Osteoporosis has emerged as a significant global public health challenge, affecting more than 200 million people worldwide. Precise screening through bone mineral density (BMD) assessment is essential for timely intervention. Although dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) serves as the gold standard for BMD evaluation, its widespread application is hampered by high costs and limited accessibility. In recent years, deep learning has demonstrated great potential in osteoporosis classification and predicting BMD from X-ray and CT scans. However, existing public datasets have notable limitations, particularly the absence of paired multimodal imaging datasets for cross-modal modeling and the lack of accurate BMD annotations required for osteoporosis-specific research and clinical model optimization. To address these issues, we introduce the LUmbar Multimodal Osteoporosis Screening dataset (LUMOS), the first multimodal dataset specifically designed for lumbar osteoporosis screening. LUMOS integrates clinical data from 803 patients, including 1,620 anteroposterior/lateral lumbar X-rays with BMD values and T-scores, comprehensive demographic information, and 280 lumbar CT scans. The advent of LUMOS is expected to propel forward research on automated osteoporosis classification, BMD prediction, and other related tasks. Its standardized and multimodal nature fills critical gaps in lumbar osteoporosis data, providing high-quality data support for the development and validation of medical AI algorithms in the early detection of osteoporosis. The dataset is available at https://keyueshi.github.io/LUMOS/.
Amidst the swift advancement of 3D vision technology, Multi-view Compression (MVC) has become a crucial technique, widely applied in fields such as virtual reality, augmented reality, autonomous driving, telemedicine, and security surveillance. The technology effectively handles views from multiple cameras, utilizing the inter-view correlations to compress data efficiently. It substantially decreases the data transmission and storage requirements, enabling a richer and more realistic visual experience within the same bandwidth constraints. To further enhance compression performance, new methods continue to emerge. However, the absence of a unified benchmark testing library capable of effectively evaluating existing algorithms poses significant challenges to the further development of the field and the practical deployment of algorithms. To address this issue, we introduce OpenMVC, an Open-Source Library for Learning-based Multi-view Compression. We provide a comprehensive description and analysis of the performance advantages of existing algorithms. Furthermore, we conduct extensive and comprehensive benchmark testing of nine typical algorithms in the last five years, evaluating them in a consistent environment across various metrics. The open-source library for OpenMVC is available at https://openi.pcl.ac.cn/OpenAICoding/OpenMVC.
Emotional Support Chatbots could unlock potential by providing scalable, low-cost, and personal emotional support, overcoming critical accessibility barriers inherent in traditional counseling. However, current text-based Chatbots fall short in conveying the multimodal empathy crucial in counseling. Humans naturally prefer face-to-face communication with peers to share feelings, encompassing spoken tone, micro-expressions, and body language to convey empathy. To bridge this gap, we propose EMO-Avatar, an LLMagent-orchestrated framework that integrates emotional reasoning capabilities and multimodal expression in counseling. Our approach introduces two innovations: (1) a Multimodal Emotional Support Agent. EMO-Avatar can follow adaptive instruction across TTS, pose, micro-expressions, and body actions, leading to the generation of highly expressive human animations. (2) a Comforting-Exploration-Action support strategy; EMO-Avatar systematically integrates Hill's three-stage counseling theory into its emotional reasoning capability. Guided by the LLM's reasoning, this strategy informs response generation and displays stage-specific preferences for speech, body language, and expressions. EMO-Avatar can provide deeper emotional support and therapeutic human-like interactions. Experimental validation on the AvaMERG Challenge demonstrates EMO-Avatar's superior performance, achieving top-2 ranking among 20 participants across response appropriateness, multimodal consistency, naturalness, and emotional expressiveness metrics. Our demo is available at https://ai4ai.anonymous-demo.fun/.
As immersive 360 degrees video experiences through head-mounted displays (HMDs) gain widespread adoption, the need for real-time, fine-grained assessment of Quality of Experience (QoE) becomes increasingly critical for optimising user engagement and system performance. This paper introduces RCQoEA-360VR, a novel multi-modal dataset designed for continuous QoE evaluation in virtual reality (VR) environments. In a controlled study (N=32), participants watched five selected 360 degrees video sequences across eight different video quality configurations (from the VQEG database) using a Vive Pro Eye while providing continuous QoE annotations via a touchpad-based input method, enhanced by the DotMorph peripheral visualisation technique. The dataset also includes synchronised physiological signals (electrocardiogram and galvanic skin response), behavioural data (eye and head movements) and post-viewing QoE ratings gathered through a within-VR interface. RCQoEA-360VR addresses a critical gap in existing public datasets by providing a fine-grained, synchronised multimodal data for immersive QoE analysis. It offers a unique and valuable resource for the research community, supporting a wide range of research applications, including QoE prediction, behavioural modelling, adaptive streaming, and implicit perceptual analysis.
The rise of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offers new opportunities for Micro-Expression (ME) analysis. This paper introduces Micro-Expression Visual Question Answering (ME-VQA), a novel task reformulating ME annotations (e.g., emotion categories, action units) into QA pairs. To address key challenges-hardware limitations, context inconsistency, and compositional reasoning gaps-we propose a Relationship-Aware Hierarchical VQA Framework. Our approach leverages mined emotion correlations (e.g., coarse-to-fine label dependencies) and employs a two-stage process: 1) Coarse-grained anchoring for broad emotion categories, and 2) Fine-grained reasoning constrained by coarse outputs and statistical rules. We further optimize efficiency via a dual-phase video sampling strategy: during training, keyframes (onset/apex/offset) and random non-expression frames are used; uniform sampling is applied at inference. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements in answer consistency and accuracy.
