Cuddle-Fish: Exploring a Soft Floating Robot with Flapping Wings for Physical Interactions

Flying robots, such as quadrotor drones, offer new possibilities for human-robot interaction but often pose safety risks due to fast-spinning propellers, rigid structures, and noise. In contrast, lighter-than-air flapping-wing robots, inspired by animal movement, offer a soft, quiet, and touch-safe alternative. Building on these advantages, we present \textit{Cuddle-Fish}, a soft, flapping-wing floating robot designed for safe, close-proximity interactions in indoor spaces. Through a user study with 24 participants, we explored their perceptions of the robot and experiences during a series of co-located demonstrations in which the robot moved near them. Results showed that participants felt safe, willingly engaged in touch-based interactions with the robot, and exhibited spontaneous affective behaviours, such as patting, stroking, hugging, and cheek-touching, without external prompting. They also reported positive emotional responses towards the robot. These findings suggest that the soft floating robot with flapping wings can serve as a novel and socially acceptable alternative to traditional rigid flying robots, opening new possibilities for companionship, play, and interactive experiences in everyday indoor environments.

DomainCQA: Crafting Expert-Level QA from Domain-Specific Charts

Chart Question Answering (CQA) benchmarks are essential for evaluating the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to interpret visual data. However, current benchmarks focus primarily on the evaluation of general-purpose CQA but fail to adequately capture domain-specific challenges. We introduce DomainCQA, a systematic methodology for constructing domain-specific CQA benchmarks, and demonstrate its effectiveness by developing AstroChart, a CQA benchmark in the field of astronomy. Our evaluation shows that chart reasoning and combining chart information with domain knowledge for deeper analysis and summarization, rather than domain-specific knowledge, pose the primary challenge for existing MLLMs, highlighting a critical gap in current benchmarks. By providing a scalable and rigorous framework, DomainCQA enables more precise assessment and improvement of MLLMs for domain-specific applications.

RoGSplat: Learning Robust Generalizable Human Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images

This paper presents RoGSplat, a novel approach for synthesizing high-fidelity novel views of unseen human from sparse multi-view images, while requiring no cumbersome per-subject optimization. Unlike previous methods that typically struggle with sparse views with few overlappings and are less effective in reconstructing complex human geometry, the proposed method enables robust reconstruction in such challenging conditions. Our key idea is to lift SMPL vertices to dense and reliable 3D prior points representing accurate human body geometry, and then regress human Gaussian parameters based on the points. To account for possible misalignment between SMPL model and images, we propose to predict image-aligned 3D prior points by leveraging both pixel-level features and voxel-level features, from which we regress the coarse Gaussians. To enhance the ability to capture high-frequency details, we further render depth maps from the coarse 3D Gaussians to help regress fine-grained pixel-wise Gaussians. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in novel view synthesis and cross-dataset generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/RoGSplat.

CGCOD: Class-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is designed to identify objects that blend seamlessly with their surroundings. Due to the complexity of camouflaged objects (such as shape, color, and texture), their semantic cues are often blurred or completely lost, posing a significant challenge for COD. Existing COD methods often rely on visual features, which are not stable enough in changeable camouflage environments. This instability leads to false positives and false negatives, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate segmentation results. In this paper, to solve this problem, we propose a new task, Class-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection (CG-COD), which extends the traditional COD task by introducing object class knowledge, significantly improving the robustness and segmentation accuracy of the model in complex environments. Toward this end, we construct a dataset, CamoClass, containing the camouflaged objects in the real scenes and their corresponding class annotation. Based on this, we propose a multi-stage framework CGNet which consists of a plug-and-play class prompt generator and a class-guided detector. Under the guidance of textual information, CGNet enables efficient segmentation. It is worth emphasizing that for the first time, we extend the object class annotations on existing COD benchmark datasets, and introduce a flexible framework to improve the performance of the existing COD model under text guidance.

Acquisition of Spatially-Varying Reflectance and Surface Normals via Polarized Reflectance Fields

Accurately measuring the geometry and spatially-varying reflectance of real-world objects is a complex task due to their intricate shapes formed by concave features, hollow engravings and diverse surfaces, resulting in inter-reflection and occlusion when photographed. Moreover, issues like lens flare and overexposure can arise from interference from secondary reflections and limitations of hardware even in professional studios. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using polarized reflectance field capture and a comprehensive statistical analysis algorithm to obtain highly accurate surface normals (within 0.1mm/px) and spatially-varying reflectance data, including albedo, specular separation, roughness, and anisotropy parameters for realistic rendering and analysis. Our algorithm removes image artifacts via analytical modeling and further employs both an initial step and an optimization step computed on the whole image collection to further enhance the precision of per-pixel surface reflectance and normal measurement. We showcase the captured shapes and reflectance of diverse objects with a wide material range, spanning from highly diffuse to highly glossy - a challenge unaddressed by prior techniques. Our approach enhances downstream applications by offering precise measurements for realistic rendering and provides a valuable training dataset for emerging research in inverse rendering. We will release the polarized reflectance fields of several captured objects with this work.

An Entailment Tree Generation Approach for Multimodal Multi-Hop Question Answering with Mixture-of-Experts and Iterative Feedback Mechanism

With the rise of large-scale language models (LLMs), it is currently popular and effective to convert multimodal information into text descriptions for multimodal multi-hop question answering. However, we argue that the current methods of multi-modal multi-hop question answering still mainly face two challenges: 1) The retrieved evidence containing a large amount of redundant information, inevitably leads to a significant drop in performance due to irrelevant information misleading the prediction. 2) The reasoning process without interpretable reasoning steps makes the model difficult to discover the logical errors for handling complex questions. To solve these problems, we propose a unified LLMs-based approach but without heavily relying on them due to the LLM's potential errors, and innovatively treat multimodal multi-hop question answering as a joint entailment tree generation and question answering problem. Specifically, we design a multi-task learning framework with a focus on facilitating common knowledge sharing across interpretability and prediction tasks while preventing task-specific errors from interfering with each other via mixture of experts. Afterward, we design an iterative feedback mechanism to further enhance both tasks by feeding back the results of the joint training to the LLM for regenerating entailment trees, aiming to iteratively refine the potential answer. Notably, our method has won the first place in the official leaderboard of WebQA (since April 10, 2024), and achieves competitive results on MultimodalQA.

Progressive Vision-Language Prompt for Multi-Organ Multi-Class Cell Semantic Segmentation with Single Branch

Pathological cell semantic segmentation is a fundamental technology in computational pathology, essential for applications like cancer diagnosis and effective treatment. Given that multiple cell types exist across various organs, with subtle differences in cell size and shape, multi-organ, multi-class cell segmentation is particularly challenging. Most existing methods employ multi-branch frameworks to enhance feature extraction, but often result in complex architectures. Moreover, reliance on visual information limits performance in multi-class analysis due to intricate textural details. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-OrgaN multi-Class cell semantic segmentation method with a single brancH (MONCH) that leverages vision-language input. Specifically, we design a hierarchical feature extraction mechanism to provide coarse-to-fine-grained features for segmenting cells of various shapes, including high-frequency, convolutional, and topological features. Inspired by the synergy of textual and multi-grained visual features, we introduce a progressive prompt decoder to harmonize multimodal information, integrating features from fine to coarse granularity for better context capture. Extensive experiments on the PanNuke dataset, which has significant class imbalance and subtle cell size and shape variations, demonstrate that MONCH outperforms state-of-the-art cell segmentation methods and vision-language models. Codes and implementations will be made publicly available.

Viewpoint Consistency in 3D Generation via Attention and CLIP Guidance

Despite recent advances in text-to-3D generation techniques, current methods often suffer from geometric inconsistencies, commonly referred to as the Janus Problem. This paper identifies the root cause of the Janus Problem: viewpoint generation bias in diffusion models, which creates a significant gap between the actual generated viewpoint and the expected one required for optimizing the 3D model. To address this issue, we propose a tuning-free approach called the Attention and CLIP Guidance (ACG) mechanism. ACG enhances desired viewpoints by adaptively controlling cross-attention maps, employs CLIP-based view-text similarities to filter out erroneous viewpoints, and uses a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy with staged prompts to progressively refine 3D generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the Janus Problem without compromising generation speed, establishing ACG as an efficient, plug-and-play component for existing text-to-3D frameworks.

EyeCLIP: A visual-language foundation model for multi-modal ophthalmic image analysis

Early detection of eye diseases like glaucoma, macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy is crucial for preventing vision loss. While artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models hold significant promise for addressing these challenges, existing ophthalmic foundation models primarily focus on a single modality, whereas diagnosing eye diseases requires multiple modalities. A critical yet often overlooked aspect is harnessing the multi-view information across various modalities for the same patient. Additionally, due to the long-tail nature of ophthalmic diseases, standard fully supervised or unsupervised learning approaches often struggle. Therefore, it is essential to integrate clinical text to capture a broader spectrum of diseases. We propose EyeCLIP, a visual-language foundation model developed using over 2.77 million multi-modal ophthalmology images with partial text data. To fully leverage the large multi-modal unlabeled and labeled data, we introduced a pretraining strategy that combines self-supervised reconstructions, multi-modal image contrastive learning, and image-text contrastive learning to learn a shared representation of multiple modalities. Through evaluation using 14 benchmark datasets, EyeCLIP can be transferred to a wide range of downstream tasks involving ocular and systemic diseases, achieving state-of-the-art performance in disease classification, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. EyeCLIP represents a significant advancement over previous methods, especially showcasing few-shot, even zero-shot capabilities in real-world long-tail scenarios.

Generative Sentiment Analysis via Latent Category Distribution and Constrained Decoding

Fine-grained sentiment analysis involves extracting and organizing sentiment elements from textual data. However, existing approaches often overlook issues of category semantic inclusion and overlap, as well as inherent structural patterns within the target sequence. This study introduces a generative sentiment analysis model. To address the challenges related to category semantic inclusion and overlap, a latent category distribution variable is introduced. By reconstructing the input of a variational autoencoder, the model learns the intensity of the relationship between categories and text, thereby improving sequence generation. Additionally, a trie data structure and constrained decoding strategy are utilized to exploit structural patterns, which in turn reduces the search space and regularizes the generation process. Experimental results on the Restaurant-ACOS and Laptop-ACOS datasets demonstrate a significant performance improvement compared to baseline models. Ablation experiments further confirm the effectiveness of latent category distribution and constrained decoding strategy.