A Comprehensive Survey on Video Scene Parsing:Advances, Challenges, and Prospects

Video Scene Parsing (VSP) has emerged as a cornerstone in computer vision, facilitating the simultaneous segmentation, recognition, and tracking of diverse visual entities in dynamic scenes. In this survey, we present a holistic review of recent advances in VSP, covering a wide array of vision tasks, including Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS), Video Instance Segmentation (VIS), Video Panoptic Segmentation (VPS), as well as Video Tracking and Segmentation (VTS), and Open-Vocabulary Video Segmentation (OVVS). We systematically analyze the evolution from traditional hand-crafted features to modern deep learning paradigms -- spanning from fully convolutional networks to the latest transformer-based architectures -- and assess their effectiveness in capturing both local and global temporal contexts. Furthermore, our review critically discusses the technical challenges, ranging from maintaining temporal consistency to handling complex scene dynamics, and offers a comprehensive comparative study of datasets and evaluation metrics that have shaped current benchmarking standards. By distilling the key contributions and shortcomings of state-of-the-art methodologies, this survey highlights emerging trends and prospective research directions that promise to further elevate the robustness and adaptability of VSP in real-world applications.

PDCNet: a benchmark and general deep learning framework for activity prediction of peptide-drug conjugates

Peptide-drug conjugates (PDCs) represent a promising therapeutic avenue for human diseases, particularly in cancer treatment. Systematic elucidation of structure-activity relationships (SARs) and accurate prediction of the activity of PDCs are critical for the rational design and optimization of these conjugates. To this end, we carefully design and construct a benchmark PDCs dataset compiled from literature-derived collections and PDCdb database, and then develop PDCNet, the first unified deep learning framework for forecasting the activity of PDCs. The architecture systematically captures the complex factors underlying anticancer decisions of PDCs in real-word scenarios through a multi-level feature fusion framework that collaboratively characterizes and learns the features of peptides, linkers, and payloads. Leveraging a curated PDCs benchmark dataset, comprehensive evaluation results show that PDCNet demonstrates superior predictive capability, with the highest AUC, F1, MCC and BA scores of 0.9213, 0.7656, 0.7071 and 0.8388 for the test set, outperforming eight established traditional machine learning models. Multi-level validations, including 5-fold cross-validation, threshold testing, ablation studies, model interpretability analysis and external independent testing, further confirm the superiority, robustness, and usability of the PDCNet architecture. We anticipate that PDCNet represents a novel paradigm, incorporating both a benchmark dataset and advanced models, which can accelerate the design and discovery of new PDC-based therapeutic agents.

SensorLM: Learning the Language of Wearable Sensors

We present SensorLM, a family of sensor-language foundation models that enable wearable sensor data understanding with natural language. Despite its pervasive nature, aligning and interpreting sensor data with language remains challenging due to the lack of paired, richly annotated sensor-text descriptions in uncurated, real-world wearable data. We introduce a hierarchical caption generation pipeline designed to capture statistical, structural, and semantic information from sensor data. This approach enabled the curation of the largest sensor-language dataset to date, comprising over 59.7 million hours of data from more than 103,000 people. Furthermore, SensorLM extends prominent multimodal pretraining architectures (e.g., CLIP, CoCa) and recovers them as specific variants within a generic architecture. Extensive experiments on real-world tasks in human activity analysis and healthcare verify the superior performance of SensorLM over state-of-the-art in zero-shot recognition, few-shot learning, and cross-modal retrieval. SensorLM also demonstrates intriguing capabilities including scaling behaviors, label efficiency, sensor captioning, and zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks.

RADAR: Benchmarking Language Models on Imperfect Tabular Data

Language models (LMs) are increasingly being deployed to perform autonomous data analyses. However, their data awareness -- the ability to recognize, reason over, and appropriately handle data artifacts such as missing values, outliers, and logical inconsistencies -- remains underexplored. These artifacts are especially common in real-world tabular data and, if mishandled, can significantly compromise the validity of analytical conclusions. To address this gap, we present RADAR, a benchmark for systematically evaluating data-aware reasoning on tabular data. We develop a framework to simulate data artifacts via programmatic perturbations to enable targeted evaluation of model behavior. RADAR comprises 2980 table query pairs, grounded in real-world data spanning 9 domains and 5 data artifact types. In addition to evaluating artifact handling, RADAR systematically varies table size to study how reasoning performance holds when increasing table size. Our evaluation reveals that, despite decent performance on tables without data artifacts, frontier models degrade significantly when data artifacts are introduced, exposing critical gaps in their capacity for robust, data-aware analysis. Designed to be flexible and extensible, RADAR supports diverse perturbation types and controllable table sizes, offering a valuable resource for advancing tabular reasoning.

Runtime Analysis of Evolutionary NAS for Multiclass Classification

Evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS) is a key part of evolutionary machine learning, which commonly utilizes evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to automatically design high-performing deep neural architectures. During past years, various ENAS methods have been proposed with exceptional performance. However, the theory research of ENAS is still in the infant. In this work, we step for the runtime analysis, which is an essential theory aspect of EAs, of ENAS upon multiclass classification problems. Specifically, we first propose a benchmark to lay the groundwork for the analysis. Furthermore, we design a two-level search space, making it suitable for multiclass classification problems and consistent with the common settings of ENAS. Based on both designs, we consider (1+1)-ENAS algorithms with one-bit and bit-wise mutations, and analyze their upper and lower bounds on the expected runtime. We prove that the algorithm using both mutations can find the optimum with the expected runtime upper bound of $O(rM\ln{rM})$ and lower bound of $\Omega(rM\ln{M})$. This suggests that a simple one-bit mutation may be greatly considered, given that most state-of-the-art ENAS methods are laboriously designed with the bit-wise mutation. Empirical studies also support our theoretical proof.

LSM-2: Learning from Incomplete Wearable Sensor Data

Foundation models, a cornerstone of recent advancements in machine learning, have predominantly thrived on complete and well-structured data. Wearable sensor data frequently suffers from significant missingness, posing a substantial challenge for self-supervised learning (SSL) models that typically assume complete data inputs. This paper introduces the second generation of Large Sensor Model (LSM-2) with Adaptive and Inherited Masking (AIM), a novel SSL approach that learns robust representations directly from incomplete data without requiring explicit imputation. AIM's core novelty lies in its use of learnable mask tokens to model both existing ("inherited") and artificially introduced missingness, enabling it to robustly handle fragmented real-world data during inference. Pre-trained on an extensive dataset of 40M hours of day-long multimodal sensor data, our LSM-2 with AIM achieves the best performance across a diverse range of tasks, including classification, regression and generative modeling. Furthermore, LSM-2 with AIM exhibits superior scaling performance, and critically, maintains high performance even under targeted missingness scenarios, reflecting clinically coherent patterns, such as the diagnostic value of nighttime biosignals for hypertension prediction. This makes AIM a more reliable choice for real-world wearable data applications.

Unleashing Humanoid Reaching Potential via Real-world-Ready Skill Space

Humans possess a large reachable space in the 3D world, enabling interaction with objects at varying heights and distances. However, realizing such large-space reaching on humanoids is a complex whole-body control problem and requires the robot to master diverse skills simultaneously-including base positioning and reorientation, height and body posture adjustments, and end-effector pose control. Learning from scratch often leads to optimization difficulty and poor sim2real transferability. To address this challenge, we propose Real-world-Ready Skill Space (R2S2). Our approach begins with a carefully designed skill library consisting of real-world-ready primitive skills. We ensure optimal performance and robust sim2real transfer through individual skill tuning and sim2real evaluation. These skills are then ensembled into a unified latent space, serving as a structured prior that helps task execution in an efficient and sim2real transferable manner. A high-level planner, trained to sample skills from this space, enables the robot to accomplish real-world goal-reaching tasks. We demonstrate zero-shot sim2real transfer and validate R2S2 in multiple challenging goal-reaching scenarios.

Advancing Conversational Diagnostic AI with Multimodal Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential for conducting diagnostic conversations but evaluation has been largely limited to language-only interactions, deviating from the real-world requirements of remote care delivery. Instant messaging platforms permit clinicians and patients to upload and discuss multimodal medical artifacts seamlessly in medical consultation, but the ability of LLMs to reason over such data while preserving other attributes of competent diagnostic conversation remains unknown. Here we advance the conversational diagnosis and management performance of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) through a new capability to gather and interpret multimodal data, and reason about this precisely during consultations. Leveraging Gemini 2.0 Flash, our system implements a state-aware dialogue framework, where conversation flow is dynamically controlled by intermediate model outputs reflecting patient states and evolving diagnoses. Follow-up questions are strategically directed by uncertainty in such patient states, leading to a more structured multimodal history-taking process that emulates experienced clinicians. We compared AMIE to primary care physicians (PCPs) in a randomized, blinded, OSCE-style study of chat-based consultations with patient actors. We constructed 105 evaluation scenarios using artifacts like smartphone skin photos, ECGs, and PDFs of clinical documents across diverse conditions and demographics. Our rubric assessed multimodal capabilities and other clinically meaningful axes like history-taking, diagnostic accuracy, management reasoning, communication, and empathy. Specialist evaluation showed AMIE to be superior to PCPs on 7/9 multimodal and 29/32 non-multimodal axes (including diagnostic accuracy). The results show clear progress in multimodal conversational diagnostic AI, but real-world translation needs further research.

LLM-based Text Simplification and its Effect on User Comprehension and Cognitive Load

Information on the web, such as scientific publications and Wikipedia, often surpasses users' reading level. To help address this, we used a self-refinement approach to develop a LLM capability for minimally lossy text simplification. To validate our approach, we conducted a randomized study involving 4563 participants and 31 texts spanning 6 broad subject areas: PubMed (biomedical scientific articles), biology, law, finance, literature/philosophy, and aerospace/computer science. Participants were randomized to viewing original or simplified texts in a subject area, and answered multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that tested their comprehension of the text. The participants were also asked to provide qualitative feedback such as task difficulty. Our results indicate that participants who read the simplified text answered more MCQs correctly than their counterparts who read the original text (3.9% absolute increase, p<0.05). This gain was most striking with PubMed (14.6%), while more moderate gains were observed for finance (5.5%), aerospace/computer science (3.8%) domains, and legal (3.5%). Notably, the results were robust to whether participants could refer back to the text while answering MCQs. The absolute accuracy decreased by up to ~9% for both original and simplified setups where participants could not refer back to the text, but the ~4% overall improvement persisted. Finally, participants' self-reported perceived ease based on a simplified NASA Task Load Index was greater for those who read the simplified text (absolute change on a 5-point scale 0.33, p<0.05). This randomized study, involving an order of magnitude more participants than prior works, demonstrates the potential of LLMs to make complex information easier to understand. Our work aims to enable a broader audience to better learn and make use of expert knowledge available on the web, improving information accessibility.

Exploiting Temporal State Space Sharing for Video Semantic Segmentation

Video semantic segmentation (VSS) plays a vital role in understanding the temporal evolution of scenes. Traditional methods often segment videos frame-by-frame or in a short temporal window, leading to limited temporal context, redundant computations, and heavy memory requirements. To this end, we introduce a Temporal Video State Space Sharing (TV3S) architecture to leverage Mamba state space models for temporal feature sharing. Our model features a selective gating mechanism that efficiently propagates relevant information across video frames, eliminating the need for a memory-heavy feature pool. By processing spatial patches independently and incorporating shifted operation, TV3S supports highly parallel computation in both training and inference stages, which reduces the delay in sequential state space processing and improves the scalability for long video sequences. Moreover, TV3S incorporates information from prior frames during inference, achieving long-range temporal coherence and superior adaptability to extended sequences. Evaluations on the VSPW and Cityscapes datasets reveal that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, establishing a new standard for VSS with consistent results across long video sequences. By achieving a good balance between accuracy and efficiency, TV3S shows a significant advancement in spatiotemporal modeling, paving the way for efficient video analysis. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ashesham/TV3S.git.