30 accepted papers
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) must resolve conflicts when modalities provide contradictory information, a process we term "modality following". We propose a framework that deconstructs this behavior into case-specific relative reasoning uncertainty and a model's stable inherent preference…
Manipulation of motile cells is crucial for biological research and clinical applications. However, obtaining Z-axis visual feedback under monocular microscopy remains a challenge for robotic micromanipulation. Traditional depth-from-focus and depth-from-defocus methods fail to handle motile cells d
The integration of visual understanding and generation into unified multimodal models represents a significant stride toward general-purpose AI. However, a fundamental question remains unanswered by existing benchmarks: does this architectural unification actually enable synergetic interaction betwe
Automating cell manipulation at a solid-liquid interface is a critical challenge for biomedical applications such as embryo cryopreservation. Unlike manipulation in a full liquid medium, the cell-substrate contact creates a significant static friction force that is not readily measurable with curren…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behavior, agreeing with user-stated opinions even when those contradict factual knowledge. While prior work has documented this tendency, the internal mechanisms that enable such behavior remain poorly understood. In this paper, we provide a mec
Knowledge Editing-Efficiently modifying the knowledge in large language models has gathered great attention. Current benchmarks primarily use multi-hop question answering to assess and analyze newly injected or updated knowledge. However, we argue that these benchmarks fail to effectively evaluate h…
Quantifying sperm flagellar beating behavior (e.g., beating amplitude, frequency, and wavelength) plays a crucial role in biological research, clinical diagnostics, and the design of sperm-inspired microrobots. However, existing computational methods struggle to accurately and efficiently analyze th
Understanding the internal mechanisms of transformer-based language models remains challenging. Mechanistic interpretability based on circuit discovery aims to reverse engineer neural networks by analyzing their internal processes at the level of computational subgraphs. In this paper, we revisit ex…
The locate-then-edit paradigm has shown significant promise for knowledge editing (KE) in Large Language Models (LLMs). While previous methods perform well on single-hop fact recall tasks, they consistently struggle with multi-hop factual recall tasks involving newly edited knowledge. In this paper,…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved considerable accuracy in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from static images. However, their efficacy in video OCR is significantly diminished due to factors such as motion blur, temporal variations, and visual effects inherent in video conte…
Cell aspiration is a common micro-manipulation technique for cell transfer, particularly in in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures. The minuscule volume of a cell (pL) and limited damping provided by the medium make it challenging to accurately and quickly aspirate a cell to the desired position in
As demonstrated by the proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT and Claude series, LLMs have the potential to achieve remarkable proficiency across a wide range of domains, including law, medicine, finance, science, code, etc., all within a single model. These capabilities are further au
Unbiased measurement of sperm morphometric and motility parameters is essential for assessing fertility potential and guiding visual feedback for microrobotic manipulation. Automated analysis of multiple sperms and selection of an optimal sperm is crucial for in vitro fertilisation treatment such as…
Automated positioning systems play a pivotal role in micro-scale cell manipulation. In clinical intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, a motile sperm needs to be immobilized by glass micropipette tapping for subsequent surgical steps. The process requires…
Traditional sperm morphology analysis is based on tedious manual annotation. Automated morphology analysis of a high number of sperm requires accurate segmentation of each sperm part and quantitative morphology evaluation. State-of-the-art instance-aware part segmentation networks follow a "detect-t…
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…
Cell manipulation is a key technology in many biomedical and clinical applications, in which end-effector alignment is a critical procedure. Presently, end-effector alignment is performed manually and suffers from large misalignment error and inconsistency. Manual alignment often undesirably moves t…
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…
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,
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…
Cell morphology plays an important role in maintaining normal cellular functions. Existing techniques for cell morphology measurement, such as confocal imaging and atomic force microscopy, have the limitations of photobleaching and incompatibility for integration with other cell manipulation instrum
Embryo vitrification is an essential cryopreservation technique in IVF (in vitro fertilization) clinics. Vitrification involves pick-and-place of an embryo in multiple types of cryoprotectant solutions for processing before placing the embryo on a vitrification straw for cryopreservation in liquid n
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…
Mammalian sperms reorient against fluid flow in the female reproductive tract, known as rheotaxis. Compared to chemotaxis that provides short-distance guidance, rheotaxis provides long-distance guidance for a sperm to find the egg cell. However, only a low number of sperms are capable of rheotaxis a