Model Optimization for Multi-Camera 3D Detection and Tracking

Outside-in multi-camera perception is increasingly important in indoor environments, where networks of static cameras must support multi-target tracking under occlusion and heterogeneous viewpoints. We evaluate Sparse4D, a query-based spatiotemporal 3D detection and tracking framework that fuses multi-view features in a shared world frame and propagates sparse object queries via instance memory. We study reduced input frame rates, post-training quantization (INT8 and FP8), transfer to the WILDTRACK benchmark, and Transformer Engine mixed-precision fine-tuning. To better capture identity stability, we report Average Track Duration (AvgTrackDur), which measures identity persistence in seconds. Sparse4D remains stable under moderate FPS reductions, but below 2 FPS, identity association collapses even when detections are stable. Selective quantization of the backbone and neck offers the best speed-accuracy trade-off, while attention-related modules are consistently sensitive to low precision. On WILDTRACK, low-FPS pretraining yields large zero-shot gains over the base checkpoint, while small-scale fine-tuning provides limited additional benefit. Transformer Engine mixed precision reduces latency and improves camera scalability, but can destabilize identity propagation, motivating stability-aware validation.

Deep learning enables urban change profiling through alignment of historical maps

Prior to modern Earth observation technologies, historical maps provide a unique record of long-term urban transformation and offer a lens on the evolving identity of cities. However, extracting consistent and fine-grained change information from historical map series remains challenging due to spatial misalignment, cartographic variation, and degrading document quality, limiting most analyses to small-scale or qualitative approaches. We propose a fully automated, deep learning-based framework for fine-grained urban change analysis from large collections of historical maps, built on a modular design that integrates dense map alignment, multi-temporal object detection, and change profiling. This framework shifts the analysis of historical maps from ad hoc visual comparison toward systematic, quantitative characterization of urban change. Experiments demonstrate the robust performance of the proposed alignment and object detection methods. Applied to Paris between 1868 and 1937, the framework reveals the spatial and temporal heterogeneity in urban transformation, highlighting its relevance for research in the social sciences and humanities. The modular design of our framework further supports adaptation to diverse cartographic contexts and downstream applications.

Cross-Modal Alignment and Fusion for RGB-D Transmission-Line Defect Detection

Transmission line defect detection remains challenging for automated UAV inspection due to the dominance of small-scale defects, complex backgrounds, and illumination variations. Existing RGB-based detectors, despite recent progress, struggle to distinguish geometrically subtle defects from visually similar background structures under limited chromatic contrast. This paper proposes CMAFNet, a Cross-Modal Alignment and Fusion Network that integrates RGB appearance and depth geometry through a principled purify-then-fuse paradigm. CMAFNet consists of a Semantic Recomposition Module that performs dictionary-based feature purification via a learned codebook to suppress modality-specific noise while preserving defect-discriminative information, and a Contextual Semantic Integration Framework that captures global spatial dependencies using partial-channel attention to enhance structural semantic reasoning. Position-wise normalization within the purification stage enforces explicit reconstruction-driven cross-modal alignment, ensuring statistical compatibility between heterogeneous features prior to fusion. Extensive experiments on the TLRGBD benchmark, where 94.5% of instances are small objects, demonstrate that CMAFNet achieves 32.2% mAP@50 and 12.5% APs, outperforming the strongest baseline by 9.8 and 4.0 percentage points, respectively. A lightweight variant reaches 24.8% mAP50 at 228 FPS with only 4.9M parameters, surpassing all YOLO-based detectors while matching transformer-based methods at substantially lower computational cost.

Samba+: General and Accurate Salient Object Detection via A More Unified Mamba-based Framework

Existing salient object detection (SOD) models are generally constrained by the limited receptive fields of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and quadratic computational complexity of Transformers. Recently, the emerging state-space model, namely Mamba, has shown great potential in balancing global receptive fields and computational efficiency. As a solution, we propose Saliency Mamba (Samba), a pure Mamba-based architecture that flexibly handles various distinct SOD tasks, including RGB/RGB-D/RGB-T SOD, video SOD (VSOD), RGB-D VSOD, and visible-depth-thermal SOD. Specifically, we rethink the scanning strategy of Mamba for SOD, and introduce a saliency-guided Mamba block (SGMB) that features a spatial neighborhood scanning (SNS) algorithm to preserve the spatial continuity of salient regions. A context-aware upsampling (CAU) method is also proposed to promote hierarchical feature alignment and aggregation by modeling contextual dependencies. As one step further, to avoid the "task-specific" problem as in previous SOD solutions, we develop Samba+, which is empowered by training Samba in a multi-task joint manner, leading to a more unified and versatile model. Two crucial components that collaboratively tackle challenges encountered in input of arbitrary modalities and continual adaptation are investigated. Specifically, a hub-and-spoke graph attention (HGA) module facilitates adaptive cross-modal interactive fusion, and a modality-anchored continual learning (MACL) strategy alleviates inter-modal conflicts together with catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Samba individually outperforms existing methods across six SOD tasks on 22 datasets with lower computational cost, whereas Samba+ achieves even superior results on these tasks and datasets by using a single trained versatile model. Additional results further demonstrate the potential of our Samba framework.

Foundation CAN LM: A Pretrained Language Model For Automotive CAN Data

The Controller Area Network (CAN) bus provides a rich source of vehicular signals increasingly leveraged for applications in automotive and auto insurance domains, including collision detection, predictive maintenance, and driver risk modeling. Despite this potential, existing pipelines largely train isolated task-specific models on raw CAN data, with only limited efforts exploring decoded signals. Such fragmentation prevents shared representation learning and limits cross-task generalization. By contrast, natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) have been transformed by the foundation model paradigm: large-scale pretraining followed by task-specific adaptation. In this work, we introduce the foundation CAN model that demonstrates multi-objective downstream generalization using a single pretrained backbone. Our approach treats CAN data as a language: we pretrain on large-scale, unlabeled decoded CAN signals and fine-tune across heterogeneous auto insurance tasks. To enable this, we propose a unified tokenization scheme for mixed discrete-continuous signals and address challenges of temporal complexity and trip-specific variability. Our results show that one pretrained CAN model can adapt effectively to diverse predictive tasks, validating that the foundation modeling paradigm, proven in NLP and CV, also holds for CAN data. This establishes a new direction for generalizable representation learning in automotive AI.

On the Assessment of Sensitivity of Autonomous Vehicle Perception

The viability of automated driving is heavily dependent on the performance of perception systems to provide real-time accurate and reliable information for robust decision-making and maneuvers. These systems must perform reliably not only under ideal conditions, but also when challenged by natural and adversarial driving factors. Both of these types of interference can lead to perception errors and delays in detection and classification. Hence, it is essential to assess the robustness of the perception systems of automated vehicles (AVs) and explore strategies for making perception more reliable. We approach this problem by evaluating perception performance using predictive sensitivity quantification based on an ensemble of models, capturing model disagreement and inference variability across multiple models, under adverse driving scenarios in both simulated environments and real-world conditions. A notional architecture for assessing perception performance is proposed. A perception assessment criterion is developed based on an AV's stopping distance at a stop sign on varying road surfaces, such as dry and wet asphalt, and vehicle speed. Five state-of-the-art computer vision models are used, including YOLO (v8-v9), DEtection TRansformer (DETR50, DETR101), Real-Time DEtection TRansformer (RT-DETR)in our experiments. Diminished lighting conditions, e.g., resulting from the presence of fog and low sun altitude, have the greatest impact on the performance of the perception models. Additionally, adversarial road conditions such as occlusions of roadway objects increase perception sensitivity and model performance drops when faced with a combination of adversarial road conditions and inclement weather conditions. Also, it is demonstrated that the greater the distance to a roadway object, the greater the impact on perception performance, hence diminished perception robustness.

CORDS: Continuous Representations of Discrete Structures

Many learning problems require predicting sets of objects when the number of objects is not known beforehand. Examples include object detection, molecular modeling, and scientific inference tasks such as astrophysical source detection. Existing methods often rely on padded representations or must explicitly infer the set size, which often poses challenges. We present a novel strategy for addressing this challenge by casting prediction of variable-sized sets as a continuous inference problem. Our approach, CORDS (Continuous Representations of Discrete Structures), provides an invertible mapping that transforms a set of spatial objects into continuous fields: a density field that encodes object locations and count, and a feature field that carries their attributes over the same support. Because the mapping is invertible, models operate entirely in field space while remaining exactly decodable to discrete sets. We evaluate CORDS across molecular generation and regression, object detection, simulation-based inference, and a mathematical task involving recovery of local maxima, demonstrating robust handling of unknown set sizes with competitive accuracy.

PromptMAD: Cross-Modal Prompting for Multi-Class Visual Anomaly Localization

Visual anomaly detection in multi-class settings poses significant challenges due to the diversity of object categories, the scarcity of anomalous examples, and the presence of camouflaged defects. In this paper, we propose PromptMAD, a cross-modal prompting framework for unsupervised visual anomaly detection and localization that integrates semantic guidance through vision-language alignment. By leveraging CLIP-encoded text prompts describing both normal and anomalous class-specific characteristics, our method enriches visual reconstruction with semantic context, improving the detection of subtle and textural anomalies. To further address the challenge of class imbalance at the pixel level, we incorporate Focal loss function, which emphasizes hard-to-detect anomalous regions during training. Our architecture also includes a supervised segmentor that fuses multi-scale convolutional features with Transformer-based spatial attention and diffusion iterative refinement, yielding precise and high-resolution anomaly maps. Extensive experiments on the MVTec-AD dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art pixel-level performance, improving mean AUC to 98.35% and AP to 66.54%, while maintaining efficiency across diverse categories.

Don't double it: Efficient Agent Prediction in Occlusions

Occluded traffic agents pose a significant challenge for autonomous vehicles, as hidden pedestrians or vehicles can appear unexpectedly, yet this problem remains understudied. Existing learning-based methods, while capable of inferring the presence of hidden agents, often produce redundant occupancy predictions where a single agent is identified multiple times. This issue complicates downstream planning and increases computational load. To address this, we introduce MatchInformer, a novel transformer-based approach that builds on the state-of-the-art SceneInformer architecture. Our method improves upon prior work by integrating Hungarian Matching, a state-of-the-art object matching algorithm from object detection, into the training process to enforce a one-to-one correspondence between predictions and ground truth, thereby reducing redundancy. We further refine trajectory forecasts by decoupling an agent's heading from its motion, a strategy that improves the accuracy and interpretability of predicted paths. To better handle class imbalances, we propose using the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) to evaluate occupancy predictions. By considering all entries in the confusion matrix, MCC provides a robust measure even in sparse or imbalanced scenarios. Experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset demonstrate that our approach improves reasoning about occluded regions and produces more accurate trajectory forecasts than prior methods.

BLO-Inst: Bi-Level Optimization Based Alignment of YOLO and SAM for Robust Instance Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model has revolutionized image segmentation with its zero-shot capabilities, yet its reliance on manual prompts hinders fully automated deployment. While integrating object detectors as prompt generators offers a pathway to automation, existing pipelines suffer from two fundamental limitations: objective mismatch, where detectors optimized for geometric localization do not correspond to the optimal prompting context required by SAM, and alignment overfitting in standard joint training, where the detector simply memorizes specific prompt adjustments for training samples rather than learning a generalizable policy. To bridge this gap, we introduce BLO-Inst, a unified framework that aligns detection and segmentation objectives by bi-level optimization. We formulate the alignment as a nested optimization problem over disjoint data splits. In the lower level, the SAM is fine-tuned to maximize segmentation fidelity given the current detection proposals on a subset ($D_1$). In the upper level, the detector is updated to generate bounding boxes that explicitly minimize the validation loss of the fine-tuned SAM on a separate subset ($D_2$). This effectively transforms the detector into a segmentation-aware prompt generator, optimizing the bounding boxes not just for localization accuracy, but for downstream mask quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BLO-Inst achieves superior performance, outperforming standard baselines on tasks in general and biomedical domains.