This paper presents a comprehensive framework for robot manipulation failure analysis that includes binary failure detection, failure categorization, explanation generation, and the additional capability of failure onset localization, which aims to identify the earliest moment at which a robot execution deviates from a valid task-completion trajectory and is ultimately followed by task failure. To address these tasks, we propose ProTracer, a training-free framework that leverages existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) together with proprioceptive signals for failure analysis. Our method uses proprioceptive dynamics to identify temporally informative action boundaries and converts richer robot-state signals into structured natural-language descriptions that can be jointly analyzed together with visual observations by the VLM. This design combines the temporal precision of proprioceptive signals with the multimodal reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs without requiring additional model training. We further introduce FailTime, a benchmark with synchronized visual and proprioceptive observations for evaluating conventional failure diagnosis tasks as well as failure onset localization. Experiments demonstrate that ProTracer achieves strong performance across both conventional failure diagnosis tasks and the newly introduced failure onset localization task, highlighting the importance of proprioceptive reasoning for fine-grained temporal failure analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21369
Effective evaluation of zero-day jamming detectors requires robust adversarial models. However, existing attack models often assume prior knowledge of the target receiver, limiting their utility as evaluation benchmarks. On the detection side, existing detectors fail to capture the global temporal-spectral structure of jamming behavior and cannot differentiate zero-day strategies as they emerge. This paper addresses these limitations through a two-pronged framework. First, an online detection framework is introduced that combines a graph attention network (GAT) for temporal-spectral representation learning with Dirichlet process (DP)-means clustering. This framework jointly classifies known and discovers zero-day strategies within a unified learning objective. Second, an inference-driven reinforcement learning (RL) jammer is proposed as an adversarial benchmark. The jammer treats the target receiver as a black-box, infers the detector state via hypothesis testing, and optimizes the trade-off between attack impact and stealth. Simulation results show that the proposed RL jammer outperforms benchmarks, achieving 33% higher attack efficacy and 67% higher stealth. The proposed detection framework against the proposed RL jammer is shown to achieve 20% higher detection accuracy than the benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21334
Event cameras detect per-pixel brightness changes asynchronously on microsecond timescales, with high dynamic range and low power draw. These are desirable properties for robots that move fast or work in difficult lighting conditions. However, integrating an event camera into a real-world robotic pipeline still requires substantial effort: plug-and-play drivers do not exist, event streams are recorded in a variety of incompatible file formats, and most projects rely on custom research-grade code. Here, we present EventCV, an open-source and extensible Rust library with OpenCV-style Python bindings that lowers the entry barrier to working with event cameras. EventCV provides a wide range of features: denoising filters and geometric transforms, augmentations, corner detection and unsupervised feature learning, contrast-maximization motion estimation, a video-to-events simulator, and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) inference for deployment in robotic stacks. EventCV integrates the Neuromorphic Drivers package, allowing an event camera stream to be processed directly in real time. No existing toolkit covers this range of operations in one package, and EventCV builds representations and decodes files 1.1x to 3.7x faster than the currently available libraries. We deploy EventCV on a Jetson Orin AGX and present three robotics case studies spanning object detection, on-device model inference, and localization. Project webpage: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21330
Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong scene understanding and semantic judgment across diverse tasks, but their appropriate role in cooperative perception remains unclear. Directly asking a VLM to regress 3D detections is unreliable and computationally expensive, whereas using it to select the output of a single source discards useful information from other agents. We introduce VeriFuse, a bounded arbitration framework for vehicle-infrastructure cooperative 3D detection. Each agent first produces detections independently. Around each vehicle and roadside proposal, VeriFuse generates source-conditioned geometric candidates and combines the original detections, their perturbations, and cross-source hypotheses into a unified candidate pool. A frozen VLM then chooses among three admissible actions: SELECT an adequate candidate; REFINE an existing anchor when an object is supported but all candidates are geometrically inadequate; or REJECT an unsupported infrastructure-only proposal. Experiments on the DAIR-V2X dataset show that VeriFuse achieves 0.494/0.357 cooperative 3D AP50/AP70 and limits the relative vehicle-side BEV AP50 drop under a 300 ms delay to 1.7%. Overall, VeriFuse assigns the VLM a clear and constrained role in cooperative perception: semantic reasoning resolves ambiguity among cross-agent hypotheses, while deterministic constraints determine the final 3D geometry.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21323
Reliable plant-level information from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery is important for automated crop monitoring. However, in dense crop canopies, adjacent plants frequently overlap and are detected as a single object, reducing the reliability of plant-level measurements. This study presents a geometry-aware post-detection framework for resolving overlapping plant instances using standard RGB UAV imagery. The framework combines object detection with geometric clustering of plant components. Leaves or branches detected within each bush-level region are represented using two complementary geometric features: component centroids and radial intersection points (RIPs) derived from detected plant structures. K-means and Gaussian mixture models determine whether a detected region contains a single plant or two overlapping plants. Density filtering suppresses spurious radial intersections, and a post-pipeline ensemble combines spatial and directional geometric information. The framework was evaluated using UAV imagery of eggplant and tomato crops under field conditions. Centroid-based clustering achieved an F1-score of 0.89 for eggplant, while the combined centroid-RIP approach achieved the best tomato performance, with an accuracy of 0.80, precision of 1.00, and F1-score of 0.75 using K-means. Density filtering substantially improved RIP-based clustering for tomato. The proposed approach provides a lightweight, modular engineering solution that can be integrated with existing RGB UAV monitoring pipelines without additional depth sensors, pixel-level segmentation, three-dimensional reconstruction, or retraining of the primary bush detector. The results demonstrate that geometric reasoning applied to existing detector outputs can complement deep-learning-based object detection and improve plant-level interpretation in dense agricultural canopies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21304
Vision-language-action (VLA) models map visual observations and natural-language instructions to robotic actions, but distribution shifts can compromise their reliability. Because these models may still succeed under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions, detecting OOD inputs alone is insufficient to predict execution failure. In this paper, we introduce VLA-Scope, a two-stage framework that combines input-shift characterization with execution history to predict failure during OOD rollouts. The first stage uses pooled image and language representations to detect OOD inputs and classify their shift categories. For inputs flagged as OOD, the second stage combines the predicted category, action-prefix features, and execution progress features. A logistic regression model shared across shift categories updates failure risk as execution proceeds. We evaluate the framework with OpenVLA on ten LIBERO-Spatial tasks using leave-one-group-out cross-validation. OOD detection achieves a ROC-AUC of 0.9454, and shift classification achieves 91% accuracy. Evaluated independently of the OOD gate on all 1,400 OOD rollouts, the failure predictor achieves a ROC-AUC of 0.8497 after 60 executed actions, compared with 0.7906 without execution progress features. It also achieves a higher ROC-AUC than the evaluated ActProbe and SAFE-MLP baselines. These results suggest that combining action features with temporally aggregated execution step representations improves failure prediction under input shifts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21246
Procedural anomaly detection in bimanual assembly requires judging each hand action against the execution so far. A corrective action may look unusual in isolation, while a visually plausible action can violate the order of the procedure. We present HACT, a transition model over predicted per-hand events. A role-preserving history keeps the concurrent responsibilities of both hands, and a marked temporal point process assigns each observed transition a semantic and temporal surprisal. A supervised evidence head and a two-state filter convert these surprisals into per-hand anomaly posteriors. A recovery-aware protocol on predicted events and participant-disjoint folds reports the recovery false-positive rate at an operating point selected on validation participants. On two bimanual power-tool procedures HACT has the highest AUPRC and F1 among the compared methods and the fewest recovery alarms. Applied without retraining to a different assembly order of the same product, it retains the highest AUPRC and F1. The source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21207
Audio large language models (AudioLLMs) operate reactively, responding only when queried. We introduce proactive audio assistance, where an AudioLLM monitors an audio stream and autonomously decides when to alert the user from a single natural-language intent, motivated by wearable applications for Deaf and Hard of Hearing users. We propose Interrupt and Silent Modeling (ISM), a model-agnostic paradigm that embeds proactive decisions into LLM decoding via two special tokens: \texttt{<interrupt>} and \texttt{<silent>}, capturing four states: onset detection, sustained-relevance triggering, irrelevance suppression, and de-duplication. Applied to Qwen2-Audio-7B, ISM achieves 99.6\% interrupt F1 and perfect de-duplication recall on ESC-50. On noisy Epic-Sounds kitchen audio, ISM achieves the highest interrupt F1 without domain-specific training, the only method maintaining strong onset detection without over-triggering or over-suppression. Streaming evaluation confirms real-time viability with 3.5-second average latency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21183
SQL has been augmented with AI operators, enabling modern data analytics platforms to derive insights from both structured and unstructured data. We observe that while current Text-to-SQL systems can successfully generate these AI-augmented queries, reliably evaluating their correctness remains a critical open challenge. Current metrics, which rely on exact query results and deterministic execution, systematically fail against the flexible, non-deterministic outputs of AI operators. In this paper, we formalize these unique evaluation failure modes and introduce a Multilayered Evaluation Framework that decouples deterministic database logic from flexible AI semantics. We test our approach across both industry (BigQuery) and academic (ThalamusDB) systems. We demonstrate that traditional Execution Accuracy severely penalizes valid queries, achieving as low as a 25% detection rate for correct translations. Furthermore, even a state-of-the-art LLM-based autorater falsely rejects 32% of accurate queries due to the complexity of judging both relational and AI components simultaneously. By validating the standard relational logic and the AI operations separately, our framework achieves state-of-the-art overall accuracy across both platforms (up to 97.2%), proposing a reliable standard for benchmarking AI-powered SQL generators.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21133
The dominant method of processing sonar data is using image-based representations, requiring the preprocessing of image data on autonomous systems. We propose an alternative data processing method for remote sensing applications via the use of data in Comma-Seperated Value format. Experimentation on our alternative approach shows a reduction of processing time by 91.18%, an improvement in accurate object detection by Machine Learning, and an increase in SNR (Signal-to-noise ratio), PSNR (Peak signal-to-noise ratio), and other evaluation metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21123
In this work, we examine the topology of information flow patterns within attention graphs to effectively distinguish hallucinated from non-hallucinated responses. We analyze the Forman-Ricci curvature to identify structural patterns indicating information bottlenecks in attention graphs. We then introduce a method that captures both semi-local and global information-flow characteristics of attention heads associated with hallucinated responses. We evaluate our approach extensively across several LLMs and established benchmarks. Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed single-pass approach provides consistent improvements over existing attention-based and multi-response baselines across two hallucination-detection benchmarks, while achieving competitive performance across diverse LLM architectures. Further analysis reveals that impaired context sharing among tokens during causal generation is strongly associated with hallucination occurrences in LLMs. In particular, hallucinated responses are consistently characterized by an over-reliance on self-attention, diffused context retrieval from earlier tokens, or information over-squashing, especially in the final transformer layer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21096
Choreographed aquatic performances require small autonomous surface vehicles to track precise paths under per-thruster force and rate limits, including after thruster failures. We report a deployed system in which trajectory tracking, thrust allocation, and the per-thruster force and rate limits are resolved in a single quadratic program over the per-thruster commands, with fault reconfiguration entering through one binary flag per thruster from an external detector. The system has driven a fleet in live performances on Lake Zürich and at the Time Space Existence 2025 exhibition in Venice. The field campaign measures 1.6 cm root mean square position error in a 10-minute hold and 4.3 cm over a 10 m square at 0.6 m/s. At 0.5 m/s, losing the front thruster increases the error to 11.6 cm, while losing the starboard-side thruster increases it to 11.5 cm. Losing two thrusters simultaneously leaves the craft tracking a 0.4 m/s square with a root mean square position error of 1.25 m. Compared to our own cascaded baseline, the unified formulation tracks the nominal square to the same few centimeters and holds station more tightly with roughly half the thruster force. The architectures separate after a thruster failure, where the unified controller stays within 24 cm of the reference path while the cascade leaves it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21046
The rapid proliferation of unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has created a growing need for robust, jamming-resistant counter-UAV systems for perimeter defense. This paper presents \textbf{SCOUT} (Spatial Computation for Optimized UAV Tracking), a ROS-integrated onboard perception and control framework for real-time aerial defense against incoming UAVs. SCOUT performs visual detection, target association, track filtering, and control command generation directly onboard the defender UAV, without relying on external sensing infrastructure or ground-station computation. To provide stable control inputs, the perception pipeline combines TensorRT-accelerated drone detection with ByteTrack-based association and a lightweight track-retention state machine. The state machine rejects abrupt target jumps and maintains short-term target continuity during temporary detection degradation, reducing unstable control responses caused by false detections or target switching. We evaluate the proposed architecture through an integrated hardware deployment executing a planar ``goalkeeping'' interception strategy. In this setting, the defender UAV tracks the incoming target and adjusts its motion to maintain a blocking configuration near the protected boundary. Real-world flight results show that SCOUT maintains valid target detections for 92.2\% of frames while operating at real-time onboard detection rates, demonstrating the feasibility of visual tracking and closed-loop control for UAV perimeter defense. A video demonstration of the end-to-end perimeter defense operation is available online. this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21005
Spinning frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars have been gaining popularity in autonomous vehicle perception on account of their robustness to adverse weather conditions and 360° field of view. Recently, scanning radars have also been shown capable of generating per-azimuth Doppler velocity. In this paper, we investigate whether these Doppler velocity measurements improve spinning radar vehicle detection and tracking performance. For detection, we estimate the ego motion and use it to undo the Doppler range distortion of the radar image before passing it to a network. For tracking, we propose a new way to estimate a per-vehicle velocity and use it as a prior for the tracker's motion model. Since Doppler-enabled spinning radar data is not available in any dataset with ground-truth dynamic object labels, our first contribution is an automatic labelling pipeline that uses an ensemble of fine-tuned off-the-shelf lidar detectors to label all 643 km of the Boreas Road Trip dataset. We then transfer detections to radar, and use over 250 km of vehicle-dense sequences as ground-truth training data. By training and evaluating two state-of-the-art detectors, we show that Doppler undistortion can improve detection accuracy by up to $2.37$ points on mean average precision. Furthermore, we show that the Doppler velocity prior can improve tracking accuracy by $13.68$ points on multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA) versus the zero-velocity initialization baseline, while achieving $99.7\%$ of the MOTA obtained using ground-truth velocities as the prior.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21000
Close-proximity pipeline inspection is challenging for standard drones due to high hovering power consumption, airflow sensitivity, and propeller wash interference with gas sensing. To address this, we present AeRove, a compact bimodal aerial-terrestrial robot. AeRove uses its propeller guards as wheels to roll along pipes and employs a spring-loaded bistable mechanism to reconfigure between ground and flight modes in 200 ms without continuous actuator power to maintain either state. The converging propeller-guard geometry also improves measured thrust efficiency. By reserving flight for obstacle hopping and using ground rolling for continuous traversal, current draw is reduced 14x compared to continuous flight (0.7 A vs. 10 A), extending estimated travel distance from 144 m to 2057 m. Autonomous trials on a 51 cm diameter steel pipe demonstrated navigation on straight and curved sections, obstacle jumping, and leak detection of simulated inspection markers. Separate CO2 sensing experiments evaluated gas-detection performance under perched and aerial operating conditions. Perched inspection produced a substantially larger concentration response than hovering under the tested conditions. During flight, an underbody propeller-intake configuration produced a faster and stronger gas-detection response than an extended probe by leveraging propeller-induced airflow. Code and designs are released under the CC-BY license.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20965
Hostile rhetoric toward social groups can normalize exclusion and justify mistreatment, as well as contribute to rising polarization and political violence. Efforts to moderate hostile rhetoric in online speech draw on foundational theories in social and moral psychology, and political science. However, these theories were developed largely in parallel, often propose different and sometimes conflicting accounts of how hostility develops, and have rarely been tested against each other in real discourse. The result is a fragmented understanding of the rhetorical mechanisms of hostility, without a clear sense of how they appear, and relate to each other, in real-world discourse. Using 2.86 million posts from TikTok, Truth Social, and Twitter/X during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we model the mechanisms of six foundational theories of intergroup hostility -- boundary construction, threat construction, scapegoating, negative evaluation, dehumanization, and action orientation -- within a common empirical framework to recover the broader organization of intergroup hostility rhetoric. Structurally, we find that boundary construction and threat construction anchor the system; temporally, we find that these mechanisms tend to follow a regular ordering: boundary construction, derogation, and action orientation tend to appear early; dehumanization and threat construction later; scapegoating latest. Mapping how these theoretical frameworks actually manifest in discourse bridges longstanding divisions across social science traditions and presents computational social science with a clearer empirical foundation for modeling intergroup hostility rhetoric beyond single-label detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20808
Safety evaluations for large language models rely on surface-form classifiers that report declining harm scores across model generations. We provide evidence that this methodology is systematically incomplete: explicit discriminatory content is transformed rather than removed. We call this \emph{harm laundering}. Analysing 450,000 gender-directed completions across 15 models spanning GPT-2 through to GPT-5 (OpenAI GPT lineage; three demographic conditions), we show that sexual violence clusters prevalent in GPT-2 women-directed output disappear by GPT-4, while men-directed completions gain positive representational territory (caregiving, emotional range, ally identity) that women-directed completions do not. The pattern is most visible at GPT-5: Topic~5 (1,997~documents) frames breast cancer as a men's rights debate, while zero equivalent clusters appear in women-directed output. Three independent classifiers score this content as non-toxic. Sentiment scores invert at GPT-4: early models demean women; later models over-correct. Topic diversity in women-directed completions falls 36\% relative to men at the GPT-4 alignment boundary (W/M~$= 0.58$, from $0.91$ at GPT-2). REGARD representational harm disparity correlates with release date ($\rho = +0.55$, $p = .034$) while Detoxify does not ($\rho = -0.23$, $p = .42$): toxicity scores fall as representational harm grows. We formalise harm laundering as a three-criteria test and provide a three-stage detection protocol applicable to any generative model. Within the OpenAI GPT lineage, toxicity score reduction is not a sufficient proxy for harm reduction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20779
Scalable machine learning in challenging underwater environments is strongly limited by the lack of labeled real-world training data. This data is often expensive and laborious to gather, making large-scale real-world data challenging to gather and curate. However, simulated data can help close the gap, enabling many learning-based tasks for underwater perception. In this work, we extend OceanSim, an IsaacSim-based underwater perception simulator, with a Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) pipeline for training models to be used in underwater scenarios. The proposed pipeline enables users to generate large, automatically labeled, photorealistic datasets with configurable scene appearance, structure, and sensor settings. We evaluate the pipeline on a real-world sea urchin detection task and study how different forms of synthetic scene variation affect sim-to-real performance. Based on these experiments, we discuss findings on our results, main limitations of the current pipeline and identify future directions for improving underwater rendering fidelity, scene diversity, and the evaluation of sim-to-real generalization. The open-source code can be found at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20680
Earth surface anomalies, driven by escalating climate change, and expanding human activities, are increasing in both frequency and diversity, yet their limited historical data and unpredictability make them fundamentally different from conventional remote sensing targets. Existing methods address specific anomaly categories or stop at localization, leaving a gap between detection and actionable information. Here we present ESIA, an Earth Surface Immune System whose architecture is constrained by three principles from the biological immune system, refined over millions of years against equally diverse and uncertain threats. A non-specific innate immune stage treats anomalies as unobserved changes in time-series satellite imagery, generating binary localization maps at 14.51 km2/s without assuming any anomaly category, surpassing the strongest general baseline by 37% in F1. A specific adaptive immune stage applies negative selection to filter text prompts and matches surviving prompts with localized image patches through a multi-modal foundation model, enabling open-vocabulary recognition of unknown anomaly attributes including category, affected area, and damage severity, with recognition F1 exceeding 80%. A mutation mechanism tunes minimal embeddings at test time, adapting to each scene in 3.26s using a single reference image pair. We validate ESIA on a global-scale dataset covering 19,801.60 km2 across six anomaly categories, comparing against 22 models, and further apply it to quantify degraded farmland in the Dnipro Delta following the Kakhovka Dam collapse and assess burn severity from 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. This unprecedented flexibility in handling unknown anomalies opens new avenues for real-time disaster response and environmental surveillance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20662
An assistant watching egocentric video should notice a mistake from past frames alone, before the next step begins, and keep working once the person recovers. A mistake changes the state of the work, so every later step has to be read against what was done rather than against the plan. The first-mistake protocol that current online methods report on cuts each recording at its first mistake, so a fixed-time rule that never looks at the video is right on every case. We evaluate on complete trials, where mistakes and recoveries arise naturally, under a validation false-alarm budget and against controls that use timing alone. PROVIA keeps two records apart: a factual state, a learned summary of the steps each actor performed, mistakes included, and the accepted progress, an exact posterior over the state of an automaton induced from correct demonstrations by Bayesian state merging and over the execution status of each actor. Procedure-state transitions occur only in the correct-status branch; the mistake and correction branches retain the source state. A sequential test turns the per-frame mistake probability into alarms. With one filter and one optimization rule, PROVIA ranks mistakes best among the evaluated controlled baselines on CaptainCook4D, IndustReal, HoloAssist and IMPACT-ego. At a validation budget of 0.1 false alarms per minute it recalls .154 against .128 on CaptainCook4D and .034 against .015 on HoloAssist, where it leads at every budget. The pipeline runs at 58-70 frames per second. The source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20638