Bring My Cup! Personalizing Vision-Language-Action Models with Visual Attentive Prompting

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well to generic instructions, they struggle with personalized commands such as "bring my cup", where the robot must act on one specific instance among visually similar objects. We study this setting of manipulating personal objects, in which a VLA must identify and control a user-specific object unseen during training using only a few reference images. To address this challenge, we propose Visual Attentive Prompting (VAP), a simple-yet-effective training-free perceptual adapter that equips frozen VLAs with top-down selective attention. VAP treats the reference images as a non-parametric visual memory, grounds the personal object in the scene through open-vocabulary detection and embedding-based matching, and then injects this grounding as a visual prompt by highlighting the object and rewriting the instruction. We construct two simulation benchmarks, Personalized-SIMPLER and Personalized-VLABench, and a real-world tabletop benchmark to evaluate personalized manipulation across multiple robots and tasks. Experiments show that VAP consistently outperforms generic policies and token-learning baselines in both success rate and correct-object manipulation, helping to bridge the gap between semantic understanding and instance-level control.

YolovN-CBi: A Lightweight and Efficient Architecture for Real-Time Detection of Small UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly known as, drones pose increasing risks in civilian and defense settings, demanding accurate and real-time drone detection systems. However, detecting drones is challenging because of their small size, rapid movement, and low visual contrast. A modified architecture of YolovN called the YolovN-CBi is proposed that incorporates the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and the Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) to improve sensitivity to small object detections. A curated training dataset consisting of 28K images is created with various flying objects and a local test dataset is collected with 2500 images consisting of very small drone objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated on four benchmark datasets, along with the local test dataset. The baseline Yolov5 and the proposed Yolov5-CBi architecture outperform newer Yolo versions, including Yolov8 and Yolov12, in the speed-accuracy trade-off for small object detection. Four other variants of the proposed CBi architecture are also proposed and evaluated, which vary in the placement and usage of CBAM and BiFPN. These variants are further distilled using knowledge distillation techniques for edge deployment, using a Yolov5m-CBi teacher and a Yolov5n-CBi student. The distilled model achieved a mA@P0.5:0.9 of 0.6573, representing a 6.51% improvement over the teacher's score of 0.6171, highlighting the effectiveness of the distillation process. The distilled model is 82.9% faster than the baseline model, making it more suitable for real-time drone detection. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed CBi architecture, together with the distilled lightweight models in advancing efficient and accurate real-time detection of small UAVs.

AI for Mycetoma Diagnosis in Histopathological Images: The MICCAI 2024 Challenge

Mycetoma is a neglected tropical disease caused by fungi or bacteria leading to severe tissue damage and disabilities. It affects poor and rural communities and presents medical challenges and socioeconomic burdens on patients and healthcare systems in endemic regions worldwide. Mycetoma diagnosis is a major challenge in mycetoma management, particularly in low-resource settings where expert pathologists are limited. To address this challenge, this paper presents an overview of the Mycetoma MicroImage: Detect and Classify Challenge (mAIcetoma) which was organized to advance mycetoma diagnosis through AI solutions. mAIcetoma focused on developing automated models for segmenting mycetoma grains and classifying mycetoma types from histopathological images. The challenge attracted the attention of several teams worldwide to participate and five finalist teams fulfilled the challenge objectives. The teams proposed various deep learning architectures for the ultimate goal of this challenge. Mycetoma database (MyData) was provided to participants as a standardized dataset to run the proposed models. Those models were evaluated using evaluation metrics. Results showed that all the models achieved high segmentation accuracy, emphasizing the necessitate of grain detection as a critical step in mycetoma diagnosis. In addition, the top-performing models show a significant performance in classifying mycetoma types.

Generative Human-Object Interaction Detection via Differentiable Cognitive Steering of Multi-modal LLMs

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize human-object pairs and the interactions between them. Existing methods operate under a closed-world assumption, treating the task as a classification problem over a small, predefined verb set, which struggles to generalize to the long-tail of unseen or ambiguous interactions in the wild. While recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) possess the rich world knowledge required for open-vocabulary understanding, they remain decoupled from existing HOI detectors since fine-tuning them is computationally prohibitive. To address these constraints, we propose \GRASP-HO}, a novel Generative Reasoning And Steerable Perception framework that reformulates HOI detection from the closed-set classification task to the open-vocabulary generation problem. To bridge the vision and cognitive, we first extract hybrid interaction representations, then design a lightweight learnable cognitive steering conduit (CSC) module to inject the fine-grained visual evidence into a frozen MLLM for effective reasoning. To address the supervision mismatch between classification-based HOI datasets and open-vocabulary generative models, we introduce a hybrid guidance strategy that coupling the language modeling loss and auxiliary classification loss, enabling discriminative grounding without sacrificing generative flexibility. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art closed-set performance and strong zero-shot generalization, achieving a unified paradigm that seamlessly bridges discriminative perception and generative reasoning for open-world HOI detection.

DenseBEV: Transforming BEV Grid Cells into 3D Objects

In current research, Bird's-Eye-View (BEV)-based transformers are increasingly utilized for multi-camera 3D object detection. Traditional models often employ random queries as anchors, optimizing them successively. Recent advancements complement or replace these random queries with detections from auxiliary networks. We propose a more intuitive and efficient approach by using BEV feature cells directly as anchors. This end-to-end approach leverages the dense grid of BEV queries, considering each cell as a potential object for the final detection task. As a result, we introduce a novel two-stage anchor generation method specifically designed for multi-camera 3D object detection. To address the scaling issues of attention with a large number of queries, we apply BEV-based Non-Maximum Suppression, allowing gradients to flow only through non-suppressed objects. This ensures efficient training without the need for post-processing. By using BEV features from encoders such as BEVFormer directly as object queries, temporal BEV information is inherently embedded. Building on the temporal BEV information already embedded in our object queries, we introduce a hybrid temporal modeling approach by integrating prior detections to further enhance detection performance. Evaluating our method on the nuScenes dataset shows consistent and significant improvements in NDS and mAP over the baseline, even with sparser BEV grids and therefore fewer initial anchors. It is particularly effective for small objects, enhancing pedestrian detection with a 3.8% mAP increase on nuScenes and an 8% increase in LET-mAP on Waymo. Applying our method, named DenseBEV, to the challenging Waymo Open dataset yields state-of-the-art performance, achieving a LET-mAP of 60.7%, surpassing the previous best by 5.4%. Code is available at https://github.com/mdaehl/DenseBEV.

Outlier detection in mixed-attribute data: a semi-supervised approach with fuzzy approximations and relative entropy

Outlier detection is a critical task in data mining, aimed at identifying objects that significantly deviate from the norm. Semi-supervised methods improve detection performance by leveraging partially labeled data but typically overlook the uncertainty and heterogeneity of real-world mixed-attribute data. This paper introduces a semi-supervised outlier detection method, namely fuzzy rough sets-based outlier detection (FROD), to effectively handle these challenges. Specifically, we first utilize a small subset of labeled data to construct fuzzy decision systems, through which we introduce the attribute classification accuracy based on fuzzy approximations to evaluate the contribution of attribute sets in outlier detection. Unlabeled data is then used to compute fuzzy relative entropy, which provides a characterization of outliers from the perspective of uncertainty. Finally, we develop the detection algorithm by combining attribute classification accuracy with fuzzy relative entropy. Experimental results on 16 public datasets show that FROD is comparable with or better than leading detection algorithms. All datasets and source codes are accessible at https://github.com/ChenBaiyang/FROD. This manuscript is the accepted author version of a paper published by Elsevier. The final published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijar.2025.109373

Commercial Vehicle Braking Optimization: A Robust SIFT-Trajectory Approach

A vision-based trajectory analysis solution is proposed to address the "zero-speed braking" issue caused by inaccurate Controller Area Network (CAN) signals in commercial vehicle Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) systems during low-speed operation. The algorithm utilizes the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier platform to process sequential video frames from a blind spot camera, employing self-adaptive Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE)-enhanced Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) feature extraction and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN)-Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) matching. This allows for precise classification of the vehicle's motion state (static, vibration, moving). Key innovations include 1) multiframe trajectory displacement statistics (5-frame sliding window), 2) a dual-threshold state decision matrix, and 3) OBD-II driven dynamic Region of Interest (ROI) configuration. The system effectively suppresses environmental interference and false detection of dynamic objects, directly addressing the challenge of low-speed false activation in commercial vehicle safety systems. Evaluation in a real-world dataset (32,454 video segments from 1,852 vehicles) demonstrates an F1-score of 99.96% for static detection, 97.78% for moving state recognition, and a processing delay of 14.2 milliseconds (resolution 704x576). The deployment on-site shows an 89% reduction in false braking events, a 100% success rate in emergency braking, and a fault rate below 5%.

LogicLens: Visual-Logical Co-Reasoning for Text-Centric Forgery Analysis

Sophisticated text-centric forgeries, fueled by rapid AIGC advancements, pose a significant threat to societal security and information authenticity. Current methods for text-centric forgery analysis are often limited to coarse-grained visual analysis and lack the capacity for sophisticated reasoning. Moreover, they typically treat detection, grounding, and explanation as discrete sub-tasks, overlooking their intrinsic relationships for holistic performance enhancement. To address these challenges, we introduce LogicLens, a unified framework for Visual-Textual Co-reasoning that reformulates these objectives into a joint task. The deep reasoning of LogicLens is powered by our novel Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) mechanism, which iteratively cross-validates visual cues against textual logic. To ensure robust alignment across all tasks, we further propose a weighted multi-task reward function for GRPO-based optimization. Complementing this framework, we first designed the PR$^2$ (Perceiver, Reasoner, Reviewer) pipeline, a hierarchical and iterative multi-agent system that generates high-quality, cognitively-aligned annotations. Then, we constructed RealText, a diverse dataset comprising 5,397 images with fine-grained annotations, including textual explanations, pixel-level segmentation, and authenticity labels for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of LogicLens across multiple benchmarks. In a zero-shot evaluation on T-IC13, it surpasses the specialized framework by 41.4% and GPT-4o by 23.4% in macro-average F1 score. Moreover, on the challenging dense-text T-SROIE dataset, it establishes a significant lead over other MLLM-based methods in mF1, CSS, and the macro-average F1. Our dataset, model, and code will be made publicly available.

RecurGS: Interactive Scene Modeling via Discrete-State Recurrent Gaussian Fusion

Recent advances in 3D scene representations have enabled high-fidelity novel view synthesis, yet adapting to discrete scene changes and constructing interactive 3D environments remain open challenges in vision and robotics. Existing approaches focus solely on updating a single scene without supporting novel-state synthesis. Others rely on diffusion-based object-background decoupling that works on one state at a time and cannot fuse information across multiple observations. To address these limitations, we introduce RecurGS, a recurrent fusion framework that incrementally integrates discrete Gaussian scene states into a single evolving representation capable of interaction. RecurGS detects object-level changes across consecutive states, aligns their geometric motion using semantic correspondence and Lie-algebra based SE(3) refinement, and performs recurrent updates that preserve historical structures through replay supervision. A voxelized, visibility-aware fusion module selectively incorporates newly observed regions while keeping stable areas fixed, mitigating catastrophic forgetting and enabling efficient long-horizon updates. RecurGS supports object-level manipulation, synthesizes novel scene states without requiring additional scans, and maintains photorealistic fidelity across evolving environments. Extensive experiments across synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework delivers high-quality reconstructions with substantially improved update efficiency, providing a scalable step toward continuously interactive Gaussian worlds.

PILAR: Personalizing Augmented Reality Interactions with LLM-based Human-Centric and Trustworthy Explanations for Daily Use Cases

Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven augmented reality (AR) systems are becoming increasingly integrated into daily life, and with this growth comes a greater need for explainability in real-time user interactions. Traditional explainable AI (XAI) methods, which often rely on feature-based or example-based explanations, struggle to deliver dynamic, context-specific, personalized, and human-centric insights for everyday AR users. These methods typically address separate explainability dimensions (e.g., when, what, how) with different explanation techniques, resulting in unrealistic and fragmented experiences for seamless AR interactions. To address this challenge, we propose PILAR, a novel framework that leverages a pre-trained large language model (LLM) to generate context-aware, personalized explanations, offering a more intuitive and trustworthy experience in real-time AI-powered AR systems. Unlike traditional methods, which rely on multiple techniques for different aspects of explanation, PILAR employs a unified LLM-based approach that dynamically adapts explanations to the user's needs, fostering greater trust and engagement. We implement the PILAR concept in a real-world AR application (e.g., personalized recipe recommendations), an open-source prototype that integrates real-time object detection, recipe recommendation, and LLM-based personalized explanations of the recommended recipes based on users' dietary preferences. We evaluate the effectiveness of PILAR through a user study with 16 participants performing AR-based recipe recommendation tasks, comparing an LLM-based explanation interface to a traditional template-based one. Results show that the LLM-based interface significantly enhances user performance and experience, with participants completing tasks 40% faster and reporting greater satisfaction, ease of use, and perceived transparency.