Object detection is a computer vision task in which the goal is to detect and locate objects of interest in an image or video. The task involves identifying the position and boundaries of objects in an image, and classifying the objects into different categories. It forms a crucial part of vision recognition, alongside image classification and retrieval.
3D anomaly detection targets the detection and localization of defects in 3D point clouds trained solely on normal data. While a unified model improves scalability by learning across multiple categories, it often suffers from Inter-Category Entanglement (ICE)-where latent features from different categories overlap, causing the model to adopt incorrect semantic priors during reconstruction and ultimately yielding unreliable anomaly scores. To address this issue, we propose the Semantically Disentangled Unified Model for 3D Anomaly Detection, which reconstructs features conditioned on disentangled semantic representations. Our framework consists of three key components: (i) Coarse-to-Fine Global Tokenization for forming instance-level semantic identity, (ii) Category-Conditioned Contrastive Learning for disentangling category semantics, and (iii) a Geometry-Guided Decoder for semantically consistent reconstruction. Extensive experiments on Real3D-AD and Anomaly-ShapeNet demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art for both unified and category-specific models, improving object-level AUROC by 2.8% and 9.1%, respectively, while enhancing the reliability of unified 3D anomaly detection.
Machine vision, including object recognition and image reconstruction, is a central technology in many consumer devices and scientific instruments. The design of machine-vision systems has been revolutionized by the adoption of end-to-end optimization, in which the optical front end and the post-processing back end are jointly optimized. However, while machine vision currently works extremely well in moderate-light or bright-light situations -- where a camera may detect thousands of photons per pixel and billions of photons per frame -- it is far more challenging in very low-light situations. We introduce photon-aware neuromorphic sensing (PANS), an approach for end-to-end optimization in highly photon-starved scenarios. The training incorporates knowledge of the low photon budget and the stochastic nature of light detection when the average number of photons per pixel is near or less than 1. We report a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration in which we performed low-light image classification using PANS, achieving 73% (82%) accuracy on FashionMNIST with an average of only 4.9 (17) detected photons in total per inference, and 86% (97%) on MNIST with 8.6 (29) detected photons -- orders of magnitude more photon-efficient than conventional approaches. We also report simulation studies showing how PANS could be applied to other classification, event-detection, and image-reconstruction tasks. By taking into account the statistics of measurement results for non-classical states or alternative sensing hardware, PANS could in principle be adapted to enable high-accuracy results in quantum and other photon-starved setups.
Amidst the rapid advancement of camera-based autonomous driving technology, effectiveness is often prioritized with limited attention to computational efficiency. To address this issue, this paper introduces LRHPerception, a real-time monocular perception package for autonomous driving that uses single-view camera video to interpret the surrounding environment. The proposed system combines the computational efficiency of end-to-end learning with the rich representational detail of local mapping methodologies. With significant improvements in object tracking and prediction, road segmentation, and depth estimation integrated into a unified framework, LRHPerception processes monocular image data into a five-channel tensor consisting of RGB, road segmentation, and pixel-level depth estimation, augmented with object detection and trajectory prediction. Experimental results demonstrate strong performance, achieving real-time processing at 29 FPS on a single GPU, representing a 555% speedup over the fastest mapping-based approach.
Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) is a critical component in monitoring complex systems, yet modern deep learning-based detectors are often highly sensitive to localized input corruptions and structured noise. We propose ARTA (Adversarially Robust multivariate Time-series Anomaly detection via joint information retention), a joint training framework that improves detector robustness through a principled min-max optimization objective. ARTA comprises an anomaly detector and a sparsity-constrained mask generator that are trained simultaneously. The generator identifies minimal, task-relevant temporal perturbations that maximally increase the detector's anomaly score, while the detector is optimized to remain stable under these structured perturbations. The resulting masks characterize the detector's sensitivity to adversarial temporal corruptions and can serve as explanatory signals for the detector's decisions. This adversarial training strategy exposes brittle decision pathways and encourages the detector to rely on distributed and stable temporal patterns rather than spurious localized artifacts. We conduct extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark, demonstrating that ARTA consistently improves anomaly detection performance across diverse datasets and exhibits significantly more graceful degradation under increasing noise levels compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Modern multimodal systems deployed in industrial and safety-critical environments must remain reliable under partial sensor failures, signal degradation, or cross-modal inconsistencies. This work introduces a mathematically grounded framework for fault-tolerant multimodal representation learning that unifies self-supervised anomaly detection and error correction within a single architecture. Building upon a theoretical analysis of perturbation propagation, we derive Lipschitz- and Jacobian-based criteria that determine whether a neural operator amplifies or attenuates localized faults. Guided by this theory, we propose a two-stage self-supervised training scheme: pre-training a multimodal convolutional autoencoder on clean data to preserve localized anomaly signals in the latent space, and expanding it with a learnable compute block composed of dense layers for correction and contrastive objectives for anomaly identification. Furthermore, we introduce layer-specific Lipschitz modulation and gradient clipping as principled mechanisms to control sensitivity across detection and correction modules. Experimental results on multimodal fault datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach improves both anomaly detection accuracy and reconstruction under sensor corruption. Overall, this framework bridges the gap between analytical robustness guarantees and practical fault-tolerant multimodal learning.
Weakly-supervised video scene graph generation (WS-VSGG) aims to parse video content into structured relational triplets without bounding box annotations and with only sparse temporal labeling, significantly reducing annotation costs. Without ground-truth bounding boxes, these methods rely on off-the-shelf detectors to generate object proposals, yet largely overlook a fundamental discrepancy from fullysupervised pipelines. Fully-supervised detectors implicitly filter out noninteractive objects, while off-the-shelf detectors indiscriminately detect all visible objects, overwhelming relation models with noisy pairs.We address this by introducing a learnable pair affinity that estimates the likelihood of interaction between subject-object pairs. Through Pair Affinity Learning and Scoring (PALS), pair affinity is incorporated into inferencetime ranking and further integrated into contextual reasoning through Pair Affinity Modulation (PAM), enabling the model to suppress noninteractive pairs and focus on relationally meaningful ones. To provide cleaner supervision for pair affinity learning, we further propose Relation- Aware Matching (RAM), which leverages vision-language grounding to resolve class-level ambiguity in pseudo-label generation. Extensive experiments on Action Genome demonstrate that our approach consistently yields substantial improvements across different baselines and backbones, achieving state-of-the-art WS-VSGG performance.
We study object importance-based vision risk object identification (Vision-ROI), a key capability for hazard detection in intelligent driving systems. Existing approaches make deterministic decisions and ignore uncertainty, which could lead to safety-critical failures. Specifically, in ambiguous scenarios, fixed decision thresholds may cause premature or delayed risk detection and temporally unstable predictions, especially in complex scenes with multiple interacting risks. Despite these challenges, current methods lack a principled framework to model risk uncertainty jointly across space and time. We propose Conformal Risk Tube Prediction, a unified formulation that captures spatiotemporal risk uncertainty, provides coverage guarantees for true risks, and produces calibrated risk scores with uncertainty estimates. To conduct a systematic evaluation, we present a new dataset and metrics probing diverse scenario configurations with multi-risk coupling effects, which are not supported by existing datasets. We systematically analyze factors affecting uncertainty estimation, including scenario variations, per-risk category behavior, and perception error propagation. Our method delivers substantial improvements over prior approaches, enhancing vision-ROI robustness and downstream performance, such as reducing nuisance braking alerts. For more qualitative results, please visit our project webpage: https://hcis-lab.github.io/CRTP/
Burnout is an occupational syndrome that, like many other professions, affects the majority of software engineers. Past research studies showed important trends, including an increasing use of machine learning techniques to allow for an early detection of burnout. This paper is a systematic literature review (SLR) of the research papers that proposed machine learning (ML) approaches, and focused on detecting burnout in software developers and IT professionals. Our objective is to review the accuracy and precision of the proposed ML techniques, and to formulate recommendations for future researchers interested to replicate or extend those studies. From our SLR we observed that a majority of primary studies focuses on detecting emotions or utilise emotional dimensions to detect or predict the presence of burnout. We also performed a cross-sectional study to detect which ML approach shows a better performance at detecting emotions; and which dataset has more potential and expressivity to capture emotions. We believe that, by identifying which ML tools and datasets show a better performance at detecting emotions, and indirectly at identifying burnout, our paper can be a valuable asset to progress in this important research direction.
Early detection of atypical cognitive-motor development is critical for timely intervention, yet traditional assessments rely heavily on subjective, static evaluations. The integration of digital devices offers an opportunity for continuous, objective monitoring through digital biomarkers. In this work, we propose an AI-driven longitudinal framework to model developmental trajectories in children aged 18 months to 8 years. Using a dataset of tablet-based interactions collected over multiple academic years, we analyzed six cognitive-motor tasks (e.g., fine motor control, reaction time). We applied dimensionality reduction (t-SNE) and unsupervised clustering (K-Means++) to identify distinct developmental phenotypes and tracked individual transitions between these profiles over time. Our analysis reveals three distinct profiles: low, medium, and high performance. Crucially, longitudinal tracking highlights a high stability in the low-performance cluster (>90% retention in early years), suggesting that early deficits tend to persist without intervention. Conversely, higher-performance clusters show greater variability, potentially reflecting engagement factors. This study validates the use of unsupervised learning on touchscreen data to uncover heterogeneous developmental paths. The identified profiles serve as scalable, data-driven proxies for cognitive growth, offering a foundation for early screening tools and personalized pediatric interventions.
Monitoring and controlling invasive tree species across large forests, parks, and trail networks is challenging due to limited accessibility, reliance on manual scouting, and degraded under-canopy GNSS. We present MapForest, a modular field robotics system that transforms multi-modal sensor data into GIS-ready invasive-species maps. Our system features: (i) a compact, platform-agnostic sensing payload that can be rapidly mounted on UAV, bicycle, or backpack platforms, and (ii) a software pipeline comprising LiDAR-inertial mapping, image-based invasive-species detection, and georeferenced map generation. To ensure reliable operation in GNSS-intermittent environments, we enhance a LiDAR-inertial mapping backbone with covariance-aware GNSS factors and robust loss kernels. We train an object detector to detect the Tree-of-Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) from onboard RGB imagery and fuse detections with the reconstructed map to produce geospatial outputs suitable for downstream decision making. We collected a dataset spanning six sites across urban environments, parks, trails, and forests to evaluate individual system modules, and report end-to-end results on two sites containing Tree-of-Heaven. The enhanced mapping module achieved a trajectory deviation error of 1.95 m over a 1.2 km forest traversal, and the Tree-of-Heaven detector achieved an F1 score of 0.653. The datasets and associated tooling are released to support reproducible research in forest mapping and invasive-species monitoring.