Document understanding aims to perform question answering and information extraction over document images, where the visual content is highly information-dense and most queries rely on only a few relevant layout regions. However, existing methods either adopt a one-pass strategy that implicitly assumes all layouts are equally important, or focus excessively on small regions at the cost of losing critical layout information. To address these limitations, we introduce Doc-CoB (Chain-of-Boxes), a simple-yet-effective framework that integrates coarse-to-fine layout-aware visual reasoning into multimodal large language models. Instead of directly zooming into small regions, Doc-CoB progressively focuses on query-relevant layouts while preserving global document information. Specifically, it first selects key layout boxes and then focuses on them for further understanding with visual prompting. To support this paradigm, we introduce two reasoning tasks for box recognition and box reasoning, with an automatic pipeline that constructs 249k training samples with intermediate visual supervision. Experiments on seven benchmarks with four popular models show that Doc-CoB significantly improves performance, demonstrating its effectiveness and wide applicability. The code and the data are available at https://github.com/Doc-CoB/Doc-CoB.
Recent generative approaches to geometry estimation adapt pretrained image diffusion models and treat the task as image-conditioned generation. Leveraging off-the-shelf image diffusion models, they either (i) train task-specific geometry models (for depth and surface normal estimation) independently, losing the opportunity of exploring the intrinsic correlation of these geometric targets, or (ii) jointly fine-tune modified image diffusion backbones (e.g., altered self-attention), which typically demands substantial labeled data. To overcome these limitations in a principled fashion, we repurpose pretrained video generative models as a unified and data-efficient framework for geometry estimation, formulated innovatively as a next-frames prediction task. Our method, GeoNeXt, inherits naturally structured knowledge and richer priors from the video model, while further adapting them for joint modeling of images and geometry targets (image <-> geometry), enabling more data efficient and effective learning of geometry. Extensive experiments validate our method for zero-shot monocular depth and surface normal estimation across diverse datasets, outperforming both previous task-specific and unified generative competitors while using substantially less training data. Notably, our method rivals discriminative state-of-the-art approaches trained on over 100x more data and even standouts on several benchmarks.
Haosen Yang, Jifei Song, Zhensong Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Texture image classification plays a significant role in computer vision applications, including industrial inspection, medical image analysis, remote sensing, and object recognition. Handcrafted features can capture local texture characteristics but may have limited capability to represent complex visual patterns. In contrast, deep learning models automatically learn discriminative representations but may not fully exploit the multiscale spatial-frequency information inherent in texture images. This paper proposes a hybrid feature fusion framework, termed DWT_AlexNet_DNN, which combines Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) features with deep features extracted using AlexNet for texture image classification.
We present an anatomy-aware, promptable model for whole-body lesion segmentation in FDG and PSMA PET/CT, developed for the AUTOPET V challenge. The proposed method is built as family of nnU-Net-based models and trained in two stages: i) a pre-training stage that produces a strong initial segmentation, and ii) an online interactive stage that learns to exploit scribble prompts, refining the prediction over successive interactions. Anatomical context is incorporated through organ supervision using a single shared head that predicts lesions and organs from the same features, which reduces false positives arising from physiological uptake. Also as the tracer (i.e., FDG/PSMA) is not provided at inference, we add a tracer classifier based on image processing and a random forest over coronal MIP features, routing each study to a combined FDG+PSMA model or to a PSMA-specific model. Across four-fold cross-validation the organ-supervised model achieves the best and most stable performance, the interactive stage improves the Dice score monotonically with each prompt, and PSMA-specific training yields the strongest tracer-wise results.
Pablo Lozano-Jimenez, Sergio Romero-Tapiador, Ruben Tolosana· 0 citations
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Contrastive vision-language learning uses paired chest CT volumes and radiology reports to learn abnormality classifiers without manually annotated labels. However, two characteristics of chest CT challenge conventional global contrastive learning. First, many critical abnormalities are small or anatomically localized, and pooling an en- tire volume into a single embedding may dilute their visual evidence. Second, the standard contrastive objective treats every other scan in a batch as a negative. Because many chest CTs share abnormalities, this objective incorrectly pushes co-positive pairs apart. We propose Anatomy-Routed Contrastive Learning for 3D Chest CT (ARC-CT), a region-aware framework that addresses these limitations using only la- bels extracted from reports by an LLM, with no manual annotations or bounding boxes. ARC-CT combines three components: (1) an Anato- myQFormer localizing evidence via queries constrained by automatically generated organ masks; (2) a label-Jaccard soft InfoNCE objective in- tegrating the standard one-hot target with the label-set overlap of each pair, which reduces false-negative penalties between studies that share clinical findings; and (3) an organ-level alignment loss connecting mask- pooled visual features to organ-specific report text extracted offline with a large language model. ARC-CT achieves a 0.86 mask-free macro AUC across 18 abnormalities using a compact 3D ResNet-18 backbone. Over- all, ARC-CT outperforms both comparable efficient baselines and sev- eral larger transformer models. Our code and weights are available at https://github.com/arc-ct/arc-ct.
Huseyin Umut Isik, Mehmet Alp Ozaydin, Sila Kurugol et al.· 0 citations
Real-time musculoskeletal (MSK) surrogates could support personalized rehabilitation for children with cerebral palsy (CP), but their credibility depends on subject-wise evaluation, low inference latency, and calibrated uncertainty. We develop a subject-conditioned causal neural surrogate using OpenSim-derived static parameters, temporal joint kinematics, true muscle capacities, and training-only perturbations. On a real pediatric CP gait dataset comprising nine children, we use leave-one-subject-out validation on six development subjects and evaluate a frozen configuration once on three locked test subjects. The surrogate accurately reproduces musculotendon lengths (R-square = 0.92 in development validation and approximately 0.95 on locked subjects; nRMSE < 8%) while requiring only sub-millisecond to few-millisecond neural inference, well below a 100 ms interactive-rehabilitation target. In contrast, direct muscle-force estimation remains unstable at this small, heterogeneous scale: pooled metrics can overstate within-subject, per-muscle accuracy. A Monte Carlo credibility pilot further shows that propagating only +/-5% anthropometry and muscle-capacity variation produces severely overconfident nominal 90% intervals (approximately 4% force coverage and below 1% MT-length coverage). These results establish a leakage-free evaluation and credibility framework for pediatric MSK surrogates, while identifying force modeling and epistemic uncertainty as the central next challenges for clinically credible digital twins.
Precise dense correspondence is a fundamental prerequisite for multimodal spectral imaging systems that fuse disparate wavelength ranges for subsequent analysis in medical and scientific imaging. Corresponding image points are often observed with non-overlapping spectral sensitivities, leading to wavelength-dependent contrast changes, intensity inversions, and appearance shifts for which dense ground truth is difficult to obtain and conventional RGB-based training data provides only limited supervision. We address this data gap by introducing a sensor-agnostic cross-spectral modulation protocol on established correspondence benchmarks with intensity input projection, and by proposing a synthetic cross-spectral correspondence benchmark simulating physically plausible radiometric differences. Evaluation on several modern dense correspondence backbones trained with our unified cross-spectral protocol showed substantial improvements under severe spectral mismatch while maintaining performance on standard RGB benchmarks. Ablation experiments show that view-dependent channel selection and nonlinear radiometric transformations provide complementary robustness, indicating that the primary limitation of existing models is not their structural matching capacity but the mismatch between training distribution and spectral characteristics of the target image pair. Qualitative evaluations on heterogeneous medical spectral acquisition systems demonstrate the practical relevance of the proposed training data augmentation protocol as an enabler for spatially coherent spectral fusion in HSI workflows.
Eric L. Wisotzky, Jost Triller, Simon W. H\"artl et al.· 0 citations
Change detection in Earth observation (EO) is critical for monitoring land surface transformations, yet recent research in the field is constrained by inconsistent evaluation protocols and a narrow focus on predictive accuracy without regard for computational efficiency. To address this, we present a standardized, open-source benchmark for evaluating state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning methods for Earth observation change detection. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of ten representative model architectures, ranging from convolutional networks (CNNs) to vision transformers (ViTs), across ten heterogeneous change detection datasets. We rigorously evaluate these models with identical experimental protocols, comparing models trained from scratch against those utilizing pre-trained weights. Furthermore, we evaluate predictive performance alongside computational efficiency, including parameter counts and inference latency. Our findings reveal that well-optimized classical architectures, such as Siamese U-Nets, frequently outperform more complex contemporary models when computational efficiency is factored in, and that pre-training consistently provides a significant performance boost with no additional inference cost. To ensure complete transparency and reproducibility, all experimental resources, including standardized data splits, training scripts, training logs, and model checkpoints are publicly available and adhere to FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).
Tadej Tomani\v{c}, Alice Baudhuin, Jan Soto\v{s}ek et al.· 0 citations
We present CheXtriev, a graph-based, anatomy-aware framework for chest radiograph retrieval. Unlike prior methods focussed on global features, our method leverages graph transformers to extract informative features from specific anatomical regions. Furthermore, it captures spatial context and the interplay between anatomical location and findings. This contextualization, grounded in evidence-based anatomy, results in a richer anatomy-aware representation and leads to more accurate, effective and efficient retrieval, particularly for less prevalent findings. CheXtriv outperforms state-of-the-art global and local approaches by 18% to 26% in retrieval accuracy and 11% to 23% in ranking quality. The code is available at https://github.com/cvit-mip/chextriev.
Interpreting a CT scan means comparing structures on either side, judging how far apart organs sit, and knowing where each one belongs. Medical vision encoders are evaluated on diagnostic accuracy, or through assembled multimodal systems where a failure is hard to attribute, so it remains unclear whether their representations support any of this. We construct SPAR-Bench, eight probes over multi-organ abdominal CT that separate coordinate localization, relational reasoning, and spatial queries, and apply them to five architectural configurations and three medical foundation models, frozen and finetuned. Probes that ask for a comparison within the slice stay at chance, and neither pretraining scale, finetuning, nor architecture closes the gap. Probes that appear solved in domain fall to chance under zero-shot transfer, indicating that their accuracy reflects recall of canonical anatomy rather than computation over the image. Reading the same frozen features with a pooled head rather than the full set of tokens moves relational recovery from 0.7% to 67.8%, so pooled probing understates what a representation holds. Questions the encoders answer well are answered at chance by four open-weight MLLMs. Our results suggest these encoders carry a map of where organs usually lie, and little of the machinery for comparing structures within a particular patient. Code and data will be available at https://spar-bench.github.io.
Recent progress has been made in 3D Gaussian representation for reconstruction, generation, and physical simulation. However, current approaches mainly concentrate on physics-based dynamic generation of solid objects and only handle single-phase collision interactions. We introduce VersaGauss, a unified framework for generation, simulation, and rendering that supports versatile physics-based dynamic generation, particularly for multiphase interactions. Our system takes a few images as input and produces a realistic, physics-driven 3D dynamic scene with multiple objects. To optimize the Gaussian kernel distribution, we develop a particle pruning algorithm. We also propose the Coupled Multiphase Point Method (CMPM) to effectively model and generate multiphase interactions. Additionally, harmonic interpolation within CMPM and a Gaussian evolution strategy are introduced to achieve realistic fluid rendering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework can simulate interactions among various materials such as fluid, rubber, sand, snow, and others. Code is available at https://github.com/Elowen-surj/VersaGauss.
Ruijie Su, Lingxiao Yang, Xiaohua Xie et al.· 0 citations
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain prone to hallucinations, producing responses that are irrelevant or inconsistent with the multimodal input. Existing mitigation methods mainly rely on external supervision, output calibration, or attention regulation, leaving the internal representation dynamics of autoregressive generation underexplored. We identify an inference-time failure mode in which cross-modal representations degrade across decoder layers and drift across generation steps, destabilizing token prediction and increasing hallucination risk. We propose \emph{Dynamic Alignment Compensation} (DAC), a training-free inference-time method that detects representation divergence and selectively applies lightweight residual compensation. DAC combines Layer-wise Semantic Compensation to mitigate inter-layer degradation with Sequential Semantic Correction to constrain temporal drift. Experiments on nine hallucination-focused and general-purpose multimodal benchmarks across multiple LVLM backbones show that DAC consistently reduces hallucinations while maintaining strong overall performance.
The visionary PhysioNet platform launched 25 years ago, based on a system developed at MIT in the 1970s. It has become one of the most comprehensive biomedical and clinical data repositories in existence.
Known for his clear and elegant writing style, Bertsekas shaped fields from control and optimization to large-scale computation and artificial intelligence.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduJul 6, 2026
PhD student Rachel Sava, winner of the Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize, explores transformative improvements and dystopian risks of neural technology.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduJun 30, 2026
Computer scientist Phillip Isola cuts through the hype to explain how AI agents work and what the future might hold for this rapidly advancing technology.
