. This design enables the use of a mono-contrast similarity objective to train the registration network in an unsupervised manner without requiring distortion-corrected BOLD images. In addition, we incorporate test-time adaptation (TTA) to further enhance performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) data at inference time. SACRED was evaluated on one in-distribution (ID) dataset and two OOD datasets, and was compared with representative fMRI distortion correction methods. The results demonstrate that SACRED significantly outperforms competing methods on both ID and OOD datasets, exhibiting robustness to scanner and population shifts, partly enabled by TTA. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.