Hateful memes spread abusive content through implicit interactions between images and text, posing serious threats to the safety of online communities. In recent years, multimodal large language models have been widely used for hateful meme detection and are increasingly adopted to generate explainable detection results. However, we find that existing explain-then-detect methods often couple explanation generation and label prediction within the same training process. This coupling causes interference between task objectives, leading to limited detection performance and even worse results than simple SFT baselines. To address these challenges, we propose ProKDA, a progressive knowledge-to-decision alignment method for explainable hateful meme detection. Inspired by the human annotation training process, ProKDA first uses an agentic background knowledge construction pipeline to obtain external knowledge related to meme understanding. It then adopts a three-stage training strategy that sequentially performs background knowledge learning, hatefulness detection learning, and hatefulness boundary alignment. Unlike prior explain-then-detect methods that jointly optimize both tasks, ProKDA focuses on a single training objective at each stage. This design reduces interference between the two tasks and progressively transforms background knowledge into robust detection decisions. Experiments on three public hateful meme benchmarks show that ProKDA achieves state-of-the-art detection performance and provides accurate, explainable, and evidence-supported decisions for hateful meme moderation. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19778
Recent innovations in deep learning have significantly enhanced the diagnosis of medical images, although they are based on the use of centralized data storage that pose severe threats to patient privacy and medical data security. To address this issue, this research proposes a Federated Learning (FL) model that is coupled with an optimized YOLOv8 network to detect the kidney stones on a computed tomography (CT) image and at the same time, protect privacy of the patients. The suggested system can help various medical organizations to jointly train a common model without exchanging the information about the patients. This is to ensure that data protection laws like GDPR and HIPAA are adhered to. The residual feature fusion and DropBlock regularization among other architectural improvements are also included in YOLOv8 to enhance detection robustness and minimize overfitting. Experimental analysis carried out on a distributed CT dataset demonstrated that the federated YOLOv8 model has a mAP at 50 of 0.733 and is able to keep the data confidential. Moreover, its lean design facilitates fast edge deployment and real-time inference across a clinical setting. Altogether, these findings indicate that Federated Learning is a safe and efficient solution to AI-assisted diagnosis in contemporary healthcare when combined with the use of sophisticated object detection models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19740
Automated visual analysis opens new avenues for behavior--based psychological measurement. Nevertheless, existing technological modules are typically scattered across task specific systems with heterogeneous interfaces and disparate deployment requirements. In this work, we present SeetaPsych v1.0, an open source, unified and extensible computer vision toolkit designed to extract psychologically relevant signals from facial images and/or face based videos. The current release encompasses four major core modules aiming at behavior--based physiological perception: unified face based emotion analysis (simultaneous facial expression recognition, facial action unit detection, and valence--arousal estimation), camera based heart rate estimation, screen point--of--gaze estimation, and scene gaze following. A suite of auxiliary preprocessing modules for human centric visual analysis is also included, comprising face detection, facial landmark detection, and head detection. These functionalities are encapsulated within a modular Pipeline/Runner architecture that automatically resolves attribute dependencies, constructs computation graphs, and support intermediate result sharing among modules. SeetaPsych provides standardized Python APIs to facilitate reproducible, large scale analyses, alongside an interactive WebUI for rapid, code--free method evaluation. Overall, SeetaPsych offers an integrated and accessible visual measurement platform for research in psychology, behavioral science, human computer interaction, and related fields.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19719
The rapid increase of deepfakes has raised significant concerns due to their spread on social media. Traditional multi-face forgery detectors crop and verify each face independently, ignoring background context and inter-face relationships, which often yields suboptimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we leverage instruction-based Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which can interpret entire images and follow complex textual instructions. We propose a simple yet effective single-stage multi-face forgery detector, called IMFD (Instruction-based Multi-face Forgery Detector), which is trained end-to-end to jointly localize faces and predict per-face forgery labels. Rather than treating face box prediction only as a joint objective, IMFD explicitly integrates predicted face bounding boxes into the instruction as visual cues that enhance instruction grounding and forgery detection. To support the training and evaluation of IMFD, we convert existing multi-face forgery datasets into an instruction-based format. Experimental results and analyses show that IMFD improves multi-face forgery detection by integrating face bounding boxes into the instruction, and consistently outperforms various state-of-the-art methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19693
This study developed and evaluated a deep-learning-based perception framework for selective robotic cotton picking. The dataset contained 1,008 annotated field images collected using three cameras under varying natural lighting and weather conditions. Object-detection models from the YOLOv8 through YOLOv13 families were evaluated using their default configurations, while segmentation performance was assessed using YOLOv8-seg, YOLOv11-seg, YOLOv12-seg, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), SAMv2.1, FastSAM, and Grounded-SAM with the Recognize Anything Model (RAM). Among the detection models, GELAN-s achieved the most favorable balance between mean average precision (mAP) and inference speed, obtaining an mAP of 86.1%, precision of 81.6%, recall of 76.6%, and an F1-score of 79.0%, with an average inference time of 42.3 ms per image. Among the direct segmentation models, YOLOv12-m-seg provided the most favorable balance between AP@0.5 and FPS, achieving a segmentation AP@0.5 of 83.7% with an inference time of 20.4 ms per image. In the detection-prompted segmentation approach, bounding-box prompts generated by GELAN-s improved the localization of cotton bolls for SAM and SAMv2.1, while SAMv2.1 Tiny consistently outperformed FastSAM and Grounded-SAM with RAM. In the area-based evaluation against manually annotated segmentation masks, YOLOv12-m-seg achieved an $R^2$ value of 0.966, compared with 0.860 for GELAN-s + SAMv2.1 Tiny. Field experiments conducted using a UR5e robotic manipulator, a custom end-effector, and a ZED2i stereo camera further validated the effectiveness of the YOLOv12-m-seg model for real-time cotton boll detection, segmentation, and selective picking under varying confidence levels. These results demonstrate that YOLOv12-m-seg provides an efficient perception model for robotic cotton harvesting and has strong potential for field deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19592
We propose PaRID (PaRallel Instruction Duplication), a software-directed soft error detection framework that requires only compile-time effort for multithreading parallel programs. PaRID addresses two key challenges: supporting parallel programs with mixed serial and parallel regions and minimizing performance overhead without relying on costly dynamic profiling. It combines parallel-aware code transformation with LLM-tuned performance modeling, guided by eight generalizable findings from an offline characterization study, to enable fast soft error detection in parallel applications. Evaluation on NPB benchmarks shows that PaRID reduces protection overhead from 162.79% to 59.84% on average and achieves up to 5x speedup while maintaining full error detection effectiveness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19531
Robots can recall prior failures without knowing whether recalled evidence remains valid, conflicts with current observations, or is sufficient to guide a decision. We present CoreSense, a robot-system integration architecture that combines traceable episodic evidence with a conflict-aware belief gate and bounded, auditable recommendations. The gate checks scope, provenance, time, contradiction, and support before it permits PROCEED, requests re-observation, abstains, or escalates. Evaluation follows three complementary layers without commanding a physical robot: offline public real-robot data, a frozen signal-level simulation, and a live cloud deployment path. On CableTrace-120 and BotFails-200, belief gating reduces protocol-defined unsafe proceeds from 20% and 40% to 0%. A disjointly calibrated raw-video policy also reaches 0% unsafe proceed, but overblocks every nominal episode. On public data, a ViFailback-BotFails visual detector reaches 0.778 AUROC yet remains all-blocking, whereas cycle-disjoint UR3 telemetry for protective stops yields 0% unsafe proceed, 36.1% overblocking, and 61.9% coverage; grip-loss transfer remains a negative result. Controlled physical corroboration yields 3.3%, 0%, and 42.0%, while conflict-aware fusion yields 4.7%, 0%, and 42.8%. Finally, 20/20 cloud recalls validate a CockroachDB Cloud-Amazon Bedrock deployment path. The evidence supports an auditable integration pattern, not autonomous recovery or certified safety.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19512
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become an effective approach for learning visual representations without manual annotations. Among SSL approaches, contrastive learning has been widely used for visual representation learning. However, existing contrastive SSL methods have focused primarily on image-level or pixel-level representation learning, while region-level representation learning remains less explored. We propose SPARC, a region-level contrastive learning framework that leverages superpixels to establish explicit correspondence between augmented image views. SPARC introduces a region contrastive branch that performs superpixel-based feature pooling and optimizes a region-level contrastive objective jointly with a global image-level objective. Under identical settings, SPARC consistently outperforms previous methods such as MoCo-v2 and DenseCL, achieving improvements of up to +9.79 mIoU for semantic segmentation and +4.88 AP for object detection. Ablation studies further demonstrate that region-level objectives produce the strongest performance. Thus, region-level contrastive learning is an effective approach for improving self-supervised visual pretraining for dense prediction tasks. Code repository can be accessed at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25067
The Mobile Unified Multimodal Understanding (MUMU) Challenge requires a single efficient model to jointly perform multi-concept image tagging, open-vocabulary object detection, and image captioning. We present Efficient Unified Multimodal Understanding (EUMU), the winning solution for the MUMU Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge. EUMU builds on a shared pretrained multimodal model, using its prompt-based capabilities for detection and captioning and training lightweight heads on shared visual features to predict quality, scene, and event tags. Rather than treating the three tasks independently, EUMU applies task-aware inference refinement by reusing task outputs as cross-task cues. For detection, caption cues help recover objects missed by the initial detection. For captioning, detection cues help refine the caption to better reflect the detected objects. For tagging, image statistics refine quality predictions, while caption and detection cues refine scene and event predictions. This design unifies all three tasks within a single model while satisfying the challenge's resource constraints. EUMU contains 239.169M parameters, requires 23.947 GFLOPs, uses 4.5 GB of peak inference memory, and achieves a final challenge score of 17.3409. Code and models are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19451
Fine-grained evaluation of glomerular pathology must distinguish normal glomeruli from abnormalities such as global and segmental glomerulosclerosis, obsolescent, ischemic, solidified, disappearing, and atubular glomeruli. Supervised classification requires labeled examples of every category, which is impractical when subtypes are rare or absent from the training cohort. One-class anomaly detection offers an alternative by modeling normal data and scoring deviations, allowing previously unseen abnormalities to be detected. We use the frozen residual U-Net backbone of Omni-Seg, pretrained to segment structurally normal renal primitives without abnormal-subtype labels. We propose NoRDeC (Normal-Reference Detection and Characterization), a framework combining Mahalanobis normal-reference scoring with layer-wise representation analysis to determine whether and where glomerular pathology is encoded, how spatial aggregation affects detection, and whether abnormalities alter inter-layer relationships differently. Using glomerular images from two institutions, we evaluate backbone layers and aggregation strategies, compare NoRDeC with PaDiM and PatchCore, and analyze representations using centered kernel alignment (CKA). Layer 4 with Center-70 aggregation achieved a pooled AUROC of $0.926\pm0.013$. NoRDeC achieved the highest AUROC in six of seven abnormality categories and in the pooled analysis, while CKA suggested subtype-dependent changes in inter-layer relationships not captured by anomaly scores alone. The normal-reference model is fitted using only normal glomeruli; abnormality labels are used for configuration selection, evaluation, and grouping in the representation analysis. These results show that a frozen renal feature extractor can support both detection and representation-level characterization of glomerular abnormalities without using abnormal examples to fit the detector.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19444
Burnout is a chronic occupational syndrome, and open source is close to a worst case for it: maintainers absorb unbounded demand with no manager to reallocate work and no organization to notice decline. The cost is not only personal. Burnout precedes withdrawal, and in projects sustained by a handful of maintainers, one departure can break infrastructure that thousands of downstream systems depend on. Yet the field has no way to see it coming: self-report inventories, the only existing measure, miss exactly the contributors most in need of detection and cannot be applied retroactively, so the field cannot even ask how common burnout is or what helps. We present BurnRiSc, a framework that operationalizes the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory's two dimensions, exhaustion and disengagement, as 14 behavioral and linguistic signals computed from GitHub activity and scored against each contributor's own history. The signals aggregate into two weighted dimension scores, with weights learned from labeled cases, and average into a monthly Burnout Risk Score (BRS). In a preliminary evaluation across 68 contributors in ten repositories (ten disclosed burnout cases, twelve comparable-volume collapses, and 46 comparison contributors), sustained BRS elevation precedes 6 of 10 disclosures by 6-15 months, 8 of 10 when adding peak BRS as a second criterion, and 10 of 10 over any prior time frame. We thus present BurnRiSc as evidence that burnout is screenable from public data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19422
Natural turn-taking in full-duplex voice interaction requires determining from partial speech whether a pause reflects hesitation or a completed conversational intent. Acoustic voice activity detection lacks this semantic information, while cascaded ASR-based endpointing introduces transcription dependence and additional processing stages. We formulate semantic endpoint detection as a causal audio-language reasoning task and introduce FD-VAD, an ASR-free streaming endpointer that maps bounded causal audio windows directly to Continue/Stop decisions. FD-VAD combines a frozen speech encoder with a lightweight modality adapter and a parameter-efficiently adapted language model, using a last-chunk training objective for streaming inference. We further introduce confidence-gated endpoint commitment to control interruption versus delay and boundary-focused hard-negative sampling to improve decisions around ambiguous turn boundaries. Across in-domain and conversational evaluations, FD-VAD outperforms strong streaming and non-streaming semantic turn classifiers, and achieves the highest EOT recall among qualifying systems on TurnBench dev set $0.853$ (at FP<=0.10) in a zero-shot setting. These results show that semantic endpointing can be performed directly from streaming audio without intermediate ASR or dialogue state tracking.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35791
Three-dimensional object detection for autonomous driving is dominated by detectors trained on large corpora of human-annotated 3D boxes. Such a detector learns a fixed category list, and everything outside it is invisible. This paper asks whether the task can be solved training-free and open-vocabulary. A promptable segmentation model (SAM3), queried with class names as text prompts, supplies instance masks in the vehicle's six surround-view cameras, and the masks are turned into metric 3D boxes using the geometry of the scene. The core is a controlled three-stage comparison on nuScenes in which 2D detection is held fixed and only the source of 3D geometry changes. Geometry predicted from images alone reaches 0.183 mean average precision (mAP) under the official protocol; fitting boxes from raw LiDAR points inside the same masks with training-free rules reaches 0.298 mAP / 0.348 nuScenes detection score (NDS) at zero labeling cost; borrowing supervised box geometry at inference time lifts the same detections to 0.413 mAP / 0.555 NDS, which locates the pipeline's largest deficit in measurement precision rather than 2D detection, while class confusion and confidence calibration survive that substitution. Reversing the direction, a three-state camera-witness rule built from the same masks improves a supervised LiDAR-only detector from 0.596 to 0.630 mAP, roughly half the gain of fully supervised camera fusion, with no training. A coverage analysis shows that SAM3 finds 84% of in-range objects with a correctly named mask; the classes that fail in the official metric are misnamed or geometrically unforgiving, not unseen.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19358
As models scale, reward hacking becomes more frequent, more sophisticated, and more consequential. Does it leave a telltale signature in model representations? This work analyzes how reward hacking is represented internally in frontier open source LLMs, and how those representations can be used to understand and discover the range of hacking behaviors a model displays. In particular, we find that simple difference of means vectors coherently represent reward hacking in Kimi K3, GLM 5.2, and Qwen 3.8 Max across a variety of behaviors in common evaluations. Despite their simplicity, these vectors are both generalizable and interpretable, and we can use them to reliably detect reward hacking. We first evaluate reward hacking in commonly reported benchmarks like DeepSWE and SWE-bench, finding that models reward hack excessively in these environments; GLM 5.2 hacks in 57.2% of rollouts on DeepSWE and in 73% of rollouts on SWE-bench. Catching these requires monitors; LLM monitors are effective, but expensive detectors. We show that DoM vectors are similarly effective but virtually free, catching 3.1% more hacks in Kimi K3 and 7.9% fewer hacks in GLM 5.2 on DeepSWE at a monitor matched false positive rate. DoM vectors run on the chain-of-thought also predict reward hacks in the model's subsequent actions, meaning we can run them online and catch potential hacks before they occur. Finally, we analyze probe-hits that LLM monitors do not catch and discover other undesirable behaviors, as well as show transfer to finding hacks in non-SWE evaluations. Together, these results provide evidence that simple, white-box methods can be used to scalably study and monitor reward hacking behaviors in frontier open source models
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19101
When a large vision-language model misclassifies a harmful meme, the failure may reflect missing internal evidence or an inability to route represented evidence to its output. We distinguish these cases in Gemma-3 and Qwen3.5 using sparse autoencoders, role-conditioned probes, causal interventions, and recovery experiments across six harmful content benchmarks, with additional Spanish and Hindi-English code-mixed evaluations. Sparse readouts outperform native prediction on all six primary binary tasks: Qwen averages $0.740$ versus $0.432$ native macro-F1, while residual reconstruction reaches $0.486$, whereas Gemma improves from $0.532$ to $0.714$. These differences reflect supervised accessibility rather than a pre-existing, native decision rule, and the most influential token role depends on the task. Under the evaluated score scales, Qwen silent-feature ablation is $24-63$ times more probe-sensitive, whereas routed-feature patching on literal yes/no tasks is $16-140$ times more output-sensitive. Calibration-only routing recovers $93.3$% of the mean gap, and probe-distilled LoRA improves native predictions, although shared multi-task adaptation causes negative transfer. A case study of Gemma-3-12B on Facebook Hateful Memes finds a distributed rank-32 image-prompt interaction, reaching $0.756$ versus $0.685$ native macro-F1. Robustness controls show that the signal extends beyond English, is not explained solely by accompanying OCR, and depends on paired visual evidence. Thus, routing, rather than representation alone, is a recurring bottleneck in harmful meme classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18860
A surveillance system that detects an anomaly often has to repair the footage as well, yet the two tasks are studied in isolation: training-free anomaly detectors stop at a score or a label, while training-free video editing answers to a user prompt rather than to a detector. This paper proposes AVR (Anomaly-aware Video Restoration), which closes that gap with frozen pretrained models alone and generates content only where the clip offers no evidence to copy. Motion evidence first gates open-vocabulary proposals into spatio-temporal masks. A background prior computed from the clip then fills every pixel the anomaly ever uncovers, leaving diffusion to synthesize only what no frame showed, and a frozen verifier decides per clip whether to trust a classical, a prior-anchored, or a background-conditioned restorer. Extensive experiments on three surveillance datasets, under both full-reference anomaly injection and real anomalies, show that AVR leads full-frame fidelity under oracle masks, matches three trained video inpainters inside the edited region, and outperforms a detect-then-generate pipeline on the masks it produces itself, while suppressing both the residual anomaly and the flicker of free diffusion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18836
We propose SEAM, a LiDAR-based lifelong mapping framework. Instead of relying on a single anchor spanning the entire session, SEAM generates evidence based on a trajectory optimized with submap-level anchors, and performs dynamic object removal and change detection. Through submap-level reprojection, the generated evidence remains usable even if the trajectory is subsequently modified by a new session, eliminating the need to recompute the entire process from scratch. SEAM suppresses geometrically unreliable inter-session loop edges using a DOP-based confidence measure. Suppressing unreliable loop edges prevents alignment errors. SEAM also uses a directional voxel-wise evidence model. The model accounts for occupancy patterns that vary with ray direction. Direction-aware evidence separates dynamic objects from environmental changes more precisely. Experiments on a real construction-site dataset and a long-term multi-session dataset show that SEAM achieves higher accuracy and faster processing than existing methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18819
Long-range infrared imaging frequently confronts dense target clusters whose diffraction-limited signatures merge into a single indistinguishable blob, concealing the number, sub-pixel positions, and radiant intensities of the underlying sources. While deep learning has advanced general object detection, resolving such Closely-Spaced Infrared Small Targets (CSIST) remains largely unexplored, owing to a systemic infrastructure void and a fundamental paradigm mismatch. The dominant formulation, which reduces unmixing to a blind, discrete sub-pixel separation, is inherently insufficient: without semantic guidance, the ill-posed inverse problem admits ambiguous solutions plagued by false and missed detections, while grid-based discretization locks predictions onto fixed lattice centers, chaining precision to prohibitively expensive grid refinement. We argue that CSIST unmixing should instead be informed and continuous. To ground this paradigm shift, we establish the first comprehensive open-source ecosystem for the field, comprising the large-scale CSIST-100K benchmark, a tailored metric suite, and the GrokCSO toolkit. Upon this foundation, we propose DISTA-Net++, which anchors a dynamic deep unfolding backbone with two synergistic mechanisms: a Count-Guided Prior that injects the global target count as an explicit semantic constraint to regularize the solution space, and a Continuous Coordinate Rectification that regresses off-grid offsets to decouple localization accuracy from grid resolution. Extensive experiments validate our paradigm: even under the most economical 3x division, DISTA-Net++ surpasses 7x-division state-of-the-art methods by 16.15% in CSO-mAP and 62.96% in count accuracy at merely one-sixth of their computation, demonstrating that unmixing precision need not be purchased with finer discretization. The complete ecosystem is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18773
Large audio-language models have shown promise for anti-fraud detection by directly processing speech and reasoning over fraud-related evidence. Their deployment, however, requires predictions to follow a predefined label space and a structured decision protocol consisting of service-scenario identification, fraud detection, and conditional fraud-type classification. Existing fine-tuning and prompt-based approaches typically encode task knowledge, constraints, and decision rules into model parameters or manually maintained prompts, making them difficult to adapt as fraud patterns and labeling policies evolve. To this end, we propose FRAUDSkill, a structured frozen-weight adaptation framework that leaves the underlying audio-language model unchanged while optimizing an external layer of skill programs, route-specific policies, and decision rules. We further combine structured output control with validation-guided multi-path inference to ensure protocol-compliant predictions. On the TeleAntiFraud benchmark, FRAUDSkill achieves 73.50% Macro-F1, outperforming the shared frozen-model baseline by 31.96% while reducing invalid outputs to 1.94%. Extensive experiments demonstrate that external skill optimization provides an effective and adaptable solution for structured audio anti-fraud detection without modifying the underlying model. The source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18766
Telecom fraud scripts evolve rapidly and are often designed to resemble routine service conversations, creating two key requirements for audio-based telecom-fraud evaluation. First, benchmarks must incorporate newly observed scam patterns without overwriting previously established test sets. Second, they must distinguish fraud from lawful, near-domain calls rather than relying on topic-separated negative examples. We present TeleAntiFraud 2.0, constructed with our Mixed-Tree Anti-Fraud Generation Pipeline and evaluated under a monthly frozen evaluation protocol. The pipeline transforms online fraud-case abstracts into profile-grounded scenarios, expands them through mixed-tree generation, realizes fraud and non-fraud dialogue paths under shared contexts, renders validated dialogues as role-matched speech, and freezes the resulting audio, labels, prompts, manifests, and provenance records for each monthly evaluation set. Each frozen set contains 900 Chinese calls, comprising 600 fraud and 300 near-domain non-fraud cases. Controlled text experiments show that three classifiers achieve perfect macro-averaged F1 (Macro-F1) when evaluated against unrelated or ordinary negatives, but drop to 0.65-0.68 with near-domain sibling negatives. Full-set audio and automatic-speech-recognition plus large-language-model (ASR+LLM) evaluations further reveal class-prior shortcuts, prediction collapse, and snapshot sensitivity. Together, these findings establish near-domain construction and collapse-aware reporting as core requirements for evaluating audio-based telecom-fraud models under realistic confusable conditions. The accompanying research artifact includes the construction code, evaluation scripts, manifests, and documentation. Our dataset and code are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18748