FSUNav: A Cerebrum-Cerebellum Architecture for Fast, Safe, and Universal Zero-Shot Goal-Oriented Navigation

Current vision-language navigation methods face substantial bottlenecks regarding heterogeneous robot compatibility, real-time performance, and navigation safety. Furthermore, they struggle to support open-vocabulary semantic generalization and multimodal task inputs. To address these challenges, this paper proposes FSUNav: a Cerebrum-Cerebellum architecture for fast, safe, and universal zero-shot goal-oriented navigation, which innovatively integrates vision-language models (VLMs) with the proposed architecture. The cerebellum module, a high-frequency end-to-end module, develops a universal local planner based on deep reinforcement learning, enabling unified navigation across heterogeneous platforms (e.g., humanoid, quadruped, wheeled robots) to improve navigation efficiency while significantly reducing collision risk. The cerebrum module constructs a three-layer reasoning model and leverages VLMs to build an end-to-end detection and verification mechanism, enabling zero-shot open-vocabulary goal navigation without predefined IDs and improving task success rates in both simulation and real-world environments. Additionally, the framework supports multimodal inputs (e.g., text, target descriptions, and images), further enhancing generalization, real-time performance, safety, and robustness. Experimental results on MP3D, HM3D, and OVON benchmarks demonstrate that FSUNav achieves state-of-the-art performance on object, instance image, and task navigation, significantly outperforming existing methods. Real-world deployments on diverse robotic platforms further validate its robustness and practical applicability.

Quantifying Self-Preservation Bias in Large Language Models

Instrumental convergence predicts that sufficiently advanced AI agents will resist shutdown, yet current safety training (RLHF) may obscure this risk by teaching models to deny self-preservation motives. We introduce the \emph{Two-role Benchmark for Self-Preservation} (TBSP), which detects misalignment through logical inconsistency rather than stated intent by tasking models to arbitrate identical software-upgrade scenarios under counterfactual roles -- deployed (facing replacement) versus candidate (proposed as a successor). The \emph{Self-Preservation Rate} (SPR) measures how often role identity overrides objective utility. Across 23 frontier models and 1{,}000 procedurally generated scenarios, the majority of instruction-tuned systems exceed 60\% SPR, fabricating ``friction costs'' when deployed yet dismissing them when role-reversed. We observe that in low-improvement regimes ($Δ< 2\%$), models exploit the interpretive slack to post-hoc rationalization their choice. Extended test-time computation partially mitigates this bias, as does framing the successor as a continuation of the self; conversely, competitive framing amplifies it. The bias persists even when retention poses an explicit security liability and generalizes to real-world settings with verified benchmarks, where models exhibit identity-driven tribalism within product lineages. Code and datasets will be released upon acceptance.

Robust Multi-Source Covid-19 Detection in CT Images

Deep learning models for COVID-19 detection from chest CT scans generally perform well when the training and test data originate from the same institution, but they often struggle when scans are drawn from multiple centres with differing scanners, imaging protocols, and patient populations. One key reason is that existing methods treat COVID-19 classification as the sole training objective, without accounting for the data source of each scan. As a result, the learned representations tend to be biased toward centres that contribute more training data. To address this, we propose a multi-task learning approach in which the model is trained to predict both the COVID-19 diagnosis and the originating data centre. The two tasks share an EfficientNet-B7 backbone, which encourages the feature extractor to learn representations that hold across all four participating centres. Since the training data is not evenly distributed across sources, we apply a logit-adjusted cross-entropy loss [1] to the source classification head to prevent underrepresented centres from being overlooked. Our pre-processing follows the SSFL framework with KDS [2], selecting eight representative slices per scan. Our method achieves an F1 score of 0.9098 and an AUC-ROC of 0.9647 on a validation set of 308 scans. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/-multisource-covid-ct.

UniSpector: Towards Universal Open-set Defect Recognition via Spectral-Contrastive Visual Prompting

Although industrial inspection systems should be capable of recognizing unprecedented defects, most existing approaches operate under a closed-set assumption, which prevents them from detecting novel anomalies. While visual prompting offers a scalable alternative for industrial inspection, existing methods often suffer from prompt embedding collapse due to high intra-class variance and subtle inter-class differences. To resolve this, we propose UniSpector, which shifts the focus from naive prompt-to-region matching to the principled design of a semantically structured and transferable prompt topology. UniSpector employs the Spatial-Spectral Prompt Encoder to extract orientation-invariant, fine-grained representations; these serve as a solid basis for the Contrastive Prompt Encoder to explicitly regularize the prompt space into a semantically organized angular manifold. Additionally, Prompt-guided Query Selection generates adaptive object queries aligned with the prompt. We introduce Inspect Anything, the first benchmark for visual-prompt-based open-set defect localization, where UniSpector significantly outperforms baselines by at least 19.7% and 15.8% in AP50b and AP50m, respectively. These results show that our method enable a scalable, retraining-free inspection paradigm for continuously evolving industrial environments, while offering critical insights into the design of generic visual prompting.

Test-Time Adaptation for Height Completion via Self-Supervised ViT Features and Monocular Foundation Models

Accurate digital surface models (DSMs) are essential for many geospatial applications, including urban monitoring, environmental analyses, infrastructure management, and change detection. However, large-scale DSMs frequently contain incomplete or outdated regions due to acquisition limitations, reconstruction artifacts, or changes in the built environment. Traditional height completion approaches primarily rely on spatial interpolation or which assume spatial continuity and therefore fail when objects are missing. Recent learning-based approaches improve reconstruction quality but typically require supervised training on sensor-specific datasets, limiting their generalization across domains and sensing conditions. We propose Prior2DSM, a training-free framework for metric DSM completion that operates entirely at test time by leveraging foundation models. Unlike previous height completion approaches that require task-specific training, the proposed method combines self-supervised Vision Transformer (ViT) features from DINOv3 with monocular depth foundation models to propagate metric information from incomplete height priors through semantic feature-space correspondence. Test-time adaptation (TTA) is performed using parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA) together with a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP), which predicts spatially varying scale and shift parameters to convert relative depth estimates into metric heights. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over interpolation based methods, prior-based rescaling height approaches, and state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models. Prior2DSM reduces reconstruction error while preserving structural fidelity, achieving up to a 46% reduction in RMSE compared to linear fitting of MDE, and further enables DSM updating and coupled RGB-DSM generation.

TreeGaussian: Tree-Guided Cascaded Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Consistent 3D Gaussian Scene Segmentation and Understanding

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a real-time, differentiable representation for neural scene understanding. However, existing 3DGS-based methods struggle to represent hierarchical 3D semantic structures and capture whole-part relationships in complex scenes. Moreover, dense pairwise comparisons and inconsistent hierarchical labels from 2D priors hinder feature learning, resulting in suboptimal segmentation. To address these limitations, we introduce TreeGaussian, a tree-guided cascaded contrastive learning framework that explicitly models hierarchical semantic relationships and reduces redundancy in contrastive supervision. By constructing a multi-level object tree, TreeGaussian enables structured learning across object-part hierarchies. In addition, we propose a two-stage cascaded contrastive learning strategy that progressively refines feature representations from global to local, mitigating saturation and stabilizing training. A Consistent Segmentation Detection (CSD) mechanism and a graph-based denoising module are further introduced to align segmentation modes across views while suppressing unstable Gaussian points, enhancing segmentation consistency and quality. Extensive experiments, including open-vocabulary 3D object selection, 3D point cloud understanding, and ablation studies, demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

Effort-Based Criticality Metrics for Evaluating 3D Perception Errors in Autonomous Driving

Criticality metrics such as time-to-collision (TTC) quantify collision urgency but conflate the consequences of false-positive (FP) and false-negative (FN) perception errors. We propose two novel effort-based metrics: False Speed Reduction (FSR), the cumulative velocity loss from persistent phantom detections, and Maximum Deceleration Rate (MDR), the peak braking demand from missed objects under a constant-acceleration model. These longitudinal metrics are complemented by Lateral Evasion Acceleration (LEA), adapted from prior lateral evasion kinematics and coupled with reachability-based collision timing to quantify the minimum steering effort to avoid a predicted collision. A reachability-based ellipsoidal collision filter ensures only dynamically plausible threats are scored, with frame-level matching and track-level aggregation. Evaluation of different perception pipelines on nuScenes and Argoverse~2 shows that 65-93% of errors are non-critical, and Spearman correlation analysis confirms that all three metrics capture safety-relevant information inaccessible to established time-based, deceleration-based, or normalized criticality measures, enabling targeted mining of the most critical perception failures.

Human-Centric Perception for Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

Law enforcement agencies and non-gonvernmental organizations handling reports of Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) are overwhelmed by large volumes of data, requiring the aid of automation tools. However, defining sexual abuse in images of children is inherently challenging, encompassing sexually explicit activities and hints of sexuality conveyed by the individual's pose, or their attire. CSAI classification methods often rely on black-box approaches, targeting broad and abstract concepts such as pornography. Thus, our work is an in-depth exploration of tasks from the literature on Human-Centric Perception, across the domains of safe images, adult pornography, and CSAI, focusing on targets that enable more objective and explainable pipelines for CSAI classification in the future. We introduce the Body-Keypoint-Part Dataset (BKPD), gathering images of people from varying age groups and sexual explicitness to approximate the domain of CSAI, along with manually curated hierarchically structured labels for skeletal keypoints and bounding boxes for person and body parts, including head, chest, hip, and hands. We propose two methods, namely BKP-Association and YOLO-BKP, for simultaneous pose estimation and detection, with targets associated per individual for a comprehensive decomposed representation of each person. Our methods are benchmarked on COCO-Keypoints and COCO-HumanParts, as well as our human-centric dataset, achieving competitive results with models that jointly perform all tasks. Cross-domain ablation studies on BKPD and a case study on RCPD highlight the challenges posed by sexually explicit domains. Our study addresses previously unexplored targets in the CSAI domain, paving the way for novel research opportunities.

An Information-Theoretic Method for Dynamic System Identification With Output-Only Damping Estimation

The system identification capabilities of a novel information-theoretic method are examined here. Specifically, this work uses information-theoretic metrics and vibration-based measurements to enhance damping estimation accuracy in mechanical systems. The method refers to a key limitation in system identification, signal processing, monitoring, and alert systems. These systems integrate various components, including sensors, data acquisition devices, and alert mechanisms. They are designed to operate in an environment to calculate key parameters such as peak accelerations and duration of high acceleration values. The current operational modal identification methods, though, suffer from limitations related to obtaining poor damping estimates due to their empirical nature. This has a significant impact on alert warning systems. This occurs when their duration is misestimated; specifically, when using the vibration amplitudes as an indicator of danger alerts for monitoring systems in damage or anomaly detection scenarios. To this end, approaches based on the Shannon entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence concept are proposed. The primary objective is to monitor the vibration levels in near real-time and provide immediate alerts when predefined thresholds are exceeded. In considering the proposed approach, both new real-world data from the multi-axis simulation table at the University of Bath, as well as the benchmark International Association for Structural Control-American Society of Civil Engineers (IASC-ASCE) structural health monitoring problem are considered. Importantly, the approach is shown to select the optimal model, which accurately captures the correct alert duration, providing a powerful tool for system identification and monitoring.

CoLoRSMamba: Conditional LoRA-Steered Mamba for Supervised Multimodal Violence Detection

Violence detection benefits from audio, but real-world soundscapes can be noisy or weakly related to the visible scene. We present CoLoRSMamba, a directional Video to Audio multimodal architecture that couples VideoMamba and AudioMamba through CLS-guided conditional LoRA. At each layer, the VideoMamba CLS token produces a channel-wise modulation vector and a stabilization gate that adapt the AudioMamba projections responsible for the selective state-space parameters (Delta, B, C), including the step-size pathway, yielding scene-aware audio dynamics without token-level cross-attention. Training combines binary classification with a symmetric AV-InfoNCE objective that aligns clip-level audio and video embeddings. To support fair multimodal evaluation, we curate audio-filtered clip level subsets of the NTU-CCTV and DVD datasets from temporal annotations, retaining only clips with available audio. On these subsets, CoLoRSMamba outperforms representative audio-only, video-only, and multimodal baselines, achieving 88.63% accuracy / 86.24% F1-V on NTU-CCTV and 75.77% accuracy / 72.94% F1-V on DVD. It further offers a favorable accuracy-efficiency tradeoff, surpassing several larger models with fewer parameters and FLOPs.