Performance Optimization of YOLO-FEDER FusionNet for Robust Drone Detection in Visually Complex Environments

Drone detection in visually complex environments remains challenging due to background clutter, small object scale, and camouflage effects. While generic object detectors like YOLO exhibit strong performance in low-texture scenes, their effectiveness degrades in cluttered environments with low object-background separability. To address these limitations, this work presents an enhanced iteration of YOLO-FEDER FusionNet -- a detection framework that integrates generic object detection with camouflage object detection techniques. Building upon the original architecture, the proposed iteration introduces systematic advancements in training data composition, feature fusion strategies, and backbone design. Specifically, the training process leverages large-scale, photo-realistic synthetic data, complemented by a small set of real-world samples, to enhance robustness under visually complex conditions. The contribution of intermediate multi-scale FEDER features is systematically evaluated, and detection performance is comprehensively benchmarked across multiple YOLO-based backbone configurations. Empirical results indicate that integrating intermediate FEDER features, in combination with backbone upgrades, contributes to notable performance improvements. In the most promising configuration -- YOLO-FEDER FusionNet with a YOLOv8l backbone and FEDER features derived from the DWD module -- these enhancements lead to a FNR reduction of up to 39.1 percentage points and a mAP increase of up to 62.8 percentage points at an IoU threshold of 0.5, compared to the initial baseline.

Data Augmentation via Latent Diffusion Models for Detecting Smell-Related Objects in Historical Artworks

Finding smell references in historic artworks is a challenging problem. Beyond artwork-specific challenges such as stylistic variations, their recognition demands exceptionally detailed annotation classes, resulting in annotation sparsity and extreme class imbalance. In this work, we explore the potential of synthetic data generation to alleviate these issues and enable accurate detection of smell-related objects. We evaluate several diffusion-based augmentation strategies and demonstrate that incorporating synthetic data into model training can improve detection performance. Our findings suggest that leveraging the large-scale pretraining of diffusion models offers a promising approach for improving detection accuracy, particularly in niche applications where annotations are scarce and costly to obtain. Furthermore, the proposed approach proves to be effective even with relatively small amounts of data, and scaling it up provides high potential for further enhancements.

ORIC: Benchmarking Object Recognition in Incongruous Context for Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made significant strides in image caption, visual question answering, and robotics by integrating visual and textual information. However, they remain prone to errors in incongruous contexts, where objects appear unexpectedly or are absent when contextually expected. This leads to two key recognition failures: object misidentification and hallucination. To systematically examine this issue, we introduce the Object Recognition in Incongruous Context Benchmark (ORIC), a novel benchmark that evaluates LVLMs in scenarios where object-context relationships deviate from expectations. ORIC employs two key strategies: (1) LLM-guided sampling, which identifies objects that are present but contextually incongruous, and (2) CLIP-guided sampling, which detects plausible yet nonexistent objects that are likely to be hallucinated, thereby creating an incongruous context. Evaluating 18 LVLMs and two open-vocabulary detection models, our results reveal significant recognition gaps, underscoring the challenges posed by contextual incongruity. This work provides critical insights into LVLMs' limitations and encourages further research on context-aware object recognition.

Modeling the Multivariate Relationship with Contextualized Representations for Effective Human-Object Interaction Detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection aims to simultaneously localize human-object pairs and recognize their interactions. While recent two-stage approaches have made significant progress, they still face challenges due to incomplete context modeling. In this work, we introduce a Contextualized Representation Learning Network that integrates both affordance-guided reasoning and contextual prompts with visual cues to better capture complex interactions. We enhance the conventional HOI detection framework by expanding it beyond simple human-object pairs to include multivariate relationships involving auxiliary entities like tools. Specifically, we explicitly model the functional role (affordance) of these auxiliary objects through triplet structures <human, tool, object>. This enables our model to identify tool-dependent interactions such as 'filling'. Furthermore, the learnable prompt is enriched with instance categories and subsequently integrated with contextual visual features using an attention mechanism. This process aligns language with image content at both global and regional levels. These contextualized representations equip the model with enriched relational cues for more reliable reasoning over complex, context-dependent interactions. Our proposed method demonstrates superior performance on both the HICO-Det and V-COCO datasets in most scenarios. Codes will be released upon acceptance.

SegDINO3D: 3D Instance Segmentation Empowered by Both Image-Level and Object-Level 2D Features

In this paper, we present SegDINO3D, a novel Transformer encoder-decoder framework for 3D instance segmentation. As 3D training data is generally not as sufficient as 2D training images, SegDINO3D is designed to fully leverage 2D representation from a pre-trained 2D detection model, including both image-level and object-level features, for improving 3D representation. SegDINO3D takes both a point cloud and its associated 2D images as input. In the encoder stage, it first enriches each 3D point by retrieving 2D image features from its corresponding image views and then leverages a 3D encoder for 3D context fusion. In the decoder stage, it formulates 3D object queries as 3D anchor boxes and performs cross-attention from 3D queries to 2D object queries obtained from 2D images using the 2D detection model. These 2D object queries serve as a compact object-level representation of 2D images, effectively avoiding the challenge of keeping thousands of image feature maps in the memory while faithfully preserving the knowledge of the pre-trained 2D model. The introducing of 3D box queries also enables the model to modulate cross-attention using the predicted boxes for more precise querying. SegDINO3D achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the ScanNetV2 and ScanNet200 3D instance segmentation benchmarks. Notably, on the challenging ScanNet200 dataset, SegDINO3D significantly outperforms prior methods by +8.7 and +6.8 mAP on the validation and hidden test sets, respectively, demonstrating its superiority.

An Exploratory Study on Abstract Images and Visual Representations Learned from Them

Imagine living in a world composed solely of primitive shapes, could you still recognise familiar objects? Recent studies have shown that abstract images-constructed by primitive shapes-can indeed convey visual semantic information to deep learning models. However, representations obtained from such images often fall short compared to those derived from traditional raster images. In this paper, we study the reasons behind this performance gap and investigate how much high-level semantic content can be captured at different abstraction levels. To this end, we introduce the Hierarchical Abstraction Image Dataset (HAID), a novel data collection that comprises abstract images generated from normal raster images at multiple levels of abstraction. We then train and evaluate conventional vision systems on HAID across various tasks including classification, segmentation, and object detection, providing a comprehensive study between rasterised and abstract image representations. We also discuss if the abstract image can be considered as a potentially effective format for conveying visual semantic information and contributing to vision tasks.

Personalization on a Budget: Minimally-Labeled Continual Learning for Resource-Efficient Seizure Detection

Objective: Epilepsy, a prevalent neurological disease, demands careful diagnosis and continuous care. Seizure detection remains challenging, as current clinical practice relies on expert analysis of electroencephalography, which is a time-consuming process and requires specialized knowledge. Addressing this challenge, this paper explores automated epileptic seizure detection using deep learning, focusing on personalized continual learning models that adapt to each patient's unique electroencephalography signal features, which evolve over time. Methods: In this context, our approach addresses the challenge of integrating new data into existing models without catastrophic forgetting, a common issue in static deep learning models. We propose EpiSMART, a continual learning framework for seizure detection that uses a size-constrained replay buffer and an informed sample selection strategy to incrementally adapt to patient-specific electroencephalography signals. By selectively retaining high-entropy and seizure-predicted samples, our method preserves critical past information while maintaining high performance with minimal memory and computational requirements. Results: Validation on the CHB-MIT dataset, shows that EpiSMART achieves a 21% improvement in the F1 score over a trained baseline without updates in all other patients. On average, EpiSMART requires only 6.46 minutes of labeled data and 6.28 updates per day, making it suitable for real-time deployment in wearable systems. Conclusion:EpiSMART enables robust and personalized seizure detection under realistic and resource-constrained conditions by effectively integrating new data into existing models without degrading past knowledge. Significance: This framework advances automated seizure detection by providing a continual learning approach that supports patient-specific adaptation and practical deployment in wearable healthcare systems.

Explicit Multimodal Graph Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Detection

Transformer-based methods have recently become the prevailing approach for Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection. However, the Transformer architecture does not explicitly model the relational structures inherent in HOI detection, which impedes the recognition of interactions. In contrast, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are inherently better suited for this task, as they explicitly model the relationships between human-object pairs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{G}raph \textbf{N}etwork \textbf{M}odeling (MGNM) that leverages GNN-based relational structures to enhance HOI detection. Specifically, we design a multimodal graph network framework that explicitly models the HOI task in a four-stage graph structure. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-level feature interaction mechanism within our graph network. This mechanism leverages multi-level vision and language features to enhance information propagation across human-object pairs. Consequently, our proposed MGNM achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used benchmarks: HICO-DET and V-COCO. Moreover, when integrated with a more advanced object detector, our method demonstrates a significant performance gain and maintains an effective balance between rare and non-rare classes.

RAVE: Retrieval and Scoring Aware Verifiable Claim Detection

The rapid spread of misinformation on social media underscores the need for scalable fact-checking tools. A key step is claim detection, which identifies statements that can be objectively verified. Prior approaches often rely on linguistic cues or claim check-worthiness, but these struggle with vague political discourse and diverse formats such as tweets. We present RAVE (Retrieval and Scoring Aware Verifiable Claim Detection), a framework that combines evidence retrieval with structured signals of relevance and source credibility. Experiments on CT22-test and PoliClaim-test show that RAVE consistently outperforms text-only and retrieval-based baselines in both accuracy and F1.

Cumulative Consensus Score: Label-Free and Model-Agnostic Evaluation of Object Detectors in Deployment

Evaluating object detection models in deployment is challenging because ground-truth annotations are rarely available. We introduce the Cumulative Consensus Score (CCS), a label-free metric that enables continuous monitoring and comparison of detectors in real-world settings. CCS applies test-time data augmentation to each image, collects predicted bounding boxes across augmented views, and computes overlaps using Intersection over Union. Maximum overlaps are normalized and averaged across augmentation pairs, yielding a measure of spatial consistency that serves as a proxy for reliability without annotations. In controlled experiments on Open Images and KITTI, CCS achieved over 90% congruence with F1-score, Probabilistic Detection Quality, and Optimal Correction Cost. The method is model-agnostic, working across single-stage and two-stage detectors, and operates at the case level to highlight under-performing scenarios. Altogether, CCS provides a robust foundation for DevOps-style monitoring of object detectors.