Xiaolong Wu

Jiajie Guo, Qingpeng Zhu, Jin Zeng et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant progress in image and language tasks due to the strong reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, most MLLMs suffer from limited spatial reasoning ability to interpret and infer spatial arrangements in three-dimensional space. In this work, we propose a novel vision encoder based on hierarchical fusion of geometry and semantics features, generating spatial-aware visual embedding and boosting the spatial grounding capability of MLLMs. Specifically, we first unveil that the spatial ambiguity shortcoming stems from the lossy embedding of the vision encoder utilized in most existing MLLMs (e.g., CLIP), restricted to instance-level semantic features. This motivates us to complement CLIP with the geometry features from vision-only self-supervised learning via a hierarchical adapter, enhancing the spatial awareness in the proposed SpatialGeo. The network is efficiently trained using pretrained LLaVA model and optimized with random feature dropping to avoid trivial solutions relying solely on the CLIP encoder. Experimental results show that SpatialGeo improves the accuracy in spatial reasoning tasks, enhancing state-of-the-art models by at least 8.0% in SpatialRGPT-Bench with approximately 50% less memory cost during inference. The source code is available via https://ricky-plus.github.io/SpatialGeoPages/.

Runmin Jiang, Wanyue Feng, Yuntian Yang et al. · cmu, harvard

Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) enables in situ visualization of macromolecular structures, where subtomogram analysis tasks such as classification, alignment, and averaging are critical for structural determination. However, effective analysis is hindered by scarce annotations, severe noise, and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we take the first step towards foundation models for cryo-ET subtomograms. First, we introduce CryoEngine, a large-scale synthetic data generator that produces over 904k subtomograms from 452 particle classes for pretraining. Second, we design an Adaptive Phase Tokenization-enhanced Vision Transformer (APT-ViT), which incorporates adaptive phase tokenization as an equivariance-enhancing module that improves robustness to both geometric and semantic variations. Third, we introduce a Noise-Resilient Contrastive Learning (NRCL) strategy to stabilize representation learning under severe noise conditions. Evaluations across 24 synthetic and real datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on all three major subtomogram tasks and strong generalization to unseen datasets, advancing scalable and robust subtomogram analysis in cryo-ET.