Non-Contact Vibration-Based Damage Detection of Civil Structures Using a Cost-Effective Autonomous UAV

This paper presents a non-contact approach for vibration-based structural damage detection using an autonomous and customized cost-effective unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Vibration signals are extracted from video recordings through vision-based motion tracking to identify shifts in natural frequencies indicative of structural degradation. A laboratory-scale frame structure is evaluated under healthy and simulated-damage conditions. The proposed system is validated through an experimental study involving two smartphones, a USB camera, and a custom-built low-cost UAV equipped with an onboard camera and an autonomous alignment system for operation in GPS-denied environments. The displacement time is extracted and analyzed in the frequency domain and compared to reference measurements from contact accelerometers and a finite element model. Experimental results show that all platforms successfully capture the fundamental frequency and its shift due to damage. Although the UAV exhibits slightly higher errors (up to 5.7%) due to platform-induced disturbances and sensing limitations, it reliably detects damage-induced frequency changes. Compared to commercial UAV systems, the proposed platform achieves comparable inspection performance at significantly lower cost. These results demonstrate that low-cost autonomous UAVs provide a practical, flexible, and scalable solution for structural health monitoring, particularly in scenarios where contact-based sensing is impractical. The findings also support the potential for the deployment of multiple cooperative UAVs to further enhance inspection coverage and robustness.

A-SelecT: Automatic Timestep Selection for Diffusion Transformer Representation Learning

Diffusion models have significantly reshaped the field of generative artificial intelligence and are now increasingly explored for their capacity in discriminative representation learning. Diffusion Transformer (DiT) has recently gained attention as a promising alternative to conventional U-Net-based diffusion models, demonstrating a promising avenue for downstream discriminative tasks via generative pre-training. However, its current training efficiency and representational capacity remain largely constrained due to the inadequate timestep searching and insufficient exploitation of DiT-specific feature representations. In light of this view, we introduce Automatically Selected Timestep (A-SelecT) that dynamically pinpoints DiT's most information-rich timestep from the selected transformer feature in a single run, eliminating the need for both computationally intensive exhaustive timestep searching and suboptimal discriminative feature selection. Extensive experiments on classification and segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that DiT, empowered by A-SelecT, surpasses all prior diffusion-based attempts efficiently and effectively.

Learning with Geometric Priors in U-Net Variants for Polyp Segmentation

Accurate and robust polyp segmentation is essential for early colorectal cancer detection and for computer-aided diagnosis. While convolutional neural network-, Transformer-, and Mamba-based U-Net variants have achieved strong performance, they still struggle to capture geometric and structural cues, especially in low-contrast or cluttered colonoscopy scenes. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Geometric Prior-guided Module (GPM) that injects explicit geometric priors into U-Net-based architectures for polyp segmentation. Specifically, we fine-tune the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) on a simulated ColonDepth dataset to estimate depth maps of polyp images tailored to the endoscopic domain. These depth maps are then processed by GPM to encode geometric priors into the encoder's feature maps, where they are further refined using spatial and channel attention mechanisms that emphasize both local spatial and global channel information. GPM is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly integrated into diverse U-Net variants. Extensive experiments on five public polyp segmentation datasets demonstrate consistent gains over three strong baselines. Code and the generated depth maps are available at: https://github.com/fvazqu/GPM-PolypSeg

DFedReweighting: A Unified Framework for Objective-Oriented Reweighting in Decentralized Federated Learning

Decentralized federated learning (DFL) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables multiple clients to collaboratively train machine learning model through iterative rounds of local training, communication, and aggregation without relying on a central server which introduces potential vulnerabilities in conventional Federated Learning. Nevertheless, DFL systems continue to face a range of challenges, including fairness, robustness, etc. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{DFedReweighting}, a unified aggregation framework designed to achieve diverse objectives in DFL systems via a objective-oriented reweighting aggregation at the final step of each learning round. Specifically, the framework first computes preliminary weights based on \textit{target performance metric} obtained from auxiliary dataset constructed using local data. These weights are then refined using \textit{customized reweighting strategy}, resulting in the final aggregation weights. Our results from the theoretical analysis demonstrate that the appropriate combination of the target performance metric and the customized reweighting strategy ensures linear convergence. Experimental results consistently show that our proposed framework significantly improves fairness and robustness against Byzantine attacks in diverse scenarios. Provided that appropriate target performance metrics and customized reweighting strategy are selected, our framework can achieve a wide range of desired learning objectives.