GatedCLIP: Gated Multimodal Fusion for Hateful Memes Detection

Detecting hateful content in multimodal memes presents unique challenges, as harmful messages often emerge from the complex interplay between benign images and text. We propose GatedCLIP, a Vision-Language model that enhances CLIP's multimodal capabilities with specialized architectural improvements for hateful memes detection. Our approach introduces learned projection heads that map CLIP embeddings to a task-optimized semantic space, a dynamic gated fusion mechanism that adaptively weights visual and textual features, and a contrastive learning objective that maintains cross-modal semantic alignment. Experiments on the Hateful Memes dataset demonstrate that GatedCLIP achieves an AUROC of 0.66, substantially outperforming the CLIP baseline (AUROC 0.49) while maintaining computational efficiency with only 350K trainable parameters.

IR$^3$: Contrastive Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Interpretable Detection and Mitigation of Reward Hacking

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) enables powerful LLM alignment but can introduce reward hacking - models exploit spurious correlations in proxy rewards without genuine alignment. Compounding this, the objectives internalized during RLHF remain opaque, making hacking behaviors difficult to detect or correct. We introduce IR3 (Interpretable Reward Reconstruction and Rectification), a framework that reverse-engineers, interprets, and surgically repairs the implicit objectives driving RLHF-tuned models. We propose Contrastive Inverse Reinforcement Learning (C-IRL), which reconstructs the implicit reward function by contrasting paired responses from post-alignment and baseline policies to explain behavioral shifts during RLHF. We then decompose the reconstructed reward via sparse autoencoders into interpretable features, enabling identification of hacking signatures through contribution analysis. Finally, we propose mitigation strategies - clean reward optimization, adversarial shaping, constrained optimization, and feature-guided distillation - that target problematic features while preserving beneficial alignment. Experiments across multiple reward model configurations show that IR3 achieves 0.89 correlation with ground-truth rewards, identifies hacking features with over 90% precision, and significantly reduces hacking behaviors while maintaining capabilities within 3% of the original model.

EKF-Based Depth Camera and Deep Learning Fusion for UAV-Person Distance Estimation and Following in SAR Operations

Search and rescue (SAR) operations require rapid responses to save lives or property. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with vision-based systems support these missions through prior terrain investigation or real-time assistance during the mission itself. Vision-based UAV frameworks aid human search tasks by detecting and recognizing specific individuals, then tracking and following them while maintaining a safe distance. A key safety requirement for UAV following is the accurate estimation of the distance between camera and target object under real-world conditions, achieved by fusing multiple image modalities. UAVs with deep learning-based vision systems offer a new approach to the planning and execution of SAR operations. As part of the system for automatic people detection and face recognition using deep learning, in this paper we present the fusion of depth camera measurements and monocular camera-to-body distance estimation for robust tracking and following. Deep learning-based filtering of depth camera data and estimation of camera-to-body distance from a monocular camera are achieved with YOLO-pose, enabling real-time fusion of depth information using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. The proposed subsystem, designed for use in drones, estimates and measures the distance between the depth camera and the human body keypoints, to maintain the safe distance between the drone and the human target. Our system provides an accurate estimated distance, which has been validated against motion capture ground truth data. The system has been tested in real time indoors, where it reduces the average errors, root mean square error (RMSE) and standard deviations of distance estimation up to 15,3\% in three tested scenarios.

RT-RMOT: A Dataset and Framework for RGB-Thermal Referring Multi-Object Tracking

Referring Multi-Object Tracking has attracted increasing attention due to its human-friendly interactive characteristics, yet it exhibits limitations in low-visibility conditions, such as nighttime, smoke, and other challenging scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new RGB-Thermal RMOT task, named RT-RMOT, which aims to fuse RGB appearance features with the illumination robustness of the thermal modality to enable all-day referring multi-object tracking. To promote research on RT-RMOT, we construct the first Referring Multi-Object Tracking dataset under RGB-Thermal modality, named RefRT. It contains 388 language descriptions, 1,250 tracked targets, and 166,147 Language-RGB-Thermal (L-RGB-T) triplets. Furthermore, we propose RTrack, a framework built upon a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that integrates RGB, thermal, and textual features. Since the initial framework still leaves room for improvement, we introduce a Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) strategy to further exploit the model's potential. To alleviate training instability during RL fine-tuning, we introduce a Clipped Advantage Scaling (CAS) strategy to suppress gradient explosion. In addition, we design Structured Output Reward and Comprehensive Detection Reward to balance exploration and exploitation, thereby improving the completeness and accuracy of target perception. Extensive experiments on the RefRT dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RTrack framework.

Discover, Segment, and Select: A Progressive Mechanism for Zero-shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation

Current zero-shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation methods typically employ a two-stage pipeline (discover-then-segment): using MLLMs to obtain visual prompts, followed by SAM segmentation. However, relying solely on MLLMs for camouflaged object discovery often leads to inaccurate localization, false positives, and missed detections. To address these issues, we propose the \textbf{D}iscover-\textbf{S}egment-\textbf{S}elect (\textbf{DSS}) mechanism, a progressive framework designed to refine segmentation step by step. The proposed method contains a Feature-coherent Object Discovery (FOD) module that leverages visual features to generate diverse object proposals, a segmentation module that refines these proposals through SAM segmentation, and a Semantic-driven Mask Selection (SMS) module that employs MLLMs to evaluate and select the optimal segmentation mask from multiple candidates. Without requiring any training or supervision, DSS achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple COS benchmarks, especially in multiple-instance scenes.

A Two-Stage Detection-Tracking Framework for Stable Apple Quality Inspection in Dense Conveyor-Belt Environments

Industrial fruit inspection systems must operate reliably under dense multi-object interactions and continuous motion, yet most existing works evaluate detection or classification at the image level without ensuring temporal stability in video streams. We present a two-stage detection-tracking framework for stable multi-apple quality inspection in conveyor-belt environments. An orchard-trained YOLOv8 model performs apple localization, followed by ByteTrack multi-object tracking to maintain persistent identities. A ResNet18 defect classifier, fine-tuned on a healthy-defective fruit dataset, is applied to cropped apple regions. Track-level aggregation is introduced to enforce temporal consistency and reduce prediction oscillation across frames. We define video-level industrial metrics such as track-level defect ratio and temporal consistency to evaluate system robustness under realistic processing conditions. Results demonstrate improved stability compared to frame-wise inference, suggesting that integrating tracking is essential for practical automated fruit grading systems.

Brewing Stronger Features: Dual-Teacher Distillation for Multispectral Earth Observation

Foundation models are transforming Earth Observation (EO), yet the diversity of EO sensors and modalities makes a single universal model unrealistic. Multiple specialized EO foundation models (EOFMs) will likely coexist, making efficient knowledge transfer across modalities essential. Most existing EO pretraining relies on masked image modeling, which emphasizes local reconstruction but provides limited control over global semantic structure. To address this, we propose a dual-teacher contrastive distillation framework for multispectral imagery that aligns the student's pretraining objective with the contrastive self-distillation paradigm of modern optical vision foundation models (VFMs). Our approach combines a multispectral teacher with an optical VFM teacher, enabling coherent cross-modal representation learning. Experiments across diverse optical and multispectral benchmarks show that our model adapts to multispectral data without compromising performance on optical-only inputs, achieving state-of-the-art results in both settings, with an average improvement of 3.64 percentage points in semantic segmentation, 1.2 in change detection, and 1.31 in classification tasks. This demonstrates that contrastive distillation provides a principled and efficient approach to scalable representation learning across heterogeneous EO data sources. Project page: \textcolor{magenta}{https://wolfilip.github.io/DEO/}.

Learning Mutual View Information Graph for Adaptive Adversarial Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception (CP) enables data sharing among connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to enhance driving safety. However, CP systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks where malicious agents forge false objects via feature-level perturbations. Current defensive systems use threshold-based consensus verification by comparing collaborative and ego detection results. Yet, these defenses remain vulnerable to more sophisticated attack strategies that could exploit two critical weaknesses: (i) lack of robustness against attacks with systematic timing and target region optimization, and (ii) inadvertent disclosure of vulnerability knowledge through implicit confidence information in shared collaboration data. In this paper, we propose MVIG attack, a novel adaptive adversarial CP framework learning to capture vulnerability knowledge disclosed by different defensive CP systems from a unified mutual view information graph (MVIG) representation. Our approach combines MVIG representation with temporal graph learning to generate evolving fabrication risk maps and employs entropy-aware vulnerability search to optimize attack location, timing and persistence, enabling adaptive attacks with generalizability across various defensive configurations. Extensive evaluations on OPV2V and Adv-OPV2V datasets demonstrate that MVIG attack reduces defense success rates by up to 62\% against state-of-the-art defenses while achieving 47\% lower detection for persistent attacks at 29.9 FPS, exposing critical security gaps in CP systems. Code will be released at https://github.com/yihangtao/MVIG.git

No Need For Real Anomaly: MLLM Empowered Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection

The collection and detection of video anomaly data has long been a challenging problem due to its rare occurrence and spatio-temporal scarcity. Existing video anomaly detection (VAD) methods under perform in open-world scenarios. Key contributing factors include limited dataset diversity, and inadequate understanding of context-dependent anomalous semantics. To address these issues, i) we propose LAVIDA, an end-to-end zero-shot video anomaly detection framework. ii) LAVIDA employs an Anomaly Exposure Sampler that transforms segmented objects into pseudo-anomalies to enhance model adaptability to unseen anomaly categories. It further integrates a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to bolster semantic comprehension capabilities. Additionally, iii) we design a token compression approach based on reverse attention to handle the spatio-temporal scarcity of anomalous patterns and decrease computational cost. The training process is conducted solely on pseudo anomalies without any VAD data. Evaluations across four benchmark VAD datasets demonstrate that LAVIDA achieves SOTA performance in both frame-level and pixel-level anomaly detection under the zero-shot setting. Our code is available in https://github.com/VitaminCreed/LAVIDA.

A Self-Supervised Approach for Enhanced Feature Representations in Object Detection Tasks

In the fast-evolving field of artificial intelligence, where models are increasingly growing in complexity and size, the availability of labeled data for training deep learning models has become a significant challenge. Addressing complex problems like object detection demands considerable time and resources for data labeling to achieve meaningful results. For companies developing such applications, this entails extensive investment in highly skilled personnel or costly outsourcing. This research work aims to demonstrate that enhancing feature extractors can substantially alleviate this challenge, enabling models to learn more effective representations with less labeled data. Utilizing a self-supervised learning strategy, we present a model trained on unlabeled data that outperforms state-of-the-art feature extractors pre-trained on ImageNet and particularly designed for object detection tasks. Moreover, the results demonstrate that our approach encourages the model to focus on the most relevant aspects of an object, thus achieving better feature representations and, therefore, reinforcing its reliability and robustness.