Zixuan Xiao

Zixuan Xiao, Jun Ma, Siwei Zhang

Understanding urban environment change is essential for sustainable development. However, current approaches, particularly remote sensing change detection, often rely on rigid, single-modal analysis. To overcome these limitations, we propose MMUEChange, a multi-modal agent framework that flexibly integrates heterogeneous urban data via a modular toolkit and a core module, Modality Controller for cross- and intra-modal alignment, enabling robust analysis of complex urban change scenarios. Case studies include: a shift toward small, community-focused parks in New York, reflecting local green space efforts; the spread of concentrated water pollution across districts in Hong Kong, pointing to coordinated water management; and a notable decline in open dumpsites in Shenzhen, with contrasting links between nighttime economic activity and waste types, indicating differing urban pressures behind domestic and construction waste. Compared to the best-performing baseline, the MMUEChange agent achieves a 46.7% improvement in task success rate and effectively mitigates hallucination, demonstrating its capacity to support complex urban change analysis tasks with real-world policy implications.

Zixuan Xiao, Chunguang Hu, Jun Ma

As an important part of urbanization, the development monitoring of newly constructed parks is of great significance for evaluating the effect of urban planning and optimizing resource allocation. However, traditional change detection methods based on remote sensing imagery have obvious limitations in high-level and intelligent analysis, and thus are difficult to meet the requirements of current urban planning and management. In face of the growing demand for complex multi-modal data analysis in urban park development monitoring, these methods often fail to provide flexible analysis capabilities for diverse application scenarios. This study proposes a multi-modal LLM agent framework, which aims to make full use of the semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLM to meet the challenges in urban park development monitoring. In this framework, a general horizontal and vertical data alignment mechanism is designed to ensure the consistency and effective tracking of multi-modal data. At the same time, a specific toolkit is constructed to alleviate the hallucination issues of LLM due to the lack of domain-specific knowledge. Compared to vanilla GPT-4o and other agents, our approach enables robust multi-modal information fusion and analysis, offering reliable and scalable solutions tailored to the diverse and evolving demands of urban park development monitoring.

Meng Wang, Tian Lin, Qingshan Hou et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) shows remarkable potential in medical imaging diagnostics, yet most current models require retraining when applied across different clinical settings, limiting their scalability. We introduce GlobeReady, a clinician-friendly AI platform that enables fundus disease diagnosis that operates without retraining, fine-tuning, or the needs for technical expertise. GlobeReady demonstrates high accuracy across imaging modalities: 93.9-98.5% for 11 fundus diseases using color fundus photographs (CPFs) and 87.2-92.7% for 15 fundus diseases using optic coherence tomography (OCT) scans. By leveraging training-free local feature augmentation, GlobeReady platform effectively mitigates domain shifts across centers and populations, achieving accuracies of 88.9-97.4% across five centers on average in China, 86.3-96.9% in Vietnam, and 73.4-91.0% in Singapore, and 90.2-98.9% in the UK. Incorporating a bulit-in confidence-quantifiable diagnostic mechanism further enhances the platform's accuracy to 94.9-99.4% with CFPs and 88.2-96.2% with OCT, while enabling identification of out-of-distribution cases with 86.3% accuracy across 49 common and rare fundus diseases using CFPs, and 90.6% accuracy across 13 diseases using OCT. Clinicians from countries rated GlobeReady highly for usability and clinical relevance (average score 4.6/5). These findings demonstrate GlobeReady's robustness, generalizability and potential to support global ophthalmic care without technical barriers.

Zixuan Xiao, Wei Xue, Ping Zhong

In remote sensing field, there are many applications of object detection in recent years, which demands a great number of labeled data. However, we may be faced with some cases where only limited data are available. In this paper, we proposed a few-shot object detector which is designed for detecting novel objects provided with only a few examples. Particularly, in order to fit the object detection settings, our proposed few-shot detector concentrates on the relations that lie in the level of objects instead of the full image with the assistance of Self-Adaptive Attention Network (SAAN). The SAAN can fully leverage the object-level relations through a relation GRU unit and simultaneously attach attention on object features in a self-adaptive way according to the object-level relations to avoid some situations where the additional attention is useless or even detrimental. Eventually, the detection results are produced from the features that are added with attention and thus are able to be detected simply. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in few-shot scenes.

Zixuan Xiao, Ping Zhong, Yuan Quan et al.

In recent years, there are many applications of object detection in remote sensing field, which demands a great number of labeled data. However, in many cases, data is extremely rare. In this paper, we proposed a few-shot object detector which is designed for detecting novel objects based on only a few examples. Through fully leveraging labeled base classes, our model that is composed of a feature-extractor, a feature attention highlight module as well as a two-stage detection backend can quickly adapt to novel classes. The pre-trained feature extractor whose parameters are shared produces general features. While the feature attention highlight module is designed to be light-weighted and simple in order to fit the few-shot cases. Although it is simple, the information provided by it in a serial way is helpful to make the general features to be specific for few-shot objects. Then the object-specific features are delivered to the two-stage detection backend for the detection results. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for few-shot cases.

Zhiqiang Gong, Ping Zhong, Weidong Hu et al.

In this paper, a novel statistical metric learning is developed for spectral-spatial classification of the hyperspectral image. First, the standard variance of the samples of each class in each batch is used to decrease the intra-class variance within each class. Then, the distances between the means of different classes are used to penalize the inter-class variance of the training samples. Finally, the standard variance between the means of different classes is added as an additional diversity term to repulse different classes from each other. Experiments have conducted over two real-world hyperspectral image datasets and the experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed statistical metric learning.