Numan Saeed
Publications
TerraBench: Can Agents Reason Over Heterogeneous Earth-System Data?
Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs. Weather and climate foundation models can forecast well, but do not reason interactively in language, while large language models (LLMs) reason in language but cannot operate directly on high-dimensional Earth-system data. As a result, real scientific workflows in Earth-science remain underserved. We introduce TerraBench, a benchmark for grounded Earth-science reasoning, built on TerraAgent, a ReAct-style executable framework that interleaves reasoning, tool calls, and observations to couple LLM planning with scientific tools for environmental retrieval, geospatial processing, simulation, and artifact-backed computation. TerraBench unifies analysis of Earth observation imagery, gridded data, GIS reasoning and simulation in a single executable interface, whereas prior benchmarks isolate these capabilities into narrow individual tasks. It is also the first in this space to pair process-level tool-use metrics with tolerance-aware numeric scoring. The benchmark comprises 403 extensive agentic tasks across three tracks (Fundamentals, Simulator-Grounded, and Document-Grounded Verification) and eight application domains with 24,500 verified execution steps. These results indicate that reliable Earth-science agents must go beyond tool access to coordinate heterogeneous workflows, parameterize tools precisely, and preserve artifact provenance.
MobileFetalCLIP: Selective Repulsive Knowledge Distillation for Mobile Fetal Ultrasound Analysis
Fetal ultrasound AI could transform prenatal care in low-resource settings, yet current foundation models exceed 300M visual parameters, precluding deployment on point-of-care devices. Standard knowledge distillation fails under such extreme capacity gaps (~26x), as compact students waste capacity mimicking architectural artifacts of oversized teachers. We introduce Selective Repulsive Knowledge Distillation, which decomposes contrastive KD into diagonal and off-diagonal components: matched pair alignment is preserved while the off-diagonal weight decays into negative values, repelling the student from the teacher's inter-class confusions and forcing discovery of architecturally native features. Our 11.4M parameter student surpasses the 304M-parameter FetalCLIP teacher on zero-shot HC18 biometry validity (88.6% vs. 83.5%) and brain sub-plane F1 (0.784 vs. 0.702), while running at 1.6 ms on iPhone 16 Pro, enabling real-time assistive AI on handheld ultrasound devices. Our code, models, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/numanai/MobileFetalCLIP.
AnatomiX, an Anatomy-Aware Grounded Multimodal Large Language Model for Chest X-Ray Interpretation
Multimodal medical large language models have shown impressive progress in chest X-ray interpretation but continue to face challenges in spatial reasoning and anatomical understanding. Although existing grounding techniques improve overall performance, they often fail to establish a true anatomical correspondence, resulting in incorrect anatomical understanding in the medical domain. To address this gap, we introduce AnatomiX, a multitask multimodal large language model explicitly designed for anatomically grounded chest X-ray interpretation. Inspired by the radiological workflow, AnatomiX adopts a two stage approach: first, it identifies anatomical structures and extracts their features, and then leverages a large language model to perform diverse downstream tasks such as phrase grounding, report generation, visual question answering, and image understanding. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that AnatomiX achieves superior anatomical reasoning and delivers over 25% improvement in performance on anatomy grounding, phrase grounding, grounded diagnosis and grounded captioning tasks compared to existing approaches. Code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/aneesurhashmi/anatomix