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5 papers

#01Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Automated PD-L1 Tumor Proportion Scoring with Uncertainty-Guided Triage in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Kesi Xu, Ayesha Azam, Tanvier Kaur and 7 more

Programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) tumor proportion score (TPS) informs immunotherapy selection in non-small cell lung cancer. Near the 1% and 50% cutoffs, the score should also indicate when closer review is warranted. We designed a three-stage framework to follow the sequence of TPS assessment. Stage 1 identifies tumor regions and excludes macrophage-rich patches. Stage 2, a dual-branch cell counting network (D2Count-Net), counts PD-L1-positive and PD-L1-negative tumor cells in these regions to calculate TPS. Stage 3, TPS-Guard, an uncertainty-guided triage mechanism, reports model uncertainty as the disagreement among independently trained models, refers the most uncertain slides, and flags scores near the 1% or 50% cutoff when model estimates disagree across that cutoff. Flags state the reason for referral or alert the pathologist to possible scoring errors on auto-reported slides. In a retrospective, single-center study, 154 whole-slide images were scored by three pathologists, and the model and each pathologist were compared in turn with the mean of the other two. On the 114 slides unseen in training, model mean absolute error (MAE) was 6.96 percentage points, within the range of the three pathologists (4.24 to 8.29), and model uncertainty correlated with absolute TPS error (Spearman rho = 0.77) and inter-pathologist disagreement (rho = 0.71). After referral of the 15% most uncertain slides, model and pathologist MAE both decreased. Applied without retraining to an external, publicly available dataset, TPS-Guard still directed review to higher-error cases, and referring more uncertain cases raised sensitivity at the 50% cutoff. TPS-Guard provides reasons for reviewing individual automated scores and identifies slides that also produce greater disagreement among pathologists. Prospective reader studies should assess TPS-Guard's effect on TPS reporting.

#02Nov 12, 2026

physics.flu-dyn

Spatiotemporal learning improves quantification of pore-space evolution and fluid displacement

Zhuangzhuang Ma, Rukuan Chai, Qianqian Ma and 3 more

Pore-space evolution and fluid displacement influence how rocks transmit and store fluids, affecting geological carbon storage, underground hydrogen storage and groundwater contaminant transport. A single time-resolved micro-CT experiment may produce tens to hundreds of three-dimensional images, and segmentation is required to quantify physical properties and run image-based simulations. Traditional methods such as thresholding perform poorly on noisy, low-contrast images and need manual adjustment per image; 3D deep learning networks segment each image without temporal information, so their errors vary between images and could be mistaken for physical change. Here we introduce a transformer-based 4D segmentation framework combining spatial and temporal information. It uses sequential images to resolve ambiguous phase assignments and separate physical change from segmentation error. The method is tested on images of mineral dissolution: it measures pore-volume growth and rock boundaries more accurately than an equivalent 3D model that ignores temporal information. It also captures the increase in permeability verified against reference segmentations and flow simulations. The advantage transfers to another dissolution sample without retraining. On two other datasets of fluid displacement, it reduces spurious changes in predicted rock and porosity fluctuations and accurately identifies filling events. Spatiotemporal segmentation turns sequences of hundreds of three-dimensional images into more reliable quantitative measurements of pore-space evolution and fluid displacement without per-image parameter adjustment to support the analysis of time-resolved CT imaging.

#03Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Consensus Capture in Reference-Based UAV Video Stabilization: A Benchmark on Dynamic Urban Scenes

Robert Fonod, Nikolas Geroliminis

Reference-frame stabilization registers every frame of a hovering-drone video onto one reference frame, keeping object positions comparable. The registration pipelines it relies on are selected on feature-matching benchmarks in which only the camera moves. Over a busy intersection, vehicles moving together supply mutually consistent correspondences that can draw the robust homography estimate toward their motion: consensus capture, which inlier statistics cannot flag. A two-part benchmark measures it and the object masking meant to prevent it. A static protocol scores ten pipelines under exactly known homographies on 4K aerial frames, tuned on a site-disjoint split at a matched resolution and feature budget. A dynamic protocol scores them at an offline and a real-time budget on hovers selected from the video alone to span the amount and coherence of moving foreground, plus a stationary control. It measures background alignment, object position error and the share of a moving group's displacement an estimate follows, against a pseudo-ground-truth reference audited with manually annotated ground control points, which also score every candidate. On static scenes, tuned AKAZE, RootSIFT, SIFT and BRISK lead, retuning the matcher thresholds raises the mean average accuracy (mAA) by at most 0.0062, and masking costs less than 0.005. Unmasked ORB is captured on 28 of 304 real-time dynamic pairs and on 6 offline; its real-time captured estimates have a median corner error of 18.8 px yet typical inlier counts and ratios. Masking removes capture for every pipeline and leaves the leading pipelines unchanged. Code, data and results are released.

#04Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

eDMD: Endpoint Distribution Matching for Few-Step Diffusion Distillation

Tong Zhao, Xianfang Zeng, Yucheng Han and 4 more

Distribution matching distillation (DMD) has emerged as a leading paradigm for distilling diffusion models into few-step students, where an auxiliary fake score model tracks the student's distribution and the discrepancy between the teacher and fake predictions drives the student toward the teacher. In multi-step distillation, although only the student's final output is delivered, existing methods train the fake model on intermediate states or across all denoising steps. Consequently, the student's update signal becomes entangled with intermediate distributions, which can distort the matching direction and remain nonzero even after the student's final outputs already match the teacher distribution. To resolve this mismatch, we propose Endpoint Distribution Matching Distillation (eDMD), which trains a single shared fake model exclusively on the student's final outputs and uses it to correct every denoising step. Our theoretical analysis proves that this endpoint reference guarantees that the distribution matching term vanishes if and only if the student's final output distribution matches the teacher's, regardless of intermediate distributions. Beyond the fake reference, we further strengthen teacher supervision through a precise teacher (PT) that replaces single-step guided predictions with short multi-step trajectories on the final noise interval, paired with a calibrated query density for intermediate steps. Experiments on SD3-Medium, FLUX.2-klein (4B and 9B), and Qwen-Image-2.1 demonstrate that eDMD consistently outperforms existing distribution matching methods for 4-step generation.

#05Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

STeP-C: Real-Time Neural Compression for Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing at Scale

Tingfeng Li, Ming-Fang Huang, Shaobo Han and 1 more

Distributed fiber-optic sensing (DFOS) technologies such as Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) generate continuous, high-resolution spatio-temporal data at rates exceeding hundreds of megabytes per second, creating severe challenges for real-time storage and transmission. While neural compression methods can achieve strong rate-distortion performance on sensing data, prior approaches either require per-segment retraining incompatible with streaming, or have only been validated offline. None have been demonstrated end-to-end on a continuously streaming DAS acquisition system at scale. We present STeP-C (Spatio-Temporal Predictive Compression), a neural compression framework that decouples spatial encoding, temporal prediction, and entropy-optimized residual coding, trained end-to-end with a rate-distortion objective motivated by conditional entropy reduction. Critically, we identify entropy coding as the dominant bottleneck for streaming deployment. We address it through GPU-side symbol computation, cached probability tables, and parallel GIL-free arithmetic coding, together with FP16 inference and batched entropy coding, enabling a full real-time pipeline built around a GPU ring buffer. We validate this pipeline on a live DAS testbed, achieving a 98.85% file size reduction at 31.04 dB full-band PSNR and an average throughput of 535 MB/s, exceeding the 324 MB/s requirement for 1 kHz, 81 km DAS streams. We further show that STeP-C substantially outperforms conventional codecs at practical streaming bitrates, can be applied to unseen channel ranges within the same acquisition system without retraining, and largely maintains downstream detector consistency, with 96.62% high-confidence class agreement and 100% Jaccard similarity on detected event types.