Chen Zhao

Minh-Hao Van, Prateek Verma, Chen Zhao et al.

Foundation models (FMs) are catalyzing a transformative shift in materials science (MatSci) by enabling scalable, general-purpose, and multimodal AI systems for scientific discovery. Unlike traditional machine learning models, which are typically narrow in scope and require task-specific engineering, FMs offer cross-domain generalization and exhibit emergent capabilities. Their versatility is especially well-suited to materials science, where research challenges span diverse data types and scales. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of foundation models, agentic systems, datasets, and computational tools supporting this growing field. We introduce a task-driven taxonomy encompassing six broad application areas: data extraction, interpretation and Q\&A; atomistic simulation; property prediction; materials structure, design and discovery; process planning, discovery, and optimization; and multiscale modeling. We discuss recent advances in both unimodal and multimodal FMs, as well as emerging large language model (LLM) agents. Furthermore, we review standardized datasets, open-source tools, and autonomous experimental platforms that collectively fuel the development and integration of FMs into research workflows. We assess the early successes of foundation models and identify persistent limitations, including challenges in generalizability, interpretability, data imbalance, safety concerns, and limited multimodal fusion. Finally, we articulate future research directions centered on scalable pretraining, continual learning, data governance, and trustworthiness.

Chen Zhao, Tong Zhang, Zheng Dang et al.

Determining the relative pose of a previously unseen object between two images is pivotal to the success of generalizable object pose estimation. Existing approaches typically predict 3D translation utilizing the ground-truth object bounding box and approximate 3D rotation with a large number of discrete hypotheses. This strategy makes unrealistic assumptions about the availability of ground truth and incurs a computationally expensive process of scoring each hypothesis at test time. By contrast, we rethink the problem of relative pose estimation for unseen objects by presenting a Deep Voxel Matching Network (DVMNet++). Our method computes the relative object pose in a single pass, eliminating the need for ground-truth object bounding boxes and rotation hypotheses. We achieve open-set object detection by leveraging image feature embedding and natural language understanding as reference. The detection result is then employed to approximate the translation parameters and crop the object from the query image. For rotation estimation, we map the two RGB images, i.e., reference and cropped query, to their respective voxelized 3D representations. The resulting voxels are passed through a rotation estimation module, which aligns the voxels and computes the rotation in an end-to-end fashion by solving a least-squares problem. To enhance robustness, we introduce a weighted closest voxel algorithm capable of mitigating the impact of noisy voxels. We conduct extensive experiments on the CO3D, Objaverse, LINEMOD, and LINEMOD-O datasets, demonstrating that our approach delivers more accurate relative pose estimates for novel objects at a lower computational cost compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code is released at https://github.com/sailor-z/DVMNet/.

Dong Li, Guihong Wan, Xintao Wu et al.

Computational pathology foundation models (CPathFMs) have emerged as a powerful approach for analyzing histopathological data, leveraging self-supervised learning to extract robust feature representations from unlabeled whole-slide images. These models, categorized into uni-modal and multi-modal frameworks, have demonstrated promise in automating complex pathology tasks such as segmentation, classification, and biomarker discovery. However, the development of CPathFMs presents significant challenges, such as limited data accessibility, high variability across datasets, the necessity for domain-specific adaptation, and the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks. This survey provides a comprehensive review of CPathFMs in computational pathology, focusing on datasets, adaptation strategies, and evaluation tasks. We analyze key techniques, such as contrastive learning and multi-modal integration, and highlight existing gaps in current research. Finally, we explore future directions from four perspectives for advancing CPathFMs. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers, clinicians, and AI practitioners, guiding the advancement of CPathFMs toward robust and clinically applicable AI-driven pathology solutions.

Dong Li, Guihong Wan, Xintao Wu et al.

Foundation models have emerged as a powerful paradigm in computational pathology (CPath), enabling scalable and generalizable analysis of histopathological images. While early developments centered on uni-modal models trained solely on visual data, recent advances have highlighted the promise of multi-modal foundation models that integrate heterogeneous data sources such as textual reports, structured domain knowledge, and molecular profiles. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of multi-modal foundation models in CPath, with a particular focus on models built upon hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSIs) and tile-level representations. We categorize 32 state-of-the-art multi-modal foundation models into three major paradigms: vision-language, vision-knowledge graph, and vision-gene expression. We further divide vision-language models into non-LLM-based and LLM-based approaches. Additionally, we analyze 28 available multi-modal datasets tailored for pathology, grouped into image-text pairs, instruction datasets, and image-other modality pairs. Our survey also presents a taxonomy of downstream tasks, highlights training and evaluation strategies, and identifies key challenges and future directions. We aim for this survey to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of pathology and AI.

Hao Li, Chenming Wu, Ming Yuan et al.

Comprehensive testing of autonomous systems through simulation is essential to ensure the safety of autonomous driving vehicles. This requires the generation of safety-critical scenarios that extend beyond the limitations of real-world data collection, as many of these scenarios are rare or rarely encountered on public roads. However, evaluating most existing novel view synthesis (NVS) methods relies on sporadic sampling of image frames from the training data, comparing the rendered images with ground-truth images. Unfortunately, this evaluation protocol falls short of meeting the actual requirements in closed-loop simulations. Specifically, the true application demands the capability to render novel views that extend beyond the original trajectory (such as cross-lane views), which are challenging to capture in the real world. To address this, this paper presents a synthetic dataset for novel driving view synthesis evaluation, which is specifically designed for autonomous driving simulations. This unique dataset includes testing images captured by deviating from the training trajectory by $1-4$ meters. It comprises six sequences that cover various times and weather conditions. Each sequence contains $450$ training images, $120$ testing images, and their corresponding camera poses and intrinsic parameters. Leveraging this novel dataset, we establish the first realistic benchmark for evaluating existing NVS approaches under front-only and multicamera settings. The experimental findings underscore the significant gap in current approaches, revealing their inadequate ability to fulfill the demanding prerequisites of cross-lane or closed-loop simulation.

Jinzhi Zheng, Ruyi Ji, Libo Zhang et al.

Scene text recognition, as a cross-modal task involving vision and text, is an important research topic in computer vision. Most existing methods use language models to extract semantic information for optimizing visual recognition. However, the guidance of visual cues is ignored in the process of semantic mining, which limits the performance of the algorithm in recognizing irregular scene text. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel cross-modal fusion network (CMFN) for irregular scene text recognition, which incorporates visual cues into the semantic mining process. Specifically, CMFN consists of a position self-enhanced encoder, a visual recognition branch and an iterative semantic recognition branch. The position self-enhanced encoder provides character sequence position encoding for both the visual recognition branch and the iterative semantic recognition branch. The visual recognition branch carries out visual recognition based on the visual features extracted by CNN and the position encoding information provided by the position self-enhanced encoder. The iterative semantic recognition branch, which consists of a language recognition module and a cross-modal fusion gate, simulates the way that human recognizes scene text and integrates cross-modal visual cues for text recognition. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed CMFN algorithm achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art algorithms, indicating its effectiveness.