19 accepted papers
Recent advances in diffusion models (DMs) have achieved exceptional visual quality in image editing tasks. However, the global denoising dynamics of DMs inherently conflate local editing targets with the full-image context, leading to unintended modifications in non-target regions. In this paper, we
Structure optimization, which yields the relaxed structure (minimum‑energy state), is essential for reliable materials property calculations, yet traditional ab initio approaches such as density‑functional theory (DFT) are computationally intensive. Machine learning (ML) has emerged to alleviate thi
Mechanical stimulation has recently been shown as a promising approach to induce targeted cancer cell death. With precise field control, magnetic microrobots were navigated to the tumor site for delivering mechanical stimulation as a new treatment approach. However, most magnetic microrobots suffer …
Recent innovations in autonomous drones have facilitated time-optimal flight in single-drone configurations, and enhanced maneuverability in multi-drone systems by applying optimal control and learning-based methods. However, few studies have achieved time-optimal motion planning for multi-drone sys
Semantic retrieval is crucial for modern applications yet remains underexplored in current research. Existing datasets are limited to single languages, single images, or singular retrieval conditions, often failing to fully exploit the expressive capacity of visual information as evidenced by maint…
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enhanced document understanding by integrating textual and visual information. However, existing models exhibit incompleteness within their paradigm in real-world scenarios, particularly under visual degradation (e.g., blur, occlus…
Soft tissue cutting is used for incision, separation and removal of tissues or cells. Due to high deformation of soft tissues resulting from their viscosity and elasticity, it is challenging to accurately cut the tissue along a desired path and control the force applied to the tissue for reducing in…
Recently, deep learning-based image enhancement algorithms achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on several publicly available datasets. However, most existing methods fail to meet practical requirements either for visual perception or for computation efficiency, especially for high-resolutio…
Cell penetration is an indispensable step in many cell surgery tasks. Conventionally, cell penetration is achieved by passively indenting and eventually puncturing the cell membrane, during which undesired large cell deformation is induced. Piezo drills have been developed to penetrate cells with le
Aspirating a single cell from the outside to the inside of a micropipette is widely used for cell transfer and manipulation. Due to the small volume of a single cell (picoliter) and nonlinear dynamics involved in the aspiration process, it is challenging to accurately and quickly position a cell to
In biology, fluorescent dyes are routinely used for biochemical measurements such as pH and ion concentrations. They, especially when used for detecting a low concentration of ions, suffer from low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR); and increasing the concentration of fluorescent dyes causes more sever c…
Existing approaches for robotic control of magnetic swarms are not capable of generating magnetic aggregates precisely in an arbitrarily specified target region in a fluidic flow environment. Such a swarm control capability is demanded by medical applications such as clinical embolization (i.e., loc…
Automated manipulation of single cells is required in both biological and clinical applications. In clinical infertility treatments, a single motile sperm is immobilized and inserted into an egg cell for in vitro fertilization. Sperm immobilization is essential to ease the ensuing pick-up procedure,
In this paper, a gridless super-resolution direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method with unknown mutual coupling is proposed. A new clean steering vector is obtained based on the banded symmetric Toeplitz structure of the mutual coupling matrix (MCM). Further, atomic norms associated with the ar…
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects (vs. rigid objects) has been a classic topic in robotics. Compared to deformable synthetic objects such as rubber balls and clothes, biological cells are highly deformable and more prone to damage. This paper presents robotic manipulation of deformable cell…
Measuring the motility and morphology parameters of motile cells is important for revealing their functional characteristics. This paper presents automation techniques that, for the first time, enable automated, non-invasive measurement of motility and morphology parameters of individual sperms. Com…
Manipulation of motile cells such as bacteria and sperm is required in both cell biology and clinical applications. For immobilizing a motile sperm, the sperm head and tail positions must be accurately tracked, interference of proximal sperms on the target sperm must be tackled, and the orientation…
Magnetic micromanipulation is an untethered technique and has enabled numerous applications in the scale of millimeters to micrometers from the tissue level to cell level. However, existing systems are not capable of maneuvering a sub-micrometer object for precise force control, preventing the reali…
Magnetic micromanipulation has the advantage of untethered control, high precision, and biocompatibility and has recently undergone great advances. The magnetic micromanipulation task to tackle in this work is to three-dimensionally navigate a 5-micrometer magnetic bead inside a mouse embryo and per…