On the Transferability of Agricultural Weed Detection Under Cross-Field Distribution Shift

Accurate agricultural weed detection in real-world field conditions is essential for precision agriculture, enabling targeted intervention and reducing yield loss. Recent work has reported strong detection performance from UAV-based imagery across a range of crops, yet existing approaches evaluate within a single crop and field, leaving practitioners with little evidence that a model trained on one crop will generalize to a new field or crop type. In this work, we characterize where cross-dataset weed-localization performance degrades and which modeling choices recover it, reducing the need to relabel every new deployment field. We introduce a newly collected and annotated UAV image dataset for agricultural weed detection in cotton fields and use it alongside an existing soybean dataset collected under a similar protocol. Using these datasets, we evaluate the performance of several strategies for transferring a detector trained on one crop to another, comparing unsupervised domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) against pretraining on a domain-adjacent source dataset followed by few-shot fine-tuning on the target dataset. Our analysis spans target-domain label budgets from zero to the full target dataset, characterizing the trade-off between adaptation strategy and annotation effort. We find that few-shot fine-tuning with as few as 25 labeled target examples outperforms unsupervised DAOD in our cross-crop comparison, suggesting that source domain selection combined with modest target supervision is more productive than algorithmic sophistication in adaptation.

Characterising cardiac tissue properties with graph neural networks

Characterising electrophysiological properties of cardiac tissue efficiently and accurately from spatially sparse intracardiac measurements is clinically important for localising ablation targets and improving arrhythmia treatment. We developed a graph neural network-based framework trained on synthetic electrogram signals on 2D flat surfaces to identify areas of interest in the context of cardiac ablation for premature ventricular complexes (PVCs). Our method achieved an average precision of 0.96, 0.97, and 0.95 for the detection of single-patch fibrosis, rapid depolarisation and high excitability, respectively. The trained model can then be applied to 2D curved surfaces with few-shot fine-tuning, demonstrating its generalisation capability. Future work will develop this framework further for clinical use in PVC ablation.

Decoupling Intention from Trajectory: A Representational Deduction Framework for World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) aim to construct a unified architecture capable of understanding world state evolution and guiding to generative motion planning. However, existing visual branches focus on predicting static visual observation, rather than reflecting potential transition information that captures the evolution of world states under motion interactions. This leads to representational entanglement between high-level physical condition evolution and low-level action trajectory generation within the Action Model, creating a structural bottleneck while weakening the predictive capability of world evolution modeling for action generation. We propose PILOT (Physical Inference for Latent Optimized Trajectories), whose core Representational Deduction (RD) bridges this gap by integrating motion thought-of-chain (CoT) guidance as a native model capability. Specifically, RD aims to encourage the action branch to explicitly model potential state transition tokens, which are retained as CoT in the reasoning space to guide fine-grained motion trajectory. Experiments demonstrate that RD not only significantly improves the success rate and generalization ability of WAMs in complex robotic manipulation tasks but also enhances the model's physical interpretability by decoupling high-level motion semantics from low-level trajectory details. Furthermore, the abundant state transition supervision signals introduced by RD effectively alleviate the sparse supervision in action generation, enabling it to serve as an efficient few-shot real-robot fine-tuning strategy and demonstrating superior scalability for migration to mainstream WAM architectures.