SCAFusion: A Multimodal 3D Detection Framework for Small Object Detection in Lunar Surface Exploration

Reliable and precise detection of small and irregular objects, such as meteor fragments and rocks, is critical for autonomous navigation and operation in lunar surface exploration. Existing multimodal 3D perception methods designed for terrestrial autonomous driving often underperform in off world environments due to poor feature alignment, limited multimodal synergy, and weak small object detection. This paper presents SCAFusion, a multimodal 3D object detection model tailored for lunar robotic missions. Built upon the BEVFusion framework, SCAFusion integrates a Cognitive Adapter for efficient camera backbone tuning, a Contrastive Alignment Module to enhance camera LiDAR feature consistency, a Camera Auxiliary Training Branch to strengthen visual representation, and most importantly, a Section aware Coordinate Attention mechanism explicitly designed to boost the detection performance of small, irregular targets. With negligible increase in parameters and computation, our model achieves 69.7% mAP and 72.1% NDS on the nuScenes validation set, improving the baseline by 5.0% and 2.7%, respectively. In simulated lunar environments built on Isaac Sim, SCAFusion achieves 90.93% mAP, outperforming the baseline by 11.5%, with notable gains in detecting small meteor like obstacles.

Scalpel-SAM: A Semi-Supervised Paradigm for Adapting SAM to Infrared Small Object Detection

Infrared small object detection urgently requires semi-supervised paradigms due to the high cost of annotation. However, existing methods like SAM face significant challenges of domain gaps, inability of encoding physical priors, and inherent architectural complexity. To address this, we designed a Hierarchical MoE Adapter consisting of four white-box neural operators. Building upon this core component, we propose a two-stage paradigm for knowledge distillation and transfer: (1) Prior-Guided Knowledge Distillation, where we use our MoE adapter and 10% of available fully supervised data to distill SAM into an expert teacher (Scalpel-SAM); and (2) Deployment-Oriented Knowledge Transfer, where we use Scalpel-SAM to generate pseudo labels for training lightweight and efficient downstream models. Experiments demonstrate that with minimal annotations, our paradigm enables downstream models to achieve performance comparable to, or even surpassing, their fully supervised counterparts. To our knowledge, this is the first semi-supervised paradigm that systematically addresses the data scarcity issue in IR-SOT using SAM as the teacher model.

Rectifying Adversarial Examples Using Their Vulnerabilities

Deep neural network-based classifiers are prone to errors when processing adversarial examples (AEs). AEs are minimally perturbed input data undetectable to humans posing significant risks to security-dependent applications. Hence, extensive research has been undertaken to develop defense mechanisms that mitigate their threats. Most existing methods primarily focus on discriminating AEs based on the input sample features, emphasizing AE detection without addressing the correct sample categorization before an attack. While some tasks may only require mere rejection on detected AEs, others necessitate identifying the correct original input category such as traffic sign recognition in autonomous driving. The objective of this study is to propose a method for rectifying AEs to estimate the correct labels of their original inputs. Our method is based on re-attacking AEs to move them beyond the decision boundary for accurate label prediction, effectively addressing the issue of rectifying minimally perceptible AEs created using white-box attack methods. However, challenge remains with respect to effectively rectifying AEs produced by black-box attacks at a distance from the boundary, or those misclassified into low-confidence categories by targeted attacks. By adopting a straightforward approach of only considering AEs as inputs, the proposed method can address diverse attacks while avoiding the requirement of parameter adjustments or preliminary training. Results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits consistent performance in rectifying AEs generated via various attack methods, including targeted and black-box attacks. Moreover, it outperforms conventional rectification and input transformation methods in terms of stability against various attacks.

HeteroHBA: A Generative Structure-Manipulating Backdoor Attack on Heterogeneous Graphs

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have achieved strong performance in many real-world applications, yet targeted backdoor poisoning on heterogeneous graphs remains less studied. We consider backdoor attacks for heterogeneous node classification, where an adversary injects a small set of trigger nodes and connections during training to force specific victim nodes to be misclassified into an attacker-chosen label at test time while preserving clean performance. We propose HeteroHBA, a generative backdoor framework that selects influential auxiliary neighbors for trigger attachment via saliency-based screening and synthesizes diverse trigger features and connection patterns to better match the local heterogeneous context. To improve stealthiness, we combine Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) with a Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) loss to align the trigger feature distribution with benign statistics, thereby reducing detectability, and we optimize the attack with a bilevel objective that jointly promotes attack success and maintains clean accuracy. Experiments on multiple real-world heterogeneous graphs with representative HGNN architectures show that HeteroHBA consistently achieves higher attack success than prior backdoor baselines with comparable or smaller impact on clean accuracy; moreover, the attack remains effective under our heterogeneity-aware structural defense, CSD. These results highlight practical backdoor risks in heterogeneous graph learning and motivate the development of stronger defenses.

Towards Robust Optical-SAR Object Detection under Missing Modalities: A Dynamic Quality-Aware Fusion Framework

Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) fusion-based object detection has attracted significant research interest in remote sensing, as these modalities provide complementary information for all-weather monitoring. However, practical deployment is severely limited by inherent challenges. Due to distinct imaging mechanisms, temporal asynchrony, and registration difficulties, obtaining well-aligned optical-SAR image pairs remains extremely difficult, frequently resulting in missing or degraded modality data. Although recent approaches have attempted to address this issue, they still suffer from limited robustness to random missing modalities and lack effective mechanisms to ensure consistent performance improvement in fusion-based detection. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Quality-Aware Dynamic Fusion Network (QDFNet) for robust optical-SAR object detection. Our proposed method leverages learnable reference tokens to dynamically assess feature reliability and guide adaptive fusion in the presence of missing modalities. In particular, we design a Dynamic Modality Quality Assessment (DMQA) module that employs learnable reference tokens to iteratively refine feature reliability assessment, enabling precise identification of degraded regions and providing quality guidance for subsequent fusion. Moreover, we develop an Orthogonal Constraint Normalization Fusion (OCNF) module that employs orthogonal constraints to preserve modality independence while dynamically adjusting fusion weights based on reliability scores, effectively suppressing unreliable feature propagation. Extensive experiments on the SpaceNet6-OTD and OGSOD-2.0 datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of QDFNet compared to state-of-the-art methods, particularly under partial modality corruption or missing data scenarios.

LLM-Based Agentic Exploration for Robot Navigation & Manipulation with Skill Orchestration

This paper presents an end-to-end LLM-based agentic exploration system for an indoor shopping task, evaluated in both Gazebo simulation and a corresponding real-world corridor layout. The robot incrementally builds a lightweight semantic map by detecting signboards at junctions and storing direction-to-POI relations together with estimated junction poses, while AprilTags provide repeatable anchors for approach and alignment. Given a natural-language shopping request, an LLM produces a constrained discrete action at each junction (direction and whether to enter a store), and a ROS finite-state main controller executes the decision by gating modular motion primitives, including local-costmap-based obstacle avoidance, AprilTag approaching, store entry, and grasping. Qualitative results show that the integrated stack can perform end-to-end task execution from user instruction to multi-store navigation and object retrieval, while remaining modular and debuggable through its text-based map and logged decision history.

PatchBlock: A Lightweight Defense Against Adversarial Patches for Embedded EdgeAI Devices

Adversarial attacks pose a significant challenge to the reliable deployment of machine learning models in EdgeAI applications, such as autonomous driving and surveillance, which rely on resource-constrained devices for real-time inference. Among these, patch-based adversarial attacks, where small malicious patches (e.g., stickers) are applied to objects, can deceive neural networks into making incorrect predictions with potentially severe consequences. In this paper, we present PatchBlock, a lightweight framework designed to detect and neutralize adversarial patches in images. Leveraging outlier detection and dimensionality reduction, PatchBlock identifies regions affected by adversarial noise and suppresses their impact. It operates as a pre-processing module at the sensor level, efficiently running on CPUs in parallel with GPU inference, thus preserving system throughput while avoiding additional GPU overhead. The framework follows a three-stage pipeline: splitting the input into chunks (Chunking), detecting anomalous regions via a redesigned isolation forest with targeted cuts for faster convergence (Separating), and applying dimensionality reduction on the identified outliers (Mitigating). PatchBlock is both model- and patch-agnostic, can be retrofitted to existing pipelines, and integrates seamlessly between sensor inputs and downstream models. Evaluations across multiple neural architectures, benchmark datasets, attack types, and diverse edge devices demonstrate that PatchBlock consistently improves robustness, recovering up to 77% of model accuracy under strong patch attacks such as the Google Adversarial Patch, while maintaining high portability and minimal clean accuracy loss. Additionally, PatchBlock outperforms the state-of-the-art defenses in efficiency, in terms of computation time and energy consumption per sample, making it suitable for EdgeAI applications.

Comparing Object Detection Models for Electrical Substation Component Mapping

Electrical substations are a significant component of an electrical grid. Indeed, the assets at these substations (e.g., transformers) are prone to disruption from many hazards, including hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, and geomagnetically induced currents (GICs). As electrical grids are considered critical national infrastructure, any failure can have significant economic and public safety implications. To help prevent and mitigate these failures, it is thus essential that we identify key substation components to quantify vulnerability. Unfortunately, traditional manual mapping of substation infrastructure is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, an autonomous solution utilizing computer vision models is preferable, as it allows for greater convenience and efficiency. In this research paper, we train and compare the outputs of 3 models (YOLOv8, YOLOv11, RF-DETR) on a manually labeled dataset of US substation images. Each model is evaluated for detection accuracy, precision, and efficiency. We present the key strengths and limitations of each model, identifying which provides reliable and large-scale substation component mapping. Additionally, we utilize these models to effectively map the various substation components in the United States, showcasing a use case for machine learning in substation mapping.

Learning Where to Focus: Density-Driven Guidance for Detecting Dense Tiny Objects

High-resolution remote sensing imagery increasingly contains dense clusters of tiny objects, the detection of which is extremely challenging due to severe mutual occlusion and limited pixel footprints. Existing detection methods typically allocate computational resources uniformly, failing to adaptively focus on these density-concentrated regions, which hinders feature learning effectiveness. To address these limitations, we propose the Dense Region Mining Network (DRMNet), which leverages density maps as explicit spatial priors to guide adaptive feature learning. First, we design a Density Generation Branch (DGB) to model object distribution patterns, providing quantifiable priors that guide the network toward dense regions. Second, to address the computational bottleneck of global attention, our Dense Area Focusing Module (DAFM) uses these density maps to identify and focus on dense areas, enabling efficient local-global feature interaction. Finally, to mitigate feature degradation during hierarchical extraction, we introduce a Dual Filter Fusion Module (DFFM). It disentangles multi-scale features into high- and low-frequency components using a discrete cosine transform and then performs density-guided cross-attention to enhance complementarity while suppressing background interference. Extensive experiments on the AI-TOD and DTOD datasets demonstrate that DRMNet surpasses state-of-the-art methods, particularly in complex scenarios with high object density and severe occlusion.

Real-Time Human Detection for Aerial Captured Video Sequences via Deep Models

Human detection in videos plays an important role in various real-life applications. Most traditional approaches depend on utilizing handcrafted features, which are problem-dependent and optimal for specific tasks. Moreover, they are highly susceptible to dynamical events such as illumination changes, camera jitter, and variations in object sizes. On the other hand, the proposed feature learning approaches are cheaper and easier because highly abstract and discriminative features can be produced automatically without the need of expert knowledge. In this paper, we utilize automatic feature learning methods, which combine optical flow and three different deep models (i.e., supervised convolutional neural network (S-CNN), pretrained CNN feature extractor, and hierarchical extreme learning machine) for human detection in videos captured using a nonstatic camera on an aerial platform with varying altitudes. The models are trained and tested on the publicly available and highly challenging UCF-ARG aerial dataset. The comparison between these models in terms of training, testing accuracy, and learning speed is analyzed. The performance evaluation considers five human actions (digging, waving, throwing, walking, and running). Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed methods are successful for the human detection task. The pretrained CNN produces an average accuracy of 98.09%. S-CNN produces an average accuracy of 95.6% with softmax and 91.7% with Support Vector Machines (SVM). H-ELM has an average accuracy of 95.9%. Using a normal Central Processing Unit (CPU), H-ELM's training time takes 445 seconds. Learning in S-CNN takes 770 seconds with a high-performance Graphical Processing Unit (GPU).