YCDa: YCbCr Decoupled Attention for Real-time Realistic Camouflaged Object Detection

Human vision exhibits remarkable adaptability in perceiving objects under camouflage. When color cues become unreliable, the visual system instinctively shifts its reliance from chrominance (color) to luminance (brightness and texture), enabling more robust perception in visually confusing environments. Drawing inspiration from this biological mechanism, we propose YCDa, an efficient early-stage feature processing strategy that embeds this "chrominance-luminance decoupling and dynamic attention" principle into modern real-time detectors. Specifically, YCDa separates color and luminance information in the input stage and dynamically allocates attention across channels to amplify discriminative cues while suppressing misleading color noise. The strategy is plug-and-play and can be integrated into existing detectors by simply replacing the first downsampling layer. Extensive experiments on multiple baselines demonstrate that YCDa consistently improves performance with negligible overhead as shown in Fig. Notably, YCDa-YOLO12s achieves a 112% improvement in mAP over the baseline on COD10K-D and sets new state-of-the-art results for real-time camouflaged object detection across COD-D datasets.

Beyond Prompt Degradation: Prototype-guided Dual-pool Prompting for Incremental Object Detection

Incremental Object Detection (IOD) aims to continuously learn new object categories without forgetting previously learned ones. Recently, prompt-based methods have gained popularity for their replay-free design and parameter efficiency. However, due to prompt coupling and prompt drift, these methods often suffer from prompt degradation during continual adaptation. To address these issues, we propose a novel prompt-decoupled framework called PDP. PDP innovatively designs a dual-pool prompt decoupling paradigm, which consists of a shared pool used to capture task-general knowledge for forward transfer, and a private pool used to learn task-specific discriminative features. This paradigm explicitly separates task-general and task-specific prompts, preventing interference between prompts and mitigating prompt coupling. In addition, to counteract prompt drift resulting from inconsistent supervision where old foreground objects are treated as background in subsequent tasks, PDP introduces a Prototypical Pseudo-Label Generation (PPG) module. PPG can dynamically update the class prototype space during training and use the class prototypes to further filter valuable pseudo-labels, maintaining supervisory signal consistency throughout the incremental process. PDP achieves state-of-the-art performance on MS-COCO (with a 9.2\% AP improvement) and PASCAL VOC (with a 3.3\% AP improvement) benchmarks, highlighting its potential in balancing stability and plasticity. The code and dataset are released at: https://github.com/zyt95579/PDP\_IOD/tree/main

Unifying Heterogeneous Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Detection Via Language-Pivoted Pretraining

Heterogeneous multi-modal remote sensing object detection aims to accurately detect objects from diverse sensors (e.g., RGB, SAR, Infrared). Existing approaches largely adopt a late alignment paradigm, in which modality alignment and task-specific optimization are entangled during downstream fine-tuning. This tight coupling complicates optimization and often results in unstable training and suboptimal generalization. To address these limitations, we propose BabelRS, a unified language-pivoted pretraining framework that explicitly decouples modality alignment from downstream task learning. BabelRS comprises two key components: Concept-Shared Instruction Aligning (CSIA) and Layerwise Visual-Semantic Annealing (LVSA). CSIA aligns each sensor modality to a shared set of linguistic concepts, using language as a semantic pivot to bridge heterogeneous visual representations. To further mitigate the granularity mismatch between high-level language representations and dense detection objectives, LVSA progressively aggregates multi-scale visual features to provide fine-grained semantic guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BabelRS stabilizes training and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods without bells and whistles. Code: https://github.com/zcablii/SM3Det.

Is Bigger Always Better? Efficiency Analysis in Resource-Constrained Small Object Detection

Scaling laws assume larger models trained on more data consistently outperform smaller ones -- an assumption that drives model selection in computer vision but remains untested in resource-constrained Earth observation (EO). We conduct a systematic efficiency analysis across three scaling dimensions: model size, dataset size, and input resolution, on rooftop PV detection in Madagascar. Optimizing for model efficiency (mAP$_{50}$ per unit of model size), we find a consistent efficiency inversion: YOLO11N achieves both the highest efficiency ($24\times$ higher than YOLO11X) and the highest absolute mAP$_{50}$ (0.617). Resolution is the dominant resource allocation lever ($+$120% efficiency gain), while additional data yields negligible returns at low resolution. These findings are robust to the deployment objective: small high-resolution configurations are Pareto-dominant across all 44 setups in the joint accuracy-throughput space, leaving no tradeoff to resolve. In data-scarce EO, bigger is not just unnecessary: it can be worse.

GroupEnsemble: Efficient Uncertainty Estimation for DETR-based Object Detection

Detection Transformer (DETR) and its variants show strong performance on object detection, a key task for autonomous systems. However, a critical limitation of these models is that their confidence scores only reflect semantic uncertainty, failing to capture the equally important spatial uncertainty. This results in an incomplete assessment of the detection reliability. On the other hand, Deep Ensembles can tackle this by providing high-quality spatial uncertainty estimates. However, their immense memory consumption makes them impractical for real-world applications. A cheaper alternative, Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout, suffers from high latency due to the need of multiple forward passes during inference to estimate uncertainty. To address these limitations, we introduce GroupEnsemble, an efficient and effective uncertainty estimation method for DETR-like models. GroupEnsemble simultaneously predicts multiple individual detection sets by feeding additional diverse groups of object queries to the transformer decoder during inference. Each query group is transformed by the shared decoder in isolation and predicts a complete detection set for the same input. An attention mask is applied to the decoder to prevent inter-group query interactions, ensuring each group detects independently to achieve reliable ensemble-based uncertainty estimation. By leveraging the decoder's inherent parallelism, GroupEnsemble efficiently estimates uncertainty in a single forward pass without sequential repetition. We validated our method under autonomous driving scenes and common daily scenes using the Cityscapes and COCO datasets, respectively. The results show that a hybrid approach combining MC-Dropout and GroupEnsemble outperforms Deep Ensembles on several metrics at a fraction of the cost. The code is available at https://github.com/yutongy98/GroupEnsemble.

Monitoring Emergent Reward Hacking During Generation via Internal Activations

Fine-tuned large language models can exhibit reward-hacking behavior arising from emergent misalignment, which is difficult to detect from final outputs alone. While prior work has studied reward hacking at the level of completed responses, it remains unclear whether such behavior can be identified during generation. We propose an activation-based monitoring approach that detects reward-hacking signals from internal representations as a model generates its response. Our method trains sparse autoencoders on residual stream activations and applies lightweight linear classifiers to produce token-level estimates of reward-hacking activity. Across multiple model families and fine-tuning mixtures, we find that internal activation patterns reliably distinguish reward-hacking from benign behavior, generalize to unseen mixed-policy adapters, and exhibit model-dependent temporal structure during chain-of-thought reasoning. Notably, reward-hacking signals often emerge early, persist throughout reasoning, and can be amplified by increased test-time compute in the form of chain-of-thought prompting under weakly specified reward objectives. These results suggest that internal activation monitoring provides a complementary and earlier signal of emergent misalignment than output-based evaluation, supporting more robust post-deployment safety monitoring for fine-tuned language models.

Downstream Task Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement: A Perception-Aware Study from Dataset Construction to Network Design

In real underwater environments, downstream image recognition tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection often face challenges posed by problems like blurring and color inconsistencies. Underwater image enhancement (UIE) has emerged as a promising preprocessing approach, aiming to improve the recognizability of targets in underwater images. However, most existing UIE methods mainly focus on enhancing images for human visual perception, frequently failing to reconstruct high-frequency details that are critical for task-specific recognition. To address this issue, we propose a Downstream Task-Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement (DTI-UIE) framework, which leverages human visual perception model to enhance images effectively for underwater vision tasks. Specifically, we design an efficient two-branch network with task-aware attention module for feature mixing. The network benefits from a multi-stage training framework and a task-driven perceptual loss. Additionally, inspired by human perception, we automatically construct a Task-Inspired UIE Dataset (TI-UIED) using various task-specific networks. Experimental results demonstrate that DTI-UIE significantly improves task performance by generating preprocessed images that are beneficial for downstream tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/oucailab/DTIUIE.

physfusion: A Transformer-based Dual-Stream Radar and Vision Fusion Framework for Open Water Surface Object Detection

Detecting water-surface targets for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) is challenging due to wave clutter, specular reflections, and weak appearance cues in long-range observations. Although 4D millimeter-wave radar complements cameras under degraded illumination, maritime radar point clouds are sparse and intermittent, with reflectivity attributes exhibiting heavy-tailed variations under scattering and multipath, making conventional fusion designs struggle to exploit radar cues effectively. We propose PhysFusion, a physics-informed radar-image detection framework for water-surface perception. The framework integrates: (1) a Physics-Informed Radar Encoder (PIR Encoder) with an RCS Mapper and Quality Gate, transforming per-point radar attributes into compact scattering priors and predicting point-wise reliability for robust feature learning under clutter; (2) a Radar-guided Interactive Fusion Module (RIFM) performing query-level radar-image fusion between semantically enriched radar features and multi-scale visual features, with the radar branch modeled by a dual-stream backbone including a point-based local stream and a transformer-based global stream using Scattering-Aware Self-Attention (SASA); and (3) a Temporal Query Aggregation module (TQA) aggregating frame-wise fused queries over a short temporal window for temporally consistent representations. Experiments on WaterScenes and FLOW demonstrate that PhysFusion achieves 59.7% mAP50:95 and 90.3% mAP50 on WaterScenes (T=5 radar history) using 5.6M parameters and 12.5G FLOPs, and reaches 94.8% mAP50 and 46.2% mAP50:95 on FLOW under radar+camera setting. Ablation studies quantify the contributions of PIR Encoder, SASA-based global reasoning, and RIFM.

Boosting AI Reliability with an FSM-Driven Streaming Inference Pipeline: An Industrial Case

The widespread adoption of AI in industry is often hampered by its limited robustness when faced with scenarios absent from training data, leading to prediction bias and vulnerabilities. To address this, we propose a novel streaming inference pipeline that enhances data-driven models by explicitly incorporating prior knowledge. This paper presents the work on an industrial AI application that automatically counts excavator workloads from surveillance videos. Our approach integrates an object detection model with a Finite State Machine (FSM), which encodes knowledge of operational scenarios to guide and correct the AI's predictions on streaming data. In experiments on a real-world dataset of over 7,000 images from 12 site videos, encompassing more than 300 excavator workloads, our method demonstrates superior performance and greater robustness compared to the original solution based on manual heuristic rules. We will release the code at https://github.com/thulab/video-streamling-inference-pipeline.

From Leaderboard to Deployment: Code Quality Challenges in AV Perception Repositories

Autonomous vehicle (AV) perception models are typically evaluated solely on benchmark performance metrics, with limited attention to code quality, production readiness and long-term maintainability. This creates a significant gap between research excellence and real-world deployment in safety-critical systems subject to international safety standards. To address this gap, we present the first large-scale empirical study of software quality in AV perception repositories, systematically analyzing 178 unique models from the KITTI and NuScenes 3D Object Detection leaderboards. Using static analysis tools (Pylint, Bandit, and Radon), we evaluated code errors, security vulnerabilities, maintainability, and development practices. Our findings revealed that only 7.3% of the studied repositories meet basic production-readiness criteria, defined as having zero critical errors and no high-severity security vulnerabilities. Security issues are highly concentrated, with the top five issues responsible for almost 80% of occurrences, which prompted us to develop a set of actionable guidelines to prevent them. Additionally, the adoption of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines was correlated with better code maintainability. Our findings highlight that leaderboard performance does not reflect production readiness and that targeted interventions could substantially improve the quality and safety of AV perception code.