Decentralized Multi-Robot Obstacle Detection and Tracking in a Maritime Scenario

Autonomous aerial-surface robot teams are promising for maritime monitoring. Robust deployment requires reliable perception over reflective water and scalable coordination under limited communication. We present a decentralized multi-robot framework for detecting and tracking floating containers using multiple UAVs cooperating with an autonomous surface vessel. Each UAV performs YOLOv8 and stereo-disparity-based visual detection, then tracks targets with per-object EKFs using uncertainty-aware data association. Compact track summaries are exchanged and fused conservatively via covariance intersection, ensuring consistency under unknown correlations. An information-driven assignment module allocates targets and selects UAV hover viewpoints by trading expected uncertainty reduction against travel effort and safety separation. Simulation results in a maritime scenario demonstrate improved coverage, localization accuracy, and tracking consistency while maintaining modest communication requirements.

A Novel Public Dataset for Strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) Ripeness Detection and Comparative Evaluation of YOLO-Based Models

The strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa), known worldwide for its economic value and nutritional richness, is a widely cultivated fruit. Determining the correct ripeness level during the harvest period is crucial for both preventing losses for producers and ensuring consumers receive a quality product. However, traditional methods, i.e., visual assessments alone, can be subjective and have a high margin of error. Therefore, computer-assisted systems are needed. However, the scarcity of comprehensive datasets accessible to everyone in the literature makes it difficult to compare studies in this field. In this study, a new and publicly available strawberry ripeness dataset, consisting of 566 images and 1,201 labeled objects, prepared under variable light and environmental conditions in two different greenhouses in Turkey, is presented to the literature. Comparative tests conducted on the data set using YOLOv8, YOLOv9, and YOLO11-based models showed that the highest precision value was 90.94% in the YOLOv9c model, while the highest recall value was 83.74% in the YOLO11s model. In terms of the general performance criterion mAP@50, YOLOv8s was the best performing model with a success rate of 86.09%. The results show that small and medium-sized models work more balanced and efficiently on this type of dataset, while also establishing a fundamental reference point for smart agriculture applications.

ArtifactLens: Hundreds of Labels Are Enough for Artifact Detection with VLMs

Modern image generators produce strikingly realistic images, where only artifacts like distorted hands or warped objects reveal their synthetic origin. Detecting these artifacts is essential: without detection, we cannot benchmark generators or train reward models to improve them. Current detectors fine-tune VLMs on tens of thousands of labeled images, but this is expensive to repeat whenever generators evolve or new artifact types emerge. We show that pretrained VLMs already encode the knowledge needed to detect artifacts - with the right scaffolding, this capability can be unlocked using only a few hundred labeled examples per artifact category. Our system, ArtifactLens, achieves state-of-the-art on five human artifact benchmarks (the first evaluation across multiple datasets) while requiring orders of magnitude less labeled data. The scaffolding consists of a multi-component architecture with in-context learning and text instruction optimization, with novel improvements to each. Our methods generalize to other artifact types - object morphology, animal anatomy, and entity interactions - and to the distinct task of AIGC detection.

A real-time UAS hyperspectral anomaly detection system

Detecting anomalies in hyperspectral image data, i.e. regions which are spectrally distinct from the image background, is a common task in hyperspectral imaging. Such regions may represent interesting objects to human operators, but obtaining results often requires post-processing of captured data, delaying insight. To address this limitation, we apply an anomaly detection algorithm to a visible and near-infrared (VNIR) push-broom hyperspectral image sensor in real time onboard a small uncrewed aerial system (UAS), exploring how UAS limitations affect the algorithm. As the generated anomaly information is much more concise than the raw hyperspectral data, it can feasibly be transmitted wirelessly. To detection, we couple an innovative and fast georectification algorithm that enables anomalous areas to be interactively investigated and characterized immediately by a human operator receiving the anomaly data at a ground station. Using these elements, we demonstrate a novel and complete end-to-end solution from data capture and preparation, through anomaly detection and transmission, to ground station display and interaction, all in real time and with relatively low cost components.

Conditional Flow Matching for Continuous Anomaly Detection in Autonomous Driving on a Manifold-Aware Spectral Space

Safety validation for Level 4 autonomous vehicles (AVs) is currently bottlenecked by the inability to scale the detection of rare, high-risk long-tail scenarios using traditional rule-based heuristics. We present Deep-Flow, an unsupervised framework for safety-critical anomaly detection that utilizes Optimal Transport Conditional Flow Matching (OT-CFM) to characterize the continuous probability density of expert human driving behavior. Unlike standard generative approaches that operate in unstable, high-dimensional coordinate spaces, Deep-Flow constrains the generative process to a low-rank spectral manifold via a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) bottleneck. This ensures kinematic smoothness by design and enables the computation of the exact Jacobian trace for numerically stable, deterministic log-likelihood estimation. To resolve multi-modal ambiguity at complex junctions, we utilize an Early Fusion Transformer encoder with lane-aware goal conditioning, featuring a direct skip-connection to the flow head to maintain intent-integrity throughout the network. We introduce a kinematic complexity weighting scheme that prioritizes high-energy maneuvers (quantified via path tortuosity and jerk) during the simulation-free training process. Evaluated on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD), our framework achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.766 against a heuristic golden set of safety-critical events. More significantly, our analysis reveals a fundamental distinction between kinematic danger and semantic non-compliance. Deep-Flow identifies a critical predictability gap by surfacing out-of-distribution behaviors, such as lane-boundary violations and non-normative junction maneuvers, that traditional safety filters overlook. This work provides a mathematically rigorous foundation for defining statistical safety gates, enabling objective, data-driven validation for the safe deployment of autonomous fleets.

MASAR: Motion-Appearance Synergy Refinement for Joint Detection and Trajectory Forecasting

Classical autonomous driving systems connect perception and prediction modules via hand-crafted bounding-box interfaces, limiting information flow and propagating errors to downstream tasks. Recent research aims to develop end-to-end models that jointly address perception and prediction; however, they often fail to fully exploit the synergy between appearance and motion cues, relying mainly on short-term visual features. We follow the idea of "looking backward to look forward", and propose MASAR, a novel fully differentiable framework for joint 3D detection and trajectory forecasting compatible with any transformer-based 3D detector. MASAR employs an object-centric spatio-temporal mechanism that jointly encodes appearance and motion features. By predicting past trajectories and refining them using guidance from appearance cues, MASAR captures long-term temporal dependencies that enhance future trajectory forecasting. Experiments conducted on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate MASAR's effectiveness, showing improvements of over 20% in minADE and minFDE while maintaining robust detection performance. Code and models are available at https://github.com/aminmed/MASAR.

ResWorld: Temporal Residual World Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

The comprehensive understanding capabilities of world models for driving scenarios have significantly improved the planning accuracy of end-to-end autonomous driving frameworks. However, the redundant modeling of static regions and the lack of deep interaction with trajectories hinder world models from exerting their full effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Temporal Residual World Model (TR-World), which focuses on dynamic object modeling. By calculating the temporal residuals of scene representations, the information of dynamic objects can be extracted without relying on detection and tracking. TR-World takes only temporal residuals as input, thus predicting the future spatial distribution of dynamic objects more precisely. By combining the prediction with the static object information contained in the current BEV features, accurate future BEV features can be obtained. Furthermore, we propose Future-Guided Trajectory Refinement (FGTR) module, which conducts interaction between prior trajectories (predicted from the current scene representation) and the future BEV features. This module can not only utilize future road conditions to refine trajectories, but also provides sparse spatial-temporal supervision on future BEV features to prevent world model collapse. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the nuScenes and NAVSIM datasets demonstrate that our method, namely ResWorld, achieves state-of-the-art planning performance. The code is available at https://github.com/mengtan00/ResWorld.git.

Semantic-Deviation-Anchored Multi-Branch Fusion for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localization in Unstructured Conveyor-Belt Coal Scenes

Reliable foreign-object anomaly detection and pixel-level localization in conveyor-belt coal scenes are essential for safe and intelligent mining operations. This task is particularly challenging due to the highly unstructured environment: coal and gangue are randomly piled, backgrounds are complex and variable, and foreign objects often exhibit low contrast, deformation, occlusion, resulting in coupling with their surroundings. These characteristics weaken the stability and regularity assumptions that many anomaly detection methods rely on in structured industrial settings, leading to notable performance degradation. To support evaluation and comparison in this setting, we construct \textbf{CoalAD}, a benchmark for unsupervised foreign-object anomaly detection with pixel-level localization in coal-stream scenes. We further propose a complementary-cue collaborative perception framework that extracts and fuses complementary anomaly evidence from three perspectives: object-level semantic composition modeling, semantic-attribution-based global deviation analysis, and fine-grained texture matching. The fused outputs provide robust image-level anomaly scoring and accurate pixel-level localization. Experiments on CoalAD demonstrate that our method outperforms widely used baselines across the evaluated image-level and pixel-level metrics, and ablation studies validate the contribution of each component. The code is available at https://github.com/xjpp2016/USAD.

Protecting Language Models Against Unauthorized Distillation through Trace Rewriting

Knowledge distillation is a widely adopted technique for transferring capabilities from LLMs to smaller, more efficient student models. However, unauthorized use of knowledge distillation takes unfair advantage of the considerable effort and cost put into developing frontier models. We investigate methods for modifying teacher-generated reasoning traces to achieve two objectives that deter unauthorized distillation: (1) \emph{anti-distillation}, or degrading the training usefulness of query responses, and (2) \emph{API watermarking}, which embeds verifiable signatures in student models. We introduce several approaches for dynamically rewriting a teacher's reasoning outputs while preserving answer correctness and semantic coherence. Two of these leverage the rewriting capabilities of LLMs, while others use gradient-based techniques. Our experiments show that a simple instruction-based rewriting approach achieves a strong anti-distillation effect while maintaining or even improving teacher performance. Furthermore, we show that our rewriting approach also enables highly reliable watermark detection with essentially no false alarms.

Machine Learning for Detection and Severity Estimation of Sweetpotato Weevil Damage in Field and Lab Conditions

Sweetpotato weevils (Cylas spp.) are considered among the most destructive pests impacting sweetpotato production, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Traditional methods for assessing weevil damage, predominantly relying on manual scoring, are labour-intensive, subjective, and often yield inconsistent results. These challenges significantly hinder breeding programs aimed at developing resilient sweetpotato varieties. This study introduces a computer vision-based approach for the automated evaluation of weevil damage in both field and laboratory contexts. In the field settings, we collected data to train classification models to predict root-damage severity levels, achieving a test accuracy of 71.43%. Additionally, we established a laboratory dataset and designed an object detection pipeline employing YOLO12, a leading real-time detection model. This methodology incorporated a two-stage laboratory pipeline that combined root segmentation with a tiling strategy to improve the detectability of small objects. The resulting model demonstrated a mean average precision of 77.7% in identifying minute weevil feeding holes. Our findings indicate that computer vision technologies can provide efficient, objective, and scalable assessment tools that align seamlessly with contemporary breeding workflows. These advancements represent a significant improvement in enhancing phenotyping efficiency within sweetpotato breeding programs and play a crucial role in mitigating the detrimental effects of weevils on food security.