Abstract:Open-domain open-vocabulary detection (ODOVD) requires detectors to generalize to both novel categories and unseen domains, making it more challenging than open-vocabulary detection. Existing methods typically train open-vocabulary detectors together with domain generalization modules from scratch, leading to high training cost. we propose ExDet, a lightweight category-domain collaborative generalization framework for ODOVD that enhances the cross-category and cross-domain generalization of existing detectors. ExDet consists of Text-Guided Extrapolation (TGE), a lightweight Detector-Compatible Rectification (DCR) module, and ExRPN. Specifically, TGE exploits the DeltaSpace property of vision-language models (VLMs) to infer category- and domain-aware proxy visual prototypes from text. DCR is learned from the TGE-generated prototypes in a detector training-free and real-data-free manner, and is inserted after the classification head at inference to rectify representations toward a detector-compatible source-domain visual distribution, thereby enhancing classification for targets from novel categories and unseen domains. ExRPN recalibrates proposal scores by combining semantic similarity with RPN confidence, improving recall for novel and domain-shifted objects while providing better support for subsequent classification and DCR. ExDet achieves SOTA performance on OD-LVIS, OV-LVIS, Objects365, and MSOSB.
Abstract:In real-world deployment under strict real-time constraints, weather and imaging variations induce significant distribution shifts, severely degrading detectors. Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection aims to mitigate this issue, yet existing methods rarely investigate-at the level of problem formulation-the generalization capability of real-time detectors under such constrained inference budgets. To this end, we introduce Real-Time Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection (RT-SDGOD), which focuses on how real-time detectors can achieve cross-domain generalization under zero extra inference overhead by relying solely on training-time representation learning. We observe that, under domain shift, DETR-based real-time detectors mainly degrade through increased missed detections, rooted in limited and unstable object-level discriminative evidence. Based on this, we propose RT-SDGDet, a multi-evidence collaborative modeling framework for RT-SDGOD. The core idea is to enable multiple queries of the same object to collaboratively cover more sufficient discriminative evidence while maintaining the stability of such evidence modeling across views. Specifically, we use one-to-many (O2M) supervision to construct stable object-specific query groups, and further design Discriminative Evidence Diversity Learning (DEDL) and Dual-view Evidence Consistency Learning (DvECL) to expand object-level evidence coverage and improve evidence stability under appearance perturbations, respectively. Since all components are introduced only during training, our method incurs no extra inference overhead. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves better generalization performance than existing approaches across multiple unseen target domains.
Abstract:Object detection is an important task in computer vision, which aims to detect the objects of interest. through the given category list or query images. In this work, we propose a new problem of language-visual-complementary open-set object detection (LV-OSD), i.e., using the flexible text-based and/or image-based prompts to specify the desired object categories. This setting is more common and practical in real-world applications. For this purpose, we design a dual-branch detection framework, LVDor, which can simultaneously accept both text and image prompts. Specifically, we first build the Multi-modal Prompts (MPr) containing various text descriptions and image samples for each category. Subsequently, to bridge the semantic gap among the input image, text prompts, and image prompts, we design a Target-guided Prompt Dynamic Weighting (TPDW) module. Guided by the prior information of the target image, this module dynamically produces the text and image prompts that best align with the target semantics, achieving precise alignment and effectively reducing the discrepancy between the two modalities, thereby accommodating the LV-OSD setting. We also propose a simple Prompt Random Masking (PRM) mechanism during training to simulate the arbitrary combination of text and/or image prompts in testing. Extensive experimental results verify our problem formulation's reasonability and our method's effectiveness. Prompts and code will be released publicly.
Abstract:Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) has made significant progress, enabling detectors to generalize from seen to unseen categories. However, real-world category spaces continually evolve, and existing OVD models still struggle with newly emerging concepts, while repeated full retraining is prohibitively expensive. To this end, we introduce a new task setting, termed Continual OVD with Novel Concept Injection (COVD), where models sequentially learn incoming novel concept groups while preserving prior concepts and original open-vocabulary knowledge, along with a new benchmark, Novel-114. Our key observation is that pretrained visual encoders often already perceive and represent many novel concepts, and the main bottleneck lies in the lack of stable semantic alignment between visual representations and textual concepts. Based on this, we propose NoIn-Det, an efficient continual injection framework without additional parameters. NoIn-Det freezes the visual encoder, preserves the text representation space using only texts of common concepts and previously injected concepts, and injects novel concepts by updating only a small subset of text-branch parameters beneficial to novel concept learning. Extensive experiments show that NoIn-Det effectively learns novel concepts, preserves old knowledge, and consistently outperforms existing continual learning methods for VLMs without introducing additional parameters.Novel-114 and the code will be released.
Abstract:While multimodal data integrating diverse imaging and clinical tabular records is crucial for accurate medical diagnosis, the arbitrary absence of specific modalities is prevalent in clinical practice, severely degrading the performance of multimodal models. Existing methods either discard missing modalities, leading to information loss, or struggle to synthesize them without capturing complex inter-modal dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Context-driven Missing-Modality Learning (CMML) framework, which sequentially performs modality synthesis and semantic alignment to achieve robust diagnosis under arbitrary missing conditions. Specifically, we design a Cascade Residual Transformer-based Autoencoder (CRTA) that leverages learnable context tokens acting as dataset-level semantic prior to capture inter-modal dependencies and synthesize key missing representations. These representations are further enriched by modality-specific memory banks. To resolve the discrepancy between original available and synthesized representations, we transform the learned context tokens into instance-adaptive semantic references by infusing multimodal representations from the CRTA's outputs. This reference guides the alignment of heterogeneous modality representations into a unified space, where class-aware contrastive refinement is finally applied to explore discriminative diagnostic cues. Extensive evaluations on skin lesion (Derm7pt), ocular disease (ODIR), and meningioma (MEN) datasets demonstrate that CMML significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, yielding AVG AUC improvements of 1.26%, 0.97%, and 1.32%, respectively.
Abstract:In real-world scenarios, continual changes in weather, illumination, and imaging conditions cause significant domain shifts, leading detectors trained on a single source domain to degrade severely in unseen environments. Existing single-domain generalized object detection (SDGOD) methods mainly rely on data augmentation or domain-invariant representation learning, but pay limited attention to detector mechanisms, leaving clear limitations under complex domain shifts. Through analytical experiments, we find that performance degradation is dominated by increasing missed detections, which fundamentally arises from reduced cross-domain stability of the detector: object-background and inter-instance relations become less stable in the encoding stage, while semantic-spatial alignment of query representations also becomes harder to maintain in the decoding stage. To this end, we propose VFM$^{4}$SDG, a dual-prior learning framework for SDGOD, which introduces a frozen vision foundation model (VFM) as a transferable cross-domain stability prior into detector representation learning and query modeling. In the encoding stage, we propose Cross-domain Stable Relational Prior Distillation to enhance the robustness of object-background and inter-instance relational modeling. In the decoding stage, we propose Semantic-Contextual Prior-based Query Enhancement, which injects category-level semantic prototypes and global visual context into queries to improve their semantic recognition and spatial localization stability in unseen domains. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing SOTA methods on standard SDGOD benchmarks and two mainstream DETR-based detectors, demonstrating its effectiveness, robustness, and generality.
Abstract:Despite the remarkable progress in open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), a significant gap remains between the training and testing phases. During training, the RPN and RoI heads often misclassify unlabeled novel-category objects as background, causing some proposals to be prematurely filtered out by the RPN while others are further misclassified by the RoI head. During testing, these proposals again receive low scores and are removed in post-processing, leading to a significant drop in recall and ultimately weakening novel-category detection performance.To address these issues, we propose a novel training framework-NoOVD-which innovatively integrates a self-distillation mechanism grounded in the knowledge of frozen vision-language models (VLMs). Specifically, we design K-FPN, which leverages the pretrained knowledge of VLMs to guide the model in discovering novel-category objects and facilitates knowledge distillation-without requiring additional data-thus preventing forced alignment of novel objects with background.Additionally, we introduce R-RPN, which adjusts the confidence scores of proposals during inference to improve the recall of novel-category objects. Cross-dataset evaluations on OV-LVIS, OV-COCO, and Objects365 demonstrate that our approach consistently achieves superior performance across multiple metrics.
Abstract:In clinical practice, crossmodal information including medical images and tabular data is essential for disease diagnosis. There exists a significant modality gap between these data types, which obstructs advancements in crossmodal diagnostic accuracy. Most existing crossmodal learning (CML) methods primarily focus on exploring relationships among high-level encoder outputs, leading to the neglect of local information in images. Additionally, these methods often overlook the extraction of task-relevant information. In this paper, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine crossmodal learning (CFCML) framework to progressively reduce the modality gap between multimodal images and tabular data, by thoroughly exploring inter-modal relationships. At the coarse stage, we explore the relationships between multi-granularity features from various image encoder stages and tabular information, facilitating a preliminary reduction of the modality gap. At the fine stage, we generate unimodal and crossmodal prototypes that incorporate class-aware information, and establish hierarchical anchor-based relationship mining (HRM) strategy to further diminish the modality gap and extract discriminative crossmodal information. This strategy utilize modality samples, unimodal prototypes, and crossmodal prototypes as anchors to develop contrastive learning approaches, effectively enhancing inter-class disparity while reducing intra-class disparity from multiple perspectives. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving improvements of 1.53% and 0.91% in AUC metrics on the MEN and Derm7pt datasets, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/IsDling/CFCML.
Abstract:LiDAR semantic segmentation plays a vital role in autonomous driving. Existing voxel-based methods for LiDAR semantic segmentation apply uniform partition to the 3D LiDAR point cloud to form a structured representation based on cartesian/cylindrical coordinates. Although these methods show impressive performance, the drawback of existing voxel-based methods remains in two aspects: (1) it requires a large enough input voxel resolution, which brings a large amount of computation cost and memory consumption. (2) it does not well handle the unbalanced point distribution of LiDAR point cloud. In this paper, we propose a non-uniform cylindrical partition network named NUC-Net to tackle the above challenges. Specifically, we propose the Arithmetic Progression of Interval (API) method to non-uniformly partition the radial axis and generate the voxel representation which is representative and efficient. Moreover, we propose a non-uniform multi-scale aggregation method to improve contextual information. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets with much faster speed and much less training time. And our method can be a general component for LiDAR semantic segmentation, which significantly improves both the accuracy and efficiency of the uniform counterpart by $4 \times$ training faster and $2 \times$ GPU memory reduction and $3 \times$ inference speedup. We further provide theoretical analysis towards understanding why NUC is effective and how point distribution affects performance. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/alanWXZ/NUC-Net}{https://github.com/alanWXZ/NUC-Net}.
Abstract:Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to remarkable progress across domains, yet their capabilities in the humanities, particularly history, remain underexplored. Historical reasoning poses unique challenges for AI, involving multimodal source interpretation, temporal inference, and cross-linguistic analysis. While general-purpose agents perform well on many existing benchmarks, they lack the domain-specific expertise required to engage with historical materials and questions. To address this gap, we introduce HistBench, a new benchmark of 414 high-quality questions designed to evaluate AI's capacity for historical reasoning and authored by more than 40 expert contributors. The tasks span a wide range of historical problems-from factual retrieval based on primary sources to interpretive analysis of manuscripts and images, to interdisciplinary challenges involving archaeology, linguistics, or cultural history. Furthermore, the benchmark dataset spans 29 ancient and modern languages and covers a wide range of historical periods and world regions. Finding the poor performance of LLMs and other agents on HistBench, we further present HistAgent, a history-specific agent equipped with carefully designed tools for OCR, translation, archival search, and image understanding in History. On HistBench, HistAgent based on GPT-4o achieves an accuracy of 27.54% pass@1 and 36.47% pass@2, significantly outperforming LLMs with online search and generalist agents, including GPT-4o (18.60%), DeepSeek-R1(14.49%) and Open Deep Research-smolagents(20.29% pass@1 and 25.12% pass@2). These results highlight the limitations of existing LLMs and generalist agents and demonstrate the advantages of HistAgent for historical reasoning.