Real-time pedestrian detection in driving scenes is constrained by three coupled failure modes: tiny targets lose discriminative evidence, occlusion weakens geometric support, and weather or illumination changes distort appearance statistics. We formulate the detector through a unified \emph{contour-guided spectral routing} view rather than treating frequency processing, attention, and boundary reasoning as independent add-ons. The detector routes information in a prescribed order: spatial evidence is first augmented with global spectral context, deep representations then exchange spatial and spectral cues, and cross-scale fusion is finally conditioned on boundary--semantic disagreement. This ordering yields a compact representation pipeline in which low-frequency context stabilizes global structure while high-frequency evidence protects small-object contours. We further retain a wavelet-subband training transformation that perturbs low- and high-frequency coefficients independently, targeting appearance shifts caused by fog, rain, snow, and low illumination. The formulation exposes a single routing variable at each stage and distinguishes reusable signal transforms from the task-specific policy that decides where each signal is injected. On CityPersons, the proposed detector obtains 70.4 AP$_{50}$ and 44.2 AP$_{50:95}$, compared with 68.1 and 42.2 for RT-DETR, while the full wavelet-augmented configuration reaches 71.1 and 44.6.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14383
Camouflage image generation (CIG) aims to synthesize realistic camouflaged images by blending foreground objects into concealment-compatible background contexts. Achieving this objective requires jointly satisfying three coupled requirements: foreground preservation to retain target integrity, semantic compatibility to select plausible concealment contexts, and appearance assimilation to reduce visual discrepancies. Recent approaches predominantly rely on task-specific training on camouflage datasets to address these requirements, incurring substantial computational cost and limiting generalization beyond the training domain. To address these limitations, we formulate training-free CIG as a concealment-oriented paradigm that preserves the target while reducing its perceptual separability from the synthesized surroundings, rather than maintaining its visual prominence, without parameter updates. We instantiate this paradigm with FreeCam based on a frozen inpainting diffusion framework to preserve the foreground. Within this framework, a Contextual Reasoning Module exploits frozen multimodal priors to infer an environment favorable to concealment, thereby promoting semantic compatibility, while an Intrinsic Appearance Module extracts low-level color and texture cues from the foreground to guide background synthesis toward appearance assimilation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeCam achieves state-of-the-art generation quality and camouflage effectiveness without task-specific training, while its generated images provide synthetic supervision for camouflaged object detection and reduce target detectability under general object detectors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14377
AI-generated image detection has attracted increasing attention, but existing evaluations mainly focus on natural images, leaving AI-generated document images largely underexplored. This omission is concerning because documents often appear in sensitive real-world scenarios, such as invoices, expense reports, certificates, and medical records. In this paper, we first construct a controlled diagnostic benchmark, AIGDoc-Pilot, and reveal that existing detectors suffer substantial performance degradation on AI-generated document images, with the mean AUC dropping by more than 7%. Based on this, we further reveal two document-specific properties behind this gap: generation artifacts exhibit strong spatial inconsistency across local regions, and text density significantly affects real-synthetic separability, where text-dense regions offer stronger discriminative evidence. Motivated by these findings, we construct AIGDoc, a larger document-centric dataset containing diverse real-world documents and AI-generated counterparts produced by multiple advanced generation and editing models. Extensive experiments on AIGDoc demonstrate that existing detectors still struggle to reliably identify AI-generated documents, while document-based training partially narrows the gap. Together, these results offer valuable insights for developing dependable and generalizable detectors in document-centric scenarios. The code and datasets will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14352
Advances in image generation have made synthetic images increasingly difficult to distinguish from real photographs, raising concerns about the trustworthiness of visual media. Existing AI-generated image detectors often perform well on in-domain data, but their robustness and cross-generator generalization remain limited. These limitations are commonly attributed to overfitting to shortcut cues. Although many methods seek to suppress shortcut learning, most retain binary classification as the training task without reconsidering how the task itself shapes the learned representations. We introduce CuRe, a framework for learning Continuous Source Responses that revisits authenticity detection from the perspective of the training task. CuRe reformulates backbone adaptation as regression of real-generated mixing ratios, providing finer supervision that encourages the model to capture authenticity-related variation beyond binary endpoint separation. We further select a compact source-response subspace to suppress nuisance variation and limit the final classifier's access to potential shortcut cues. Across ten public benchmarks, CuRe achieves an average balanced accuracy of 89.7%, exceeding the second-best method by 5.2 percentage points. Further experiments demonstrate consistent generalization gains across visual backbones and strong robustness to common image degradations. Code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14316
Accurate sperm detection is essential for computer-assisted semen analysis, yet it remains challenging in microscopic images due to dense distributions, visually similar artifacts, and sperm-like impurities. In this paper, we propose SpermYOLO, a coordinated and compact YOLOv11-derived framework for joint sperm and impurity detection in microscopic images. SpermYOLO introduces four architectural improvements: C3k2-IDB for channel-wise discriminative feature extraction, D2SEM for spatial--spectral semantic enhancement, MFM for adaptive multi-scale feature fusion, and the DESD Head for detail-enhanced shared prediction. Experiments on the SVIA semen microscopic imaging benchmark show that SpermYOLO achieves 97.2\% sperm AP and 75.4\% impurity AP, outperforming generic detectors, dedicated sperm detection models, and improved YOLO variants. Compared with the baseline model, SpermYOLO improves sperm AP, impurity AP, $\mathrm{mAP}_{50}$, and $\mathrm{mAP}_{50:95}$ by 1.6, 10.0, 5.8, and 2.7 percentage points, respectively, while preserving a lightweight model scale. Cross-scene evaluation on the SDTB testicular-biopsy microscopy benchmark shows that SpermYOLO remains effective with extremely small sperm targets and complex tissue backgrounds, achieving the highest $\mathrm{mAP}_{50}$ and $\mathrm{mAP}_{50:95}$ of 74.8\% and 31.2\%, respectively. Ablation studies and qualitative analyses further support these improvements by demonstrating the contributions of the proposed modules and showing more focused feature response patterns than the baseline model. These findings suggest that SpermYOLO is an effective and efficient approach for sperm detection in challenging microscopic imaging scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14278
Bird-strike mitigation at wind farms requires identifying distant birds that span only tens of pixels, so the classifier's input resolution N is a design variable, not a fixed specification. We study it with a factorial design over 14 side lengths N (16 to 224), six architectures, two training and evaluation regimes and 30 random seeds -- 2,520 checkpoints and 5,040 evaluations -- plus latency measured on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Four results. (1) The selected N depends on the target: 0.90 is met on validation by ResNet50 at N=112 in an estimated 1.85 ms (0.8980 on test) and 0.95 by DINOv2-L at N=144 in 12.70 ms; changing the model buys more accuracy than raising N (+5.93 versus +2.33 points at N=112). (2) The benefit of lowering N depends on the assumed preprocessing path: N=224 -> 80 saves 13.5% when each individual is decoded from its own file but 46.2% when the detector decodes the 4K frame once; the Pareto set grows from 20 to 23 configurations. (3) Accuracy must be measured on the deployed engine: half precision costs ViT-S/16 alone 4 to 7 points at N>=96 while the CNNs stay within 0.1 points, and with selection held at validation the choice differs at 26 of 176 targets. A broken FP16 engine can run faster than a correct one, undetectable from latency; admitting 14 ViT-S/16 FP32 configurations moves the recommendation over the 0.931-0.938 band and under the 10 ms budget. (4) ViT-L-scale models fit this device, but activations exceed the FP16 range; splitting the graph at transformer-block boundaries confines FP32 to the affected segments, making the deployed DINOv2-L chain 1.85x faster than the single-engine build. We also quantify how the regime-difference sign stabilises with seed count; a sensitivity split removing some forms of group sharing preserves all 14 non-trivial signs at the selection boundary.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14247
A small number of unusually high-gain parameters can exert disproportionate effects in transformer language models, but whether analogous structures recur in genomic foundation models and whether structural geometry determines functional importance remains unknown. We analyzed high-gain rows in gated feed-forward networks across text and genomic foundation models, including a frozen 22-model causal census. Computing an associated bilinear weight operator exactly, without a diagonal approximation, we tested whether structural extremeness is a transferable mechanism. Activation-derived candidates were functionally enriched relative to random and top-norm same-layer controls, yet neither spectral concentration nor operator magnitude predicted causal effect size, and these associations vanished within the endpoint-homogeneous text-decoder subset. A within-layer sweep of 36 rows in one genomic and one text decoder resolved this into two regimes: below the detector's acceptance threshold the ratio carried no positive information about causal damage, whereas above it the ratio ordered rows strongly but did not grade severity as a dose-response. The same sweep revealed a second individually catastrophic row invisible to a one-candidate-per-model census, and non-additive damage among co-located critical rows. Case studies showed divergent causal organizations: a robust super-additive pair interaction in DNABERT-2, and in GENERator a sharply position-localized dependence in which preserving or restoring the row's beginning-of-sequence contribution rescued essentially all native-loss damage. High-gain gated-FFN rows are therefore a recurrent architectural phenotype whose structural prominence acts as an enrichment signal, not a calibrated measure of functional criticality or a specification of causal organization. Enrichment is general, but the mechanism is model-specific.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17599
Financial fraud in corporate transaction networks has grown more coordinated and harder to detect with rule-based engines and with classical learning models that treat each transaction in isolation. This paper presents GTFD, a graph-transformer fraud detector that fuses structural and temporal evidence from a corporation's payment graph. GTFD encodes the graph with a multi-head graph attention network, encodes ordered transaction sequences with a gated transformer, and combines both views through a cross-modal gating layer. A conformal risk-control head converts the fused representation into threshold-free anomaly scores with finite-sample coverage guarantees, and the network is trained with self-supervised link-mask pretraining plus adversarial augmentation so it remains stable under scarce labels and under adversarial perturbation. On a corporate transaction benchmark enriched with coordinated fraud rings, GTFD reaches an AUROC of 0.990, an F1-score of 96.1% (precision 96.3%, recall 95.9%), and an accuracy of 98.4%. It reduces the false-positive rate by about 29% relative to the strongest baseline while raising coordinated fraud-ring recall from 85.1% to 96.5%. Ablations attribute roughly 2.0 AUROC points to self-supervised pretraining and 1.9 AUROC points to the conformal head, and adversarial stress tests show GTFD retains 89.2% accuracy at perturbation magnitude 0.20 where the next-best model falls to 76.4%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14234
Bird's Eye View (BEV)-based multi-view 3D object detection suffers from challenges of computational complexity, multi-scale feature extraction, and efficiency of dense 2D-to-BEV view transformation. To address these problems, this paper proposes an improved BEV 3D object detection algorithm Sparse-BEVNet. Firstly, a Bi-Level Routing Attention (BRA) mechanism is introduced into the image feature extraction network to reduce the computational burden of the backbone. Second, Cascaded Group Attention (CGA) is employed in the feature fusion module, which enhances deep interaction across features of different hierarchical levels without introducing additional computational overhead. Furthermore, a Sparse Spatial Cross-Attention mechanism is adopted to replace the conventional dense view projection pipeline. Experimental results on the public nuScenes dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 45.2% and a nuScenes Detection Score (NDS) of 54.5%, corresponding to 3.6% and 2.8% improvements relative to the baseline model, respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14185
Promptable models such as microSAM segment electron microscopy (EM) images from point prompts, but automation requires generating prompts without user input. We ask whether open-weight multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can generate them from natural-language requests by returning coordinates to a frozen segmenter. To that end, we convert masks from three mitochondria datasets into training examples, pairing images and instructions with centroid coordinates, then train LoRA adapters while freezing the MLLM backbone and microSAM. We find that Qwen3-VL reaches segmentation AP$_{50}$ $0.736$ after supervised fine-tuning and reward optimization, up from $0.247$ without adaptation, while automatic prompt generation (APG) achieves $0.773$. In addition, two other MLLMs improve, reaching or exceeding APG. When compared with a supervised centroid-heatmap detector that reaches AP$_{50}$ $0.904$ for this mitochondria task, Qwen3-VL more closely matches the annotated point set and instance counts. Moreover, training on two public datasets transfers to an unseen third, while training on all three transfers to an independent EM volume. Robustness tests show stable performance under unseen formulations of the natural-language request, while the coordinates can be reused by a second segmenter. To our knowledge, this is the first feasibility study of open-weight MLLMs as EM point generators, providing an inspectable, language-directed link between localization and mask decoding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14080
Forward-looking sonar object detection is essential for underwater perception, yet deployment on embedded platforms requires highly compact models. To address this challenge, we explore quantum computing and introduce Quantum-Gated LiteSSD, a parameter-efficient hybrid quantum--classical detector that reformulates QuCNet-style multi-circuit quantum processing as an identity-centered channel-gating mechanism for spatial feature modulation. Experiments on the Marine Debris Watertank dataset and UATD forward-looking sonar benchmarks demonstrate an effective parameter--accuracy trade-off. The proposed detector achieves 90.84% $\mathrm{mAP}_{50}$ on Watertank with approximately $62\times$ fewer parameters than YOLO26s and $164.3\times$ fewer parameters than SSD-VGG16. On UATD, the model achieves 70.37% $\mathrm{mAP}_{50}$ with only 0.150M parameters, making it approximately $4.1\times$ smaller than SSGA-YOLO while retaining meaningful multi-class detection capability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14025
Datasets that ship automatically generated feature annotations invite a question rarely asked of them: would a human agree with those labels? This report answers that for the Objective Projection corpus, a Turkish narrative dataset whose scenes carry a per-scene applied_rules field from a rule-based detector over six craft features -- two prohibitions (emotion labelling, simile) and four positive techniques (materialized metaphor, micro-focus, temporal anchor, atmosphere contradiction). Three studies are reported. Study 1 ($n = 120$) scores the detector against blind labels from the scheme's own author. Study 2 ($n = 100$, a disjoint scene set) scores the detector plus Gemini 2.5 Flash and Grok against an independent non-expert rater whose labels were locked before any machine ran. Study 2b re-runs the identical protocol with Claude Fable 5 (High) and ChatGPT 5.5. The central result concerns one rule. On materialized metaphor -- closest to the methodology's theoretical core -- the five machine labellers returned positive rates of $0$, $1$, $40$, $72$ and $78$ out of $100$ scenes, against a human count of $9$. Cohen's $\kappa$ was at or indistinguishable from chance for five of six labellers, across both human references and both scene sets: $0.004$, $0.015$, $0.000$, $0.019$, $0.027$. Raw agreement ranged from $74.7\%$ to $84.5\%$, an artefact of class imbalance rather than a sign of competence. We deliberately do not resolve this into a single story. Two readings survive: the feature is genuinely inferential and beyond current automatic detection, or the rule's definition is not yet operational enough for any rater to apply consistently -- including the human. Distinguishing them needs a second independent human rater, which this report does not have and therefore does not claim.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13936
Text-centric Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires reading and reasoning over text embedded in images, a task made substantially harder when images suffer from real-world degradation such as motion blur, low resolution, or compression artifacts. While modular OCR-based pipelines and end-to-end vision-language models are both widely used for this task, their comparative robustness under degraded conditions remains underexplored. We present an empirical study comparing two modular pipelines with SA-DBNet, a custom detector architecture combining ResNet-18 with self-attention spatial modeling and deformable convolutions against an end-to-end vision-language baseline, evaluated on 4013 degraded images with 7000 question-answer pairs. Fine-tuned modular pipelines achieve up to 57.50% exact-match accuracy versus 38.00% for the end-to-end baseline, with domain-specific fine-tuning yielding a gain of up to 29.50 percentage points. Critically, we find that conventional OCR error metrics like Character Error Rate and Word Error Rate are unreliable predictors of downstream VQA performance, as semantic reasoning can compensate for recognition failures when contextual cues are present. These findings highlight the importance of task-aware evaluation for text-centric VQA systems under realistic visual conditions. Codes are available here
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13815
Detecting harmful memes is critical for maintaining safe online communities. However, harmful intent is often implicit, arising from visual-textual incongruity and cultural stereotypes, which challenges existing multimodal detectors. We propose SyRHM, a framework that decomposes harmful meme detection into meaning-grounded retrieval and symbolic-language-enhanced multi-stage reasoning. SyRHM retrieves semantically related memes by parsing multimodal content into textual elements and descriptions, providing grounded context beyond surface-level similarity. Building on the retrieved context, SyRHM uses a translator stage to convert multimodal inputs into symbolic intermediate representations, and then performs multi-stage reasoning via planner and solver stages, enabling expressive and interpretable analysis of harmful intent. Experiments on FHM, HarM, and MultiOff demonstrate the effectiveness of SyRHM, achieving superior performance on most evaluation settings against multimodal and reasoning-based baselines, while providing reasoning traces for harmful content. The code is available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13794
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed, the generation of harmful content has become a critical safety concern. Existing safeguards operate at the input, output, or streaming-generation stages, while early-risk methods that rely on surface tokens or output logits may suffer from weak initial signals, and internals-based detectors using dense representations may retain highly entangled and redundant safety-irrelevant information. It therefore remains unclear whether the earliest post-generation hidden states already contain reliable signals about final-response harmfulness. To address this gap, we propose ForeSight, a first-token output-risk forecasting framework that distills weak and redundant early safety signals into compact, layer-aware risk representations. Experiments on five safety benchmarks and two target models demonstrate that ForeSight achieves superior and efficient early-risk forecasting while relying solely on first-token hidden states. The code is available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13737
Co-salient object detection (Co-SOD) requires a model to find foreground regions that are salient in individual images and supported by the image group. We present \emph{Rank-Consistent Set Reasoning} (RCSR), a supervised dense-prediction framework that models a group as an unordered set rather than as a sequence of images or a semantic label. The core idea is to rank how strongly each spatial region agrees with a small collection of learned group slots at every image scale, and to aggregate these ranks with a robust trimmed statistic. This suppresses accidental pairwise matches and prevents one atypical group member from dominating the shared representation. A set encoder builds group slots directly from multi-scale visual features, while a rank-consistency gate measures whether the ordering of candidate regions is stable across group members. The gated slots are decoded jointly with per-image features to produce co-saliency maps. The model contains no natural-language branch, no open-vocabulary detector, and no external segmentation model. We further introduce a group permutation objective and hard-distractor augmentation so that the model learns the properties of a set-level target rather than memorizing image order or isolated visual saliency. We formulate an evaluation protocol for CoCA, CoSal2015, and CoSOD3k, together with tests of group-size robustness, distractor rejection, order invariance, and cross-dataset transfer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13706
Sparse-view computed tomography (CT) reduces radiation dose and acquisition time but remains severely ill-posed because incomplete projections poorly constrain null-space information. Existing learning-based methods often estimate this information in high-dimensional image space, conflate physical measurement errors with prediction errors, and depend on fixed discretizations. We propose SONAR, a Structure-Consistent Neural Operator for Null-Space-Aware Reconstruction. Instead of recovering the full null-space component, SONAR predicts a low-dimensional null-space-aware representation from the acquired projections as pseudo-measurements. It separates measurement and pseudo-measurement residuals, lifts them into the image domain through physics operators, and applies independent neural operators to constrain their structural effects, thereby accommodating admissible errors while suppressing unsupported structures. To support cross-discretization reconstruction, an anisotropic U-shaped neural operator models the periodic angular and nonperiodic detector dimensions using direction-dependent continuous supports, while image-domain neural operators re-discretize continuous kernels on target grids. These components form an optimization-inspired unrolled network. Experiments on simulated AAPM and clinical MARS photon-counting CT data demonstrate consistent improvements across seen and unseen view settings and unseen image resolutions. On AAPM dataset, SONAR improves PSNR by 1.87~dB at 62 views and by 7.63~dB under zero-shot transfer to a $512\times512$ grid over the strongest competing methods. SONAR also achieves the best overall performance in all clinical settings evaluated, demonstrating accurate, structurally reliable, and discretization-robust sparse-view CT reconstruction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13688
The rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has made aerial-image object detection increasingly important for natural-resource monitoring, traffic management, and disaster response. Detecting small objects in aerial images remains difficult because objects occupy very few pixels, high-frequency cues are easily lost, and global context is hard to model in cluttered scenes. Existing detectors often retain insufficient edge, corner, and texture information. We propose \ours, an aerial-image detector built on the YOLO12 architecture. The model combines a triple-path high-frequency enhancement convolution module (TriPathHFConv), receptive-field coordinate-attention convolution (RFCAConv), and a Mamba-based global-context module. On VisDrone, at an input resolution of 960*960, ours achieves 60.0% mAP@50 and 38.6%mAP@50:95, demonstrating a favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-off for small-object detection. The benchmark and dataset protocol follow the VisDrone challenge setup.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13647
Safety research often focuses on model-generated harms, but users may also direct hostility, coercion, and adversarial pressure at models. Understanding how and when that occurs is essential for accurately interpreting model behaviour, alignment drift, and real-world deployment risks. In this paper, we audit 777K English LMSYS-Chat-1M conversations with two independent detectors: an eight-category lexicon for hostility directed at the model, and the dataset's moderation signal; and show that they capture different, weakly overlapping phenomena. The lexicon identifies insults, threats, and jailbreak coercion aimed at the assistant, while moderation flags are dominated by toxic-content solicitation rather than hostility at the model. Together, they mark about 5% of user turns; adjusting the narrower lexicon-harassment union for measured precision puts mistreatment aimed at the assistant at 0.90%. These absolute rates describe arena-style evaluation traffic and should not be read as deployment-wide base rates. We find that user hostility varies 13-fold across models, driven largely by who each model attracts rather than by model behaviour: first-turn hostility spreads far wider than post-response hostility, and more than fifteenfold separates the extremes even after deduplicating opening prompts. Within conversations, assistant apologies are consistently associated with higher odds of next-turn hostility under both detectors; the effect survives restricting to non-refused prior turns and to jailbreak-free conversations, and is positive in 20 of 23 models. Yet across models, more apologetic models receive less hostility overall. Finally, hostility also shows temporal structure, with coercive openings front-loading the first turn while affective hostility accumulates over a session. We release the lexicon, the detector cross-validation pipeline, and all derived tables.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13579
Static-image benchmarks do not capture the computational and temporal requirements of practical orchard video analytics. This study presents an end-to-end framework for real-time fruit detection, tracking, and counting on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super. A lightweight YOLO26s detector is trained independently on four public datasets representing apples, mangoes, blueberries, and strawberries under a common protocol. The models are deployed on embedded platform using PyTorch and TensorRT at FP32, FP16, and INT8 precision. APPLE MOTS is then used for temporal video analytics because it provides orchard sequences with persistent fruit identities, enabling evaluation of multi-object tracking and unique-fruit counting. The selected FP16 TensorRT detector is integrated into an NVIDIA DeepStream pipeline combining hardware-accelerated decoding, ByteTrack tracking, and motion-aware line-crossing analytics. Across the four detection tasks, mean test mAP@50:95 ranges from 0.4957 to 0.8656. On the Jetson, TensorRT FP16 achieves 66.76-74.56 images/s at 13.41-14.98 ms prediction latency, while reducing mAP@50:95 by only 0.0020-0.0054 and gross energy consumption by approximately 64-66% relative to PyTorch FP32. The complete detector-tracker-analytics pipeline reaches 44.96-54.11 FPS and sustains the configured 30-FPS input rate without output-frame loss. On held-out orchard video sequences, HOTA ranges from 0.345 to 0.538, event-level counting F1 from 0.611 to 0.803, and relative count error from 6.2% to 51.6%. Performance varies across acquisition geometries: near-lateral row viewing yields the most stable tracking and counting, whereas forward traversal remains association- and recall-limited despite spatially adaptive counting geometry. These results show that practical edge-based fruit monitoring requires efficient detection and acquisition geometries that support reliable temporal association.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13551