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.
Understanding objects in 3D from a single image is a cornerstone of spatial intelligence. A key step toward this goal is monocular 3D object detection--recovering the extent, location, and orientation of objects from an input RGB image. To be practical in the open world, such a detector must generalize beyond closed-set categories, support diverse prompt modalities, and leverage geometric cues when available. Progress is hampered by two bottlenecks: existing methods are designed for a single prompt type and lack a mechanism to incorporate additional geometric cues, and current 3D datasets cover only narrow categories in controlled environments, limiting open-world transfer. In this work we address both gaps. First, we introduce WildDet3D, a unified geometry-aware architecture that natively accepts text, point, and box prompts and can incorporate auxiliary depth signals at inference time. Second, we present WildDet3D-Data, the largest open 3D detection dataset to date, constructed by generating candidate 3D boxes from existing 2D annotations and retaining only human-verified ones, yielding over 1M images across 13.5K categories in diverse real-world scenes. WildDet3D establishes a new state-of-the-art across multiple benchmarks and settings. In the open-world setting, it achieves 22.6/24.8 AP3D on our newly introduced WildDet3D-Bench with text and box prompts. On Omni3D, it reaches 34.2/36.4 AP3D with text and box prompts, respectively. In zero-shot evaluation, it achieves 40.3/48.9 ODS on Argoverse 2 and ScanNet. Notably, incorporating depth cues at inference time yields substantial additional gains (+20.7 AP on average across settings).
Fine-grained visual understanding and high-level reasoning in real-world open-water environments remain under-explored due to the lack of dedicated benchmarks. We introduce MARINER, a comprehensive benchmark built under the novel Entity-Environment-Event (3E) paradigm. MARINER contains 16,629 multi-source maritime images with 63 fine-grained vessel categories, diverse adverse environments, and 5 typical dynamic maritime incidents, covering fine-grained classification, object detection, and visual question answering tasks. We conduct extensive evaluations on mainstream Multimodal Large language models (MLLMs) and establish baselines, revealing that even advanced models struggle with fine-grained discrimination and causal reasoning in complex marine scenes. As a dedicated maritime benchmark, MARINER fills the gap of realistic and cognitive-level evaluation for maritime multimodal understanding, and promotes future research on robust vision-language models for open-water applications. Appendix and supplementary materials are available at https://lxixim.github.io/MARINER.
We present an approach for object-level detection and segmentation of target indoor assets in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes, reconstructed from 360° drone-captured imagery. We introduce a 3D object codebook that jointly leverages mask semantics and spatial information of their corresponding Gaussian primitives to guide multi-view mask association and indoor asset detection. By integrating 2D object detection and segmentation models with semantically and spatially constrained merging procedures, our method aggregates masks from multiple views into coherent 3D object instances. Experiments on two large indoor scenes demonstrate reliable multi-view mask consistency, improving F1 score by 65% over state-of-the-art baselines, and accurate object-level 3D indoor asset detection, achieving an 11% mAP gain over baseline methods.
Content moderation systems classify images as safe or unsafe but lack spatial grounding and interpretability: they cannot explain what sensitive behavior was detected, who is involved, or where it occurs. We introduce the Sensitive Benchmark (SenBen), the first large-scale scene graph benchmark for sensitive content, comprising 13,999 frames from 157 movies annotated with Visual Genome-style scene graphs (25 object classes, 28 attributes including affective states such as pain, fear, aggression, and distress, 14 predicates) and 16 sensitivity tags across 5 categories. We distill a frontier VLM into a compact 241M student model using a multi-task recipe that addresses vocabulary imbalance in autoregressive scene graph generation through suffix-based object identity, Vocabulary-Aware Recall (VAR) Loss, and a decoupled Query2Label tag head with asymmetric loss, yielding a +6.4 percentage point improvement in SenBen Recall over standard cross-entropy training. On grounded scene graph metrics, our student model outperforms all evaluated VLMs except Gemini models and all commercial safety APIs, while achieving the highest object detection and captioning scores across all models, at $7.6\times$ faster inference and $16\times$ less GPU memory.
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) enables models to detect any object category, including unseen ones. Benefiting from large-scale pre-training, existing OVOD methods achieve strong detection performance on general scenarios (e.g., OV-COCO) but suffer severe performance drops when transferred to downstream tasks with substantial domain shifts. This degradation stems from the scarcity and weak semantics of category labels in domain-specific task, as well as the inability of existing models to capture auxiliary semantics beyond coarse-grained category label. To address these issues, we propose HSA-DINO, a parameter-efficient semantic augmentation framework for enhancing open-vocabulary object detection. Specifically, we propose a multi-scale prompt bank that leverages image feature pyramids to capture hierarchical semantics and select domain-specific local semantic prompts, progressively enriching textual representations from coarse to fine-grained levels. Furthermore, we introduce a semantic-aware router that dynamically selects the appropriate semantic augmentation strategy during inference, thereby preventing parameter updates from degrading the generalization ability of the pre-trained OVOD model. We evaluate HSA-DINO on OV-COCO, several vertical domain datasets, and modified benchmark settings. The results show that HSA-DINO performs favorably against previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving a superior trade-off between domain adaptability and open-vocabulary generalization.
As large language models (LLMs) generate text that increasingly resembles human writing, the subtle cues that distinguish AI-generated content from human-written content become increasingly challenging to capture. Reliance on generator-specific artifacts is inherently unstable, since new models emerge rapidly and reduce the robustness of such shortcuts. This generalizes unseen generators as a central and challenging problem for AI-text detection. To tackle this challenge, we propose a progressively structured framework that disentangles AI-detection semantics from generator-aware artifacts. This is achieved through a compact latent encoding that encourages semantic minimality, followed by perturbation-based regularization to reduce residual entanglement, and finally a discriminative adaptation stage that aligns representations with task objectives. Experiments on MAGE benchmark, covering 20 representative LLMs across 7 categories, demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 24.2% accuracy gain and 26.2% F1 improvement. Notably, performance continues to improve as the diversity of training generators increases, confirming strong scalability and generalization in open-set scenarios. Our source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/PuXiao06/DRGD.
Accurate and timely identification of construction hazards around workers is essential for preventing workplace accidents. While large vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong contextual reasoning capabilities, their high computational requirements limit their applicability in near real-time construction hazard detection. In contrast, small vision-language models (sVLMs) with fewer than 4 billion parameters offer improved efficiency but often suffer from reduced accuracy and hallucination when analyzing complex construction scenes. To address this trade-off, this study proposes a detection-guided sVLM framework that integrates object detection with multimodal reasoning for contextual hazard identification. The framework first employs a YOLOv11n detector to localize workers and construction machinery within the scene. The detected entities are then embedded into structured prompts to guide the reasoning process of sVLMs, enabling spatially grounded hazard assessment. Within this framework, six sVLMs (Gemma-3 4B, Qwen-3-VL 2B/4B, InternVL-3 1B/2B, and SmolVLM-2B) were evaluated in zero-shot settings on a curated dataset of construction site images with hazard annotations and explanatory rationales. The proposed approach consistently improved hazard detection performance across all models. The best-performing model, Gemma-3 4B, achieved an F1-score of 50.6%, compared to 34.5% in the baseline configuration. Explanation quality also improved significantly, with BERTScore F1 increasing from 0.61 to 0.82. Despite incorporating object detection, the framework introduces minimal overhead, adding only 2.5 ms per image during inference. These results demonstrate that integrating lightweight object detection with small VLM reasoning provides an effective and efficient solution for context-aware construction safety hazard detection.
Previous studies have illustrated the potential of analysing gaze behaviours in collaborative learning to provide educationally meaningful information for students to reflect on their learning. Over the past decades, machine learning approaches have been developed to automatically detect gaze behaviours from video data. Yet, since these approaches often require large amounts of labelled data for training, human annotation remains necessary. Additionally, researchers have questioned the cross-configuration robustness of machine learning models developed, as training datasets often fail to encompass the full range of situations encountered in educational contexts. To address these challenges, this study proposes a scalable artificial intelligence approach that leverages pretrained and foundation models to automatically detect gaze behaviours in face-to-face collaborative learning contexts without requiring human-annotated data. The approach utilises pretrained YOLO11 for person tracking, YOLOE-26 with text-prompt capability for education-related object detection, and the Gaze-LLE model for gaze target prediction. The results indicate that the proposed approach achieves an F1-score of 0.829 in detecting students' gaze behaviours from video data, with strong performance for laptop-directed gaze and peer-directed gaze, yet weaker performance for other gaze targets. Furthermore, when compared to other supervised machine learning approaches, the proposed method demonstrates superior and more stable performance in complex contexts, highlighting its better cross-configuration robustness. The implications of this approach for supporting students' collaborative learning in real-world environments are also discussed.
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable conditional computation by activating only a subset of model parameters for each input. Although sparse routing has been highly effective in language models and has also shown promise in vision, most vision MoE methods operate at the image or patch level. This granularity is poorly aligned with object detection, where the fundamental unit of reasoning is an object query corresponding to a candidate instance. We propose Hierarchical Instance-Conditioned Mixture-of-Experts (HI-MoE), a DETR-style detection architecture that performs routing in two stages: a lightweight scene router first selects a scene-consistent expert subset, and an instance router then assigns each object query to a small number of experts within that subset. This design aims to preserve sparse computation while better matching the heterogeneous, instance-centric structure of detection. In the current draft, experiments are concentrated on COCO with preliminary specialization analysis on LVIS. Under these settings, HI-MoE improves over a dense DINO baseline and over simpler token-level or instance-only routing variants, with especially strong gains on small objects. We also provide an initial visualization of expert specialization patterns. We present the method, ablations, and current limitations in a form intended to support further experimental validation.
This paper advances a methodological proposal for safety research in agentic AI. As systems acquire planning, memory, tool use, persistent identity, and sustained interaction, safety can no longer be analysed primarily at the level of the isolated model. Population-level risks arise from structured interaction among agents, through processes of communication, observation, and mutual influence that shape collective behaviour over time. As the object of analysis shifts, a methodological gap emerges. Approaches focused either on single agents or on aggregate outcomes do not identify the interaction-level mechanisms that generate collective risks or the design variables that control them. A framework is required that links local interaction structure to population-level dynamics in a causally explicit way, allowing both explanation and intervention. We introduce two linked concepts. Agentic microphysics defines the level of analysis: local interaction dynamics where one agent's output becomes another's input under specific protocol conditions. Generative safety defines the methodology: growing phenomena and elicit risks from micro-level conditions to identify sufficient mechanisms, detect thresholds, and design effective interventions.