FRED: The Florence RGB-Event Drone Dataset

Small, fast, and lightweight drones present significant challenges for traditional RGB cameras due to their limitations in capturing fast-moving objects, especially under challenging lighting conditions. Event cameras offer an ideal solution, providing high temporal definition and dynamic range, yet existing benchmarks often lack fine temporal resolution or drone-specific motion patterns, hindering progress in these areas. This paper introduces the Florence RGB-Event Drone dataset (FRED), a novel multimodal dataset specifically designed for drone detection, tracking, and trajectory forecasting, combining RGB video and event streams. FRED features more than 7 hours of densely annotated drone trajectories, using 5 different drone models and including challenging scenarios such as rain and adverse lighting conditions. We provide detailed evaluation protocols and standard metrics for each task, facilitating reproducible benchmarking. The authors hope FRED will advance research in high-speed drone perception and multimodal spatiotemporal understanding.

An AI-Based Public Health Data Monitoring System

Public health experts need scalable approaches to monitor large volumes of health data (e.g., cases, hospitalizations, deaths) for outbreaks or data quality issues. Traditional alert-based monitoring systems struggle with modern public health data monitoring systems for several reasons, including that alerting thresholds need to be constantly reset and the data volumes may cause application lag. Instead, we propose a ranking-based monitoring paradigm that leverages new AI anomaly detection methods. Through a multi-year interdisciplinary collaboration, the resulting system has been deployed at a national organization to monitor up to 5,000,000 data points daily. A three-month longitudinal deployed evaluation revealed a significant improvement in monitoring objectives, with a 54x increase in reviewer speed efficiency compared to traditional alert-based methods. This work highlights the potential of human-centered AI to transform public health decision-making.

Training-free zero-shot 3D symmetry detection with visual features back-projected to geometry

We present a simple yet effective training-free approach for zero-shot 3D symmetry detection that leverages visual features from foundation vision models such as DINOv2. Our method extracts features from rendered views of 3D objects and backprojects them onto the original geometry. We demonstrate the symmetric invariance of these features and use them to identify reflection-symmetry planes through a proposed algorithm. Experiments on a subset of ShapeNet demonstrate that our approach outperforms both traditional geometric methods and learning-based approaches without requiring any training data. Our work demonstrates how foundation vision models can help in solving complex 3D geometric problems such as symmetry detection.

Bridging 3D Anomaly Localization and Repair via High-Quality Continuous Geometric Representation

3D point cloud anomaly detection is essential for robust vision systems but is challenged by pose variations and complex geometric anomalies. Existing patch-based methods often suffer from geometric fidelity issues due to discrete voxelization or projection-based representations, limiting fine-grained anomaly localization. We introduce Pose-Aware Signed Distance Field (PASDF), a novel framework that integrates 3D anomaly detection and repair by learning a continuous, pose-invariant shape representation. PASDF leverages a Pose Alignment Module for canonicalization and a SDF Network to dynamically incorporate pose, enabling implicit learning of high-fidelity anomaly repair templates from the continuous SDF. This facilitates precise pixel-level anomaly localization through an Anomaly-Aware Scoring Module. Crucially, the continuous 3D representation in PASDF extends beyond detection, facilitating in-situ anomaly repair. Experiments on Real3D-AD and Anomaly-ShapeNet demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving high object-level AUROC scores of 80.2% and 90.0%, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of continuous geometric representations in advancing 3D anomaly detection and facilitating practical anomaly region repair. The code is available at https://github.com/ZZZBBBZZZ/PASDF to support further research.

Watermarking Degrades Alignment in Language Models: Analysis and Mitigation

Watermarking techniques for large language models (LLMs) can significantly impact output quality, yet their effects on truthfulness, safety, and helpfulness remain critically underexamined. This paper presents a systematic analysis of how two popular watermarking approaches-Gumbel and KGW-affect these core alignment properties across four aligned LLMs. Our experiments reveal two distinct degradation patterns: guard attenuation, where enhanced helpfulness undermines model safety, and guard amplification, where excessive caution reduces model helpfulness. These patterns emerge from watermark-induced shifts in token distribution, surfacing the fundamental tension that exists between alignment objectives. To mitigate these degradations, we propose Alignment Resampling (AR), an inference-time sampling method that uses an external reward model to restore alignment. We establish a theoretical lower bound on the improvement in expected reward score as the sample size is increased and empirically demonstrate that sampling just 2-4 watermarked generations effectively recovers or surpasses baseline (unwatermarked) alignment scores. To overcome the limited response diversity of standard Gumbel watermarking, our modified implementation sacrifices strict distortion-freeness while maintaining robust detectability, ensuring compatibility with AR. Experimental results confirm that AR successfully recovers baseline alignment in both watermarking approaches, while maintaining strong watermark detectability. This work reveals the critical balance between watermark strength and model alignment, providing a simple inference-time solution to responsibly deploy watermarked LLMs in practice.

SR3D: Unleashing Single-view 3D Reconstruction for Transparent and Specular Object Grasping

Recent advancements in 3D robotic manipulation have improved grasping of everyday objects, but transparent and specular materials remain challenging due to depth sensing limitations. While several 3D reconstruction and depth completion approaches address these challenges, they suffer from setup complexity or limited observation information utilization. To address this, leveraging the power of single view 3D object reconstruction approaches, we propose a training free framework SR3D that enables robotic grasping of transparent and specular objects from a single view observation. Specifically, given single view RGB and depth images, SR3D first uses the external visual models to generate 3D reconstructed object mesh based on RGB image. Then, the key idea is to determine the 3D object's pose and scale to accurately localize the reconstructed object back into its original depth corrupted 3D scene. Therefore, we propose view matching and keypoint matching mechanisms,which leverage both the 2D and 3D's inherent semantic and geometric information in the observation to determine the object's 3D state within the scene, thereby reconstructing an accurate 3D depth map for effective grasp detection. Experiments in both simulation and real world show the reconstruction effectiveness of SR3D.

System-integrated intrinsic static-dynamic pressure sensing enabled by charge excitation and 3D gradient engineering for autonomous robotic interaction

High-resolution pressure sensing that distinguishes static and dynamic inputs is vital for intelligent robotics but remains challenging for self-powered sensors. We present a self-powered intrinsic static-dynamic pressure sensor (iSD Sensor) that integrates charge excitation with a 3D gradient-engineered structure, achieving enhanced voltage outputs-over 25X for static and 15X for dynamic modes. The sensor exhibits multi-region sensitivities (up to 34.7 V/kPa static, 48.4 V/kPa dynamic), a low detection limit of 6.13 Pa, and rapid response/recovery times (83/43 ms). This design enables nuanced tactile perception and supports dual-mode robotic control: proportional actuation via static signals and fast triggering via dynamic inputs. Integrated into a wireless closed-loop system, the iSD Sensor enables precise functions such as finger bending, object grasping, and sign language output.

CLDTracker: A Comprehensive Language Description for Visual Tracking

VOT remains a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision due to dynamic appearance changes, occlusions, and background clutter. Traditional trackers, relying primarily on visual cues, often struggle in such complex scenarios. Recent advancements in VLMs have shown promise in semantic understanding for tasks like open-vocabulary detection and image captioning, suggesting their potential for VOT. However, the direct application of VLMs to VOT is hindered by critical limitations: the absence of a rich and comprehensive textual representation that semantically captures the target object's nuances, limiting the effective use of language information; inefficient fusion mechanisms that fail to optimally integrate visual and textual features, preventing a holistic understanding of the target; and a lack of temporal modeling of the target's evolving appearance in the language domain, leading to a disconnect between the initial description and the object's subsequent visual changes. To bridge these gaps and unlock the full potential of VLMs for VOT, we propose CLDTracker, a novel Comprehensive Language Description framework for robust visual Tracking. Our tracker introduces a dual-branch architecture consisting of a textual and a visual branch. In the textual branch, we construct a rich bag of textual descriptions derived by harnessing the powerful VLMs such as CLIP and GPT-4V, enriched with semantic and contextual cues to address the lack of rich textual representation. Experiments on six standard VOT benchmarks demonstrate that CLDTracker achieves SOTA performance, validating the effectiveness of leveraging robust and temporally-adaptive vision-language representations for tracking. Code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/HamadYA/CLDTracker

6D Pose Estimation on Point Cloud Data through Prior Knowledge Integration: A Case Study in Autonomous Disassembly

The accurate estimation of 6D pose remains a challenging task within the computer vision domain, even when utilizing 3D point cloud data. Conversely, in the manufacturing domain, instances arise where leveraging prior knowledge can yield advancements in this endeavor. This study focuses on the disassembly of starter motors to augment the engineering of product life cycles. A pivotal objective in this context involves the identification and 6D pose estimation of bolts affixed to the motors, facilitating automated disassembly within the manufacturing workflow. Complicating matters, the presence of occlusions and the limitations of single-view data acquisition, notably when motors are placed in a clamping system, obscure certain portions and render some bolts imperceptible. Consequently, the development of a comprehensive pipeline capable of acquiring complete bolt information is imperative to avoid oversight in bolt detection. In this paper, employing the task of bolt detection within the scope of our project as a pertinent use case, we introduce a meticulously devised pipeline. This multi-stage pipeline effectively captures the 6D information with regard to all bolts on the motor, thereby showcasing the effective utilization of prior knowledge in handling this challenging task. The proposed methodology not only contributes to the field of 6D pose estimation but also underscores the viability of integrating domain-specific insights to tackle complex problems in manufacturing and automation.

Progressive Class-level Distillation

In knowledge distillation (KD), logit distillation (LD) aims to transfer class-level knowledge from a more powerful teacher network to a small student model via accurate teacher-student alignment at the logits level. Since high-confidence object classes usually dominate the distillation process, low-probability classes which also contain discriminating information are downplayed in conventional methods, leading to insufficient knowledge transfer. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective LD method termed Progressive Class-level Distillation (PCD). In contrast to existing methods which perform all-class ensemble distillation, our PCD approach performs stage-wise distillation for step-by-step knowledge transfer. More specifically, we perform ranking on teacher-student logits difference for identifying distillation priority from scratch, and subsequently divide the entire LD process into multiple stages. Next, bidirectional stage-wise distillation incorporating fine-to-coarse progressive learning and reverse coarse-to-fine refinement is conducted, allowing comprehensive knowledge transfer via sufficient logits alignment within separate class groups in different distillation stages. Extension experiments on public benchmarking datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to state-of-the-arts for both classification and detection tasks.