Label-Efficient School Detection from Aerial Imagery via Weakly Supervised Pretraining and Fine-Tuning

Accurate school detection is essential for supporting education initiatives, including infrastructure planning and expanding internet connectivity to underserved areas. However, many regions around the world face challenges due to outdated, incomplete, or unavailable official records. Manual mapping efforts, while valuable, are labor-intensive and lack scalability across large geographic areas. To address this, we propose a weakly supervised framework for school detection from aerial imagery that minimizes the need for human annotations while supporting global mapping efforts. Our method is specifically designed for low-data regimes, where manual annotations are extremely scarce. We introduce an automatic labeling pipeline that leverages sparse location points and semantic segmentation to generate infrastructure masks from which we generate bounding boxes. Using these automatically labeled images, we train our detectors on a first training stage to learn a representation of what schools look like, then using a small set of manually labeled images, we fine-tune the previously trained models on this clean dataset. This two stage training pipeline enables large-scale and strong detection in low-data setting of school infrastructure with minimal supervision. Our results demonstrate strong object detection performance, particularly in the low-data regime, where the models achieve promising results using only 50 manually labeled images, significantly reducing the need for costly annotations. This framework supports education and connectivity initiatives worldwide by providing an efficient and extensible approach to mapping schools from space. All models, training code and auto-labeled data will be publicly released to foster future research and real-world impact.

SAMOFT: Robust Multi-Object Tracking via Region and Flow

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a fundamental task in computer vision that requires continuously tracking multiple targets while maintaining consistent identities across frames. However, most existing approaches primarily rely on instance-level object features for trajectory association, which often leads to degraded performance under challenging conditions such as object deformation, nonlinear motion, and occlusion. In this work, we propose SAMOFT, a robust tracker that leverages pixel-level cues to improve robustness under complex motion scenarios. Specifically, we introduce a Pixel Motion Matching (PMM) module that integrates the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with dense optical flow to refine Kalman filter-based motion prediction using instantaneous foreground pixel motion. To further enhance robustness under unreliable detections, we design a Centroid Distance Matching (CDM) module that performs flexible mask-based centroid matching for low-confidence or partially occluded observations. Moreover, a Distribution-Based Correction (DBC) module models long-tailed motion patterns in a training-free manner using historical optical flow statistics and dynamically corrects trajectory states online. We also incorporate a Cluster-Aware ReID (CA-ReID) strategy to improve the stability and discriminative power of trajectory appearance features. Extensive experiments on the DanceTrack and MOTChallenge benchmarks demonstrate that SAMOFT consistently improves baseline trackers and achieves competitive performance compared with recent state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of leveraging pixel-level cues for robust multi-object tracking.

SpectraDINO: Bridging the Spectral Gap in Vision Foundation Models via Lightweight Adapters

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) pretrained on large-scale RGB data have demonstrated remarkable representation quality, yet their applicability to multispectral imaging spanning Near-Infrared (NIR), Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR), and Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR) remains largely unexplored. These spectral modalities offer complementary sensing capabilities critical for robust perception in adverse conditions, but present a fundamental domain gap relative to RGB-centric pretrained models. We present SpectraDINO, a multispectral VFM that bridges this spectral gap by extending DINOv2 ViT backbones to beyond-visible modalities through lightweight, per-modality bottleneck adapters, while preserving the rich representations of the frozen RGB backbone. We introduce a multi-stage teacher-student training protocol in which a frozen DINOv2 teacher guides a spectral student via cosine distillation, symmetric contrastive loss, patch-level alignment, and a novel neighborhood-structure-preservation loss. This staged curriculum enables strong cross-modal alignment without catastrophic forgetting of RGB priors. We evaluate SpectraDINO on multispectral object detection and semantic segmentation across challenging NIR, SWIR, and LWIR benchmarks using widely adopted fusion strategies. SpectraDINO achieves state-of-the-art performance across most benchmarks, validating its effectiveness as a general-purpose backbone for spectral generalization. The code and weights for model variants are available at https://github.com/Yonsei-STL/SpectraDINO.

Biosignal Fingerprinting: A Cross-Modal PPG-ECG Foundation Model

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of global mortality, yet scalable cardiac monitoring is hindered by the gap between diagnostic-rich ECG and ubiquitous wearable PPG. Bridging this gap requires representations that are compact, transferable across modalities and devices, and deployable without task-specific retraining. Here we introduce biosignal fingerprints: compact latent representations of cardiovascular state derived from a cross-modal foundation model, the Multi-modal Masked Autoencoder (M2AE), trained on over 3.4 million paired ECG and PPG signals. M2AE integrates modality-specific encoders with a shared bottleneck and dual decoders, jointly optimized using reconstruction and cross-modal contrastive objectives, yielding generalizable fingerprints that retain intra- and inter-modality features. Like a biometric fingerprint, these representations uniquely encode an individual's cardiovascular state in a modality-agnostic, privacy-preserving form reusable across clinical tasks without exposing raw waveform data or requiring model retraining. Across 7 downstream tasks, spanning cross-modal reconstruction, cardiovascular disease classification, hypertension detection, mortality prediction, and demographic inference, biosignal fingerprints achieve competitive or superior performance compared to leading domain-specialist foundation models in frozen settings, including an AUROC of 0.974 for five-class CVD classification and 0.877 for hypertension detection, with a maximum improvement of 27.7% in AUROC across 5 classification tasks. Critically, strong performance is maintained with only a single modality, enabling deployment in resource-constrained, single-sensor environments typical of real-world wearable monitoring, with direct implications for continuous cardiovascular monitoring across clinical and consumer health settings.

StreakMind: AI detection and analysis of satellite streaks in astronomical images with automated database integration

Artificial satellites and space debris increasingly contaminate astronomical images, affecting scientific surveys and producing large volumes of streaked exposures. Manual inspection is no longer feasible at scale, and reliable detection and characterisation of streaks has become essential for both data-quality control and the monitoring of objects in Earth orbit. We present StreakMind, an automated pipeline designed to detect Near-Earth Objects and satellite streaks in astronomical images, characterise their geometry, and cross-identify them with known orbital objects. The system integrates all inference results into a structured database suitable for large surveys. A YOLO OBB model was trained on a hybrid dataset of 2335 images and applied to processed FITS frames. Geometric refinement, inter-frame association, satellite cross-identification, and Gaussian-based confidence scoring were then used to produce final identifications stored in a relational database. Observations from La Sagra Observatory were used to develop and test the method. On the test set, the model achieved a precision of 94 percent and a recall of 97 percent. It reliably detected faint streaks, delivered consistent geometric reconstructions, and performed robust satellite cross-identification. StreakMind demonstrates strong potential for large-scale automated analysis of linear streaks produced by both Near-Earth Objects and artificial satellites, contributing to space situational awareness.

Heterogeneous Model Fusion for Privacy-Aware Multi-Camera Surveillance via Synthetic Domain Adaptation

We propose HeroCrystal, a novel privacy-preserving framework for multi-camera domain-adaptive object detection, addressing challenges such as data privacy, class imbalance, and heterogeneous architectures. Our framework consists of three key stages. In the Generated Stage, we introduce a one-shot, target-aware diffusion-based generation module that learns visual style from a single target-domain image while leveraging prompt-based control to synthesize specific object instances. Unlike conventional style transfer-based methods that require large target datasets and ignore semantic-level discrepancies, our approach enables privacy-preserving augmentation to reduce ethical concerns, and introduces controllable rare object generation to mitigate long-tailed category degradation. In the Federated Stage, we employ probabilistic Faster R-CNN on the client side to improve localization accuracy, and a dynamic model contrastive strategy to suppress domain-specific bias. The server side performs model fusion across heterogeneous architectures without accessing raw data. Finally, in the Distilled Stage, we propose an inconsistent categories integration algorithm to resolve label inconsistency and architecture heterogeneity across clients. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain detection benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing multi-source domain adaptation and federated learning baselines under multi-class, privacy-preserving settings. Our method improves mAP by +2.1% over prior privacy-preserving approaches and achieves a new state-of-the-art mAP of 33.4%, highlighting the effectiveness of HeroCrystal in enabling practical multi-camera AI surveillance systems.

SimPB++: Simultaneously Detecting 2D and 3D Objects from Multiple Cameras

Simultaneous perception of 2D objects in perspective view and 3D objects in Bird's Eye View (BEV) is challenging for multi-camera autonomous driving. Existing two-stage pipelines use 2D results only as a one-time cue for 3D detection. We propose SimPB++, which simultaneously detects 2D objects in perspective and 3D objects in BEV from multiple cameras. It unifies both tasks into an end-to-end model with a hybrid decoder architecture, coupling multi-view 2D and 3D decoders interactively. Two novel modules enable deep interaction: Dynamic Query Allocation adaptively assigns 2D queries to 3D candidates, and Adaptive Query Aggregation refines 3D representations using multi-view 2D features, forming a cyclic 3D-2D-3D refinement. For multi-view 2D detection, we use Query-group Attention for intra-group communication. We also design a Crop-and-Scale strategy for long-range perception and a Propagating Denoising strategy with an auxiliary RoI detector. SimPB++ supports mixed supervision with 2D-only and fully annotated data, reducing reliance on expensive 3D labels. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance on nuScenes for both tasks and strong long-range detection (up to 150m) on Argoverse2.

One Turn Too Late: Response-Aware Defense Against Hidden Malicious Intent in Multi-Turn Dialogue

Hidden malicious intent in multi-turn dialogue poses a growing threat to deployed large language models (LLMs). Rather than exposing a harmful objective in a single prompt, increasingly capable attackers can distribute their intent across multiple benign-looking turns. Recent studies show that even modern commercial models with advanced guardrails remain vulnerable to such attacks despite advances in safety alignment and external guardrails. In this work, we address this challenge by detecting the earliest turn at which delivering the candidate response would make the accumulated interaction sufficient to enable harmful action. This objective requires precise turn-level intervention that identifies the harm-enabling closure point while avoiding premature refusal of benign exploratory conversations. To further support training and evaluation, we construct the Multi-Turn Intent Dataset (MTID), which contains branching attack rollouts, matched benign hard negatives, and annotations of the earliest harm-enabling turns. We show that MTID helps enable a turn-level monitor TurnGate, which substantially outperforms existing baselines in harmful-intent detection while maintaining low over-refusal rates. TurnGate further generalizes across domains, attacker pipelines, and target models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Graph-COM/TurnGate.

AFFormer: Adaptive Feature Fusion Transformer for V2X Cooperative Perception under Channel Impairments

Accurate 3D object detection is essential for ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles. Cooperative perception, which leverages vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication to share perceptual data, enhances detection but is vulnerable to channel impairments, such as noise, fading, and interference. To strengthen the reliability of intelligent transportation systems, this work improves the robustness of V2X cooperative perception under communication conditions that reflect common channel impairments. This paper proposes an Adaptive Feature Fusion Transformer (AFFormer), a Transformer-based framework that mitigates the adverse effects of corrupted features by modeling temporal, inter-agent, and spatial correlations. AFFormer introduces three key modules: Multi-Agent and Temporal Aggregation for context-aware fusion across agents and over time, Dual Spatial Attention for efficient modeling of spatial dependencies, and Uncertainty-Guided Fusion for entropy-driven refinement of fused features. A teacher-student knowledge distillation strategy further enhances robustness by aligning fused features with reliable early-collaboration supervision. AFFormer is validated on the V2XSet and DAIR-V2X datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing methods under both ideal and impaired communication conditions, demonstrating improved robustness to communication-induced feature degradation while maintaining a competitive efficiency-accuracy trade-off.

PriorNet: Prior-Guided Engagement Estimation from Face Video

Engagement estimation from face video remains challenging because facial evidence is often incomplete, labeled data are limited, and engagement annotations are subjective. We present PriorNet, a prior-guided framework that injects task-relevant priors at three stages of the pipeline: preprocessing, model adaptation, and objective design. PriorNet converts face-detection failures into explicit zero-frame placeholders so that missing-face events remain represented in the input sequence, adapts a frozen Self-supervised Video Facial Affect Perceiver (SVFAP) backbone through a Prior-guided Low-Rank Adaptation module (Prior-LoRA) for parameter-efficient specialization, and trains with a Dirichlet-evidential, uncertainty-weighted objective under hard-label supervision. We evaluate PriorNet on EngageNet, DAiSEE, DREAMS, and PAFE using each dataset's native evaluation protocol. Across these benchmarks, PriorNet improves over the strongest listed prior reference within each dataset's evaluation framing, while component ablations on EngageNet and DAiSEE indicate that the gains arise from complementary contributions of preprocessing, adaptation, and objective-level priors. These results support explicit prior injection as a useful design principle for face-video engagement estimation under the benchmark conditions studied in this work.