Assessing Vision-Language Models for Perception in Autonomous Underwater Robotic Software

Autonomous Underwater Robots (AURs) operate in challenging underwater environments, including low visibility and harsh water conditions. Such conditions present challenges for software engineers developing perception modules for the AUR software. To successfully carry out these tasks, deep learning has been incorporated into the AUR software to support its operations. However, the unique challenges of underwater environments pose difficulties for deep learning models, which often rely on labeled data that is scarce and noisy. This may undermine the trustworthiness of AUR software that relies on perception modules. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising solutions for AUR software as they generalize to unseen objects and remain robust in noisy conditions by inferring information from contextual cues. Despite this potential, their performance and uncertainty in underwater environments remain understudied from a software engineering perspective. Motivated by the needs of an industrial partner in assurance and risk management for maritime systems to assess the potential use of VLMs in this context, we present an empirical evaluation of VLM-based perception modules within the AUR software. We assess their ability to detect underwater trash by computing performance, uncertainty, and their relationship, to enable software engineers to select appropriate VLMs for their AUR software.

A Universal Action Space for General Behavior Analysis

Analyzing animal and human behavior has long been a challenging task in computer vision. Early approaches from the 1970s to the 1990s relied on hand-crafted edge detection, segmentation, and low-level features such as color, shape, and texture to locate objects and infer their identities-an inherently ill-posed problem. Behavior analysis in this era typically proceeded by tracking identified objects over time and modeling their trajectories using sparse feature points, which further limited robustness and generalization. A major shift occurred with the introduction of ImageNet by Deng and Li in 2010, which enabled large-scale visual recognition through deep neural networks and effectively served as a comprehensive visual dictionary. This development allowed object recognition to move beyond complex low-level processing toward learned high-level representations. In this work, we follow this paradigm to build a large-scale Universal Action Space (UAS) using existing labeled human-action datasets. We then use this UAS as the foundation for analyzing and categorizing mammalian and chimpanzee behavior datasets. The source code is released on GitHub at https://github.com/franktpmvu/Universal-Action-Space.

What if Agents Could Imagine? Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary HOI Comprehension through Generation

Multimodal Large Language Models have shown promising capabilities in bridging visual and textual reasoning, yet their reasoning capabilities in Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction (OV-HOI) are limited by cross-modal hallucinations and occlusion-induced ambiguity. To address this, we propose \textbf{ImagineAgent}, an agentic framework that harmonizes cognitive reasoning with generative imagination for robust visual understanding. Specifically, our method innovatively constructs cognitive maps that explicitly model plausible relationships between detected entities and candidate actions. Subsequently, it dynamically invokes tools including retrieval augmentation, image cropping, and diffusion models to gather domain-specific knowledge and enriched visual evidence, thereby achieving cross-modal alignment in ambiguous scenarios. Moreover, we propose a composite reward that balances prediction accuracy and tool efficiency. Evaluations on SWIG-HOI and HICO-DET datasets demonstrate our SOTA performance, requiring approximately 20\% of training data compared to existing methods, validating our robustness and efficiency.

Conformal Prediction Sets for Instance Segmentation

Current instance segmentation models achieve high performance on average predictions, but lack principled uncertainty quantification: their outputs are not calibrated, and there is no guarantee that a predicted mask is close to the ground truth. To address this limitation, we introduce a conformal prediction algorithm to generate adaptive confidence sets for instance segmentation. Given an image and a pixel coordinate query, our algorithm generates a confidence set of instance predictions for that pixel, with a provable guarantee for the probability that at least one of the predictions has high Intersection-Over-Union (IoU) with the true object instance mask. We apply our algorithm to instance segmentation examples in agricultural field delineation, cell segmentation, and vehicle detection. Empirically, we find that our prediction sets vary in size based on query difficulty and attain the target coverage, outperforming existing baselines such as Learn Then Test, Conformal Risk Control, and morphological dilation-based methods. We provide versions of the algorithm with asymptotic and finite sample guarantees.

Radar Operating Metrics and Network Throughput for Integrated Sensing and Communications in Millimeter-wave Urban Environments

Millimeter wave integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems are being researched for next-generation intelligent transportation systems. Here, radar and communication functionalities share a common spectrum and hardware resources in a time-multiplexed manner. The objective of the radar is to first scan the angular search space and detect and localize mobile users/targets in the presence of discrete clutter scatterers. Subsequently, this information is used to direct highly directional beams toward these mobile users for communication service. The choice of radar parameters such as the radar duty cycle and the corresponding beamwidth are critical for realizing high communication throughput. In this work, we use the stochastic geometry-based mathematical framework to analyze the radar operating metrics as a function of diverse radar, target, and clutter parameters and subsequently use these results to study the network throughput of the ISAC system. The results are validated through Monte Carlo simulations.

SCA-Net: Spatial-Contextual Aggregation Network for Enhanced Small Building and Road Change Detection

Automated change detection in remote sensing imagery is critical for urban management, environmental monitoring, and disaster assessment. While deep learning models have advanced this field, they often struggle with challenges like low sensitivity to small objects and high computational costs. This paper presents SCA-Net, an enhanced architecture built upon the Change-Agent framework for precise building and road change detection in bi-temporal images. Our model incorporates several key innovations: a novel Difference Pyramid Block for multi-scale change analysis, an Adaptive Multi-scale Processing module combining shape-aware and high-resolution enhancement blocks, and multi-level attention mechanisms (PPM and CSAGate) for joint contextual and detail processing. Furthermore, a dynamic composite loss function and a four-phase training strategy are introduced to stabilize training and accelerate convergence. Comprehensive evaluations on the LEVIR-CD and LEVIR-MCI datasets demonstrate SCA-Net's superior performance over Change-Agent and other state-of-the-art methods. Our approach achieves a significant 2.64% improvement in mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) on LEVIR-MCI and a remarkable 57.9% increase in IoU for small buildings, while reducing the training time by 61%. This work provides an efficient, accurate, and robust solution for practical change detection applications.

Decoding Future Risk: Deep Learning Analysis of Tubular Adenoma Whole-Slide Images

Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains a significant cause of cancer-related mortality, despite the widespread implementation of prophylactic initiatives aimed at detecting and removing precancerous polyps. Although screening effectively reduces incidence, a notable portion of patients initially diagnosed with low-grade adenomatous polyps will still develop CRC later in life, even without the presence of known high-risk syndromes. Identifying which low-risk patients are at higher risk of progression is a critical unmet need for tailored surveillance and preventative therapeutic strategies. Traditional histological assessment of adenomas, while fundamental, may not fully capture subtle architectural or cytological features indicative of malignant potential. Advancements in digital pathology and machine learning provide an opportunity to analyze whole-slide images (WSIs) comprehensively and objectively. This study investigates whether machine learning algorithms, specifically convolutional neural networks (CNNs), can detect subtle histological features in WSIs of low-grade tubular adenomas that are predictive of a patient's long-term risk of developing colorectal cancer.

Perception-Control Coupled Visual Servoing for Textureless Objects Using Keypoint-Based EKF

Visual servoing is fundamental to robotic applications, enabling precise positioning and control. However, applying it to textureless objects remains a challenge due to the absence of reliable visual features. Moreover, adverse visual conditions, such as occlusions, often corrupt visual feedback, leading to reduced accuracy and instability in visual servoing. In this work, we build upon learning-based keypoint detection for textureless objects and propose a method that enhances robustness by tightly integrating perception and control in a closed loop. Specifically, we employ an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that integrates per-frame keypoint measurements to estimate 6D object pose, which drives pose-based visual servoing (PBVS) for control. The resulting camera motion, in turn, enhances the tracking of subsequent keypoints, effectively closing the perception-control loop. Additionally, unlike standard PBVS, we propose a probabilistic control law that computes both camera velocity and its associated uncertainty, enabling uncertainty-aware control for safe and reliable operation. We validate our approach on real-world robotic platforms using quantitative metrics and grasping experiments, demonstrating that our method outperforms traditional visual servoing techniques in both accuracy and practical application.

X-Mark: Saliency-Guided Robust Dataset Ownership Verification for Medical Imaging

High-quality medical imaging datasets are essential for training deep learning models, but their unauthorized use raises serious copyright and ethical concerns. Medical imaging presents a unique challenge for existing dataset ownership verification methods designed for natural images, as static watermark patterns generated in fixed-scale images scale poorly dynamic and high-resolution scans with limited visual diversity and subtle anatomical structures, while preserving diagnostic quality. In this paper, we propose X-Mark, a sample-specific clean-label watermarking method for chest x-ray copyright protection. Specifically, X-Mark uses a conditional U-Net to generate unique perturbations within salient regions of each sample. We design a multi-component training objective to ensure watermark efficacy, robustness against dynamic scaling processes while preserving diagnostic quality and visual-distinguishability. We incorporate Laplacian regularization into our training objective to penalize high-frequency perturbations and achieve watermark scale-invariance. Ownership verification is performed in a black-box setting to detect characteristic behaviors in suspicious models. Extensive experiments on CheXpert verify the effectiveness of X-Mark, achieving WSR of 100% and reducing probability of false positives in Ind-M scenario by 12%, while demonstrating resistance to potential adaptive attacks.

AD$^2$: Analysis and Detection of Adversarial Threats in Visual Perception for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Systems

End-to-end autonomous driving systems have achieved significant progress, yet their adversarial robustness remains largely underexplored. In this work, we conduct a closed-loop evaluation of state-of-the-art autonomous driving agents under black-box adversarial threat models in CARLA. Specifically, we consider three representative attack vectors on the visual perception pipeline: (i) a physics-based blur attack induced by acoustic waves, (ii) an electromagnetic interference attack that distorts captured images, and (iii) a digital attack that adds ghost objects as carefully crafted bounded perturbations on images. Our experiments on two advanced agents, Transfuser and Interfuser, reveal severe vulnerabilities to such attacks, with driving scores dropping by up to 99% in the worst case, raising valid safety concerns. To help mitigate such threats, we further propose a lightweight Attack Detection model for Autonomous Driving systems (AD$^2$) based on attention mechanisms that capture spatial-temporal consistency. Comprehensive experiments across multi-camera inputs on CARLA show that our detector achieves superior detection capability and computational efficiency compared to existing approaches.