MODA: The First Challenging Benchmark for Multispectral Object Detection in Aerial Images

Aerial object detection faces significant challenges in real-world scenarios, such as small objects and extensive background interference, which limit the performance of RGB-based detectors with insufficient discriminative information. Multispectral images (MSIs) capture additional spectral cues across multiple bands, offering a promising alternative. However, the lack of training data has been the primary bottleneck to exploiting the potential of MSIs. To address this gap, we introduce the first large-scale dataset for Multispectral Object Detection in Aerial images (MODA), which comprises 14,041 MSIs and 330,191 annotations across diverse, challenging scenarios, providing a comprehensive data foundation for this field. Furthermore, to overcome challenges inherent to aerial object detection using MSIs, we propose OSSDet, a framework that integrates spectral and spatial information with object-aware cues. OSSDet employs a cascaded spectral-spatial modulation structure to optimize target perception, aggregates spectrally related features by exploiting spectral similarities to reinforce intra-object correlations, and suppresses irrelevant background via object-aware masking. Moreover, cross-spectral attention further refines object-related representations under explicit object-aware guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OSSDet outperforms existing methods with comparable parameters and efficiency.

SOP^2: Transfer Learning with Scene-Oriented Prompt Pool on 3D Object Detection

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, these models exhibit strong generalization capabilities. Through transfer learning techniques such as fine-tuning and prompt tuning, they can be adapted to various downstream tasks with minimal parameter adjustments. This approach is particularly common in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of common prompt tuning methods in 3D object detection. We investigate whether a model trained on the large-scale Waymo dataset can serve as a foundation model and adapt to other scenarios within the 3D object detection field. This paper sequentially examines the impact of prompt tokens and prompt generators, and further proposes a Scene-Oriented Prompt Pool (\textbf{SOP$^2$}). We demonstrate the effectiveness of prompt pools in 3D object detection, with the goal of inspiring future researchers to delve deeper into the potential of prompts in the 3D field.

INDOOR-LiDAR: Bridging Simulation and Reality for Robot-Centric 360 degree Indoor LiDAR Perception -- A Robot-Centric Hybrid Dataset

We present INDOOR-LIDAR, a comprehensive hybrid dataset of indoor 3D LiDAR point clouds designed to advance research in robot perception. Existing indoor LiDAR datasets often suffer from limited scale, inconsistent annotation formats, and human-induced variability during data collection. INDOOR-LIDAR addresses these limitations by integrating simulated environments with real-world scans acquired using autonomous ground robots, providing consistent coverage and realistic sensor behavior under controlled variations. Each sample consists of dense point cloud data enriched with intensity measurements and KITTI-style annotations. The annotation schema encompasses common indoor object categories within various scenes. The simulated subset enables flexible configuration of layouts, point densities, and occlusions, while the real-world subset captures authentic sensor noise, clutter, and domain-specific artifacts characteristic of real indoor settings. INDOOR-LIDAR supports a wide range of applications including 3D object detection, bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception, SLAM, semantic scene understanding, and domain adaptation between simulated and real indoor domains. By bridging the gap between synthetic and real-world data, INDOOR-LIDAR establishes a scalable, realistic, and reproducible benchmark for advancing robotic perception in complex indoor environments.

STAR: Semantic-Traffic Alignment and Retrieval for Zero-Shot HTTPS Website Fingerprinting

Modern HTTPS mechanisms such as Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) and encrypted DNS improve privacy but remain vulnerable to website fingerprinting (WF) attacks, where adversaries infer visited sites from encrypted traffic patterns. Existing WF methods rely on supervised learning with site-specific labeled traces, which limits scalability and fails to handle previously unseen websites. We address these limitations by reformulating WF as a zero-shot cross-modal retrieval problem and introducing STAR. STAR learns a joint embedding space for encrypted traffic traces and crawl-time logic profiles using a dual-encoder architecture. Trained on 150K automatically collected traffic-logic pairs with contrastive and consistency objectives and structure-aware augmentation, STAR retrieves the most semantically aligned profile for a trace without requiring target-side traffic during training. Experiments on 1,600 unseen websites show that STAR achieves 87.9 percent top-1 accuracy and 0.963 AUC in open-world detection, outperforming supervised and few-shot baselines. Adding an adapter with only four labeled traces per site further boosts top-5 accuracy to 98.8 percent. Our analysis reveals intrinsic semantic-traffic alignment in modern web protocols, identifying semantic leakage as the dominant privacy risk in encrypted HTTPS traffic. We release STAR's datasets and code to support reproducibility and future research.

Coarse-to-Fine Hierarchical Alignment for UAV-based Human Detection using Diffusion Models

Training object detectors demands extensive, task-specific annotations, yet this requirement becomes impractical in UAV-based human detection due to constantly shifting target distributions and the scarcity of labeled images. As a remedy, synthetic simulators are adopted to generate annotated data, with a low annotation cost. However, the domain gap between synthetic and real images hinders the model from being effectively applied to the target domain. Accordingly, we introduce Coarse-to-Fine Hierarchical Alignment (CFHA), a three-stage diffusion-based framework designed to transform synthetic data for UAV-based human detection, narrowing the domain gap while preserving the original synthetic labels. CFHA explicitly decouples global style and local content domain discrepancies and bridges those gaps using three modules: (1) Global Style Transfer -- a diffusion model aligns color, illumination, and texture statistics of synthetic images to the realistic style, using only a small real reference set; (2) Local Refinement -- a super-resolution diffusion model is used to facilitate fine-grained and photorealistic details for the small objects, such as human instances, preserving shape and boundary integrity; (3) Hallucination Removal -- a module that filters out human instances whose visual attributes do not align with real-world data to make the human appearance closer to the target distribution. Extensive experiments on public UAV Sim2Real detection benchmarks demonstrate that our methods significantly improve the detection accuracy compared to the non-transformed baselines. Specifically, our method achieves up to $+14.1$ improvement of mAP50 on Semantic-Drone benchmark. Ablation studies confirm the complementary roles of the global and local stages and highlight the importance of hierarchical alignment. The code is released at \href{https://github.com/liwd190019/CFHA}{this url}.

A Comprehensive Safety Metric to Evaluate Perception in Autonomous Systems

Complete perception of the environment and its correct interpretation is crucial for autonomous vehicles. Object perception is the main component of automotive surround sensing. Various metrics already exist for the evaluation of object perception. However, objects can be of different importance depending on their velocity, orientation, distance, size, or the potential damage that could be caused by a collision due to a missed detection. Thus, these additional parameters have to be considered for safety evaluation. We propose a new safety metric that incorporates all these parameters and returns a single easily interpretable safety assessment score for object perception. This new metric is evaluated with both real world and virtual data sets and compared to state of the art metrics.

Improving Cardiac Risk Prediction Using Data Generation Techniques

Cardiac rehabilitation constitutes a structured clinical process involving multiple interdependent phases, individualized medical decisions, and the coordinated participation of diverse healthcare professionals. This sequential and adaptive nature enables the program to be modeled as a business process, thereby facilitating its analysis. Nevertheless, studies in this context face significant limitations inherent to real-world medical databases: data are often scarce due to both economic costs and the time required for collection; many existing records are not suitable for specific analytical purposes; and, finally, there is a high prevalence of missing values, as not all patients undergo the same diagnostic tests. To address these limitations, this work proposes an architecture based on a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) for the synthesis of realistic clinical records that are coherent with real-world observations. The primary objective is to increase the size and diversity of the available datasets in order to enhance the performance of cardiac risk prediction models and to reduce the need for potentially hazardous diagnostic procedures, such as exercise stress testing. The results demonstrate that the proposed architecture is capable of generating coherent and realistic synthetic data, whose use improves the accuracy of the various classifiers employed for cardiac risk detection, outperforming state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for synthetic data generation.

Distilling Future Temporal Knowledge with Masked Feature Reconstruction for 3D Object Detection

Camera-based temporal 3D object detection has shown impressive results in autonomous driving, with offline models improving accuracy by using future frames. Knowledge distillation (KD) can be an appealing framework for transferring rich information from offline models to online models. However, existing KD methods overlook future frames, as they mainly focus on spatial feature distillation under strict frame alignment or on temporal relational distillation, thereby making it challenging for online models to effectively learn future knowledge. To this end, we propose a sparse query-based approach, Future Temporal Knowledge Distillation (FTKD), which effectively transfers future frame knowledge from an offline teacher model to an online student model. Specifically, we present a future-aware feature reconstruction strategy to encourage the student model to capture future features without strict frame alignment. In addition, we further introduce future-guided logit distillation to leverage the teacher's stable foreground and background context. FTKD is applied to two high-performing 3D object detection baselines, achieving up to 1.3 mAP and 1.3 NDS gains on the nuScenes dataset, as well as the most accurate velocity estimation, without increasing inference cost.

DOS: Distilling Observable Softmaps of Zipfian Prototypes for Self-Supervised Point Representation

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) have shown tremendous potential for learning 3D point cloud representations without human annotations. However, SSL for 3D point clouds still faces critical challenges due to irregular geometry, shortcut-prone reconstruction, and unbalanced semantics distribution. In this work, we propose DOS (Distilling Observable Softmaps), a novel SSL framework that self-distills semantic relevance softmaps only at observable (unmasked) points. This strategy prevents information leakage from masked regions and provides richer supervision than discrete token-to-prototype assignments. To address the challenge of unbalanced semantics in an unsupervised setting, we introduce Zipfian prototypes and incorporate them using a modified Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, Zipf-Sinkhorn, which enforces a power-law prior over prototype usage and modulates the sharpness of the target softmap during training. DOS outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on semantic segmentation and 3D object detection across multiple benchmarks, including nuScenes, Waymo, SemanticKITTI, ScanNet, and ScanNet200, without relying on extra data or annotations. Our results demonstrate that observable-point softmaps distillation offers a scalable and effective paradigm for learning robust 3D representations.

Hands-on Evaluation of Visual Transformers for Object Recognition and Detection

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for computer vision sometimes struggle with understanding images in a global context, as they mainly focus on local patterns. On the other hand, Vision Transformers (ViTs), inspired by models originally created for language processing, use self-attention mechanisms, which allow them to understand relationships across the entire image. In this paper, we compare different types of ViTs (pure, hierarchical, and hybrid) against traditional CNN models across various tasks, including object recognition, detection, and medical image classification. We conduct thorough tests on standard datasets like ImageNet for image classification and COCO for object detection. Additionally, we apply these models to medical imaging using the ChestX-ray14 dataset. We find that hybrid and hierarchical transformers, especially Swin and CvT, offer a strong balance between accuracy and computational resources. Furthermore, by experimenting with data augmentation techniques on medical images, we discover significant performance improvements, particularly with the Swin Transformer model. Overall, our results indicate that Vision Transformers are competitive and, in many cases, outperform traditional CNNs, especially in scenarios requiring the understanding of global visual contexts like medical imaging.