Object detection is a computer vision task in which the goal is to detect and locate objects of interest in an image or video. The task involves identifying the position and boundaries of objects in an image, and classifying the objects into different categories. It forms a crucial part of vision recognition, alongside image classification and retrieval.
Text-to-image models are known to struggle with generating images that perfectly align with textual prompts. Several previous studies have focused on evaluating image-text alignment in text-to-image generation. However, these evaluations either address overly simple scenarios, especially overlooking the difficulty of prompts with multiple different instances belonging to the same category, or they introduce metrics that do not correlate well with human evaluation. In this study, we introduce M$^3$T2IBench, a large-scale, multi-category, multi-instance, multi-relation along with an object-detection-based evaluation metric, $AlignScore$, which aligns closely with human evaluation. Our findings reveal that current open-source text-to-image models perform poorly on this challenging benchmark. Additionally, we propose the Revise-Then-Enforce approach to enhance image-text alignment. This training-free post-editing method demonstrates improvements in image-text alignment across a broad range of diffusion models. \footnote{Our code and data has been released in supplementary material and will be made publicly available after the paper is accepted.}
Learned robot policies have consistently been shown to be versatile, but they typically have no built-in mechanism for handling the complexity of open environments, making them prone to execution failures; this implies that deploying policies without the ability to recognise and react to failures may lead to unreliable and unsafe robot behaviour. In this paper, we present a framework that couples a learned policy with a method to detect visual anomalies during policy deployment and to perform recovery behaviours when necessary, thereby aiming to prevent failures. Specifically, we train an anomaly detection model using data collected during nominal executions of a trained policy. This model is then integrated into the online policy execution process, so that deviations from the nominal execution can trigger a three-level sequential recovery process that consists of (i) pausing the execution temporarily, (ii) performing a local perturbation of the robot's state, and (iii) resetting the robot to a safe state by sampling from a learned execution success model. We verify our proposed method in two different scenarios: (i) a door handle reaching task with a Kinova Gen3 arm using a policy trained in simulation and transferred to the real robot, and (ii) an object placing task with a UFactory xArm 6 using a general-purpose policy model. Our results show that integrating policy execution with anomaly detection and recovery increases the execution success rate in environments with various anomalies, such as trajectory deviations and adversarial human interventions.
The proposed solution is Deep Learning Technique that will be able classify three types of tea leaves diseases from which two diseases are caused by the pests and one due to pathogens (infectious organisms) and environmental conditions and also show the area damaged by a disease in leaves. Namely Red Rust, Helopeltis and Red spider mite respectively. In this paper we have evaluated two models namely SSD MobileNet V2 and Faster R-CNN ResNet50 V1 for the object detection. The SSD MobileNet V2 gave precision of 0.209 for IOU range of 0.50:0.95 with recall of 0.02 on IOU 0.50:0.95 and final mAP of 20.9%. While Faster R-CNN ResNet50 V1 has precision of 0.252 on IOU range of 0.50:0.95 and recall of 0.044 on IOU of 0.50:0.95 with a mAP of 25%, which is better than SSD. Also used Mask R-CNN for Object Instance Segmentation where we have implemented our custom method to calculate the damaged diseased portion of leaves. Keywords: Tea Leaf Disease, Deep Learning, Red Rust, Helopeltis and Red Spider Mite, SSD MobileNet V2, Faster R-CNN ResNet50 V1 and Mask RCNN.
Because 3D structure of a roadway environment can be characterized directly by a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors, they can be used to obtain exceptional situational awareness for assitive and autonomous driving systems. Although LiDARs demonstrate good performance in clean and clear weather conditions, their performance significantly deteriorates in adverse weather conditions such as those involving atmospheric precipitation. This may render perception capabilities of autonomous systems that use LiDAR data in learning based models to perform object detection and ranging ineffective. While efforts have been made to enhance the accuracy of these models, the extent of signal degradation under various weather conditions remains largely not quantified. In this study, we focus on the performance of an automotive grade LiDAR in snowy conditions in order to develop a physics-based model that examines failure modes of a LiDAR sensor. Specifically, we investigated how the LiDAR signal attenuates with different snowfall rates and how snow particles near the source serve as small but efficient reflectors. Utilizing our model, we transform data from clear conditions to simulate snowy scenarios, enabling a comparison of our synthetic data with actual snowy conditions. Furthermore, we employ this synthetic data, representative of different snowfall rates, to explore the impact on a pre-trained object detection model, assessing its performance under varying levels of snowfall
Concept erasure in text-to-image diffusion models is crucial for mitigating harmful content, yet existing methods often compromise generative quality. We introduce Semantic Surgery, a novel training-free, zero-shot framework for concept erasure that operates directly on text embeddings before the diffusion process. It dynamically estimates the presence of target concepts in a prompt and performs a calibrated vector subtraction to neutralize their influence at the source, enhancing both erasure completeness and locality. The framework includes a Co-Occurrence Encoding module for robust multi-concept erasure and a visual feedback loop to address latent concept persistence. As a training-free method, Semantic Surgery adapts dynamically to each prompt, ensuring precise interventions. Extensive experiments on object, explicit content, artistic style, and multi-celebrity erasure tasks show our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. We achieve superior completeness and robustness while preserving locality and image quality (e.g., 93.58 H-score in object erasure, reducing explicit content to just 1 instance, and 8.09 H_a in style erasure with no quality degradation). This robustness also allows our framework to function as a built-in threat detection system, offering a practical solution for safer text-to-image generation.
Remote monitoring of drones has become a global objective due to emerging applications in national security and managing aerial delivery traffic. Despite their relatively small size, drones can carry significant payloads, which require monitoring, especially in cases of unauthorized transportation of dangerous goods. A drone's flight dynamics heavily depend on outdoor wind conditions and the carry-on weight, which affect the tilt angle of a drone's body and the rotation velocity of the blades. A surveillance radar can capture both effects, provided a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio for the received echoes and an adjusted postprocessing detection algorithm. Here, we conduct a systematic study to demonstrate that micro-Doppler analysis enables the disentanglement of the impacts of wind and weight on a hovering drone. The physics behind the effect is related to the flight controller, as the way the drone counteracts weight and wind differs. When the payload is balanced, it imposes an additional load symmetrically on all four rotors, causing them to rotate faster, thereby generating a blade-related micro-Doppler shift at a higher frequency. However, the impact of the wind is different. The wind attempts to displace the drone, and to counteract this, the drone tilts to the side. As a result, the forward and rear rotors rotate at different velocities to maintain the tilt angle of the drone body relative to the airflow direction. This causes the splitting in the micro-Doppler spectra. By performing a set of experiments in a controlled environment, specifically, an anechoic chamber for electromagnetic isolation and a wind tunnel for imposing deterministic wind conditions, we demonstrate that both wind and payload details can be extracted using a simple deterministic algorithm based on branching in the micro-Doppler spectra.
Salient object detection exemplifies data-bounded tasks where expensive pixel-precise annotations force separate model training for related subtasks like DIS and HR-SOD. We present a method that dramatically improves generalization through large-scale synthetic data generation and ambiguity-aware architecture. We introduce S3OD, a dataset of over 139,000 high-resolution images created through our multi-modal diffusion pipeline that extracts labels from diffusion and DINO-v3 features. The iterative generation framework prioritizes challenging categories based on model performance. We propose a streamlined multi-mask decoder that naturally handles the inherent ambiguity in salient object detection by predicting multiple valid interpretations. Models trained solely on synthetic data achieve 20-50% error reduction in cross-dataset generalization, while fine-tuned versions reach state-of-the-art performance across DIS and HR-SOD benchmarks.
Computer vision can accelerate ecological research and conservation monitoring, yet adoption in ecology lags in part because of a lack of trust in black-box neural-network-based models. We seek to address this challenge by applying post-hoc explanations to provide evidence for predictions and document limitations that are important to field deployment. Using aerial imagery from Glacier Bay National Park, we train a Faster R-CNN to detect pinnipeds (harbor seals) and generate explanations via gradient-based class activation mapping (HiResCAM, LayerCAM), local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME), and perturbation-based explanations. We assess explanations along three axes relevant to field use: (i) localization fidelity: whether high-attribution regions coincide with the animal rather than background context; (ii) faithfulness: whether deletion/insertion tests produce changes in detector confidence; and (iii) diagnostic utility: whether explanations reveal systematic failure modes. Explanations concentrate on seal torsos and contours rather than surrounding ice/rock, and removal of the seals reduces detection confidence, providing model-evidence for true positives. The analysis also uncovers recurrent error sources, including confusion between seals and black ice and rocks. We translate these findings into actionable next steps for model development, including more targeted data curation and augmentation. By pairing object detection with post-hoc explainability, we can move beyond "black-box" predictions toward auditable, decision-supporting tools for conservation monitoring.
Probes trained on model activations can detect undesirable behaviors like deception or biases that are difficult to identify from outputs alone. This makes them useful detectors to identify misbehavior. Furthermore, they are also valuable training signals, since they not only reward outputs, but also good internal processes for arriving at that output. However, training against interpretability tools raises a fundamental concern: when a monitor becomes a training target, it may cease to be reliable (Goodhart's Law). We propose two methods for training against probes based on Supervised Fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization. We conduct an initial exploration of these methods in a testbed for reducing toxicity and evaluate the amount by which probe accuracy drops when training against them. To retain the accuracy of probe-detectors after training, we attempt (1) to train against an ensemble of probes, (2) retain held-out probes that aren't used for training, and (3) retrain new probes after training. First, probe-based preference optimization unexpectedly preserves probe detectability better than classifier-based methods, suggesting the preference learning objective incentivizes maintaining rather than obfuscating relevant representations. Second, probe diversity provides minimal practical benefit - simply retraining probes after optimization recovers high detection accuracy. Our findings suggest probe-based training can be viable for certain alignment methods, though probe ensembles are largely unnecessary when retraining is feasible.
Deep vision models are now mature enough to be integrated in industrial and possibly critical applications such as autonomous navigation. Yet, data collection and labeling to train such models requires too much efforts and costs for a single company or product. This drawback is more significant in critical applications, where training data must include all possible conditions including rare scenarios. In this perspective, generating synthetic images is an appealing solution, since it allows a cheap yet reliable covering of all the conditions and environments, if the impact of the synthetic-to-real distribution shift is mitigated. In this article, we consider the case of runway detection that is a critical part in autonomous landing systems developed by aircraft manufacturers. We propose an image generation approach based on a commercial flight simulator that complements a few annotated real images. By controlling the image generation and the integration of real and synthetic data, we show that standard object detection models can achieve accurate prediction. We also evaluate their robustness with respect to adverse conditions, in our case nighttime images, that were not represented in the real data, and show the interest of using a customized domain adaptation strategy.