Mohd Yamani Idna Idris

Zhenyu Yu, Chunlei Meng, Yangchen Zeng et al.

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays a crucial role in location-based services by predicting users' future mobility patterns. Existing methods typically compute a single user representation from historical trajectories and use it to score all candidate POIs uniformly. However, this candidate-agnostic paradigm overlooks that the relevance of historical visits inherently depends on which candidate is being evaluated. In this paper, we propose CaST-POI, a candidate-conditioned spatiotemporal model for next POI recommendation. Our key insight is that the same user history should be interpreted differently when evaluating different candidate POIs. CaST-POI employs a candidate-conditioned sequence reader that uses candidates as queries to dynamically attend to user history. In addition, we introduce candidate-relative temporal and spatial biases to capture fine-grained mobility patterns based on the relationships between historical visits and each candidate POI. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that CaST-POI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding substantial improvements across multiple evaluation metrics, with particularly strong advantages under large candidate pools. Code is available at https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/CaST-POI.git.

Zhenyu Yu, Chunlei Meng, Yangchen Zeng et al.

Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation requires modeling user mobility as a spatiotemporal sequence, where different behavioral factors may evolve at different temporal and spatial scales. Most existing methods compress a user's history into a single latent representation, which tends to entangle heterogeneous signals such as routine mobility patterns, short-term intent, and temporal regularities. This entanglement limits the flexibility of state evolution and reduces the model's ability to adapt to diverse decision contexts. We propose ADS-POI, a spatiotemporal state decomposition framework for next POI recommendation. ADS-POI represents a user with multiple parallel evolving latent sub-states, each governed by its own spatiotemporal transition dynamics. These sub-states are selectively aggregated through a context-conditioned mechanism to form the decision state used for prediction. This design enables different behavioral components to evolve at different rates while remaining coordinated under the current spatiotemporal context. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmark datasets from Foursquare and Gowalla demonstrate that ADS-POI consistently outperforms strong state-of-the-art baselines under a full-ranking evaluation protocol. The results show that decomposing user behavior into multiple spatiotemporally aware states leads to more effective and robust next POI recommendation. Our code is available at https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/ADS-POI.git.

Muhammad Mun'im Ahmad Zabidi, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Norisma Idris

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) enables large-scale biodiversity assessment, but continuous recording generates large amounts of non-informative audio, creating challenges for storage, power consumption, and long-term edge deployment. Bird audio detection (BAD), which identifies bird vocalizations, can reduce this burden by filtering irrelevant recordings before downstream analysis. However, most BAD systems are trained on temperate datasets despite tropical soundscapes being denser, more species-rich, and acoustically unpredictable. To address this gap, we introduce SEABAD (Southeast Asian Bird Activity Detection), a dataset of 50,000 curated three-second clips from Southeast Asian soundscapes, evenly balanced between bird-present and bird-absent samples. The dataset spans 1,677 bird species and is standardized to 16 kHz mono audio for embedded and low-power inference. We developed a dual-branch curation pipeline: a six-stage positive-label workflow applied to Xeno-Canto recordings, alongside six source-specific negative-label extractions from environmental datasets. These procedures reduced class imbalance by 13.7% (Gini coefficient: 0.601 to 0.519). A manual audit of 1,000 positive clips confirmed 97.8% +/- 0.9% labeling accuracy. Baseline experiments using MobileNetV3-Small achieved 99.57% +/- 0.25% accuracy and 0.9985 +/- 0.0002 AUC across three random seeds. SEABAD and the full curation pipeline are publicly released to support tropical BAD research and energy-efficient acoustic monitoring.

Zhenyu Yu, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Hua Wang et al.

We present DanceText, a training-free framework for multilingual text editing in images, designed to support complex geometric transformations and achieve seamless foreground-background integration. While diffusion-based generative models have shown promise in text-guided image synthesis, they often lack controllability and fail to preserve layout consistency under non-trivial manipulations such as rotation, translation, scaling, and warping. To address these limitations, DanceText introduces a layered editing strategy that separates text from the background, allowing geometric transformations to be performed in a modular and controllable manner. A depth-aware module is further proposed to align appearance and perspective between the transformed text and the reconstructed background, enhancing photorealism and spatial consistency. Importantly, DanceText adopts a fully training-free design by integrating pretrained modules, allowing flexible deployment without task-specific fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on the AnyWord-3M benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in visual quality, especially under large-scale and complex transformation scenarios. Code is avaible at https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/DanceText.git.

Ayushman Sarkar, Zhenyu Yu, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris

Maintaining visual and semantic consistency across frames is a key challenge in text-to-image storytelling. Existing training-free methods, such as One-Prompt-One-Story, concatenate all prompts into a single sequence, which often induces strong embedding correlation and leads to color leakage, background blending, and identity drift. We propose DeCorStory, a training-free inference-time framework that explicitly reduces inter-frame semantic interference. DeCorStory applies Gram-Schmidt prompt embedding decorrelation to orthogonalize frame-level semantics, followed by singular value reweighting to strengthen prompt-specific information and identity-preserving cross-attention to stabilize character identity during diffusion. The method requires no model modification or fine-tuning and can be seamlessly integrated into existing diffusion pipelines. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in prompt-image alignment, identity consistency, and visual diversity, achieving state-of-the-art performance among training-free baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/DeCorStory

Ayushman Sarkar, Zhenyu Yu, Wei Tang et al.

Large multimodal models have enabled one-click storybook generation, where users provide a short description and receive a multi-page illustrated story. However, the underlying story state, such as characters, world settings, and page-level objects, remains implicit, making edits coarse-grained and often breaking visual consistency. We present StoryState, an agent-based orchestration layer that introduces an explicit and editable story state on top of training-free text-to-image generation. StoryState represents each story as a structured object composed of a character sheet, global settings, and per-page scene constraints, and employs a small set of LLM agents to maintain this state and derive 1Prompt1Story-style prompts for generation and editing. Operating purely through prompts, StoryState is model-agnostic and compatible with diverse generation backends. System-level experiments on multi-page editing tasks show that StoryState enables localized page edits, improves cross-page consistency, and reduces unintended changes, interaction turns, and editing time compared to 1Prompt1Story, while approaching the one-shot consistency of Gemini Storybook. Code is available at https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/StoryState

Ayushman Sarkar, Zhenyu Yu, Chu Chen et al.

Generating coherent visual stories requires maintaining subject identity across multiple images while preserving frame-specific semantics. Recent training-free methods concatenate identity and frame prompts into a unified representation, but this often introduces inter-frame semantic interference that weakens identity preservation in complex stories. We propose ReDiStory, a training-free framework that improves multi-frame story generation via inference-time prompt embedding reorganization. ReDiStory explicitly decomposes text embeddings into identity-related and frame-specific components, then decorrelates frame embeddings by suppressing shared directions across frames. This reduces cross-frame interference without modifying diffusion parameters or requiring additional supervision. Under identical diffusion backbones and inference settings, ReDiStory improves identity consistency while maintaining prompt fidelity. Experiments on the ConsiStory+ benchmark show consistent gains over 1Prompt1Story on multiple identity consistency metrics. Code is available at: https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/ReDiStory

Zhenyu Yu, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Hua Wang et al.

Quantitative remote sensing inversion aims to estimate continuous surface variables-such as biomass, vegetation indices, and evapotranspiration-from satellite observations, supporting applications in ecosystem monitoring, carbon accounting, and land management. With the evolution of remote sensing systems and artificial intelligence, traditional physics-based paradigms are giving way to data-driven and foundation model (FM)-based approaches. This paper systematically reviews the methodological evolution of inversion techniques, from physical models (e.g., PROSPECT, SCOPE, DART) to machine learning methods (e.g., deep learning, multimodal fusion), and further to foundation models (e.g., SatMAE, GFM, mmEarth). We compare the modeling assumptions, application scenarios, and limitations of each paradigm, with emphasis on recent FM advances in self-supervised pretraining, multi-modal integration, and cross-task adaptation. We also highlight persistent challenges in physical interpretability, domain generalization, limited supervision, and uncertainty quantification. Finally, we envision the development of next-generation foundation models for remote sensing inversion, emphasizing unified modeling capacity, cross-domain generalization, and physical interpretability.

Ayushman Sarkar, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Zhenyu Yu

Visual reasoning is critical for a wide range of computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite notable advances in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys often address these directions in isolation, lacking a unified analysis and comparison across reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols. This survey aims to address this gap by categorizing visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and systematically examining their implementation through architectures such as graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems. We review evaluation protocols designed to assess functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and critically analyze their limitations in terms of generalizability, reproducibility, and explanatory power. Beyond evaluation, we identify key open challenges in visual reasoning, including scalability to complex scenes, deeper integration of symbolic and neural paradigms, the lack of comprehensive benchmark datasets, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we outline a forward-looking research agenda for next-generation vision systems, emphasizing that bridging perception and reasoning is essential for building transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain adaptive AI systems, particularly in critical domains such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

Zhenyu Yu, Jinnian Wang, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris

The forest serves as the most significant terrestrial carbon stock mechanism, effectively reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations and mitigating climate change. Remote sensing provides high data accuracy and enables large-scale observations. Optical images facilitate long-term monitoring, which is crucial for future carbon stock estimation studies. This study focuses on Huize County, Qujing City, Yunnan Province, China, utilizing GF-1 WFV satellite imagery. The KD-VGG and KD-UNet modules were introduced for initial feature extraction, and the improved implicit diffusion model (IIDM) was proposed. The results showed: (1) The VGG module improved initial feature extraction, improving accuracy, and reducing inference time with optimized model parameters. (2) The Cross-attention + MLPs module enabled effective feature fusion, establishing critical relationships between global and local features, achieving high-accuracy estimation. (3) The IIDM model, a novel contribution, demonstrated the highest estimation accuracy with an RMSE of 12.17%, significantly improving by 41.69% to 42.33% compared to the regression model. In carbon stock estimation, the generative model excelled in extracting deeper features, significantly outperforming other models, demonstrating the feasibility of AI-generated content in quantitative remote sensing. The 16-meter resolution estimates provide a robust basis for tailoring forest carbon sink regulations, enhancing regional carbon stock management.

Zhenyu Yu, Hanqing Chen, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris et al.

Precipitation plays a critical role in the Earth's hydrological cycle, directly affecting ecosystems, agriculture, and water resource management. Accurate precipitation estimation and prediction are crucial for understanding climate dynamics, disaster preparedness, and environmental monitoring. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has gained increasing attention in quantitative remote sensing (QRS), enabling more advanced data analysis and improving precipitation estimation accuracy. Although traditional methods have been widely used for precipitation estimation, they face limitations due to the difficulty of data acquisition and the challenge of capturing complex feature relationships. Furthermore, the lack of standardized multi-source satellite datasets, and in most cases, the exclusive reliance on station data, significantly hinders the effective application of advanced AI models. To address these challenges, we propose the Rainy dataset, a multi-source spatio-temporal dataset that integrates pure satellite data with station data, and propose Taper Loss, designed to fill the gap in tasks where only in-situ data is available without area-wide support. The Rainy dataset supports five main tasks: (1) satellite calibration, (2) precipitation event prediction, (3) precipitation level prediction, (4) spatiotemporal prediction, and (5) precipitation downscaling. For each task, we selected benchmark models and evaluation metrics to provide valuable references for researchers. Using precipitation as an example, the Rainy dataset and Taper Loss demonstrate the seamless collaboration between QRS and computer vision, offering data support for AI for Science in the field of QRS and providing valuable insights for interdisciplinary collaboration and integration.

Zhenyu Yu, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Pei Wang

Cloud occlusion significantly hinders remote sensing applications by obstructing surface information and complicating analysis. To address this, we propose DC4CR (Diffusion Control for Cloud Removal), a novel multimodal diffusion-based framework for cloud removal in remote sensing imagery. Our method introduces prompt-driven control, allowing selective removal of thin and thick clouds without relying on pre-generated cloud masks, thereby enhancing preprocessing efficiency and model adaptability. Additionally, we integrate low-rank adaptation for computational efficiency, subject-driven generation for improved generalization, and grouped learning to enhance performance on small datasets. Designed as a plug-and-play module, DC4CR seamlessly integrates into existing cloud removal models, providing a scalable and robust solution. Extensive experiments on the RICE and CUHK-CR datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving superior cloud removal across diverse conditions. This work presents a practical and efficient approach for remote sensing image processing with broad real-world applications.