Abstract-- This paper presents a cutting-edge robotic inspection solution (Figure 1) designed to automate quality control in automotive manufacturing. The system integrates a pair of collaborative robots, each equipped with a high-resolution camera-based vision system to accurately detect and localize surface and thread defects in aluminum high-pressure die casting (HPDC) automotive components. In addition, specialized lenses and optimized lighting configurations are employed to ensure consistent and high-quality image acquisition. The YOLO11n deep learning model is utilized, incorporating additional enhancements such as image slicing, ensemble learning, and bounding-box merging to significantly improve performance and minimize false detections. Furthermore, image processing techniques are applied to estimate the extent of the detected defects. Experimental results demonstrate real-time performance with high accuracy across a wide variety of defects, while minimizing false detections. The proposed solution is promising and highly scalable, providing the flexibility to adapt to various production environments and meet the evolving demands of the automotive industry. Quality control plays a crucial role in automotive manufacturing. Even minor defects introduced during production can result in significant performance issues and safety risks, emphasizing the importance of stringent quality inspections [1]. Traditionally, quality control processes in automotive production have been heavily dependent on skilled human operators to inspect components visually. This approach is not only costly and time-intensive but also susceptible to inconsistencies arising from operator fatigue and subjective decision-making [2].

Deep learning segmentation relies heavily on labeled data, but manual labeling is laborious and time-consuming, especially for volumetric images such as brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). While recent domain-randomization techniques alleviate the dependency on labeled data by synthesizing diverse training images from label maps, they offer limited anatomical variability when very few label maps are available. Semi-supervised self-training addresses label scarcity by iteratively incorporating model predictions into the training set, enabling networks to learn from unlabeled data. In this work, we combine domain randomization with self-training to train three-dimensional skull-stripping networks using as little as a single labeled example. First, we automatically bin voxel intensities, yielding labels we use to synthesize images for training an initial skull-stripping model. Second, we train a convolutional autoencoder (AE) on the labeled example and use its reconstruction error to assess the quality of brain masks predicted for unlabeled data. Third, we select the top-ranking pseudo-labels to fine-tune the network, achieving skull-stripping performance on out-of-distribution data that approaches models trained with more labeled images. We compare AE-based ranking to consistency-based ranking under test-time augmentation, finding that the AE approach yields a stronger correlation with segmentation accuracy. Our results highlight the potential of combining domain randomization and AE-based quality control to enable effective semi-supervised segmentation from extremely limited labeled data. This strategy may ease the labeling burden that slows progress in studies involving new anatomical structures or emerging imaging techniques.

Radiology reporting is an essential yet time-consuming and error-prone task for radiologists in clinical examinations, especially for volumetric medical images. Rigorous quality control is also critical but tedious, ensuring that the final report meets clinical standards. Existing automated approaches, including radiology report generation methods and medical vision-language models, focus mainly on the report generation phase and neglect the crucial quality control procedure, limiting their capability to provide comprehensive support to radiologists. We propose Radiologist Copilot, an agentic AI assistant equipped with orchestrated tools designed for automated radiology reporting with quality control. Leveraging large language models as the reasoning backbone, the agentic system autonomously selects tools, plans, and executes actions, emulating the behavior of radiologists throughout the holistic radiology reporting process. The orchestrated tools include region localization, think with image paradigm directed region analysis planning, strategic template selection for report generation, quality assessment and feedback-driven adaptive refinement for quality control. Therefore, Radiologist Copilot facilitates accurate, complete, and efficient radiology reporting, assisting radiologists and improving clinical efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that Radiologist Copilot significantly surpasses other state-of-the-art methods in radiology reporting. The source code will be released upon acceptance.

Large language models perform strongly on general tasks but remain constrained in specialized settings such as music, particularly in the music-entertainment domain, where corpus scale, purity, and the match between data and training objectives are critical. We address this by constructing a large, music-related natural language corpus (40B tokens) that combines open source and in-house data, and by implementing a domain-first data pipeline: a lightweight classifier filters and weights in-domain text, followed by multi-stage cleaning, de-duplication, and privacy-preserving masking. We further integrate multi-source music text with associated metadata to form a broader, better-structured foundation of domain knowledge. On the training side, we introduce reference-model (RM)-based token-level soft scoring for quality control: a unified loss-ratio criterion is used both for data selection and for dynamic down-weighting during optimization, reducing noise gradients and amplifying task-aligned signals, thereby enabling more effective music-domain continued pretraining and alignment. To assess factuality, we design the MusicSimpleQA benchmark, which adopts short, single-answer prompts with automated agreement scoring. Beyond the benchmark design, we conduct systematic comparisons along the axes of data composition. Overall, this work advances both the right corpus and the right objective, offering a scalable data-training framework and a reusable evaluation tool for building domain LLMs in the music field.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging suffers from substantial data heterogeneity and the absence of standardized contrast labels across scanners, protocols, and institutions, which severely limits large-scale automated analysis. A unified representation of MRI contrast would enable a wide range of downstream utilities, from automatic sequence recognition to harmonization and quality control, without relying on manual annotations. To this end, we introduce MR-CLIP, a metadata-guided framework that learns MRI contrast representations by aligning volumetric images with their DICOM acquisition parameters. The resulting embeddings shows distinct clusters of MRI sequences and outperform supervised 3D baselines under data scarcity in few-shot sequence classification. Moreover, MR-CLIP enables unsupervised data quality control by identifying corrupted or inconsistent metadata through image-metadata embedding distances. By transforming routinely available acquisition metadata into a supervisory signal, MR-CLIP provides a scalable foundation for label-efficient MRI analysis across diverse clinical datasets.

Small Language Models (SLMs) offer compelling advantages in deployment cost and latency, but their accuracy often lags behind larger models, particularly for complex domain-specific tasks. While supervised fine-tuning can help bridge this performance gap, it requires substantial manual effort in data preparation and iterative optimization. We present PaDA-Agent (Pattern-guided Data Augmentation Agent), an evaluation-driven approach that streamlines the data augmentation process for SLMs through coordinated operations. Unlike state-of-the-art approaches that focus on model training errors only and generating error-correcting samples, PaDA-Agent discovers failure patterns from the validation data via evaluations and drafts targeted data augmentation strategies aiming to directly reduce the generalization gap. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art LLM-based data augmentation approaches for Llama 3.2 1B Instruct model fine-tuning.

Defective surgical instruments pose serious risks to sterility, mechanical integrity, and patient safety, increasing the likelihood of surgical complications. However, quality control in surgical instrument manufacturing often relies on manual inspection, which is prone to human error and inconsistency. This study introduces SurgScan, an AI-powered defect detection framework for surgical instruments. Using YOLOv8, SurgScan classifies defects in real-time, ensuring high accuracy and industrial scalability. The model is trained on a high-resolution dataset of 102,876 images, covering 11 instrument types and five major defect categories. Extensive evaluation against state-of-the-art CNN architectures confirms that SurgScan achieves the highest accuracy (99.3%) with real-time inference speeds of 4.2-5.8 ms per image, making it suitable for industrial deployment. Statistical analysis demonstrates that contrast-enhanced preprocessing significantly improves defect detection, addressing key limitations in visual inspection. SurgScan provides a scalable, cost-effective AI solution for automated quality control, reducing reliance on manual inspection while ensuring compliance with ISO 13485 and FDA standards, paving the way for enhanced defect detection in medical manufacturing.

Industrial surface defect inspection for sample-wise quality control (QC) must simultaneously decide whether a given sample contains defects and localize those defects spatially. In real production lines, extreme foreground-background imbalance, defect sparsity with a long-tailed scale distribution, and low contrast are common. As a result, pixel-centric training and evaluation are easily dominated by large homogeneous regions, making it difficult to drive models to attend to small or low-contrast defects-one of the main bottlenecks for deployment. Empirically, existing models achieve strong pixel-overlap metrics (e.g., mIoU) but exhibit insufficient stability at the sample level, especially for sparse or slender defects. The root cause is a mismatch between the optimization objective and the granularity of QC decisions. To address this, we propose a sample-centric multi-task learning framework and evaluation suite. Built on a shared-encoder architecture, the method jointly learns sample-level defect classification and pixel-level mask localization. Sample-level supervision modulates the feature distribution and, at the gradient level, continually boosts recall for small and low-contrast defects, while the segmentation branch preserves boundary and shape details to enhance per-sample decision stability and reduce misses. For evaluation, we propose decision-linked metrics, Seg_mIoU and Seg_Recall, which remove the bias of classical mIoU caused by empty or true-negative samples and tightly couple localization quality with sample-level decisions. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach substantially improves the reliability of sample-level decisions and the completeness of defect localization.

In the last decade, video workflows in the cinema production ecosystem have presented new use cases for video streaming technology. These new workflows, e.g. in On-set Virtual Production, present the challenge of requiring precise quality control and energy efficiency. Existing approaches to transcoding often fall short of these requirements, either due to a lack of quality control or computational overhead. To fill this gap, we present a lightweight neural network (LiteVPNet) for accurately predicting Quantisation Parameters for NVENC AV1 encoders that achieve a specified VMAF score. We use low-complexity features, including bitstream characteristics, video complexity measures, and CLIP-based semantic embeddings. Our results demonstrate that LiteVPNet achieves mean VMAF errors below 1.2 points across a wide range of quality targets. Notably, LiteVPNet achieves VMAF errors within 2 points for over 87% of our test corpus, c.f. approx 61% with state-of-the-art methods. LiteVPNet's performance across various quality regions highlights its applicability for enhancing high-value content transport and streaming for more energy-efficient, high-quality media experiences.