Adaptive Texture-aware Masking for Self-Supervised Learning in 3D Dental CBCT Analysis

Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is pivotal for 3D diagnostic imaging in dentistry. However, the development of robust AI models for volumetric analysis is often constrained by the scarcity of large, annotated datasets. Self-supervised learning (SSL), particularly Masked Image Modeling (MIM), offers a promising pathway to leverage unlabeled data. A limitation of standard MIM is its reliance on random masking, which fails to prioritize diagnostically critical regions in dental CBCT volumes, such as subtle pathological changes and intricate anatomical boundaries. To address this, we propose ATMask, a novel adaptive masking strategy. Instead of applying random masks or employing computationally intensive attention modules, ATMask computes an inter-slice texture variation map to identify regions with high structural or textural complexity. These high-variation areas are then selectively masked during pre-training, compelling the model to learn richer contextual representations essential for inferring complex 3D morphological transitions. Furthermore, we contribute the first large-scale CBCT dataset, curated from both public and private sources, comprising 6,314 scans, for the dental AI model pretraining. Extensive experiments on three downstream dental CBCT tasks demonstrate that our ATMask enables more data-efficient and powerful representation learning than standard random masking and other advanced SSL baselines. The dataset and code will be released.

SurgCoT: Advancing Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Surgical Videos through a Chain-of-Thought Benchmark

Fine-grained spatiotemporal reasoning on surgical videos is critical, yet the capabilities of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in this domain remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SurgCoT, a unified benchmark for evaluating chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in MLLMs across 7 surgical specialties and 35 diverse procedures. SurgCoT assesses five core reasoning dimensions: Causal Action Ordering, Cue-Action Alignment, Affordance Mapping, Micro-Transition Localization, and Anomaly Onset Tracking, through a structured CoT framework with an intensive annotation protocol (Question-Option-Knowledge-Clue-Answer), where the Knowledge field provides essential background context and Clue provides definitive spatiotemporal evidence. Evaluation of 10 leading MLLMs shows: 1) commercial models outperform open-source and medical-specialized variants; 2) significant gaps exist in surgical CoT reasoning; 3) SurgCoT enables effective evaluation and enhances progressive spatiotemporal reasoning. SurgCoT provides a reproducible testbed to narrow the gap between MLLM capabilities and clinical reasoning demands. Code: https://github.com/CVI-SZU/SurgCoT.

X-PCR: A Benchmark for Cross-modality Progressive Clinical Reasoning in Ophthalmic Diagnosis

Despite significant progress in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their clinical reasoning capacity for multi-modal diagnosis remains largely unexamined. Current benchmarks, mostly single-modality data, can't evaluate progressive reasoning and cross-modal integration essential for clinical practice. We introduce the Cross-Modality Progressive Clinical Reasoning (X-PCR) benchmark, the first comprehensive evaluation of MLLMs through a complete ophthalmology diagnostic workflow, with two reasoning tasks: 1) a six-stage progressive reasoning chain spanning image quality assessment to clinical decision-making, and 2) a cross-modality reasoning task integrating six imaging modalities. The benchmark comprises 26,415 images and 177,868 expert-verified VQA pairs curated from 51 public datasets, covering 52 ophthalmic diseases. Evaluation of 21 MLLMs reveals critical gaps in progressive reasoning and cross-modal integration. Dataset and code: https://github.com/CVI-SZU/X-PCR.

DIRCR: Dual-Inference Rule-Contrastive Reasoning for Solving RAVENs

Abstract visual reasoning remains challenging as existing methods often prioritize either global context or local row-wise relations, failing to integrate both, and lack intermediate feature constraints, leading to incomplete rule capture and entangled representations. To address these issues, we propose the Dual-Inference Rule-Contrastive Reasoning (DIRCR) model. Its core component, the Dual-Inference Reasoning Module, combines a local path for row-wise analogical reasoning and a global path for holistic inference, integrated via a gated attention mechanism. Additionally, a Rule-Contrastive Learning Module introduces pseudo-labels to construct positive and negative rule samples, applying contrastive learning to enhance feature separability and promote abstract, transferable rule learning. Experimental results on three RAVEN datasets demonstrate that DIRCR significantly enhances reasoning robustness and generalization. Codes are available at https://github.com/csZack-Zhang/DIRCR.

Preference-Agile Multi-Objective Optimization for Real-time Vehicle Dispatching

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has been widely studied in literature because of its versatility in human-centered decision making in real-life applications. Recently, demand for dynamic MOO is fast-emerging due to tough market dynamics that require real-time re-adjustments of priorities for different objectives. However, most existing studies focus either on deterministic MOO problems which are not practical, or non-sequential dynamic MOO decision problems that cannot deal with some real-life complexities. To address these challenges, a preference-agile multi-objective optimization (PAMOO) is proposed in this paper to permit users to dynamically adjust and interactively assign the preferences on the fly. To achieve this, a novel uniform model within a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework is proposed that can take as inputs users' dynamic preference vectors explicitly. Additionally, a calibration function is fitted to ensure high quality alignment between the preference vector inputs and the output DRL decision policy. Extensive experiments on challenging real-life vehicle dispatching problems at a container terminal showed that PAMOO obtains superior performance and generalization ability when compared with two most popular MOO methods. Our method presents the first dynamic MOO method for challenging \rev{dynamic sequential MOO decision problems

ReactMotion: Generating Reactive Listener Motions from Speaker Utterance

In this paper, we introduce a new task, Reactive Listener Motion Generation from Speaker Utterance, which aims to generate naturalistic listener body motions that appropriately respond to a speaker's utterance. However, modeling such nonverbal listener behaviors remains underexplored and challenging due to the inherently non-deterministic nature of human reactions. To facilitate this task, we present ReactMotionNet, a large-scale dataset that pairs speaker utterances with multiple candidate listener motions annotated with varying degrees of appropriateness. This dataset design explicitly captures the one-to-many nature of listener behavior and provides supervision beyond a single ground-truth motion. Building on this dataset design, we develop preference-oriented evaluation protocols tailored to evaluate reactive appropriateness, where conventional motion metrics focusing on input-motion alignment ignore. We further propose ReactMotion, a unified generative framework that jointly models text, audio, emotion, and motion, and is trained with preference-based objectives to encourage both appropriate and diverse listener responses. Extensive experiments show that ReactMotion outperforms retrieval baselines and cascaded LLM-based pipelines, generating more natural, diverse, and appropriate listener motions.

Predictive Reasoning with Augmented Anomaly Contrastive Learning for Compositional Visual Relations

While visual reasoning for simple analogies has received significant attention, compositional visual relations (CVR) remain relatively unexplored due to their greater complexity. To solve CVR tasks, we propose Predictive Reasoning with Augmented Anomaly Contrastive Learning (PR-A$^2$CL), \ie, to identify an outlier image given three other images that follow the same compositional rules. To address the challenge of modelling abundant compositional rules, an Augmented Anomaly Contrastive Learning is designed to distil discriminative and generalizable features by maximizing similarity among normal instances while minimizing similarity between normal and anomalous outliers. More importantly, a predict-and-verify paradigm is introduced for rule-based reasoning, in which a series of Predictive Anomaly Reasoning Blocks (PARBs) iteratively leverage features from three out of the four images to predict those of the remaining one. Throughout the subsequent verification stage, the PARBs progressively pinpoint the specific discrepancies attributable to the underlying rules. Experimental results on SVRT, CVR and MC$^2$R datasets show that PR-A$^2$CL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning models.

RegFreeNet: A Registration-Free Network for CBCT-based 3D Dental Implant Planning

As the commercial surgical guide design software usually does not support the export of implant position for pre-implantation data, existing methods have to scan the post-implantation data and map the implant to pre-implantation space to get the label of implant position for training. Such a process is time-consuming and heavily relies on the accuracy of registration algorithm. Moreover, not all hospitals have paired CBCT data, limitting the construction of multi-center dataset. Inspired by the way dentists determine the implant position based on the neighboring tooth texture, we found that even if the implant area is masked, it will not affect the determination of the implant position. Therefore, we propose to mask the implants in the post-implantation data so that any CBCT containing the implants can be used as training data. This paradigm enables us to discard the registration process and makes it possible to construct a large-scale multi-center implant dataset. On this basis, we proposes ImplantFairy, a comprehensive, publicly accessible dental implant dataset with voxel-level 3D annotations of 1622 CBCT data. Furthermore, according to the area variation characteristics of the tooth's spatial structure and the slope information of the implant, we designed a slope-aware implant position prediction network. Specifically, a neighboring distance perception (NDP) module is designed to adaptively extract tooth area variation features, and an implant slope prediction branch assists the network in learning more robust features through additional implant supervision information. Extensive experiments conducted on ImplantFairy and two public dataset demonstrate that the proposed RegFreeNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

MCD-Net: A Lightweight Deep Learning Baseline for Optical-Only Moraine Segmentation

Glacial segmentation is essential for reconstructing past glacier dynamics and evaluating climate-driven landscape change. However, weak optical contrast and the limited availability of high-resolution DEMs hinder automated mapping. This study introduces the first large-scale optical-only moraine segmentation dataset, comprising 3,340 manually annotated high-resolution images from Google Earth covering glaciated regions of Sichuan and Yunnan, China. We develop MCD-Net, a lightweight baseline that integrates a MobileNetV2 encoder, a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and a DeepLabV3+ decoder. Benchmarking against deeper backbones (ResNet152, Xception) shows that MCD-Net achieves 62.3% mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) and 72.8% Dice coefficient while reducing computational cost by more than 60%. Although ridge delineation remains constrained by sub-pixel width and spectral ambiguity, the results demonstrate that optical imagery alone can provide reliable moraine-body segmentation. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Lyra-alpha/MCD-Net, establishing a reproducible benchmark for moraine-specific segmentation and offering a deployable baseline for high-altitude glacial monitoring.

EyePCR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Fine-Grained Perception, Knowledge Comprehension and Clinical Reasoning in Ophthalmic Surgery

MLLMs (Multimodal Large Language Models) have showcased remarkable capabilities, but their performance in high-stakes, domain-specific scenarios like surgical settings, remains largely under-explored. To address this gap, we develop \textbf{EyePCR}, a large-scale benchmark for ophthalmic surgery analysis, grounded in structured clinical knowledge to evaluate cognition across \textit{Perception}, \textit{Comprehension} and \textit{Reasoning}. EyePCR offers a richly annotated corpus with more than 210k VQAs, which cover 1048 fine-grained attributes for multi-view perception, medical knowledge graph of more than 25k triplets for comprehension, and four clinically grounded reasoning tasks. The rich annotations facilitate in-depth cognitive analysis, simulating how surgeons perceive visual cues and combine them with domain knowledge to make decisions, thus greatly improving models' cognitive ability. In particular, \textbf{EyePCR-MLLM}, a domain-adapted variant of Qwen2.5-VL-7B, achieves the highest accuracy on MCQs for \textit{Perception} among compared models and outperforms open-source models in \textit{Comprehension} and \textit{Reasoning}, rivalling commercial models like GPT-4.1. EyePCR reveals the limitations of existing MLLMs in surgical cognition and lays the foundation for benchmarking and enhancing clinical reliability of surgical video understanding models.