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.
As autonomous vehicles are rolled out, measures must be taken to ensure their safe operation. In order to supervise a system that is already in operation, monitoring frameworks are frequently employed. These run continuously online in the background, supervising the system status and recording anomalies. This work proposes an online monitoring framework to detect anomalies in object state representations. Thereby, a key challenge is creating a framework for anomaly detection without anomaly labels, which are usually unavailable for unknown anomalies. To address this issue, this work applies a self-supervised embedding method to translate object data into a latent representation space. For this, a JEPA-based self-supervised prediction task is constructed, allowing training without anomaly labels and the creation of rich object embeddings. The resulting expressive JEPA embeddings serve as input for established anomaly detection methods, in order to identify anomalies within object state representations. This framework is particularly useful for applications in real-world environments, where new or unknown anomalies may occur during operation for which there are no labels available. Experiments performed on the publicly available, real-world nuScenes dataset illustrate the framework's capabilities.
Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is an emerging area, yet a persistent challenge remains: MLLMs rely on coarse time-series heuristics but struggle with multi-dimensional, detailed reasoning, which is vital for understanding complex time-series data. We present AnomSeer to address this by reinforcing the model to ground its reasoning in precise, structural details of time series, unifying anomaly classification, localization, and explanation. At its core, an expert chain-of-thought trace is generated to provide a verifiable, fine-grained reasoning from classical analyses (e.g., statistical measures, frequency transforms). Building on this, we propose a novel time-series grounded policy optimization (TimerPO) that incorporates two additional components beyond standard reinforcement learning: a time-series grounded advantage based on optimal transport and an orthogonal projection to ensure this auxiliary granular signal does not interfere with the primary detection objective. Across diverse anomaly scenarios, AnomSeer, with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct, outperforms larger commercial baselines (e.g., GPT-4o) in classification and localization accuracy, particularly on point- and frequency-driven exceptions. Moreover, it produces plausible time-series reasoning traces that support its conclusions.
Modern image generators produce strikingly realistic images, where only artifacts like distorted hands or warped objects reveal their synthetic origin. Detecting these artifacts is essential: without detection, we cannot benchmark generators or train reward models to improve them. Current detectors fine-tune VLMs on tens of thousands of labeled images, but this is expensive to repeat whenever generators evolve or new artifact types emerge. We show that pretrained VLMs already encode the knowledge needed to detect artifacts - with the right scaffolding, this capability can be unlocked using only a few hundred labeled examples per artifact category. Our system, ArtifactLens, achieves state-of-the-art on five human artifact benchmarks (the first evaluation across multiple datasets) while requiring orders of magnitude less labeled data. The scaffolding consists of a multi-component architecture with in-context learning and text instruction optimization, with novel improvements to each. Our methods generalize to other artifact types - object morphology, animal anatomy, and entity interactions - and to the distinct task of AIGC detection.
The comprehensive understanding capabilities of world models for driving scenarios have significantly improved the planning accuracy of end-to-end autonomous driving frameworks. However, the redundant modeling of static regions and the lack of deep interaction with trajectories hinder world models from exerting their full effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Temporal Residual World Model (TR-World), which focuses on dynamic object modeling. By calculating the temporal residuals of scene representations, the information of dynamic objects can be extracted without relying on detection and tracking. TR-World takes only temporal residuals as input, thus predicting the future spatial distribution of dynamic objects more precisely. By combining the prediction with the static object information contained in the current BEV features, accurate future BEV features can be obtained. Furthermore, we propose Future-Guided Trajectory Refinement (FGTR) module, which conducts interaction between prior trajectories (predicted from the current scene representation) and the future BEV features. This module can not only utilize future road conditions to refine trajectories, but also provides sparse spatial-temporal supervision on future BEV features to prevent world model collapse. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the nuScenes and NAVSIM datasets demonstrate that our method, namely ResWorld, achieves state-of-the-art planning performance. The code is available at https://github.com/mengtan00/ResWorld.git.
As multi-agent AI systems evolve from simple chatbots to autonomous swarms, debugging semantic failures requires reasoning about knowledge, belief, causality, and obligation, precisely what modal logic was designed to formalize. However, traditional modal logic requires manual specification of relationship structures that are unknown or dynamic in real systems. This tutorial demonstrates differentiable modal logic (DML), implemented via Modal Logical Neural Networks (MLNNs), enabling systems to learn trust networks, causal chains, and regulatory boundaries from behavioral data alone. We present a unified neurosymbolic debugging framework through four modalities: epistemic (who to trust), temporal (when events cause failures), deontic (what actions are permitted), and doxastic (how to interpret agent confidence). Each modality is demonstrated on concrete multi-agent scenarios, from discovering deceptive alliances in diplomacy games to detecting LLM hallucinations, with complete implementations showing how logical contradictions become learnable optimization objectives. Key contributions for the neurosymbolic community: (1) interpretable learned structures where trust and causality are explicit parameters, not opaque embeddings; (2) knowledge injection via differentiable axioms that guide learning with sparse data (3) compositional multi-modal reasoning that combines epistemic, temporal, and deontic constraints; and (4) practical deployment patterns for monitoring, active control and communication of multi-agent systems. All code provided as executable Jupyter notebooks.
While Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) has made significant strides, most methods rely on unlabeled target data that is assumed to contain sufficient foreground instances. However, in many practical scenarios (e.g., wildlife monitoring, lesion detection), collecting target domain data with objects of interest is prohibitively costly, whereas background-only data is abundant. This common practical constraint introduces a significant technical challenge: the difficulty of achieving domain alignment when target instances are unavailable, forcing adaptation to rely solely on the target background information. We formulate this challenge as the novel problem of Instance-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection. To tackle this, we propose the Relational and Structural Consistency Network (RSCN) which pioneers an alignment strategy based on background feature prototypes while simultaneously encouraging consistency in the relationship between the source foreground features and the background features within each domain, enabling robust adaptation even without target instances. To facilitate research, we further curate three specialized benchmarks, including simulative auto-driving detection, wildlife detection, and lung nodule detection. Extensive experiments show that RSCN significantly outperforms existing DAOD methods across all three benchmarks in the instance-free scenario. The code and benchmarks will be released soon.
Cross-category anomaly detection for 3D point clouds aims to determine whether an unseen object belongs to a target category using only a few normal examples. Most existing methods rely on category-specific training, which limits their flexibility in few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we propose DMP-3DAD, a training-free framework for cross-category 3D anomaly detection based on multi-view realistic depth map projection. Specifically, by converting point clouds into a fixed set of realistic depth images, our method leverages a frozen CLIP visual encoder to extract multi-view representations and performs anomaly detection via weighted feature similarity, which does not require any fine-tuning or category-dependent adaptation. Extensive experiments on the ShapeNetPart dataset demonstrate that DMP-3DAD achieves state-of-the-art performance under few-shot setting. The results show that the proposed approach provides a simple yet effective solution for practical cross-category 3D anomaly detection.
Salient object detection is inherently a subjective problem, as observers with different priors may perceive different objects as salient. However, existing methods predominantly formulate it as an objective prediction task with a single groundtruth segmentation map for each image, which renders the problem under-determined and fundamentally ill-posed. To address this issue, we propose Observer-Centric Salient Object Detection (OC-SOD), where salient regions are predicted by considering not only the visual cues but also the observer-specific factors such as their preferences or intents. As a result, this formulation captures the intrinsic ambiguity and diversity of human perception, enabling personalized and context-aware saliency prediction. By leveraging multi-modal large language models, we develop an efficient data annotation pipeline and construct the first OC-SOD dataset named OC-SODBench, comprising 33k training, validation and test images with 152k textual prompts and object pairs. Built upon this new dataset, we further design OC-SODAgent, an agentic baseline which performs OC-SOD via a human-like "Perceive-Reflect-Adjust" process. Extensive experiments on our proposed OC-SODBench have justified the effectiveness of our contribution. Through this observer-centric perspective, we aim to bridge the gap between human perception and computational modeling, offering a more realistic and flexible understanding of what makes an object truly "salient." Code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/Dustzx/OC_SOD
This paper presents a practical and lightweight solution for enhancing child detection in low-quality surveillance footage, a critical component in real-world missing child alert and daycare monitoring systems. Building upon the efficient YOLOv11n architecture, we propose a deployment-ready pipeline that improves detection under challenging conditions including occlusion, small object size, low resolution, motion blur, and poor lighting commonly found in existing CCTV infrastructures. Our approach introduces a domain-specific augmentation strategy that synthesizes realistic child placements using spatial perturbations such as partial visibility, truncation, and overlaps, combined with photometric degradations including lighting variation and noise. To improve recall of small and partially occluded instances, we integrate Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI) at inference time. All components are trained and evaluated on a filtered, child-only subset of the Roboflow Daycare dataset. Compared to the baseline YOLOv11n, our enhanced system achieves a mean Average Precision at 0.5 IoU (mAP@0.5) of 0.967 and a mean Average Precision averaged over IoU thresholds from 0.5 to 0.95 (mAP@0.5:0.95) of 0.783, yielding absolute improvements of 0.7 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively, without architectural changes. Importantly, the entire pipeline maintains compatibility with low-power edge devices and supports real-time performance, making it particularly well suited for low-cost or resource-constrained industrial surveillance deployments. The example augmented dataset and the source code used to generate it are available at: https://github.com/html-ptit/Data-Augmentation-YOLOv11n-child-detection
Foundation object detectors such as GLIP and Grounding DINO excel on general-domain data but often degrade in specialized and data-scarce settings like underwater imagery or industrial defects. Typical cross-domain few-shot approaches rely on fine-tuning scarce target data, incurring cost and overfitting risks. We instead ask: Can a frozen detector adapt with only one exemplar per class without training? To answer this, we introduce training-free one-shot domain generalization for object detection, where detectors must adapt to specialized domains with only one annotated exemplar per class and no weight updates. To tackle this task, we propose LAB-Det, which exploits Language As a domain-invariant Bridge. Instead of adapting visual features, we project each exemplar into a descriptive text that conditions and guides a frozen detector. This linguistic conditioning replaces gradient-based adaptation, enabling robust generalization in data-scarce domains. We evaluate on UODD (underwater) and NEU-DET (industrial defects), two widely adopted benchmarks for data-scarce detection, where object boundaries are often ambiguous, and LAB-Det achieves up to 5.4 mAP improvement over state-of-the-art fine-tuned baselines without updating a single parameter. These results establish linguistic adaptation as an efficient and interpretable alternative to fine-tuning in specialized detection settings.