VGent: Visual Grounding via Modular Design for Disentangling Reasoning and Prediction

Current visual grounding models are either based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that performs auto-regressive decoding, which is slow and risks hallucinations, or on re-aligning an LLM with vision features to learn new special or object tokens for grounding, which may undermine the LLM's pretrained reasoning ability. In contrast, we propose VGent, a modular encoder-decoder architecture that explicitly disentangles high-level reasoning and low-level bounding box prediction. Specifically, a frozen MLLM serves as the encoder to provide untouched powerful reasoning capabilities, while a decoder takes high-quality boxes proposed by detectors as queries and selects target box(es) via cross-attending on encoder's hidden states. This design fully leverages advances in both object detection and MLLM, avoids the pitfalls of auto-regressive decoding, and enables fast inference. Moreover, it supports modular upgrades of both the encoder and decoder to benefit the whole system: we introduce (i) QuadThinker, an RL-based training paradigm for enhancing multi-target reasoning ability of the encoder; (ii) mask-aware label for resolving detection-segmentation ambiguity; and (iii) global target recognition to improve the recognition of all the targets which benefits the selection among augmented proposals. Experiments on multi-target visual grounding benchmarks show that VGent achieves a new state-of-the-art with +20.6% F1 improvement over prior methods, and further boosts gIoU by +8.2% and cIoU by +5.8% under visual reference challenges, while maintaining constant, fast inference latency.

Domain-Agnostic Causal-Aware Audio Transformer for Infant Cry Classification

Accurate and interpretable classification of infant cry paralinguistics is essential for early detection of neonatal distress and clinical decision support. However, many existing deep learning methods rely on correlation-driven acoustic representations, which makes them vulnerable to noise, spurious cues, and domain shifts across recording environments. We propose DACH-TIC, a Domain-Agnostic Causal-Aware Hierarchical Audio Transformer for robust infant cry classification. The model integrates causal attention, hierarchical representation learning, multi-task supervision, and adversarial domain generalization within a unified framework. DACH-TIC employs a structured transformer backbone with local token-level and global semantic encoders, augmented by causal attention masking and controlled perturbation training to approximate counterfactual acoustic variations. A domain-adversarial objective promotes environment-invariant representations, while multi-task learning jointly optimizes cry type recognition, distress intensity estimation, and causal relevance prediction. The model is evaluated on the Baby Chillanto and Donate-a-Cry datasets, with ESC-50 environmental noise overlays for domain augmentation. Experimental results show that DACH-TIC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including HTS-AT and SE-ResNet Transformer, achieving improvements of 2.6 percent in accuracy and 2.2 points in macro-F1 score, alongside enhanced causal fidelity. The model generalizes effectively to unseen acoustic environments, with a domain performance gap of only 2.4 percent, demonstrating its suitability for real-world neonatal acoustic monitoring systems.

RadarFuseNet: Complex-Valued Attention-Based Fusion of IQ Time- and Frequency-Domain Radar Features for Classification Tasks

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar has emerged as a compact and powerful sensing modality for advanced perception tasks that leverage machine learning techniques. It is particularly effective in scenarios where vision-based sensors fail to capture reliable information, such as detecting occluded objects or distinguishing between different surface materials in indoor environments. Due to the non-linear characteristics of mmWave radar signals, deep learning-based methods are well suited for extracting relevant information from in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data. However, the current state of the art in IQ signal-based occluded-object and material classification still offers substantial potential for further improvement. In this paper, we propose a bidirectional cross-attention fusion network that combines IQ-signal and FFT-transformed radar features obtained by distinct complex-valued convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The proposed method achieves improved performance and robustness compared to standalone complex-valued CNNs. We achieve a near-perfect material classification accuracy of 99.92% on samples collected at same sensor-to-surface distances used during training, and an improved accuracy of 67.38% on samples measured at previously unseen distances, demonstrating improved generalization ability across varying measurement conditions. Furthermore, the accuracy for occluded object classification improves from 91.99% using standalone complex-valued CNNs to 94.20% using our proposed approach.

Adaptive Dual-Weighted Gravitational Point Cloud Denoising Method

High-quality point cloud data is a critical foundation for tasks such as autonomous driving and 3D reconstruction. However, LiDAR-based point cloud acquisition is often affected by various disturbances, resulting in a large number of noise points that degrade the accuracy of subsequent point cloud object detection and recognition. Moreover, existing point cloud denoising methods typically sacrifice computational efficiency in pursuit of higher denoising accuracy, or, conversely, improve processing speed at the expense of preserving object boundaries and fine structural details, making it difficult to simultaneously achieve high denoising accuracy, strong edge preservation, and real-time performance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an adaptive dual-weight gravitational-based point cloud denoising method. First, an octree is employed to perform spatial partitioning of the global point cloud, enabling parallel acceleration. Then, within each leaf node, adaptive voxel-based occupancy statistics and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) density estimation are applied to rapidly remove clearly isolated and low-density noise points, thereby reducing the effective candidate set. Finally, a gravitational scoring function that combines density weights with adaptive distance weights is constructed to finely distinguish noise points from object points. Experiments conducted on the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository, the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions (CADC) dataset, and in-house FMCW LiDAR point clouds acquired in our laboratory demonstrate that, compared with existing methods, the proposed approach achieves consistent improvements in F1, PSNR, and Chamfer Distance (CD) across various noise conditions while reducing the single-frame processing time, thereby validating its high accuracy, robustness, and real-time performance in multi-noise scenarios.

Predictive Concept Decoders: Training Scalable End-to-End Interpretability Assistants

Interpreting the internal activations of neural networks can produce more faithful explanations of their behavior, but is difficult due to the complex structure of activation space. Existing approaches to scalable interpretability use hand-designed agents that make and test hypotheses about how internal activations relate to external behavior. We propose to instead turn this task into an end-to-end training objective, by training interpretability assistants to accurately predict model behavior from activations through a communication bottleneck. Specifically, an encoder compresses activations to a sparse list of concepts, and a decoder reads this list and answers a natural language question about the model. We show how to pretrain this assistant on large unstructured data, then finetune it to answer questions. The resulting architecture, which we call a Predictive Concept Decoder, enjoys favorable scaling properties: the auto-interp score of the bottleneck concepts improves with data, as does the performance on downstream applications. Specifically, PCDs can detect jailbreaks, secret hints, and implanted latent concepts, and are able to accurately surface latent user attributes.

NordFKB: a fine-grained benchmark dataset for geospatial AI in Norway

We present NordFKB, a fine-grained benchmark dataset for geospatial AI in Norway, derived from the authoritative, highly accurate, national Felles KartdataBase (FKB). The dataset contains high-resolution orthophotos paired with detailed annotations for 36 semantic classes, including both per-class binary segmentation masks in GeoTIFF format and COCO-style bounding box annotations. Data is collected from seven geographically diverse areas, ensuring variation in climate, topography, and urbanization. Only tiles containing at least one annotated object are included, and training/validation splits are created through random sampling across areas to ensure representative class and context distributions. Human expert review and quality control ensures high annotation accuracy. Alongside the dataset, we release a benchmarking repository with standardized evaluation protocols and tools for semantic segmentation and object detection, enabling reproducible and comparable research. NordFKB provides a robust foundation for advancing AI methods in mapping, land administration, and spatial planning, and paves the way for future expansions in coverage, temporal scope, and data modalities.

Attacking and Securing Community Detection: A Game-Theoretic Framework

It has been demonstrated that adversarial graphs, i.e., graphs with imperceptible perturbations, can cause deep graph models to fail on classification tasks. In this work, we extend the concept of adversarial graphs to the community detection problem, which is more challenging. We propose novel attack and defense techniques for community detection problem, with the objective of hiding targeted individuals from detection models and enhancing the robustness of community detection models, respectively. These techniques have many applications in real-world scenarios, for example, protecting personal privacy in social networks and understanding camouflage patterns in transaction networks. To simulate interactive attack and defense behaviors, we further propose a game-theoretic framework, called CD-GAME. One player is a graph attacker, while the other player is a Rayleigh Quotient defender. The CD-GAME models the mutual influence and feedback mechanisms between the attacker and the defender, revealing the dynamic evolutionary process of the game. Both players dynamically update their strategies until they reach the Nash equilibrium. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed attack and defense methods, and both outperform existing baselines by a significant margin. Furthermore, CD-GAME provides valuable insights for understanding interactive attack and defense scenarios in community detection problems. We found that in traditional single-step attack or defense, attacker tends to employ strategies that are most effective, but are easily detected and countered by defender. When the interactive game reaches a Nash equilibrium, attacker adopts more imperceptible strategies that can still achieve satisfactory attack effectiveness even after defense.

An AI-Powered Autonomous Underwater System for Sea Exploration and Scientific Research

Traditional sea exploration faces significant challenges due to extreme conditions, limited visibility, and high costs, resulting in vast unexplored ocean regions. This paper presents an innovative AI-powered Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) system designed to overcome these limitations by automating underwater object detection, analysis, and reporting. The system integrates YOLOv12 Nano for real-time object detection, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) (ResNet50) for feature extraction, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction, and K-Means++ clustering for grouping marine objects based on visual characteristics. Furthermore, a Large Language Model (LLM) (GPT-4o Mini) is employed to generate structured reports and summaries of underwater findings, enhancing data interpretation. The system was trained and evaluated on a combined dataset of over 55,000 images from the DeepFish and OzFish datasets, capturing diverse Australian marine environments. Experimental results demonstrate the system's capability to detect marine objects with a mAP@0.5 of 0.512, a precision of 0.535, and a recall of 0.438. The integration of PCA effectively reduced feature dimensionality while preserving 98% variance, facilitating K-Means clustering which successfully grouped detected objects based on visual similarities. The LLM integration proved effective in generating insightful summaries of detections and clusters, supported by location data. This integrated approach significantly reduces the risks associated with human diving, increases mission efficiency, and enhances the speed and depth of underwater data analysis, paving the way for more effective scientific research and discovery in challenging marine environments.

Automated Pollen Recognition in Optical and Holographic Microscopy Images

This study explores the application of deep learning to improve and automate pollen grain detection and classification in both optical and holographic microscopy images, with a particular focus on veterinary cytology use cases. We used YOLOv8s for object detection and MobileNetV3L for the classification task, evaluating their performance across imaging modalities. The models achieved 91.3% mAP50 for detection and 97% overall accuracy for classification on optical images, whereas the initial performance on greyscale holographic images was substantially lower. We addressed the performance gap issue through dataset expansion using automated labeling and bounding box area enlargement. These techniques, applied to holographic images, improved detection performance from 2.49% to 13.3% mAP50 and classification performance from 42% to 54%. Our work demonstrates that, at least for image classification tasks, it is possible to pair deep learning techniques with cost-effective lensless digital holographic microscopy devices.

A Hierarchical, Model-Based System for High-Performance Humanoid Soccer

The development of athletic humanoid robots has gained significant attention as advances in actuation, sensing, and control enable increasingly dynamic, real-world capabilities. RoboCup, an international competition of fully autonomous humanoid robots, provides a uniquely challenging benchmark for such systems, culminating in the long-term goal of competing against human soccer players by 2050. This paper presents the hardware and software innovations underlying our team's victory in the RoboCup 2024 Adult-Sized Humanoid Soccer Competition. On the hardware side, we introduce an adult-sized humanoid platform built with lightweight structural components, high-torque quasi-direct-drive actuators, and a specialized foot design that enables powerful in-gait kicks while preserving locomotion robustness. On the software side, we develop an integrated perception and localization framework that combines stereo vision, object detection, and landmark-based fusion to provide reliable estimates of the ball, goals, teammates, and opponents. A mid-level navigation stack then generates collision-aware, dynamically feasible trajectories, while a centralized behavior manager coordinates high-level decision making, role selection, and kick execution based on the evolving game state. The seamless integration of these subsystems results in fast, precise, and tactically effective gameplay, enabling robust performance under the dynamic and adversarial conditions of real matches. This paper presents the design principles, system architecture, and experimental results that contributed to ARTEMIS's success as the 2024 Adult-Sized Humanoid Soccer champion.