OCELOT 2023: Cell Detection from Cell-Tissue Interaction Challenge

Pathologists routinely alternate between different magnifications when examining Whole-Slide Images, allowing them to evaluate both broad tissue morphology and intricate cellular details to form comprehensive diagnoses. However, existing deep learning-based cell detection models struggle to replicate these behaviors and learn the interdependent semantics between structures at different magnifications. A key barrier in the field is the lack of datasets with multi-scale overlapping cell and tissue annotations. The OCELOT 2023 challenge was initiated to gather insights from the community to validate the hypothesis that understanding cell and tissue (cell-tissue) interactions is crucial for achieving human-level performance, and to accelerate the research in this field. The challenge dataset includes overlapping cell detection and tissue segmentation annotations from six organs, comprising 673 pairs sourced from 306 The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Whole-Slide Images with hematoxylin and eosin staining, divided into training, validation, and test subsets. Participants presented models that significantly enhanced the understanding of cell-tissue relationships. Top entries achieved up to a 7.99 increase in F1-score on the test set compared to the baseline cell-only model that did not incorporate cell-tissue relationships. This is a substantial improvement in performance over traditional cell-only detection methods, demonstrating the need for incorporating multi-scale semantics into the models. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the methods used by participants, highlighting innovative strategies implemented in the OCELOT 2023 challenge.

Implicit Shape-Prior for Few-Shot Assisted 3D Segmentation

The objective of this paper is to significantly reduce the manual workload required from medical professionals in complex 3D segmentation tasks that cannot be yet fully automated. For instance, in radiotherapy planning, organs at risk must be accurately identified in computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to ensure they are spared from harmful radiation. Similarly, diagnosing age-related degenerative diseases such as sarcopenia, which involve progressive muscle volume loss and strength, is commonly based on muscular mass measurements often obtained from manual segmentation of medical volumes. To alleviate the manual-segmentation burden, this paper introduces an implicit shape prior to segment volumes from sparse slice manual annotations generalized to the multi-organ case, along with a simple framework for automatically selecting the most informative slices to guide and minimize the next interactions. The experimental validation shows the method's effectiveness on two medical use cases: assisted segmentation in the context of at risks organs for brain cancer patients, and acceleration of the creation of a new database with unseen muscle shapes for patients with sarcopenia.

Medverse: A Universal Model for Full-Resolution 3D Medical Image Segmentation, Transformation and Enhancement

In-context learning (ICL) offers a promising paradigm for universal medical image analysis, enabling models to perform diverse image processing tasks without retraining. However, current ICL models for medical imaging remain limited in two critical aspects: they cannot simultaneously achieve high-fidelity predictions and global anatomical understanding, and there is no unified model trained across diverse medical imaging tasks (e.g., segmentation and enhancement) and anatomical regions. As a result, the full potential of ICL in medical imaging remains underexplored. Thus, we present \textbf{Medverse}, a universal ICL model for 3D medical imaging, trained on 22 datasets covering diverse tasks in universal image segmentation, transformation, and enhancement across multiple organs, imaging modalities, and clinical centers. Medverse employs a next-scale autoregressive in-context learning framework that progressively refines predictions from coarse to fine, generating consistent, full-resolution volumetric outputs and enabling multi-scale anatomical awareness. We further propose a blockwise cross-attention module that facilitates long-range interactions between context and target inputs while preserving computational efficiency through spatial sparsity. Medverse is extensively evaluated on a broad collection of held-out datasets covering previously unseen clinical centers, organs, species, and imaging modalities. Results demonstrate that Medverse substantially outperforms existing ICL baselines and establishes a novel paradigm for in-context learning. Code and model weights will be made publicly available. Our model are publicly available at https://github.com/jiesihu/Medverse.

Prompt-Driven Image Analysis with Multimodal Generative AI: Detection, Segmentation, Inpainting, and Interpretation

Prompt-driven image analysis converts a single natural-language instruction into multiple steps: locate, segment, edit, and describe. We present a practical case study of a unified pipeline that combines open-vocabulary detection, promptable segmentation, text-conditioned inpainting, and vision-language description into a single workflow. The system works end to end from a single prompt, retains intermediate artifacts for transparent debugging (such as detections, masks, overlays, edited images, and before and after composites), and provides the same functionality through an interactive UI and a scriptable CLI for consistent, repeatable runs. We highlight integration choices that reduce brittleness, including threshold adjustments, mask inspection with light morphology, and resource-aware defaults. In a small, single-word prompt segment, detection and segmentation produced usable masks in over 90% of cases with an accuracy above 85% based on our criteria. On a high-end GPU, inpainting makes up 60 to 75% of total runtime under typical guidance and sampling settings, which highlights the need for careful tuning. The study offers implementation-guided advice on thresholds, mask tightness, and diffusion parameters, and details version pinning, artifact logging, and seed control to support replay. Our contribution is a transparent, reliable pattern for assembling modern vision and multimodal models behind a single prompt, with clear guardrails and operational practices that improve reliability in object replacement, scene augmentation, and removal.

OmniMap: A General Mapping Framework Integrating Optics, Geometry, and Semantics

Robotic systems demand accurate and comprehensive 3D environment perception, requiring simultaneous capture of photo-realistic appearance (optical), precise layout shape (geometric), and open-vocabulary scene understanding (semantic). Existing methods typically achieve only partial fulfillment of these requirements while exhibiting optical blurring, geometric irregularities, and semantic ambiguities. To address these challenges, we propose OmniMap. Overall, OmniMap represents the first online mapping framework that simultaneously captures optical, geometric, and semantic scene attributes while maintaining real-time performance and model compactness. At the architectural level, OmniMap employs a tightly coupled 3DGS-Voxel hybrid representation that combines fine-grained modeling with structural stability. At the implementation level, OmniMap identifies key challenges across different modalities and introduces several innovations: adaptive camera modeling for motion blur and exposure compensation, hybrid incremental representation with normal constraints, and probabilistic fusion for robust instance-level understanding. Extensive experiments show OmniMap's superior performance in rendering fidelity, geometric accuracy, and zero-shot semantic segmentation compared to state-of-the-art methods across diverse scenes. The framework's versatility is further evidenced through a variety of downstream applications, including multi-domain scene Q&A, interactive editing, perception-guided manipulation, and map-assisted navigation.

Graph-Fused Vision-Language-Action for Policy Reasoning in Multi-Arm Robotic Manipulation

Acquiring dexterous robotic skills from human video demonstrations remains a significant challenge, largely due to conventional reliance on low-level trajectory replication, which often fails to generalize across varying objects, spatial layouts, and manipulator configurations. To address this limitation, we introduce Graph-Fused Vision-Language-Action (GF-VLA), a unified framework that enables dual-arm robotic systems to perform task-level reasoning and execution directly from RGB-D human demonstrations. GF-VLA employs an information-theoretic approach to extract task-relevant cues, selectively highlighting critical hand-object and object-object interactions. These cues are structured into temporally ordered scene graphs, which are subsequently integrated with a language-conditioned transformer to produce hierarchical behavior trees and interpretable Cartesian motion primitives. To enhance efficiency in bimanual execution, we propose a cross-arm allocation strategy that autonomously determines gripper assignment without requiring explicit geometric modeling. We validate GF-VLA on four dual-arm block assembly benchmarks involving symbolic structure construction and spatial generalization. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed representation achieves over 95% graph accuracy and 93% subtask segmentation, enabling the language-action planner to generate robust, interpretable task policies. When deployed on a dual-arm robot, these policies attain 94% grasp reliability, 89% placement accuracy, and 90% overall task success across stacking, letter-formation, and geometric reconfiguration tasks, evidencing strong generalization and robustness under diverse spatial and semantic variations.

VisioFirm: Cross-Platform AI-assisted Annotation Tool for Computer Vision

AI models rely on annotated data to learn pattern and perform prediction. Annotation is usually a labor-intensive step that require associating labels ranging from a simple classification label to more complex tasks such as object detection, oriented bounding box estimation, and instance segmentation. Traditional tools often require extensive manual input, limiting scalability for large datasets. To address this, we introduce VisioFirm, an open-source web application designed to streamline image labeling through AI-assisted automation. VisioFirm integrates state-of-the-art foundation models into an interface with a filtering pipeline to reduce human-in-the-loop efforts. This hybrid approach employs CLIP combined with pre-trained detectors like Ultralytics models for common classes and zero-shot models such as Grounding DINO for custom labels, generating initial annotations with low-confidence thresholding to maximize recall. Through this framework, when tested on COCO-type of classes, initial prediction have been proven to be mostly correct though the users can refine these via interactive tools supporting bounding boxes, oriented bounding boxes, and polygons. Additionally, VisioFirm has on-the-fly segmentation powered by Segment Anything accelerated through WebGPU for browser-side efficiency. The tool supports multiple export formats (YOLO, COCO, Pascal VOC, CSV) and operates offline after model caching, enhancing accessibility. VisioFirm demonstrates up to 90\% reduction in manual effort through benchmarks on diverse datasets, while maintaining high annotation accuracy via clustering of connected CLIP-based disambiguate components and IoU-graph for redundant detection suppression. VisioFirm can be accessed from \href{https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm}{https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm}.

ROPE: A Novel Method for Real-Time Phase Estimation of Complex Biological Rhythms

Accurate phase estimation -- the process of assigning phase values between $0$ and $2\pi$ to repetitive or periodic signals -- is a cornerstone in the analysis of oscillatory signals across diverse fields, from neuroscience to robotics, where it is fundamental, e.g., to understanding coordination in neural networks, cardiorespiratory coupling, and human-robot interaction. However, existing methods are often limited to offline processing and/or constrained to one-dimensional signals. In this paper, we introduce ROPE, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first phase-estimation algorithm capable of (i) handling signals of arbitrary dimension and (ii) operating in real-time, with minimal error. ROPE identifies repetitions within the signal to segment it into (pseudo-)periods and assigns phase values by performing efficient, tractable searches over previous signal segments. We extensively validate the algorithm on a variety of signal types, including trajectories from chaotic dynamical systems, human motion-capture data, and electrocardiographic recordings. Our results demonstrate that ROPE is robust against noise and signal drift, and achieves significantly superior performance compared to state-of-the-art phase estimation methods. This advancement enables real-time analysis of complex biological rhythms, opening new pathways, for example, for early diagnosis of pathological rhythm disruptions and developing rhythm-based therapeutic interventions in neurological and cardiovascular disorders.

Can the Waymo Open Motion Dataset Support Realistic Behavioral Modeling? A Validation Study with Naturalistic Trajectories

The Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD) has become a popular resource for data-driven modeling of autonomous vehicles (AVs) behavior. However, its validity for behavioral analysis remains uncertain due to proprietary post-processing, the absence of error quantification, and the segmentation of trajectories into 20-second clips. This study examines whether WOMD accurately captures the dynamics and interactions observed in real-world AV operations. Leveraging an independently collected naturalistic dataset from Level 4 AV operations in Phoenix, Arizona (PHX), we perform comparative analyses across three representative urban driving scenarios: discharging at signalized intersections, car-following, and lane-changing behaviors. For the discharging analysis, headways are manually extracted from aerial video to ensure negligible measurement error. For the car-following and lane-changing cases, we apply the Simulation-Extrapolation (SIMEX) method to account for empirically estimated error in the PHX data and use Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distances to quantify behavioral differences. Results across all scenarios consistently show that behavior in PHX falls outside the behavioral envelope of WOMD. Notably, WOMD underrepresents short headways and abrupt decelerations. These findings suggest that behavioral models calibrated solely on WOMD may systematically underestimate the variability, risk, and complexity of naturalistic driving. Caution is therefore warranted when using WOMD for behavior modeling without proper validation against independently collected data.

Maybe you don't need a U-Net: convolutional feature upsampling for materials micrograph segmentation

Feature foundation models - usually vision transformers - offer rich semantic descriptors of images, useful for downstream tasks such as (interactive) segmentation and object detection. For computational efficiency these descriptors are often patch-based, and so struggle to represent the fine features often present in micrographs; they also struggle with the large image sizes present in materials and biological image analysis. In this work, we train a convolutional neural network to upsample low-resolution (i.e, large patch size) foundation model features with reference to the input image. We apply this upsampler network (without any further training) to efficiently featurise and then segment a variety of microscopy images, including plant cells, a lithium-ion battery cathode and organic crystals. The richness of these upsampled features admits separation of hard to segment phases, like hairline cracks. We demonstrate that interactive segmentation with these deep features produces high-quality segmentations far faster and with far fewer labels than training or finetuning a more traditional convolutional network.