MSC: A Marine Wildlife Video Dataset with Grounded Segmentation and Clip-Level Captioning

Marine videos present significant challenges for video understanding due to the dynamics of marine objects and the surrounding environment, camera motion, and the complexity of underwater scenes. Existing video captioning datasets, typically focused on generic or human-centric domains, often fail to generalize to the complexities of the marine environment and gain insights about marine life. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage marine object-oriented video captioning pipeline. We introduce a comprehensive video understanding benchmark that leverages the triplets of video, text, and segmentation masks to facilitate visual grounding and captioning, leading to improved marine video understanding and analysis, and marine video generation. Additionally, we highlight the effectiveness of video splitting in order to detect salient object transitions in scene changes, which significantly enrich the semantics of captioning content. Our dataset and code have been released at https://msc.hkustvgd.com.

Decoupling Geometry from Optimization in 2D Irregular Cutting and Packing Problems: an Open-Source Collision Detection Engine

Addressing irregular cutting and packing (C&P) optimization problems poses two distinct challenges: the geometric challenge of determining whether or not an item can be placed feasibly at a certain position, and the optimization challenge of finding a good solution according to some objective function. Until now, those tackling such problems have had to address both challenges simultaneously, requiring two distinct sets of expertise and a lot of research & development effort. One way to lower this barrier is to decouple the two challenges. In this paper we introduce a powerful collision detection engine (CDE) for 2D irregular C&P problems which assumes full responsibility for the geometric challenge. The CDE (i) allows users to focus with full confidence on their optimization challenge by abstracting geometry away and (ii) enables independent advances to propagate to all optimization algorithms built atop it. We present a set of core principles and design philosophies to model a general and adaptable CDE focused on maximizing performance, accuracy and robustness. These principles are accompanied by a concrete open-source implementation called $\texttt{jagua-rs}$. This paper together with its implementation serves as a catalyst for future advances in irregular C&P problems by providing a solid foundation which can either be used as it currently exists or be further improved upon.

Autonomous Mobile Plant Watering Robot : A Kinematic Approach

Plants need regular and the appropriate amount of watering to thrive and survive. While agricultural robots exist that can spray water on plants and crops such as the , they are expensive and have limited mobility and/or functionality. We introduce a novel autonomous mobile plant watering robot that uses a 6 degree of freedom (DOF) manipulator, connected to a 4 wheel drive alloy chassis, to be able to hold a garden hose, recognize and detect plants, and to water them with the appropriate amount of water by being able to insert a soil humidity/moisture sensor into the soil. The robot uses Jetson Nano and Arduino microcontroller and real sense camera to perform computer vision to detect plants using real-time YOLOv5 with the Pl@ntNet-300K dataset. The robot uses LIDAR for object and collision avoideance and does not need to move on a pre-defined path and can keep track of which plants it has watered. We provide the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) Table, forward kinematics, differential driving kinematics, and inverse kinematics along with simulation and experiment results

CLIPVehicle: A Unified Framework for Vision-based Vehicle Search

Vehicles, as one of the most common and significant objects in the real world, the researches on which using computer vision technologies have made remarkable progress, such as vehicle detection, vehicle re-identification, etc. To search an interested vehicle from the surveillance videos, existing methods first pre-detect and store all vehicle patches, and then apply vehicle re-identification models, which is resource-intensive and not very practical. In this work, we aim to achieve the joint detection and re-identification for vehicle search. However, the conflicting objectives between detection that focuses on shared vehicle commonness and re-identification that focuses on individual vehicle uniqueness make it challenging for a model to learn in an end-to-end system. For this problem, we propose a new unified framework, namely CLIPVehicle, which contains a dual-granularity semantic-region alignment module to leverage the VLMs (Vision-Language Models) for vehicle discrimination modeling, and a multi-level vehicle identification learning strategy to learn the identity representation from global, instance and feature levels. We also construct a new benchmark, including a real-world dataset CityFlowVS, and two synthetic datasets SynVS-Day and SynVS-All, for vehicle search. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods of both vehicle Re-ID and person search tasks.

Generative AI for Critical Infrastructure in Smart Grids: A Unified Framework for Synthetic Data Generation and Anomaly Detection

In digital substations, security events pose significant challenges to the sustained operation of power systems. To mitigate these challenges, the implementation of robust defense strategies is critically important. A thorough process of anomaly identification and detection in information and communication technology (ICT) frameworks is crucial to ensure secure and reliable communication and coordination between interconnected devices within digital substations. Hence, this paper addresses the critical cybersecurity challenges confronting IEC61850-based digital substations within modern smart grids, where the integration of advanced communication protocols, e.g., generic object-oriented substation event (GOOSE), has enhanced energy management and introduced significant vulnerabilities to cyberattacks. Focusing on the limitations of traditional anomaly detection systems (ADSs) in detecting threats, this research proposes a transformative approach by leveraging generative AI (GenAI) to develop robust ADSs. The primary contributions include the suggested advanced adversarial traffic mutation (AATM) technique to generate synthesized and balanced datasets for GOOSE messages, ensuring protocol compliance and enabling realistic zero-day attack pattern creation to address data scarcity. Then, the implementation of GenAI-based ADSs incorporating the task-oriented dialogue (ToD) processes has been explored for improved detection of attack patterns. Finally, a comparison of the GenAI-based ADS with machine learning (ML)-based ADSs has been implemented to showcase the outperformance of the GenAI-based frameworks considering the AATM-generated GOOSE datasets and standard/advanced performance evaluation metrics.

Radar-Based NLoS Pedestrian Localization for Darting-Out Scenarios Near Parked Vehicles with Camera-Assisted Point Cloud Interpretation

The presence of Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) blind spots resulting from roadside parking in urban environments poses a significant challenge to road safety, particularly due to the sudden emergence of pedestrians. mmWave technology leverages diffraction and reflection to observe NLoS regions, and recent studies have demonstrated its potential for detecting obscured objects. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on predefined spatial information or assume simple wall reflections, thereby limiting their generalizability and practical applicability. A particular challenge arises in scenarios where pedestrians suddenly appear from between parked vehicles, as these parked vehicles act as temporary spatial obstructions. Furthermore, since parked vehicles are dynamic and may relocate over time, spatial information obtained from satellite maps or other predefined sources may not accurately reflect real-time road conditions, leading to erroneous sensor interpretations. To address this limitation, we propose an NLoS pedestrian localization framework that integrates monocular camera image with 2D radar point cloud (PCD) data. The proposed method initially detects parked vehicles through image segmentation, estimates depth to infer approximate spatial characteristics, and subsequently refines this information using 2D radar PCD to achieve precise spatial inference. Experimental evaluations conducted in real-world urban road environments demonstrate that the proposed approach enhances early pedestrian detection and contributes to improved road safety. Supplementary materials are available at https://hiyeun.github.io/NLoS/.

A Semantic-Aware Framework for Safe and Intent-Integrative Assistance in Upper-Limb Exoskeletons

Upper-limb exoskeletons are primarily designed to provide assistive support by accurately interpreting and responding to human intentions. In home-care scenarios, exoskeletons are expected to adapt their assistive configurations based on the semantic information of the task, adjusting appropriately in accordance with the nature of the object being manipulated. However, existing solutions often lack the ability to understand task semantics or collaboratively plan actions with the user, limiting their generalizability. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a semantic-aware framework that integrates large language models into the task planning framework, enabling the delivery of safe and intent-integrative assistance. The proposed approach begins with the exoskeleton operating in transparent mode to capture the wearer's intent during object grasping. Once semantic information is extracted from the task description, the system automatically configures appropriate assistive parameters. In addition, a diffusion-based anomaly detector is used to continuously monitor the state of human-robot interaction and trigger real-time replanning in response to detected anomalies. During task execution, online trajectory refinement and impedance control are used to ensure safety and regulate human-robot interaction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively aligns with the wearer's cognition, adapts to semantically varying tasks, and responds reliably to anomalies.

RORPCap: Retrieval-based Objects and Relations Prompt for Image Captioning

Image captioning aims to generate natural language descriptions for input images in an open-form manner. To accurately generate descriptions related to the image, a critical step in image captioning is to identify objects and understand their relations within the image. Modern approaches typically capitalize on object detectors or combine detectors with Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). However, these models suffer from redundant detection information, difficulty in GCN construction, and high training costs. To address these issues, a Retrieval-based Objects and Relations Prompt for Image Captioning (RORPCap) is proposed, inspired by the fact that image-text retrieval can provide rich semantic information for input images. RORPCap employs an Objects and relations Extraction Model to extract object and relation words from the image. These words are then incorporate into predefined prompt templates and encoded as prompt embeddings. Next, a Mamba-based mapping network is designed to quickly map image embeddings extracted by CLIP to visual-text embeddings. Finally, the resulting prompt embeddings and visual-text embeddings are concatenated to form textual-enriched feature embeddings, which are fed into a GPT-2 model for caption generation. Extensive experiments conducted on the widely used MS-COCO dataset show that the RORPCap requires only 2.6 hours under cross-entropy loss training, achieving 120.5% CIDEr score and 22.0% SPICE score on the "Karpathy" test split. RORPCap achieves comparable performance metrics to detector-based and GCN-based models with the shortest training time and demonstrates its potential as an alternative for image captioning.

Exploring Self-Supervised Audio Models for Generalized Anomalous Sound Detection

Machine anomalous sound detection (ASD) is a valuable technique across various applications. However, its generalization performance is often limited due to challenges in data collection and the complexity of acoustic environments. Inspired by the success of large pre-trained models in numerous fields, this paper introduces a robust ASD model that leverages self-supervised pre-trained models trained on large-scale speech and audio datasets. Although there are inconsistencies between the pre-training datasets and the ASD task, our findings indicate that pre-training still provides substantial benefits for ASD. To mitigate overfitting and retain learned knowledge when fine-tuning with limited data, we explore Fully-Connected Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as an alternative to full fine-tuning. Additionally, we propose a Machine-aware Group Adapter module, which enables the model to capture differences between various machines within a unified framework, thereby enhancing the generalization performance of ASD systems. To address the challenge of missing attribute labels, we design a novel objective function that dynamically clusters unattributed data using vector quantization and optimizes through a dual-level contrastive learning loss. The proposed methods are evaluated on all benchmark datasets, including the DCASE 2020-2024 five ASD challenges, and the experimental results show significant improvements of our new approach and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategies.

GRASPTrack: Geometry-Reasoned Association via Segmentation and Projection for Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking (MOT) in monocular videos is fundamentally challenged by occlusions and depth ambiguity, issues that conventional tracking-by-detection (TBD) methods struggle to resolve owing to a lack of geometric awareness. To address these limitations, we introduce GRASPTrack, a novel depth-aware MOT framework that integrates monocular depth estimation and instance segmentation into a standard TBD pipeline to generate high-fidelity 3D point clouds from 2D detections, thereby enabling explicit 3D geometric reasoning. These 3D point clouds are then voxelized to enable a precise and robust Voxel-Based 3D Intersection-over-Union (IoU) for spatial association. To further enhance tracking robustness, our approach incorporates Depth-aware Adaptive Noise Compensation, which dynamically adjusts the Kalman filter process noise based on occlusion severity for more reliable state estimation. Additionally, we propose a Depth-enhanced Observation-Centric Momentum, which extends the motion direction consistency from the image plane into 3D space to improve motion-based association cues, particularly for objects with complex trajectories. Extensive experiments on the MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance, significantly improving tracking robustness in complex scenes with frequent occlusions and intricate motion patterns.