ProSDD: Learning Prosodic Representations for Speech Deepfake Detection against Expressive and Emotional Attacks

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems perform well on standard benchmarks datasets but often fail to generalize to expressive and emotional spoofing attacks. Many methods rely on spoof-heavy training data, learning dataset-specific artifacts rather than transferable cues of natural speech. In contrast, humans internalize variability in real speech and detect fakes as deviations from it. We introduce ProSDD, a two-stage framework that enriches model embeddings through supervised masked prediction of speaker-conditioned prosodic variation based on pitch, voice activity, and energy. Stage I learns prosodic variability from real speech, and Stage II jointly optimizes this objective with spoof classification. ProSDD consistently outperforms baselines under both ASVspoof 2019 and 2024 training, reducing ASVspoof 2024 EER from 25.43% to 16.14% (2019-trained) and from 39.62% to 7.38% (2024-trained), while achieving 50% relative reductions on EmoFake and EmoSpoof-TTS.

A Unified Approach to Human-Scale Blockage and Scattering Analysis in Sub-THz Propagation With Application to RF Sensing

RF sensing exploits phase-sensitive measurements of stray electromagnetic (EM) fields from wireless devices across various frequency bands to detect EM blockage and to reconstruct and map the surrounding environment in 2D/3D. Although blockage effects caused by objects or human motion are well-studied in ISM bands and frequencies up to 60~GHz, there is a significant lack of research for frequencies above 100~GHz. The paper proposes a unified signal processing framework for RF sensing in the sub-THz D-band (105--175~GHz), explicitly integrating EM blockage and scattering as a single process through the birth-death dynamics of multipath components (MPCs). The framework extracts, associates, and classifies MPCs from angle-delay measurements using statistically grounded detection and classification, enabling human-scale sensing from a single radio link. The modeling and classification of MPCs, along with large-scale EM parameters, are demonstrated through an indoor measurement campaign using multiple test targets. Experimental results show that newly formed, attenuated, and suppressed MPCs can be reliably identified with millimeter-scale delay resolution. Static object localization achieves average positioning errors of $8-20$~cm depending on range and material, while passive human localization yields errors of 12-17cm at 0.5m and 26-30cm at 2m, respectively. The proposed framework demonstrates that accurate sensing and localization are feasible at sub-THz frequencies using a single link.

A Comparative Study of Modern Object Detectors for Robust Apple Detection in Orchard Imagery

Accurate apple detection in orchard images is important for yield prediction, fruit counting, robotic harvesting, and crop monitoring. However, changing illumination, leaf clutter, dense fruit clusters, and partial occlusion make detection difficult. To provide a fair and reproducible comparison, this study establishes a controlled benchmark for single-class apple detection on the public AppleBBCH81 dataset using one deterministic train, validation, and test split and a unified evaluation protocol across six representative detectors: YOLOv10n, YOLO11n, RT-DETR-L, Faster R-CNN (ResNet50-FPN), FCOS (ResNet50-FPN), and SSDLite320 (MobileNetV3-Large). Performance is evaluated primarily using COCO-style mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95, and threshold-dependent behavior is further analyzed using precision-recall curves and fixed-threshold precision, recall, and F1-score at IoU = 0.5. On the validation split, YOLO11n achieves the best strict localization performance with mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.6065 and mAP@0.5 = 0.9620, followed closely by RT-DETR-L and YOLOv10n. At a fixed operating point with confidence >= 0.05, YOLOv10n attains the highest F1-score, whereas RT-DETR-L achieves very high recall but low precision because of many false positives at low confidence. These findings show that detector selection for orchard deployment should be guided not only by localization-aware accuracy but also by threshold robustness and the requirements of the downstream task.

See Fair, Speak Truth: Equitable Attention Improves Grounding and Reduces Hallucination in Vision-Language Alignment

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently hallucinate objects that are absent from the visual input, often because attention during decoding is disproportionately drawn to visually dominant or frequently occurring content. We observe that this inequity in attention allocation is a root cause of object hallucination: when rare, small, or contextually peripheral objects receive insufficient attention, the model fails to ground its generation in the full visual scene. We argue that every object in an image, regardless of its size, frequency or visual salience, deserves equal representational opportunity during decoding. To this end, we propose DOP-OBC, a training-free and architecture-agnostic decoding strategy built on the principle of equitable attention. Two complementary object-aware signals work in tandem: a Dominant Object Penalty (DOP) that softly suppresses attention over-concentration on visually dominant regions, and an Outlier Boost Coefficient (OBC) that amplifies attention toward rare yet confidently detected objects. These signals are injected as per-row logit modulations within the causal attention mask, requiring no weight updates and preserving autoregressive decoding properties. Extensive experiments across image and video MLLMs demonstrate consistent reductions in object hallucination on CHAIR and POPE benchmarks, alongside improvements in GPT-4o assessed captioning quality across correctness, consistency, detail, context and temporal dimensions. DOP-OBC establishes that fairness in attention allocation is not merely a design principle but a practical and effective path toward more faithful multimodal generation.

RACF: A Resilient Autonomous Car Framework with Object Distance Correction

Autonomous vehicles are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, where sensing failures or cyberphysical attacks can lead to unsafe operations resulting in human loss and/or severe physical damages. Reliable real-time perception is therefore critically important for their safe operations and acceptability. For example, vision-based distance estimation is vulnerable to environmental degradation and adversarial perturbations, and existing defenses are often reactive and too slow to promptly mitigate their impacts on safe operations. We present a Resilient Autonomous Car Framework (RACF) that incorporates an Object Distance Correction Algorithm (ODCA) to improve perception-layer robustness through redundancy and diversity across a depth camera, LiDAR, and physics-based kinematics. Within this framework, when obstacle distance estimation produced by depth camera is inconsistent, a cross-sensor gate activates the correction algorithm to fix the detected inconsistency. We have experiment with the proposed resilient car framework and evaluate its performance on a testbed implemented using the Quanser QCar 2 platform. The presented framework achieved up to 35% RMSE reduction under strong corruption and improves stop compliance and braking latency, while operating in real time. These results demonstrate a practical and lightweight approach to resilient perception for safety-critical autonomous driving

ToxiTrace: Gradient-Aligned Training for Explainable Chinese Toxicity Detection

Existing Chinese toxic content detection methods mainly target sentence-level classification but often fail to provide readable and contiguous toxic evidence spans. We propose \textbf{ToxiTrace}, an explainability-oriented method for BERT-style encoders with three components: (1) \textbf{CuSA}, which refines encoder-derived saliency cues into fine-grained toxic spans with lightweight LLM guidance; (2) \textbf{GCLoss}, a gradient-constrained objective that concentrates token-level saliency on toxic evidence while suppressing irrelevant activations; and (3) \textbf{ARCL}, which constructs sample-specific contrastive reasoning pairs to sharpen the semantic boundary between toxic and non-toxic content. Experiments show that ToxiTrace improves classification accuracy and toxic span extraction while preserving efficient encoder-based inference and producing more coherent, human-readable explanations. We have released the model at https://huggingface.co/ArdLi/ToxiTrace.

WUTDet: A 100K-Scale Ship Detection Dataset and Benchmarks with Dense Small Objects

Ship detection for navigation is a fundamental perception task in intelligent waterway transportation systems. However, existing public ship detection datasets remain limited in terms of scale, the proportion of small-object instances, and scene diversity, which hinders the systematic evaluation and generalization study of detection algorithms in complex maritime environments. To this end, we construct WUTDet, a large-scale ship detection dataset. WUTDet contains 100,576 images and 381,378 annotated ship instances, covering diverse operational scenarios such as ports, anchorages, navigation, and berthing, as well as various imaging conditions including fog, glare, low-lightness, and rain, thereby exhibiting substantial diversity and challenge. Based on WUTDet, we systematically evaluate 20 baseline models from three mainstream detection architectures, namely CNN, Transformer, and Mamba. Experimental results show that the Transformer architecture achieves superior overall detection accuracy (AP) and small-object detection performance (APs), demonstrating stronger adaptability to complex maritime scenes; the CNN architecture maintains an advantage in inference efficiency, making it more suitable for real-time applications; and the Mamba architecture achieves a favorable balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency. Furthermore, we construct a unified cross-dataset test set, Ship-GEN, to evaluate model generalization. Results on Ship-GEN show that models trained on WUTDet exhibit stronger generalization under different data distributions. These findings demonstrate that WUTDet provides effective data support for the research, evaluation, and generalization analysis of ship detection algorithms in complex maritime scenarios. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/MAPGroup/WUTDet.

AI Driven Soccer Analysis Using Computer Vision

Sport analysis is crucial for team performance since it provides actionable data that can inform coaching decisions, improve player performance, and enhance team strategies. To analyze more complex features from game footage, a computer vision model can be used to identify and track key entities from the field. We propose the use of an object detection and tracking system to predict player positioning throughout the game. To translate this to positioning in relation to the field dimensions, we use a point prediction model to identify key points on the field and combine these with known field dimensions to extract actual distances. For the player-identification model, object detection models like YOLO and Faster R-CNN are evaluated on the accuracy of our custom video footage using multiple different evaluation metrics. The goal is to identify the best model for object identification to obtain the most accurate results when paired with SAM2 (Segment Anything Model 2) for segmentation and tracking. For the key point detection model, we use a CNN model to find consistent locations in the soccer field. Through homography, the positions of points and objects in the camera perspective will be transformed to a real-ground perspective. The segmented player masks from SAM2 are transformed from camera perspective to real-world field coordinates through homography, regardless of camera angle or movement. The transformed real-world coordinates can be used to calculate valuable tactical insights including player speed, distance covered, positioning heatmaps, and more complex team statistics, providing coaches and players with actionable performance data previously unavailable from standard video analysis.

Scene Change Detection with Vision-Language Representation Learning

Scene change detection (SCD) is crucial for urban monitoring and navigation but remains challenging in real-world environments due to lighting variations, seasonal shifts, viewpoint differences, and complex urban layouts. Existing methods rely primarily on low-level visual features, limiting their ability to accurately identify changed objects amid the visual complexity of urban scenes. In this paper, we propose LangSCD, a vision-language framework for scene change detection that overcomes this single-modal limitation by incorporating semantic reasoning through language. Our approach introduces a modular language component that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to generate textual descriptions of scene changes, which are fused with visual features through a cross-modal feature enhancer. We further introduce a geometric-semantic matching module that refines the predicted masks by enforcing semantic consistency and spatial completeness. Existing real-world scene change detection benchmarks provide only binary change annotations, which are insufficient for downstream applications requiring fine-grained understanding of scene dynamics. To address this limitation, we introduce NYC-CD, a large-scale dataset of 8,122 real-world image pairs collected in New York City with multiclass change annotations generated through a semi-automatic pipeline. Extensive experiments across multiple street-view benchmarks demonstrate that our language and matching modules consistently improve existing change-detection architectures, achieving state-of-the-art performance and highlighting the value of integrating linguistic reasoning with visual representations for robust scene change detection.

Compositional-Degradation UAV Image Restoration: Conditional Decoupled MoE Network and A Benchmark

UAV images are critical for applications such as large-area mapping, infrastructure inspection, and emergency response. However, in real-world flight environments, a single image is often affected by multiple degradation factors, including rain, haze, and noise, undermining downstream task performance. Current unified restoration approaches typically rely on implicit degradation representations that entangle multiple factors into a single condition, causing mutual interference among heterogeneous corrections. To this end, we propose DAME-Net, a Degradation-Aware Mixture-of-Experts Network that decouples explicit degradation perception from degradation-conditioned reconstruction for compositional UAV image restoration. Specifically, we design a Factor-wise Degradation Perception module(FDPM) to provide explicit per-factor degradation cues for the restoration stage through multi-label prediction with label-similarity-guided soft alignment, replacing implicit entangled conditions with interpretable and generalizable degradation descriptions. Moreover, we develop a Conditioned Decoupled MoE module(CDMM) that leverages these cues for stage-wise conditioning, spatial-frequency hybrid processing, and mask-constrained decoupled expert routing, enabling selective factor-specific correction while suppressing irrelevant interference. In addition, we construct the Multi-Degradation UAV Restoration benchmark (MDUR), the first large-scale UAV benchmark for compositional UAV image restoration, with 43 degradation configurations from single degradations to four-factor composites and standardized seen/unseen splits.Extensive experiments on MDUR demonstrate consistent improvements over representative unified restoration methods, with greater gains on unseen and higher-order composite degradations. Downstream experiments further validate benefits for UAV object detection.