Self-supervised Multiplex Consensus Mamba for General Image Fusion

Image fusion integrates complementary information from different modalities to generate high-quality fused images, thereby enhancing downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Unlike task-specific techniques that primarily focus on consolidating inter-modal information, general image fusion needs to address a wide range of tasks while improving performance without increasing complexity. To achieve this, we propose SMC-Mamba, a Self-supervised Multiplex Consensus Mamba framework for general image fusion. Specifically, the Modality-Agnostic Feature Enhancement (MAFE) module preserves fine details through adaptive gating and enhances global representations via spatial-channel and frequency-rotational scanning. The Multiplex Consensus Cross-modal Mamba (MCCM) module enables dynamic collaboration among experts, reaching a consensus to efficiently integrate complementary information from multiple modalities. The cross-modal scanning within MCCM further strengthens feature interactions across modalities, facilitating seamless integration of critical information from both sources. Additionally, we introduce a Bi-level Self-supervised Contrastive Learning Loss (BSCL), which preserves high-frequency information without increasing computational overhead while simultaneously boosting performance in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) image fusion algorithms in tasks such as infrared-visible, medical, multi-focus, and multi-exposure fusion, as well as downstream visual tasks.

Real-World Adversarial Attacks on RF-Based Drone Detectors

Radio frequency (RF) based systems are increasingly used to detect drones by analyzing their RF signal patterns, converting them into spectrogram images which are processed by object detection models. Existing RF attacks against image based models alter digital features, making over-the-air (OTA) implementation difficult due to the challenge of converting digital perturbations to transmittable waveforms that may introduce synchronization errors and interference, and encounter hardware limitations. We present the first physical attack on RF image based drone detectors, optimizing class-specific universal complex baseband (I/Q) perturbation waveforms that are transmitted alongside legitimate communications. We evaluated the attack using RF recordings and OTA experiments with four types of drones. Our results show that modest, structured I/Q perturbations are compatible with standard RF chains and reliably reduce target drone detection while preserving detection of legitimate drones.

PaveSync: A Unified and Comprehensive Dataset for Pavement Distress Analysis and Classification

Automated pavement defect detection often struggles to generalize across diverse real-world conditions due to the lack of standardized datasets. Existing datasets differ in annotation styles, distress type definitions, and formats, limiting their integration for unified training. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark dataset that consolidates multiple publicly available sources into a standardized collection of 52747 images from seven countries, with 135277 bounding box annotations covering 13 distinct distress types. The dataset captures broad real-world variation in image quality, resolution, viewing angles, and weather conditions, offering a unique resource for consistent training and evaluation. Its effectiveness was demonstrated through benchmarking with state-of-the-art object detection models including YOLOv8-YOLOv12, Faster R-CNN, and DETR, which achieved competitive performance across diverse scenarios. By standardizing class definitions and annotation formats, this dataset provides the first globally representative benchmark for pavement defect detection and enables fair comparison of models, including zero-shot transfer to new environments.

OptiVote: Non-Coherent FSO Over-the-Air Majority Vote for Communication-Efficient Distributed Federated Learning in Space Data Centers

The rapid deployment of mega-constellations is driving the long-term vision of space data centers (SDCs), where interconnected satellites form in-orbit distributed computing and learning infrastructures. Enabling distributed federated learning in such systems is challenging because iterative training requires frequent aggregation over inter-satellite links that are bandwidth- and energy-constrained, and the link conditions can be highly dynamic. In this work, we exploit over-the-air computation (AirComp) as an in-network aggregation primitive. However, conventional coherent AirComp relies on stringent phase alignment, which is difficult to maintain in space environments due to satellite jitter and Doppler effects. To overcome this limitation, we propose OptiVote, a robust and communication-efficient non-coherent free-space optical (FSO) AirComp framework for federated learning toward Space Data Centers. OptiVote integrates sign stochastic gradient descent (signSGD) with a majority-vote (MV) aggregation principle and pulse-position modulation (PPM), where each satellite conveys local gradient signs by activating orthogonal PPM time slots. The aggregation node performs MV detection via non-coherent energy accumulation, transforming phase-sensitive field superposition into phase-agnostic optical intensity combining, thereby eliminating the need for precise phase synchronization and improving resilience under dynamic impairments. To mitigate aggregation bias induced by heterogeneous FSO channels, we further develop an importance-aware, channel state information (CSI)-free dynamic power control scheme that balances received energies without additional signaling. We provide theoretical analysis by characterizing the aggregate error probability under statistical FSO channels and establishing convergence guarantees for non-convex objectives.

LECalib: Line-Based Event Camera Calibration

Camera calibration is an essential prerequisite for event-based vision applications. Current event camera calibration methods typically involve using flashing patterns, reconstructing intensity images, and utilizing the features extracted from events. Existing methods are generally time-consuming and require manually placed calibration objects, which cannot meet the needs of rapidly changing scenarios. In this paper, we propose a line-based event camera calibration framework exploiting the geometric lines of commonly-encountered objects in man-made environments, e.g., doors, windows, boxes, etc. Different from previous methods, our method detects lines directly from event streams and leverages an event-line calibration model to generate the initial guess of camera parameters, which is suitable for both planar and non-planar lines. Then, a non-linear optimization is adopted to refine camera parameters. Both simulation and real-world experiments have demonstrated the feasibility and accuracy of our method, with validation performed on monocular and stereo event cameras. The source code is released at https://github.com/Zibin6/line_based_event_camera_calib.

ProGuard: Towards Proactive Multimodal Safeguard

The rapid evolution of generative models has led to a continuous emergence of multimodal safety risks, exposing the limitations of existing defense methods. To address these challenges, we propose ProGuard, a vision-language proactive guard that identifies and describes out-of-distribution (OOD) safety risks without the need for model adjustments required by traditional reactive approaches. We first construct a modality-balanced dataset of 87K samples, each annotated with both binary safety labels and risk categories under a hierarchical multimodal safety taxonomy, effectively mitigating modality bias and ensuring consistent moderation across text, image, and text-image inputs. Based on this dataset, we train our vision-language base model purely through reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve efficient and concise reasoning. To approximate proactive safety scenarios in a controlled setting, we further introduce an OOD safety category inference task and augment the RL objective with a synonym-bank-based similarity reward that encourages the model to generate concise descriptions for unseen unsafe categories. Experimental results show that ProGuard achieves performance comparable to closed-source large models on binary safety classification, substantially outperforms existing open-source guard models on unsafe content categorization. Most notably, ProGuard delivers a strong proactive moderation ability, improving OOD risk detection by 52.6% and OOD risk description by 64.8%.

${D}^{3}${ETOR}: ${D}$ebate-Enhanced Pseudo Labeling and Frequency-Aware Progressive ${D}$ebiasing for Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object ${D}$etection with Scribble Annotations

Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection (WSCOD) aims to locate and segment objects that are visually concealed within their surrounding scenes, relying solely on sparse supervision such as scribble annotations. Despite recent progress, existing WSCOD methods still lag far behind fully supervised ones due to two major limitations: (1) the pseudo masks generated by general-purpose segmentation models (e.g., SAM) and filtered via rules are often unreliable, as these models lack the task-specific semantic understanding required for effective pseudo labeling in COD; and (2) the neglect of inherent annotation bias in scribbles, which hinders the model from capturing the global structure of camouflaged objects. To overcome these challenges, we propose ${D}^{3}$ETOR, a two-stage WSCOD framework consisting of Debate-Enhanced Pseudo Labeling and Frequency-Aware Progressive Debiasing. In the first stage, we introduce an adaptive entropy-driven point sampling method and a multi-agent debate mechanism to enhance the capability of SAM for COD, improving the interpretability and precision of pseudo masks. In the second stage, we design FADeNet, which progressively fuses multi-level frequency-aware features to balance global semantic understanding with local detail modeling, while dynamically reweighting supervision strength across regions to alleviate scribble bias. By jointly exploiting the supervision signals from both the pseudo masks and scribble semantics, ${D}^{3}$ETOR significantly narrows the gap between weakly and fully supervised COD, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks.

LiteFusion: Taming 3D Object Detectors from Vision-Based to Multi-Modal with Minimal Adaptation

3D object detection is fundamental for safe and robust intelligent transportation systems. Current multi-modal 3D object detectors often rely on complex architectures and training strategies to achieve higher detection accuracy. However, these methods heavily rely on the LiDAR sensor so that they suffer from large performance drops when LiDAR is absent, which compromises the robustness and safety of autonomous systems in practical scenarios. Moreover, existing multi-modal detectors face difficulties in deployment on diverse hardware platforms, such as NPUs and FPGAs, due to their reliance on 3D sparse convolution operators, which are primarily optimized for NVIDIA GPUs. To address these challenges, we reconsider the role of LiDAR in the camera-LiDAR fusion paradigm and introduce a novel multi-modal 3D detector, LiteFusion. Instead of treating LiDAR point clouds as an independent modality with a separate feature extraction backbone, LiteFusion utilizes LiDAR data as a complementary source of geometric information to enhance camera-based detection. This straightforward approach completely eliminates the reliance on a 3D backbone, making the method highly deployment-friendly. Specifically, LiteFusion integrates complementary features from LiDAR points into image features within a quaternion space, where the orthogonal constraints are well-preserved during network training. This helps model domain-specific relations across modalities, yielding a compact cross-modal embedding. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that LiteFusion improves the baseline vision-based detector by +20.4% mAP and +19.7% NDS with a minimal increase in parameters (1.1%) without using dedicated LiDAR encoders. Notably, even in the absence of LiDAR input, LiteFusion maintains strong results , highlighting its favorable robustness and effectiveness across diverse fusion paradigms and deployment scenarios.

Bridging Modalities and Transferring Knowledge: Enhanced Multimodal Understanding and Recognition

This manuscript explores multimodal alignment, translation, fusion, and transference to enhance machine understanding of complex inputs. We organize the work into five chapters, each addressing unique challenges in multimodal machine learning. Chapter 3 introduces Spatial-Reasoning Bert for translating text-based spatial relations into 2D arrangements between clip-arts. This enables effective decoding of spatial language into visual representations, paving the way for automated scene generation aligned with human spatial understanding. Chapter 4 presents a method for translating medical texts into specific 3D locations within an anatomical atlas. We introduce a loss function leveraging spatial co-occurrences of medical terms to create interpretable mappings, significantly enhancing medical text navigability. Chapter 5 tackles translating structured text into canonical facts within knowledge graphs. We develop a benchmark for linking natural language to entities and predicates, addressing ambiguities in text extraction to provide clearer, actionable insights. Chapter 6 explores multimodal fusion methods for compositional action recognition. We propose a method fusing video frames and object detection representations, improving recognition robustness and accuracy. Chapter 7 investigates multimodal knowledge transference for egocentric action recognition. We demonstrate how multimodal knowledge distillation enables RGB-only models to mimic multimodal fusion-based capabilities, reducing computational requirements while maintaining performance. These contributions advance methodologies for spatial language understanding, medical text interpretation, knowledge graph enrichment, and action recognition, enhancing computational systems' ability to process complex, multimodal inputs across diverse applications.

ALIGN: Advanced Query Initialization with LiDAR-Image Guidance for Occlusion-Robust 3D Object Detection

Recent query-based 3D object detection methods using camera and LiDAR inputs have shown strong performance, but existing query initialization strategies,such as random sampling or BEV heatmap-based sampling, often result in inefficient query usage and reduced accuracy, particularly for occluded or crowded objects. To address this limitation, we propose ALIGN (Advanced query initialization with LiDAR and Image GuidaNce), a novel approach for occlusion-robust, object-aware query initialization. Our model consists of three key components: (i) Occlusion-aware Center Estimation (OCE), which integrates LiDAR geometry and image semantics to estimate object centers accurately (ii) Adaptive Neighbor Sampling (ANS), which generates object candidates from LiDAR clustering and supplements each object by sampling spatially and semantically aligned points around it and (iii) Dynamic Query Balancing (DQB), which adaptively balances queries between foreground and background regions. Our extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that ALIGN consistently improves performance across multiple state-of-the-art detectors, achieving gains of up to +0.9 mAP and +1.2 NDS, particularly in challenging scenes with occlusions or dense crowds. Our code will be publicly available upon publication.