BAAI Cardiac Agent: An intelligent multimodal agent for automated reasoning and diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases from cardiac magnetic resonance imaging

Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is a cornerstone for diagnosing cardiovascular disease. However, it remains underutilized due to complex, time-consuming interpretation across multi-sequences, phases, quantitative measures that heavily reliant on specialized expertise. Here, we present BAAI Cardiac Agent, a multimodal intelligent system designed for end-to-end CMR interpretation. The agent integrates specialized cardiac expert models to perform automated segmentation of cardiac structures, functional quantification, tissue characterization and disease diagnosis, and generates structured clinical reports within a unified workflow. Evaluated on CMR datasets from two hospitals (2413 patients) spanning 7-types of major cardiovascular diseases, the agent achieved an area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve exceeding 0.93 internally and 0.81 externally. In the task of estimating left ventricular function indices, the results generated by this system for core parameters such as ejection fraction, stroke volume, and left ventricular mass are highly consistent with clinical reports, with Pearson correlation coefficients all exceeding 0.90. The agent outperformed state-of-the-art models in segmentation and diagnostic tasks, and generated clinical reports showing high concordance with expert radiologists (six readers across three experience levels). By dynamically orchestrating expert models for coordinated multimodal analysis, this agent framework enables accurate, efficient CMR interpretation and highlights its potentials for complex clinical imaging workflows. Code is available at https://github.com/plantain-herb/Cardiac-Agent.

Beyond Ground-Truth: Leveraging Image Quality Priors for Real-World Image Restoration

Real-world image restoration aims to restore high-quality (HQ) images from degraded low-quality (LQ) inputs captured under uncontrolled conditions. Existing methods typically depend on ground-truth (GT) supervision, assuming that GT provides perfect reference quality. However, GT can still contain images with inconsistent perceptual fidelity, causing models to converge to the average quality level of the training data rather than achieving the highest perceptual quality attainable. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework, termed IQPIR, that introduces an Image Quality Prior (IQP)-extracted from pre-trained No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) models-to guide the restoration process toward perceptually optimal outputs explicitly. Our approach synergistically integrates IQP with a learned codebook prior through three key mechanisms: (1) a quality-conditioned Transformer, where NR-IQA-derived scores serve as conditioning signals to steer the predicted representation toward maximal perceptual quality. This design provides a plug-and-play enhancement compatible with existing restoration architectures without structural modification; and (2) a dual-branch codebook structure, which disentangles common and HQ-specific features, ensuring a comprehensive representation of both generic structural information and quality-sensitive attributes; and (3) a discrete representation-based quality optimization strategy, which mitigates over-optimization effects commonly observed in continuous latent spaces. Extensive experiments on real-world image restoration demonstrate that our method not only surpasses cutting-edge methods but also serves as a generalizable quality-guided enhancement strategy for existing methods. The code is available.

GMPilot: An Expert AI Agent For FDA cGMP Compliance

The pharmaceutical industry is facing challenges with quality management such as high costs of compliance, slow responses and disjointed knowledge. This paper presents GMPilot, a domain-specific AI agent that is designed to support FDA cGMP compliance. GMPilot is based on a curated knowledge base of regulations and historical inspection observations and uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Reasoning-Acting (ReAct) frameworks to provide real-time and traceable decision support to the quality professionals. In a simulated inspection scenario, GMPilot shows how it can improve the responsiveness and professionalism of quality professionals by providing structured knowledge retrieval and verifiable regulatory and case-based support. Although GMPilot lacks in the aspect of regulatory scope and model interpretability, it is a viable avenue of improving quality management decision-making in the pharmaceutical sector using intelligent approaches and an example of specialized application of AI in highly regulated sectors.

QualiTeacher: Quality-Conditioned Pseudo-Labeling for Real-World Image Restoration

Real-world image restoration (RWIR) is a highly challenging task due to the absence of clean ground-truth images. Many recent methods resort to pseudo-label (PL) supervision, often within a Mean-Teacher (MT) framework. However, these methods face a critical paradox: unconditionally trusting the often imperfect, low-quality PLs forces the student model to learn undesirable artifacts, while discarding them severely limits data diversity and impairs model generalization. In this paper, we propose QualiTeacher, a novel framework that transforms pseudo-label quality from a noisy liability into a conditional supervisory signal. Instead of filtering, QualiTeacher explicitly conditions the student model on the quality of the PLs, estimated by an ensemble of complementary non-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) models spanning low-level distortion and semantic-level assessment. This strategy teaches the student network to learn a quality-graded restoration manifold, enabling it to understand what constitutes different quality levels. Consequently, it can not only avoid mimicking artifacts from low-quality labels but also extrapolate to generate results of higher quality than the teacher itself. To ensure the robustness and accuracy of this quality-driven learning, we further enhance the process with a multi-augmentation scheme to diversify the PL quality spectrum, a score-based preference optimization strategy inspired by Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enforce a monotonically ordered quality separation, and a cropped consistency loss to prevent adversarial over-optimization (reward hacking) of the IQA models. Experiments on standard RWIR benchmarks demonstrate that QualiTeacher can serve as a plug-and-play strategy to improve the quality of the existing pseudo-labeling framework, establishing a new paradigm for learning from imperfect supervision. Code will be released.

SoberDSE: Sample-Efficient Design Space Exploration via Learning-Based Algorithm Selection

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is a pivotal electronic design automation (EDA) technology that enables the generation of hardware circuits from high-level language descriptions. A critical step in HLS is Design Space Exploration (DSE), which seeks to identify high-quality hardware architectures under given constraints. However, the enormous size of the design space makes DSE computationally prohibitive. Although numerous algorithms have been proposed to accelerate DSE, our extensive experimental studies reveal that no single algorithm consistently achieves Pareto dominance across all problem instances. Consequently, the inability of any single algorithm to dominate all benchmarks necessitates an automated selection mechanism to identify the best-performing DSE algorithm for each specific case. To address this challenge, we propose the SoberDSE framework, which recommends suitable algorithm based on benchmark characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that our SoberDSE framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art heuristic-based DSE algorithms by up to 5.7 $\times$ and state-of-the-art learning-based DSE methods by up to 4.2 $\times$. Furthermore, compared to conventional classification models, SoberDSE delivers superior accuracy in small-sample learning scenarios, with an average enhancement of 35.57\%. Code and models are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Sober-4377.

OrthoDiffusion: A Generalizable Multi-Task Diffusion Foundation Model for Musculoskeletal MRI Interpretation

Musculoskeletal disorders represent a significant global health burden and are a leading cause of disability worldwide. While MRI is essential for accurate diagnosis, its interpretation remains exceptionally challenging. Radiologists must identify multiple potential abnormalities within complex anatomical structures across different imaging planes, a process that requires significant expertise and is prone to variability. We developed OrthoDiffusion, a unified diffusion-based foundation model designed for multi-task musculoskeletal MRI interpretation. The framework utilizes three orientation-specific 3D diffusion models, pre-trained in a self-supervised manner on 15,948 unlabeled knee MRI scans, to learn robust anatomical features from sagittal, coronal, and axial views. These view-specific representations are integrated to support diverse clinical tasks, including anatomical segmentation and multi-label diagnosis. Our evaluation demonstrates that OrthoDiffusion achieves excellent performance in the segmentation of 11 knee structures and the detection of 8 knee abnormalities. The model exhibited remarkable robustness across different clinical centers and MRI field strengths, consistently outperforming traditional supervised models. Notably, in settings where labeled data was scarce, OrthoDiffusion maintained high diagnostic precision using only 10\% of training labels. Furthermore, the anatomical representations learned from knee imaging proved highly transferable to other joints, achieving strong diagnostic performance across 11 diseases of the ankle and shoulder. These findings suggest that diffusion-based foundation models can serve as a unified platform for multi-disease diagnosis and anatomical segmentation, potentially improving the efficiency and accuracy of musculoskeletal MRI interpretation in real-world clinical workflows.

MTS-CSNet: Multiscale Tensor Factorization for Deep Compressive Sensing on RGB Images

Deep learning based compressive sensing (CS) methods typically learn sampling operators using convolutional or block wise fully connected layers, which limit receptive fields and scale poorly for high dimensional data. We propose MTSCSNet, a CS framework based on Multiscale Tensor Summation (MTS) factorization, a structured operator for efficient multidimensional signal processing. MTS performs mode-wise linear transformations with multiscale summation, enabling large receptive fields and effective modeling of cross-dimensional correlations. In MTSCSNet, MTS is first used as a learnable CS operator that performs linear dimensionality reduction in tensor space, with its adjoint defining the initial back-projection, and is then applied in the reconstruction stage to directly refine this estimate. This results in a simple feed-forward architecture without iterative or proximal optimization, while remaining parameter and computation efficient. Experiments on standard CS benchmarks show that MTSCSNet achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance on RGB images, with notable PSNR gains and faster inference, even compared to recent diffusion-based CS methods, while using a significantly more compact feed-forward architecture.

Factored Causal Representation Learning for Robust Reward Modeling in RLHF

A reliable reward model is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback. However, standard reward models are susceptible to spurious features that are not causally related to human labels. This can lead to reward hacking, where high predicted reward does not translate into better behavior. In this work, we address this problem from a causal perspective by proposing a factored representation learning framework that decomposes the model's contextual embedding into (1) causal factors that are sufficient for reward prediction and (2) non-causal factors that capture reward-irrelevant attributes such as length or sycophantic bias. The reward head is then constrained to depend only on the causal component. In addition, we introduce an adversarial head trained to predict reward from the non-causal factors, while applying gradient reversal to discourage them from encoding reward-relevant information. Experiments on both mathematical and dialogue tasks demonstrate that our method learns more robust reward models and consistently improves downstream RLHF performance over state-of-the-art baselines. Analyses on length and sycophantic bias further validate the effectiveness of our method in mitigating reward hacking behaviors.

Structure-constrained Language-informed Diffusion Model for Unpaired Low-dose Computed Tomography Angiography Reconstruction

The application of iodinated contrast media (ICM) improves the sensitivity and specificity of computed tomography (CT) for a wide range of clinical indications. However, overdose of ICM can cause problems such as kidney damage and life-threatening allergic reactions. Deep learning methods can generate CT images of normal-dose ICM from low-dose ICM, reducing the required dose while maintaining diagnostic power. However, existing methods are difficult to realize accurate enhancement with incompletely paired images, mainly because of the limited ability of the model to recognize specific structures. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Structure-constrained Language-informed Diffusion Model (SLDM), a unified medical generation model that integrates structural synergy and spatial intelligence. First, the structural prior information of the image is effectively extracted to constrain the model inference process, thus ensuring structural consistency in the enhancement process. Subsequently, semantic supervision strategy with spatial intelligence is introduced, which integrates the functions of visual perception and spatial reasoning, thus prompting the model to achieve accurate enhancement. Finally, the subtraction angiography enhancement module is applied, which serves to improve the contrast of the ICM agent region to suitable interval for observation. Qualitative analysis of visual comparison and quantitative results of several metrics demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in angiographic reconstruction for low-dose contrast medium CT angiography.

CauScientist: Teaching LLMs to Respect Data for Causal Discovery

Causal discovery is fundamental to scientific understanding and reliable decision-making. Existing approaches face critical limitations: purely data-driven methods suffer from statistical indistinguishability and modeling assumptions, while recent LLM-based methods either ignore statistical evidence or incorporate unverified priors that can mislead result. To this end, we propose CauScientist, a collaborative framework that synergizes LLMs as hypothesis-generating "data scientists" with probabilistic statistics as rigorous "verifiers". CauScientist employs hybrid initialization to select superior starting graphs, iteratively refines structures through LLM-proposed modifications validated by statistical criteria, and maintains error memory to guide efficient search space. Experiments demonstrate that CauScientist substantially outperforms purely data-driven baselines, achieving up to 53.8% F1 score improvement and enhancing recall from 35.0% to 100.0%. Notably, while standalone LLM performance degrades with graph complexity, CauScientist reduces structural hamming distance (SHD) by 44.0% compared to Qwen3-32B on 37-node graphs. Our project page is at https://github.com/OpenCausaLab/CauScientist.