Michael
Abstract:In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.
Abstract:The success of generative models in language and visual generation has inspired extensive applications to generative robot planning. However, most existing works either focus on single-robot planning, or generate multi-robot trajectories in a sequential manner with iterative post-processing to resolve inter-robot conflicts. In this work, we investigate whether coordinated multi-robot trajectories, as a special spatiotemporal distribution, can be learned and generated with a generative model in a feed-forward manner. We propose Robots as Tokens (Roken), a unified diffusion transformer that directly generates multi-robot trajectories that satisfy both (individual) safety and (global) connectivity constraints. The core design of Roken is to represent each robot as a discrete token, allowing them to naturally interact with each other through self-attention, and cross-attend to map tokens for environment layouts. We further introduce several auxiliary tasks based on Bayes' theorem to provide multi-scale spatial-temporal supervision for efficient learning of the conditional distribution. In training, Roken absorbs diverse expert trajectories from different team sizes. During inference, Roken behaves as a versatile multi-robot planner that can handle single-robot planning, coordinated multi-robot trajectory generation, and conditional trajectory generation by fixing some robot tokens as conditions. Experiments in diverse cluttered environments show that Roken can generate coordinated multi-robot trajectories to perform connectivity-constrained goal navigation tasks with high success rates, outperforming the baseline method used to generate the training dataset. Roken also demonstrates good scalability after training with mixed team sizes, and shows generalization to unseen or partially observed environments, verifying its potential to learn from diverse data and perform versatile tasks.
Abstract:RS-MLLMs enable natural-language understanding and spatial reasoning over earth observation imagery. However, existing models support only a narrow range of sensor types and tasks, yielding a fragmented view of the earth and leaving cross-modal geoscientific knowledge largely unexploited. This work presents Earth-OneVision, a 2B RS-MLLM that unifies six sensor modalities (i.e., optical, SAR, infrared, multispectral, temporal, and video) and cross-sensor fusion across 9 task categories within a single autoregressive framework. Three dedicated mechanisms address three bottlenecks. Full-Granularity Vision-Language Alignment (FGVLA) aligns multi-level visual features with the multi-dimensional language space. Spatial-Linguistic Isomorphic Serialization (SLIS) unifies heterogeneous spatial outputs as autoregressive tokens. Progressive Cross-Modality Adaptation (PCMA) decomposes the compound domain gap into sequential stages, tackling the viewpoint and imaging physics gaps in turn. To support joint training, MMRS-OneVision is constructed with ~34M QA pairs spanning all six sensor modalities and cross-sensor fusion across 9 task categories, substantially exceeding existing RS multimodal instruction datasets. With only 2B parameters, Earth-OneVision achieves competitive or state-of-the-art results across extensive benchmarks, consistently matching or outperforming 4B-72B RS-MLLMs. It achieves 87.52% P@0.5 on the OPT-RSVG testset for optical visual grounding and 80.68% on the SAR VQA benchmark SARLANG-Bench, exceeding 7B models by over 7%. It further achieves 75.74% recall on the BigEarthNet-MS testset for multispectral classification, and 81.94% MCQ accuracy on EarthMind-Bench for cross-modality reasoning.
Abstract:Structural heart disease (SHD) is a primary driver of heart failure and cardiovascular mortality, yet early detection remains constrained by the limited accessibility of echocardiography. While single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is ubiquitous through wearables, existing AI screening models often depend on 12-lead inputs, generalize poorly across institutions, or require massive, condition-specific labeled datasets. Recent work has demonstrated the feasibility of contrastive pre-training between single-lead ECGs and echocardiography reports within a single health system. Here, we present AnyECG-Echo, a framework that advance this paradigm toward clinical translation through three key developments: (1) evaluation in a geographically independent external cohort (n = 16,621); (2) diagnostic coverage of 13 fine-grained SHD subtypes spanning myocardial, chamber, valvular, and great-vessel pathologies; and (3) dual-axis mechanistic interpretability combining electrophysiology-grounded Shapley attribution with emergent correlations to quantitative measurements. Across validation cohorts totaling n = 25,222, the model demonstrated high AUROC for high-impact subtypes, including reduced left ventricular systolic function (AUROC 0.866-0.924), global heart enlargement (0.877-0.931), and mitral stenosis (0.836-0.906). Furthermore, we successfully validated the alignment of model outputs with established medical physiological traits, thereby enhancing interpretability. Notably, we discovered that AnyECG-Echo's outputs function as physiologically grounded digital biomarkers that accurately track objective metrics such as LVEF and myocardial wall thickness. These findings prove that wearable single-lead ECGs can effectively detect fine-grained structural heart disease, offering a practical solution for population-scale screening.
Abstract:Personalized tutoring, teacher training, and education research need access to \emph{targeted} synthetic misconceptions, but privacy and IRB constraints make labelled corpora of real student errors scarce. LLMs could in principle generate synthetic errors at scale, but producing an arbitrary wrong answer is easy for a modern LLM while producing one that matches a specified cognitive failure mode is much harder. We present a framework that generates errors targeted to a five-class taxonomy adapted from the revised Bloom's taxonomy, evaluated on questions from the TheoremQA dataset. A Generation Agent (GA) drafts a candidate erroneous solution conditioned on a target class, and an Examination Agent (EA) judges whether the draft is incorrect and class-consistent. The framework yields a reusable recipe for building class-stratified synthetic error datasets where authentic student corpora are unavailable. As a secondary diagnostic, targeted error generation is substantially harder than free-form incorrect-answer generation, and answer-grounding contributes more than expanded examples or external textbook content.
Abstract:Traditional lossless text compression preserves every byte, but its gains on natural language are often modest in realistic operating regimes. We study \emph{lossy semantic text compression}, where the encoder strategically deletes parts of the text and a large language model (LLM) reconstructs the original content from the retained skeleton. We benchmark a progression of deletion strategies, including uniform step deletion, word-length-guided deletion (WordLen), word-frequency-guided deletion (WordFreq), LP-optimized deletion (Opt), entropy-based deletion using GPT-2 surprisal, and hybrid methods that combine frequency and surprisal signals. Evaluation on the BBC News dataset across retention rates $\r_{keep} \in [0.1,0.9]$ shows three main findings. First, WordFreq is a strong low-cost baseline: despite using only a static frequency lookup, it remains competitive with much more expensive semantic methods while being far faster at the encoder. Second, semantic and hybrid methods provide their clearest gains at mild-to-moderate compression, whereas word-frequency deletion is often more robust at the lowest retention rates. Third, QLoRA fine-tuning yields a strong local decoder that is competitive with Gemini 2.0 Flash and is often strongest in decoder-only comparisons. Additional English and Chinese experiments show that the overall framework transfers across domains, while the best deletion rule remains dataset-dependent.
Abstract:Semi-supervised learning has become a dominant paradigm for reducing annotation costs. However, we argue that the current progress is clouded by a twofold overconfidence problem. Algorithmically, mainstream pseudo-labeling frameworks often conflate prediction confidence with uncertainty, leading to severe confirmation bias. Strategically, since multiple benchmark datasets lack dedicated validation sets, some studies use the test set for validation as well, leading to inflated performance estimates. Subsequent methods, compelled to employ the same strategy to surpass reported SOTA, trigger an arms race of overfitting. This raises concerns that the impressive numerical gains in the community may reflect overfitting rather than genuine progress. Thus, we propose a tri-space calibrated segmentation framework founded on a principled dual-axis reliability assessment engine. It explicitly decouples confidence from uncertainty and uses this signal to detect and correct confirmation bias across feature, probability, and image spaces in a collaborative manner. Across three benchmark datasets, TCSeg consistently delivers strong performance under existing evaluation protocols. More importantly, we advocate that the community report final-checkpoint results under multiple-run protocols, thereby establishing more rigorous benchmarks with a more realistic perspective. Code will be available: github.com/DirkLiii/TCSeg.
Abstract:Medical diagnosis is not a single prediction from a fully specified vignette. It is a sequential workup: clinicians decide what evidence to obtain, revise a differential diagnosis, and stop when the diagnosis is sufficiently supported. Most medical AI benchmarks instead reveal the relevant context upfront and score only the final answer, making unsupported correct guesses, premature closure, inefficient workups, and poor uncertainty updating invisible. We introduce DDX-TRACE, a physician-adjudicated benchmark for multimodal neuroradiology that evaluates diagnostic trajectories under hidden evidence over 211 challenging cases. Each case begins with limited clinical history; models request imaging studies in free form, receive matched image bundles when available, update a probabilistic differential diagnosis after each turn, and stop with a localized final diagnosis. Evaluating state-of-the-art VLMs, we find that final diagnosis scores can substantially misrepresent workup quality: models may guess plausible diagnoses without essential evidence, request useful studies but misinterpret raw images, or acquire evidence inefficiently while updating uncertainty poorly. Controlled evidence variants isolate bottlenecks in planning, visual evidence extraction, and downstream differential reasoning. DDX-TRACE shifts medical AI evaluation from final answers to evidence-supported diagnostic trajectories.
Abstract:Instilling creativity in text-to-image (T2I) generation presents a significant challenge, as it requires synthesized images to exhibit not only visual novelty and surprise, but also artistic value. Current T2I models, however, are largely optimized for literal text-image alignment with their data distribution, and their noise prediction networks constrain the generation to high-probability regions, consequently generating outputs that lack authentic creativity. To address this, we propose a Self-Creative Diffusion (SCDiff) model for meaningful T2I generations featuring two core modules: a learnable spatial weighting (LSW) module and a visual-semantic mixing loss (VSML). The LSW module designs a parametric Kaiser-Bessel window to reinforce central image features, fostering novel and surprising generation. The VSML module introduces a dual loss function: a similarity loss constrains that the new images align with its textual description, while a diversity loss maximizes its distinction from the original image, enhancing both semantic value and visual novelty. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model substantially improves creativity, semantic alignment, and visual coherence, offering a simple yet powerful framework for generating creative objects.
Abstract:LiDAR-based 3D human motion capture has broad applications in fields such as autonomous driving and robotics, where accurate motion reconstruction is crucial. However, existing methods often struggle with unstable inputs and severe occlusions, leading to jittery or even failed pose predictions. To address these challenges, we propose BMLiCap, a coarse-to-fine framework that models motion using temporally compressible Bézier curves. By reducing control points through a trajectory-preserving strategy, we obtain a coherent and learning-friendly motion representation. To reconstruct human actions from LiDAR point-cloud cues, we design a progressive motion-reconstruction module. Specifically, a Time-scale Motion Transformer (TMT) is introduced to predict motion curves at multiple temporal scales, and a Multi-level Motion Aggregator (MMA) is utilized to adaptively fuse the multi-scale curves to recover detailed, temporally coherent poses, effectively bridging observation gaps caused by occlusions and noise. Across four mainstream benchmarks LiDARHuman26M, FreeMotion, NoiseMotion, and SLOPER4D, BMLiCap achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and temporal continuity in complex scenes, demonstrating its ability to compensate for severe occlusions and reduce prediction jitter.