In this paper, we introduce Bangla-Bayanno, an open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA) Dataset in Bangla, a widely used, low-resource language in multimodal AI research. The majority of existing datasets are either manually annotated with an emphasis on a specific domain, query type, or answer type or are constrained by niche answer formats. In order to mitigate human-induced errors and guarantee lucidity, we implemented a multilingual LLM-assisted translation refinement pipeline. This dataset overcomes the issues of low-quality translations from multilingual sources. The dataset comprises 52,650 question-answer pairs across 4750+ images. Questions are classified into three distinct answer types: nominal (short descriptive), quantitative (numeric), and polar (yes/no). Bangla-Bayanno provides the most comprehensive open-source, high-quality VQA benchmark in Bangla, aiming to advance research in low-resource multimodal learning and facilitate the development of more inclusive AI systems.

The use of inappropriate language--such as outdated, exclu-sionary, or non-patient-centered terms--in medical instructional materials can significantly influence clinical training, patient interactions, and health outcomes. Despite their reputability, many materials developed over past decades contain examples now considered inappropriate by current medical standards. Given the volume of curricular content, manually identifying instances of inappropriate use of language (IUL) and its subcategories for systematic review is prohibitively costly and impractical. To address this challenge, we conduct a first-in-class evaluation of small language models (SLMs) fine-tuned on labeled data and pre-trained LLMs with in-context learning on a dataset containing approximately 500 documents and over 12,000 pages. For SLMs, we consider: (1) a general IUL classifier, (2) subcategory-specific binary classifiers, (3) a multilabel classifier, and (4) a two-stage hierarchical pipeline for general IUL detection followed by mul-tilabel classification. For LLMs, we consider variations of prompts that include subcategory definitions and/or shots. We found that both LLama-3 8B and 70B, even with carefully curated shots, are largely outperformed by SLMs. While the multilabel classifier performs best on annotated data, supplementing training with unflagged excerpts as negative examples boosts the specific classifiers' AUC by up to 25%, making them most effective models for mitigating harmful language in medical curricula.

Autonomous driving systems (ADS) have been an active area of research, with the potential to deliver significant benefits to society. However, before large-scale deployment on public roads, extensive testing is necessary to validate their functionality and safety under diverse driving conditions. Therefore, different testing approaches are required, and achieving effective and efficient testing of ADS remains an open challenge. Recently, generative AI has emerged as a powerful tool across many domains, and it is increasingly being applied to ADS testing due to its ability to interpret context, reason about complex tasks, and generate diverse outputs. To gain a deeper understanding of its role in ADS testing, we systematically analyzed 91 relevant studies and synthesized their findings into six major application categories, primarily centered on scenario-based testing of ADS. We also reviewed their effectiveness and compiled a wide range of datasets, simulators, ADS, metrics, and benchmarks used for evaluation, while identifying 27 limitations. This survey provides an overview and practical insights into the use of generative AI for testing ADS, highlights existing challenges, and outlines directions for future research in this rapidly evolving field.

Monitoring urban tree dynamics is vital for supporting greening policies and reducing risks to electrical infrastructure. Airborne laser scanning has advanced large-scale tree management, but challenges remain due to complex urban environments and tree variability. Multispectral (MS) light detection and ranging (LiDAR) improves this by capturing both 3D spatial and spectral data, enabling detailed mapping. This study explores tree point extraction using MS-LiDAR and deep learning (DL) models. Three state-of-the-art models are evaluated: Superpoint Transformer (SPT), Point Transformer V3 (PTv3), and Point Transformer V1 (PTv1). Results show the notable time efficiency and accuracy of SPT, with a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 85.28%. The highest detection accuracy is achieved by incorporating pseudo normalized difference vegetation index (pNDVI) with spatial data, reducing error rate by 10.61 percentage points (pp) compared to using spatial information alone. These findings highlight the potential of MS-LiDAR and DL to improve tree extraction and further tree inventories.

--With the introduction of vehicles with autonomous capabilities on public roads, predicting pedestrian crossing intention has emerged as an active area of research. The task of predicting pedestrian crossing intention involves determining whether pedestrians in the scene are likely to cross the road or not. In this work, we propose TrajFusionNet, a novel transformer-based model that combines future pedestrian trajectory and vehicle speed predictions as priors for predicting crossing intention. TrajFusionNet comprises two branches: a Sequence Attention Module (SAM) and a Visual Attention Module (V AM). The SAM branch learns from a sequential representation of the observed and predicted pedestrian trajectory and vehicle speed. Complementarily, the V AM branch enables learning from a visual representation of the predicted pedestrian trajectory by overlaying predicted pedestrian bounding boxes onto scene images. By utilizing a small number of lightweight modalities, TrajFusionNet achieves the lowest total inference time (including model runtime and data preprocessing) among current state-of-the-art approaches. In terms of performance, it achieves state-of-the-art results across the three most commonly used datasets for pedestrian crossing intention prediction.

Personalized, accurate prediction of aortic aneurysm progression is essential for timely intervention but remains challenging due to the need to model both subtle local deformations and global anatomical changes within complex 3D geometries. We propose MCMeshGAN, the first multimodal conditional mesh-to-mesh generative adversarial network for 3D aneurysm growth prediction. MCMeshGAN introduces a dual-branch architecture combining a novel local KNN-based convolutional network (KCN) to preserve fine-grained geometric details and a global graph convolutional network (GCN) to capture long-range structural context, overcoming the over-smoothing limitations of deep GCNs. A dedicated condition branch encodes clinical attributes (age, sex) and the target time interval to generate anatomically plausible, temporally controlled predictions, enabling retrospective and prospective modeling. We curated TAAMesh, a new longitudinal thoracic aortic aneurysm mesh dataset consisting of 590 multimodal records (CT scans, 3D meshes, and clinical data) from 208 patients. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MCMeshGAN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both geometric accuracy and clinically important diameter estimation. This framework offers a robust step toward clinically deployable, personalized 3D disease trajectory modeling. The source code for MCMeshGAN and the baseline methods is publicly available at https://github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/MCMeshGAN.

Many successful families of generative models leverage a low-dimensional latent distribution that is mapped to a data distribution. Though simple latent distributions are commonly used, it has been shown that more sophisticated distributions can improve performance. For instance, recent work has explored using the distributions produced by quantum processors and found empirical improvements. However, when latent space distributions produced by quantum processors can be expected to improve performance, and whether these improvements are reproducible, are open questions that we investigate in this work. We prove that, under certain conditions, these "quantum latent distributions" enable generative models to produce data distributions that classical latent distributions cannot efficiently produce. We also provide actionable intuitions to identify when such quantum advantages may arise in real-world settings. We perform benchmarking experiments on both a synthetic quantum dataset and the QM9 molecular dataset, using both simulated and real photonic quantum processors. Our results demonstrate that quantum latent distributions can lead to improved generative performance in GANs compared to a range of classical baselines. We also explore diffusion and flow matching models, identifying architectures compatible with quantum latent distributions. This work confirms that near-term quantum processors can expand the capabilities of deep generative models.

We propose a new symplectic convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture by leveraging symplectic neural networks, proper symplectic decomposition, and tensor techniques. Specifically, we first introduce a mathematically equivalent form of the convolution layer and then, using symplectic neural networks, we demonstrate a way to parameterize the layers of the CNN to ensure that the convolution layer remains symplectic. To construct a complete autoencoder, we introduce a symplectic pooling layer. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed neural network on three examples: the wave equation, the nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation, and the sine-Gordon equation. The numerical results indicate that the symplectic CNN outperforms the linear symplectic autoencoder obtained via proper symplectic decomposition.

Model merging has emerged as an efficient strategy for constructing multitask models by integrating the strengths of multiple available expert models, thereby reducing the need to fine-tune a pre-trained model for all the tasks from scratch. Existing data-independent methods struggle with performance limitations due to the lack of data-driven guidance. Data-driven approaches also face key challenges: gradient-based methods are computationally expensive, limiting their practicality for merging large expert models, whereas existing gradient-free methods often fail to achieve satisfactory results within a limited number of optimization steps. To address these limitations, this paper introduces PSO-Merging, a novel data-driven merging method based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In this approach, we initialize the particle swarm with a pre-trained model, expert models, and sparsified expert models. We then perform multiple iterations, with the final global best particle serving as the merged model. Experimental results on different language models show that PSO-Merging generally outperforms baseline merging methods, offering a more efficient and scalable solution for model merging.

Deep neural networks often produce overconfident predictions, undermining their reliability in safety-critical applications. This miscalibration is further exacerbated under distribution shift, where test data deviates from the training distribution due to environmental or acquisition changes. While existing approaches improve calibration through training-time regularization or post-hoc adjustment, their reliance on access to or simulation of target domains limits their practicality in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel calibration framework that operates without access to target domain information. From a frequency-domain perspective, we identify that distribution shifts often distort high-frequency visual cues exploited by deep models, and introduce a low-frequency filtering strategy to encourage reliance on domain-invariant features. However, such information loss may degrade In-Distribution (ID) calibration performance. Therefore, we further propose a gradient-based rectification mechanism that enforces ID calibration as a hard constraint during optimization. Experiments on synthetic and real-world shifted datasets, including CIFAR-10/100-C and WILDS, demonstrate that our method significantly improves calibration under distribution shift while maintaining strong in-distribution performance.