Deep Learning
Hybrid CNN-ViT Framework for Motion-Blurred Scene Text Restoration
Rashid, Umar, Arshad, Muhammad Arslan, Ahmad, Ghulam, Anjum, Muhammad Zeeshan, Khan, Rizwan, Akmal, Muhammad
Motion blur in scene text images severely impairs readability and hinders the reliability of computer vision tasks, including autonomous driving, document digitization, and visual information retrieval. Conventional deblurring approaches are often inadequate in handling spatially varying blur and typically fall short in modeling the long-range dependencies necessary for restoring textual clarity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a hybrid deep learning framework that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with vision transformers (ViTs), thereby leveraging both local feature extraction and global contextual reasoning. The architecture employs a CNN-based encoder-decoder to preserve structural details, while a transformer module enhances global awareness through self-attention. Training is conducted on a curated dataset derived from TextOCR, where sharp scene-text samples are paired with synthetically blurred versions generated using realistic motion-blur kernels of multiple sizes and orientations. Model optimization is guided by a composite loss that incorporates mean absolute error (MAE), squared error (MSE), perceptual similarity, and structural similarity (SSIM). Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed method attains 32.20 dB in PSNR and 0.934 in SSIM, while remaining lightweight with 2.83 million parameters and an average inference time of 61 ms. These results highlight the effectiveness and computational efficiency of the CNN-ViT hybrid design, establishing its practicality for real-world motion-blurred scene-text restoration.
Towards Human-AI-Robot Collaboration and AI-Agent based Digital Twins for Parkinson's Disease Management: Review and Outlook
Hizeh, Hassan, Chighri, Rim, Rahman, Muhammad Mahboob Ur, Bahloul, Mohamed A., Muqaibel, Ali, Al-Naffouri, Tareq Y.
The current body of research on Parkinson's disease (PD) screening, monitoring, and management has evolved along two largely independent trajectories. The first research community focuses on multimodal sensing of PD-related biomarkers using noninvasive technologies such as inertial measurement units (IMUs), force/pressure insoles, electromyography (EMG), electroencephalography (EEG), speech and acoustic analysis, and RGB/RGB-D motion capture systems. These studies emphasize data acquisition, feature extraction, and machine learning-based classification for PD screening, diagnosis, and disease progression modeling. In parallel, a second research community has concentrated on robotic intervention and rehabilitation, employing socially assistive robots (SARs), robot-assisted rehabilitation (RAR) systems, and virtual reality (VR)-integrated robotic platforms for improving motor and cognitive function, enhancing social engagement, and supporting caregivers. Despite the complementary goals of these two domains, their methodological and technological integration remains limited, with minimal data-level or decision-level coupling between the two. With the advent of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), including large language models (LLMs), agentic AI systems, a unique opportunity now exists to unify these research streams. We envision a closed-loop sensor-AI-robot framework in which multimodal sensing continuously guides the interaction between the patient, caregiver, humanoid robot (and physician) through AI agents that are powered by a multitude of AI models such as robotic and wearables foundation models, LLM-based reasoning, reinforcement learning, and continual learning. Such closed-loop system enables personalized, explainable, and context-aware intervention, forming the basis for digital twin of the PD patient that can adapt over time to deliver intelligent, patient-centered PD care.
Sample-Efficient Language Modeling with Linear Attention and Lightweight Enhancements
Haller, Patrick, Golde, Jonas, Akbik, Alan
We study architectural and optimization techniques for sample-efficient language modeling under the constraints of the BabyLM 2025 shared task. Our model, BLaLM, replaces self-attention with a linear-time mLSTM token mixer and explores lightweight enhancements, including short convolutions, sliding window attention with dynamic modulation, and Hedgehog feature maps. To support training in low-resource settings, we curate a high-quality corpus emphasizing readability and pedagogical structure. Experiments across both STRICT and STRICT-SMALL tracks show that (1) linear attention combined with sliding window attention consistently improves zero-shot performance, and (2) the Muon optimizer stabilizes convergence and reduces perplexity over AdamW. These results highlight effective strategies for efficient language modeling without relying on scale.
ConnectomeBench: Can LLMs Proofread the Connectome?
Brown, Jeff, Kirjner, Andrew, Vivekananthan, Annika, Boyden, Ed
Connectomics - the mapping of neural connections in an organism's brain - currently requires extraordinary human effort to proofread the data collected from imaging and machine-learning assisted segmentation. With the growing excitement around using AI agents to automate important scientific tasks, we explore whether current AI systems can perform multiple tasks necessary for data proofreading. We introduce ConnectomeBench, a multimodal benchmark evaluating large language model (LLM) capabilities in three critical proofreading tasks: segment type identification, split error correction, and merge error detection. Using expert annotated data from two large open-source datasets - a cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex and the complete Drosophila brain - we evaluate proprietary multimodal LLMs including Claude 3.7/4 Sonnet, o4-mini, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, as well as open source models like InternVL-3 and NVLM. Our results demonstrate that current models achieve surprisingly high performance in segment identification (52-82% balanced accuracy vs. 20-25% chance) and binary/multiple choice split error correction (75-85% accuracy vs. 50% chance) while generally struggling on merge error identification tasks. Overall, while the best models still lag behind expert performance, they demonstrate promising capabilities that could eventually enable them to augment and potentially replace human proofreading in connectomics. Project page: https://github.com/jffbrwn2/ConnectomeBench and Dataset https://huggingface.co/datasets/jeffbbrown2/ConnectomeBench/tree/main
Rethinking Metrics and Diffusion Architecture for 3D Point Cloud Generation
Bastico, Matteo, Ryckelynck, David, Cortรฉ, Laurent, Tillier, Yannick, Decenciรจre, Etienne
As 3D point clouds become a cornerstone of modern technology, the need for sophisticated generative models and reliable evaluation metrics has grown exponentially. In this work, we first expose that some commonly used metrics for evaluating generated point clouds, particularly those based on Chamfer Distance (CD), lack robustness against defects and fail to capture geometric fidelity and local shape consistency when used as quality indicators. W e further show that introducing samples alignment prior to distance calculation and replacing CD with Density-Aware Chamfer Distance (DCD) are simple yet essential steps to ensure the consistency and robustness of point cloud generative model evaluation metrics. While existing metrics primarily focus on directly comparing 3D Euclidean coordinates, we present a novel metric, named Surface Normal Concordance (SNC), which approximates surface similarity by comparing estimated point normals. This new metric, when combined with traditional ones, provides a more comprehensive evaluation of the quality of generated samples. Finally, leveraging recent advancements in transformer-based models for point cloud analysis, such as serialized patch attention, we propose a new architecture for generating high-fidelity 3D structures, the Diffusion Point Transformer . W e perform extensive experiments and comparisons on the ShapeNet dataset, showing that our model outperforms previous solutions, particularly in terms of quality of generated point clouds, achieving new state-of-the-art.
DeepEyesV2: Toward Agentic Multimodal Model
Hong, Jack, Zhao, Chenxiao, Zhu, ChengLin, Lu, Weiheng, Xu, Guohai, Yu, Xing
Agentic multimodal models should not only comprehend text and images, but also actively invoke external tools, such as code execution environments and web search, and integrate these operations into reasoning. In this work, we introduce DeepEyesV2 and explore how to build an agentic multimodal model from the perspectives of data construction, training methods, and model evaluation. We observe that direct reinforcement learning alone fails to induce robust tool-use behavior. This phenomenon motivates a two-stage training pipeline: a cold-start stage to establish tool-use patterns, and reinforcement learning stage to further refine tool invocation. We curate a diverse, moderately challenging training dataset, specifically including examples where tool use is beneficial. We further introduce RealX-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate real-world multimodal reasoning, which inherently requires the integration of multiple capabilities, including perception, search, and reasoning. We evaluate DeepEyesV2 on RealX-Bench and other representative benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness across real-world understanding, mathematical reasoning, and search-intensive tasks. Moreover, DeepEyesV2 exhibits task-adaptive tool invocation, tending to use image operations for perception tasks and numerical computations for reasoning tasks. Reinforcement learning further enables complex tool combinations and allows model to selectively invoke tools based on context. We hope our study can provide guidance for community in developing agentic multimodal models.
SDS KoPub VDR: A Benchmark Dataset for Visual Document Retrieval in Korean Public Documents
Lee, Jaehoon, Kim, Sohyun, Park, Wanggeun, Lee, Geon, Kim, Seungkyung, Lee, Minyoung
Existing benchmarks for visual document retrieval (VDR) largely overlook non-English languages and the structural complexity of official publications. To address this gap, we introduce SDS KoPub VDR, the first large-scale, public benchmark for retrieving and understanding Korean public documents. The benchmark is built upon 361 real-world documents, including 256 files under the KOGL Type 1 license and 105 from official legal portals, capturing complex visual elements like tables, charts, and multi-column layouts. To establish a reliable evaluation set, we constructed 600 query-page-answer triples. These were initially generated using multimodal models (e.g., GPT-4o) and subsequently underwent human verification to ensure factual accuracy and contextual relevance. The queries span six major public domains and are categorized by the reasoning modality required: text-based, visual-based, and cross-modal. We evaluate SDS KoPub VDR on two complementary tasks: (1) text-only retrieval and (2) multimodal retrieval, which leverages visual features alongside text. This dual-task evaluation reveals substantial performance gaps, particularly in multimodal scenarios requiring cross-modal reasoning, even for state-of-the-art models. As a foundational resource, SDS KoPub VDR enables rigorous and fine-grained evaluation and provides a roadmap for advancing multimodal AI in real-world document intelligence. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SamsungSDS-Research/SDS-KoPub-VDR-Benchmark.
multiMentalRoBERTa: A Fine-tuned Multiclass Classifier for Mental Health Disorder
Islam, K M Sajjadul, Fields, John, Madiraju, Praveen
The early detection of mental health disorders from social media text is critical for enabling timely support, risk assessment, and referral to appropriate resources. This work introduces multiMentalRoBERTa, a fine-tuned RoBERTa model designed for multiclass classification of common mental health conditions, including stress, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicidal ideation, and neutral discourse. Drawing on multiple curated datasets, data exploration is conducted to analyze class overlaps, revealing strong correlations between depression and suicidal ideation as well as anxiety and PTSD, while stress emerges as a broad, overlapping category. Comparative experiments with traditional machine learning methods, domain-specific transformers, and prompting-based large language models demonstrate that multiMentalRoBERTa achieves superior performance, with macro F1-scores of 0.839 in the six-class setup and 0.870 in the five-class setup (excluding stress), outperforming both fine-tuned MentalBERT and baseline classifiers. Beyond predictive accuracy, explainability methods, including Layer Integrated Gradients and KeyBERT, are applied to identify lexical cues that drive classification, with a particular focus on distinguishing depression from suicidal ideation. The findings emphasize the effectiveness of fine-tuned transformers for reliable and interpretable detection in sensitive contexts, while also underscoring the importance of fairness, bias mitigation, and human-in-the-loop safety protocols. Overall, multiMentalRoBERTa is presented as a lightweight, robust, and deployable solution for enhancing support in mental health platforms.
Real-to-Sim Robot Policy Evaluation with Gaussian Splatting Simulation of Soft-Body Interactions
Zhang, Kaifeng, Sha, Shuo, Jiang, Hanxiao, Loper, Matthew, Song, Hyunjong, Cai, Guangyan, Xu, Zhuo, Hu, Xiaochen, Zheng, Changxi, Li, Yunzhu
Robotic manipulation policies are advancing rapidly, but their direct evaluation in the real world remains costly, time-consuming, and difficult to reproduce, particularly for tasks involving deformable objects. Simulation provides a scalable and systematic alternative, yet existing simulators often fail to capture the coupled visual and physical complexity of soft-body interactions. We present a real-to-sim policy evaluation framework that constructs soft-body digital twins from real-world videos and renders robots, objects, and environments with photorealistic fidelity using 3D Gaussian Splatting. We validate our approach on representative deformable manipulation tasks, including plush toy packing, rope routing, and T-block pushing, demonstrating that simulated rollouts correlate strongly with real-world execution performance and reveal key behavioral patterns of learned policies. Our results suggest that combining physics-informed reconstruction with high-quality rendering enables reproducible, scalable, and accurate evaluation of robotic manipulation policies. Website: https://real2sim-eval.github.io/
Jr. AI Scientist and Its Risk Report: Autonomous Scientific Exploration from a Baseline Paper
Miyai, Atsuyuki, Toyooka, Mashiro, Otonari, Takashi, Zhao, Zaiying, Aizawa, Kiyoharu
Understanding the current capabilities and risks of AI Scientist systems is essential for ensuring trustworthy and sustainable AI-driven scientific progress while preserving the integrity of the academic ecosystem. To this end, we develop Jr. AI Scientist, a state-of-the-art autonomous AI scientist system that mimics the core research workflow of a novice student researcher: Given the baseline paper from the human mentor, it analyzes its limitations, formulates novel hypotheses for improvement, and iteratively conducts experiments until improvements are realized, and writes a paper with the results. Unlike previous approaches that assume full automation or operate on small-scale code, Jr. AI Scientist follows a well-defined research workflow and leverages modern coding agents to handle complex, multi-file implementations, leading to scientifically valuable contributions. Through our experiments, the Jr. AI Scientist successfully generated new research papers that build upon real NeurIPS, IJCV, and ICLR works by proposing and implementing novel methods. For evaluation, we conducted automated assessments using AI Reviewers, author-led evaluations, and submissions to Agents4Science, a venue dedicated to AI-driven scientific contributions. The findings demonstrate that Jr. AI Scientist generates papers receiving higher review scores than existing fully automated systems. Nevertheless, we identify important limitations from both the author evaluation and the Agents4Science reviews, indicating the potential risks of directly applying current AI Scientist systems and key challenges for future research. Finally, we comprehensively report various risks identified during development. We believe this study clarifies the current role and limitations of AI Scientist systems, offering insights into the areas that still require human expertise and the risks that may emerge as these systems evolve.