Secure Linear Alignment of Large Language Models

Language models increasingly appear to learn similar representations, despite differences in training objectives, architectures, and data modalities. This emerging compatibility between independently trained models introduces new opportunities for cross-model alignment to downstream objectives. Moreover, it unlocks new potential application domains, such as settings where security, privacy, or competitive constraints prohibit direct data or model sharing. In this work, we propose a privacy-preserving framework that exploits representational convergence to enable cross-silo inference between independent language models. The framework learns an affine transformation over a shared public dataset and applies homomorphic encryption to protect client queries during inference. By encrypting only the linear alignment and classification operations, the method achieves sub-second inference latency while maintaining strong security guarantees. We support this framework with an empirical investigation into representational convergence, in which we learn linear transformations between the final hidden states of independent models. We evaluate these cross-model mappings on embedding classification and out-of-distribution detection, observing minimal performance degradation across model pairs. Additionally, we show for the first time that linear alignment sometimes enables text generation across independently trained models.

Video Detector: A Dual-Phase Vision-Based System for Real-Time Traffic Intersection Control and Intelligent Transportation Analysis

Urban traffic management increasingly requires intelligent sensing systems capable of adapting to dynamic traffic conditions without costly infrastructure modifications. Vision-based vehicle detection has therefore become a key technology for modern intelligent transportation systems. This study presents Video Detector (VD), a dual-phase vision-based traffic intersection management system designed as a flexible and cost-effective alternative to traditional inductive loop detectors. The framework integrates a real-time module (VD-RT) for intersection control with an offline analytical module (VD-Offline) for detailed traffic behavior analysis. Three system configurations were implemented using SSD Inception v2, Faster R-CNN Inception v2, and CenterNet ResNet-50 V1 FPN, trained on datasets totaling 108,000 annotated images across 6-10 vehicle classes. Experimental results show detection performance of up to 90% test accuracy and 29.5 mAP@0.5, while maintaining real-time throughput of 37 FPS on HD video streams. Field deployments conducted in collaboration with Istanbul IT and Smart City Technologies Inc. (ISBAK) demonstrate stable operation under diverse environmental conditions. The system supports virtual loop detection, vehicle counting, multi-object tracking, queue estimation, speed analysis, and multiclass vehicle classification, enabling comprehensive intersection monitoring without the need for embedded road sensors. The annotated dataset and training pipeline are publicly released to support reproducibility. These results indicate that the proposed framework provides a scalable and deployable vision-based solution for intelligent transportation systems and smart-city traffic management.

SR-Nav: Spatial Relationships Matter for Zero-shot Object Goal Navigation

Zero-shot object-goal navigation aims to find target objects in unseen environments using only egocentric observation. Recent methods leverage foundation models' comprehension and reasoning capabilities to enhance navigation performance. However, when faced with poor viewpoints or weak semantic cues, foundation models often fail to support reliable reasoning in both perception and planning, resulting in inefficient or failed navigation. We observe that inherent relationships among objects and regions encode structured scene priors, which help agents infer plausible target locations even under partial observations. Motivated by this insight, we propose Spatial Relation-aware Navigation (SR-Nav), a framework that models both observed and experience-based spatial relationships to enhance both perception and planning. Specifically, SR-Nav first constructs a Dynamic Spatial Relationship Graph (DSRG) that encodes the target-centered spatial relationships through the foundation models and updates dynamically with real-time observations. We then introduce a Relation-aware Matching Module. It utilizes relationship matching instead of naive detection, leveraging diverse relationships in the DSRG to verify and correct errors, enhancing visual perception robustness. Finally, we design a Dynamic Relationship Planning Module to reduce the planning search space by dynamically computing the optimal paths based on the DSRG from the current position, thereby guiding planning and reducing exploration redundancy. Experiments on HM3D show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both success rate and navigation efficiency. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Mzyw-1314/SR-Nav

Edge-Efficient Two-Stream Multimodal Architecture for Non-Intrusive Bathroom Fall Detection

Falls in wet bathroom environments are a major safety risk for seniors living alone. Recent work has shown that mmWave-only, vibration-only, and existing multimodal schemes, such as vibration-triggered radar activation, early feature concatenation, and decision-level score fusion, can support privacy-preserving, non-intrusive fall detection. However, these designs still treat motion and impact as loosely coupled streams, depending on coarse temporal alignment and amplitude thresholds, and do not explicitly encode the causal link between radar-observed collapse and floor impact or address timing drift, object drop confounders, and latency and energy constraints on low-power edge devices. To this end, we propose a two-stream architecture that encodes radar signals with a Motion--Mamba branch for long-range motion patterns and processes floor vibration with an Impact--Griffin branch that emphasizes impact transients and cross-axis coupling. Cross-conditioned fusion uses low-rank bilinear interaction and a Switch--MoE head to align motion and impact tokens and suppress object-drop confounders. The model keeps inference cost suitable for real-time execution on a Raspberry Pi 4B gateway. We construct a bathroom fall detection benchmark dataset with frame-level annotations, comprising more than 3~h of synchronized mmWave radar and triaxial vibration recordings across eight scenarios under running water, together with subject-independent training, validation, and test splits. On the test split, our model attains 96.1% accuracy, 94.8% precision, 88.0% recall, a 91.1% macro F1 score, and an AUC of 0.968. Compared with the strongest baseline, it improves accuracy by 2.0 percentage points and fall recall by 1.3 percentage points, while reducing latency from 35.9 ms to 15.8 ms and lowering energy per 2.56 s window from 14200 mJ to 10750 mJ on the Raspberry Pi 4B gateway.

MO-SAE:Multi-Objective Stacked Autoencoders Optimization for Edge Anomaly Detection

Stacked AutoEncoders (SAE) have been widely adopted in edge anomaly detection scenarios. However, the resource-intensive nature of SAE can pose significant challenges for edge devices, which are typically resource-constrained and must adapt rapidly to dynamic and changing conditions. Optimizing SAE to meet the heterogeneous demands of real-world deployment scenarios, including high performance under constrained storage, low power consumption, fast inference, and efficient model updates, remains a substantial challenge. To address this, we propose an integrated optimization framework that jointly considers these critical factors to achieve balanced and adaptive system-level optimization. Specifically, we formulate SAE optimization for edge anomaly detection as a multi-objective optimization problem and propose MO-SAE (Multi-Objective Stacked AutoEncoders). The multiple objectives are addressed by integrating model clipping, multi-branch exit design, and a matrix approximation technique. In addition, a multi-objective heuristic algorithm is employed to effectively balance the competing objectives in SAE optimization. Our results demonstrate that the proposed MO-SAE delivers substantial improvements over the original approach. On the x86 architecture, it reduces storage space and power consumption by at least 50%, improves runtime efficiency by no less than 28%, and achieves an 11.8% compression rate, all while maintaining application performance. Furthermore, MO-SAE runs efficiently on edge devices with ARM architecture. Experimental results show a 15% improvement in inference speed, facilitating efficient deployment in cloud-edge collaborative anomaly detection systems.

OCRA: Object-Centric Learning with 3D and Tactile Priors for Human-to-Robot Action Transfer

We present OCRA, an Object-Centric framework for video-based human-to-Robot Action transfer that learns directly from human demonstration videos to enable robust manipulation. Object-centric learning emphasizes task-relevant objects and their interactions while filtering out irrelevant background, providing a natural and scalable way to teach robots. OCRA leverages multi-view RGB videos, the state-of-the-art 3D foundation model VGGT, and advanced detection and segmentation models to reconstruct object-centric 3D point clouds, capturing rich interactions between objects. To handle properties not easily perceived by vision alone, we incorporate tactile priors via a large-scale dataset of over one million tactile images. These 3D and tactile priors are fused through a multimodal module (ResFiLM) and fed into a Diffusion Policy to generate robust manipulation actions. Extensive experiments on both vision-only and visuo-tactile tasks show that OCRA significantly outperforms existing baselines and ablations, demonstrating its effectiveness for learning from human demonstration videos.

WildDepth: A Multimodal Dataset for 3D Wildlife Perception and Depth Estimation

Depth estimation and 3D reconstruction have been extensively studied as core topics in computer vision. Starting from rigid objects with relatively simple geometric shapes, such as vehicles, the research has expanded to address general objects, including challenging deformable objects, such as humans and animals. However, for the animal, in particular, the majority of existing models are trained based on datasets without metric scale, which can help validate image-only models. To address this limitation, we present WildDepth, a multimodal dataset and benchmark suite for depth estimation, behavior detection, and 3D reconstruction from diverse categories of animals ranging from domestic to wild environments with synchronized RGB and LiDAR. Experimental results show that the use of multi-modal data improves depth reliability by up to 10% RMSE, while RGB-LiDAR fusion enhances 3D reconstruction fidelity by 12% in Chamfer distance. By releasing WildDepth and its benchmarks, we aim to foster robust multimodal perception systems that generalize across domains.

GATE-AD: Graph Attention Network Encoding For Few-Shot Industrial Visual Anomaly Detection

Few-Shot Industrial Visual Anomaly Detection (FS-IVAD) comprises a critical task in modern manufacturing settings, where automated product inspection systems need to identify rare defects using only a handful of normal/defect-free training samples. In this context, the current study introduces a novel reconstruction-based approach termed GATE-AD. In particular, the proposed framework relies on the employment of a masked, representation-aligned Graph Attention Network (GAT) encoding scheme to learn robust appearance patterns of normal samples. By leveraging dense, patch-level, visual feature tokens as graph nodes, the model employs stacked self-attentional layers to adaptively encode complex, irregular, non-Euclidean, local relations. The graph is enhanced with a representation alignment component grounded on a learnable, latent space, where high reconstruction residual areas (i.e., defects) are assessed using a Scaled Cosine Error (SCE) objective function. Extensive comparative evaluation on the MVTec AD, VisA, and MPDD industrial defect detection benchmarks demonstrates that GATE-AD achieves state-of-the-art performance across the $1$- to $8$-shot settings, combining the highest detection accuracy (increase up to $1.8\%$ in image AUROC in the 8-shot case in MPDD) with the lowest per-image inference latency (at least $25.05\%$ faster), compared to the best-performing literature methods. In order to facilitate reproducibility and further research, the source code of GATE-AD is available at https://github.com/gthpapadopoulos/GATE-AD.

GroundCount: Grounding Vision-Language Models with Object Detection for Mitigating Counting Hallucinations

Vision Language Models (VLMs) exhibit persistent hallucinations in counting tasks, with accuracy substantially lower than other visual reasoning tasks (excluding sentiment). This phenomenon persists even in state-of-the-art reasoning-capable VLMs. Conversely, CNN-based object detection models (ODMs) such as YOLO excel at spatial localization and instance counting with minimal computational overhead. We propose GroundCount, a framework that augments VLMs with explicit spatial grounding from ODMs to mitigate counting hallucinations. In the best case, our prompt-based augmentation strategy achieves 81.3% counting accuracy on the best-performing model (Ovis2.5-2B) - a 6.6pp improvement - while reducing inference time by 22% through elimination of hallucination-driven reasoning loops for stronger models. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies demonstrating that positional encoding is a critical component, being beneficial for stronger models but detrimental for weaker ones. Confidence scores, by contrast, introduce noise for most architectures and their removal improves performance in four of five evaluated models. We further evaluate feature-level fusion architectures, finding that explicit symbolic grounding via structured prompts outperforms implicit feature fusion despite sophisticated cross-attention mechanisms. Our approach yields consistent improvements across four of five evaluated VLM architectures (6.2--7.5pp), with one architecture exhibiting degraded performance due to incompatibility between its iterative reflection mechanisms and structured prompts. These results suggest that counting failures stem from fundamental spatial-semantic integration limitations rather than architecture-specific deficiencies, while highlighting the importance of architectural compatibility in augmentation strategies.

One Supervisor, Many Modalities: Adaptive Tool Orchestration for Autonomous Queries

We present an agentic AI framework for autonomous multimodal query processing that coordinates specialized tools across text, image, audio, video, and document modalities. A central Supervisor dynamically decomposes user queries, delegates subtasks to modality-appropriate tools (e.g., object detection, OCR, speech transcription), and synthesizes results through adaptive routing strategies rather than predetermined decision trees. For text-only queries, the framework uses learned routing via RouteLLM, while non-text paths use SLM-assisted modality decomposition. Evaluated on 2,847 queries across 15 task categories, our framework achieves 72% reduction in time-to-accurate-answer, 85% reduction in conversational rework, and 67% cost reduction compared to the matched hierarchical baseline while maintaining accuracy parity. These results demonstrate that intelligent centralized orchestration fundamentally improves multimodal AI deployment economics.