Vision foundation tools such as open-vocabulary detectors, segmentation models, and post-processing operators are powerful building blocks for computer vision, but their effectiveness depends heavily on how they are orchestrated: which tools are used, in what order, with what parameters, and under what visual conditions. Existing visual-programming agents typically generate a fixed solution pipeline, making them brittle under dense objects, occlusion, small targets, and domain shift. We introduce VTOS (Vision Tools Orchestration Search), a framework for adaptive visual tool orchestration through joint solution-observer search. VTOS co-searches executable solution programs that compose vision tools such as Grounding DINO, SAM, NMS, and slice-and-detect, together with observer programs that diagnose candidate solutions, identify failure modes, and generate actionable feedback. These observations are accumulated in a shared VisionThoughts knowledge base to guide subsequent search. We evaluate VTOS through two case studies: dense object counting on LVIS-Count and zero-shot plant-disease segmentation on PlantSeg-OOD, which stress different orchestration challenges including threshold calibration, NMS, slicing, mask refinement, and domain generalization. Across both tasks, VTOS outperforms static tool pipelines and agentic visual-programming baselines, specifically in complex settings such as dense, occluded scenes and out-of-distribution segmentation where static pipelines leave measurable headroom, rather than in standard tasks where a single well-calibrated tool already approaches its ceiling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20728
The rapid progress of AIGC has made text-centric image manipulation increasingly accessible, creating new forensic challenges that require not only authenticity detection but also spatial grounding and evidence-based explanation. This paper presents our solution to the GenText-Forensics Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2026. We propose an evidence-guided detector-localizer-reasoner system, where an image-level detector provides a global authenticity prior, a dedicated localizer extracts tampered regions as spatial grounding evidence, and an MLLM-based reasoner generates structured forensic reports grounded in this expert forensic evidence. These modules are connected through a cascaded evidence flow: the detector gates the subsequent localization and prompting process, the localizer converts tamper responses into grounding boxes, and the reasoner is trained to synthesize the detector decision and localized evidence into the final report. As a key part of our method, we introduce iterative difficulty-aware mining to improve localization quality and apply report-mask consistency post-processing to align report grounding with predicted masks. On the official hidden test set, our system achieves a final score of 0.638 and ranks second in the challenge, validating the effectiveness of the proposed evidence-guided system. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02097
Accurate 3D ship detection in maritime environments is critical for autonomous navigation, yet remains challenging due to large-scale vessel variations, sparse point clouds of small vessels, and severe sea-clutter interference. Existing methods, primarily based on 2D features or dense representations, struggle to balance detection accuracy and computational efficiency, while sparse 3D detectors designed for road scenes generalize poorly to maritime scenarios. This paper focuses on two key challenges in maritime LiDAR perception: weak feature representation for small and sparse vessels, and insufficient global structural modeling for large vessels due to the limited receptive field of local sparse convolutions. To address these issues, we propose KSG-Net, a Key-Sparse and Global-Context learning network for maritime 3D ship detection. The core idea is to jointly enhance local discriminative features and global structural awareness within a unified fully sparse detection framework. Specifically, a Key Sparse Multi-scale Aggregation (KSMA) module is designed to enhance the representation of small and sparse vessels by selecting informative key voxels and aggregating cross-scale neighborhood features. Furthermore, a Global Context Aggregation (GCA) module is introduced to capture long-range geometric dependencies through scene-level context modeling with gated residual interactions, thereby improving the representation of large vessels. Extensive experiments on the Thames River vessel dataset and simulated datasets demonstrate that KSG-Net consistently outperforms existing methods in multi-scale vessel detection and exhibits strong robustness in complex maritime environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02077
Despite recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs), object hallucination remains a major barrier to their reliable deployment. Existing detection methods often characterize visual grounding using attention from individual layers, leaving its evolution across layers underexplored. We propose CADMP, a lightweight object hallucination detection framework that combines adjacent-layer cross-modal attention drift with prediction sensitivity to targeted visual masking. During decoding, CADMP quantifies distributional changes between consecutive cross-modal attention maps to capture abrupt transitions in visual grounding. It then selects the transition with the largest drift, locates the corresponding visually relevant regions, and measures the change in prediction probability after masking these regions. These two signals provide complementary evidence: attention drift characterizes the stability of internal visual grounding, while probability variation verifies whether a prediction truly depends on the identified visual evidence. A lightweight detector integrates both signals to identify hallucinated predictions. Experiments on multiple benchmarks and representative open-source LVLMs demonstrate that CADMP achieves consistently competitive detection performance. Ablation studies further confirm the complementary contributions of adjacent-layer drift modeling and mask-based grounding verification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02028
Vision-language object detectors (VLODs) achieve strong zero-shot performance but remain vulnerable to distribution shifts during deployment. Mean-teacher methods for test-time adaptation (TTA) can improve robustness by updating a student model using teacher-generated pseudo-labels. However, mean-teacher TTA is highly sensitive to the choice of a fixed exponential moving average (EMA) coefficient for teacher updates, and repeated optimization with noisy pseudo-labels can cause cumulative student drift. We propose Dynamic EMA and Source Anchoring for TTA (DESA-TTA), a low-overhead method that jointly regulates teacher updates and student drift through dynamic temporal averaging and source anchoring. Dynamic temporal averaging estimates teacher uncertainty from pseudo-label confidence and box density and uses it to select a sample-wise EMA coefficient within bounds determined by teacher parameter drift. Source anchoring partially restores the updated student parameters toward their pretrained values, with the anchoring strength increasing according to student drift. Experiments across diverse distribution shifts and two VLOD architectures show consistent improvements over existing TTA methods. On VOC-C, DESA-TTA improves AP$_{50}$ by 14.5 points over zero-shot inference while achieving 55\% higher inference throughput than the previous state-of-the-art TTA method for YOLO-World. Our code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01795
Passive acoustic monitoring of killer whales is particularly important for conservation of the endangered Southern Resident killer whale population, but requires accurate models that can operate in real time under severe class imbalance and deployment shift. We propose a lightweight ResNet-based two-stage cascade that first detects killer whale vocalizations and then classifies confident detections into five eastern North Pacific ecotypes, abstaining on ambiguous calls. We train and evaluate the pipeline on the DCLDE 2027 dataset, where the detector achieves 0.960 macro-F1 and the classifier 0.958, outperforming frozen Perch 2.0 embeddings on the five-ecotype benchmark. By separating detection from ecotype recognition, the end-to-end cascade improves seven-class macro-F1 from 0.919 for a single-stage model to 0.933, with the largest gain on the rare OKW ecotype. To assess transfer beyond the benchmark, we use active learning to adapt the Stage 1 to the acoustic environment of Puget Sound, WA, increasing killer whale detection F1 from 0.405 to 0.755 on manually verified detection windows. Finally, each stage processes a 3 s window in approximately 1.4 ms on an NVIDIA H100, enabling faster than real time inference. These results demonstrate that the proposed two-stage cascade pipeline enables reliable killer whale detection and classification, adaptation to new acoustic domains, and real-time monitoring for conservation applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01792
Vision Transformers (ViT) excel in semantic understanding but fail to discriminate between object instances (e.g., identical embeddings for two dogs), limiting their use in instance-level tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. We propose Contrastive Vision Transformer (CoViT), a self-supervised learning framework that injects instance-awareness into ViT through geometry-guided contrastive learning. CoViT uniquely coordinates ViT's attention maps and embeddings by constructing triplets: (1) Attention-guided masking: Refine multi-head attention via adaptive thresholding and morphological operations to generate instance masks, identifying foreground anchors; (2) Hardest contrastive mining: For each anchor, computing pairwise embedding similarities to select the intra-instance hardest positive (least similar patch within its mask) and inter-instance hardest negative (most similar patch from other instances), with intra-instance regions masked during negative search. These triplets drive a contrastive loss that simultaneously compresses intra-instance variance and expands inter-instance margins, forcing ViT to discern subtle geometric and appearance differences between instances. CoViT consistently achieves stable performance gains of over 2 AP points across multiple instance-level perception tasks by using ViT as backbone architecture. Notably, CoViT requires no extra decoders or labels, demonstrating that a pure ViT can learn instance-aware representations via inherent attention priors and targeted contrastive constraints. Code and models will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01787
Unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to restrict civilian access, agricultural activity, infrastructure recovery, and environmental remediation in contaminated areas around the world. This study created a multi campaign UAV thermal image data set of inert ordnance, developed a labeled image set from collected imagery, tested object detection models, and identified practical considerations for humanitarian mine action and demining applications. Data were collected during four field campaigns in Tennessee under summer and winter conditions using inert mines, munitions, and other ordnance placed in short grass, tall vegetation, gravel, mulch, rock, compost, and compacted surfaces. Thermal imagery was collected under flight altitutes of 33 m and 15 m. The final source inventory contained 5,855 thermal image label pairs, including 918 positive images and 4,937 background images. After retaining all positive images and downsampling background images, the 33 m dataset contained 420 training and 106 validation images, while the 15 m dataset contained 629 training and 157 validation images. YOLOV11l and RT-DETR-R50 algorithms were trained and evaluated to develop an automated candidate detection model. Practical recommendations include collecting thermal and RGB imagery together, incorporating varied surfaces and background only imagery, considering periods following changes in solar exposure, balancing survey coverage against target pixel representation, calibrating models with representative local data, and retaining qualified human review. The intended use is screening and prioritization for follow on technical survey or EOD assessment, and not a standalone clearance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01738
This paper presents a hybrid insider threat detection framework for enterprise environments, integrating multi-agent simulation, layered SIEM correlation, trust-adaptive thresholds, behavioral and communication forensics, and Theory-of-Mind reasoning. Email is treated not as a control channel but as a coordination and social-engineering evidence stream correlated with authentication, file-access, and privilege events. Four variants are evaluated: Layered SIEM-Core (LSC), Cognitive-Enriched SIEM (CE-SIEM), Evidence-Gated SIEM (EG-SIEM), and EG-SIEM-Enron with Enron-calibrated email forensics. Across ten matched runs with eight malicious insiders, actor-level F1 improves from 0.567 for LSC to 0.774 for CE-SIEM, 0.898 for EG-SIEM, and 0.944 for EG-SIEM-Enron; paired Wilcoxon tests confirm the first three differences after Holm-Bonferroni correction. Evidence gating reduces confirmed false positives from 33.7 per run under LSC and 49.3 under CE-SIEM to 0.2 and 0.0 respectively, a precision gain traded against longer confirmation time. Domain-shift evaluation shows that an Enron-trained email classifier does not transfer to a different operational email domain, although target-domain fine-tuning reaches F1 = 0.974 under grouped template-family evaluation. On CERT r4.2, the evidence-gated logic improves actor-level detection while reducing false positives, outperforming tabular anomaly detectors and a sentence-embedding baseline. Scalability tests to 1000 agents indicate stable detection quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04243
Self-supervised pre-training via cross-view completion learns strong features for 3D vision from co-visible regions of image pairs. However, the reference view provides little information for reconstructing non-co-visible patches, implicitly yielding a monocular training signal in these regions. We introduce Gekko, which turns this limitation into a useful signal. The relative improvement of the cross-view reconstruction error over a masked-autoencoder error is a self-supervised proxy for co-visibility: large improvements indicate co-visible regions, negligible ones non-co-visible areas. Gekko is a network, trained from scratch, that jointly performs cross-view completion, masked autoencoding, and per-pixel prediction of this relative improvement, providing an additional binocular signal for all masked regions without any ground-truth 3D annotation. Under identical architectures and training data, Gekko consistently outperforms CroCo on zero-shot correspondence estimation, relative pose estimation, and pointmap regression, with up to 6 times higher accuracy at the strictest relative-pose threshold and a 22% drop in end-point error on ETH3D. The extra channel it learns is itself a strong co-visibility detector on unseen scenes, and Gekko's frozen features outperform released cross-view backbones of comparable or larger size. It can also be trained directly from raw videos with a simple stride-based curriculum, removing the cumbersome 3D preprocessing prior methods require while matching models trained on curated data. Code and pre-trained models are publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01530
Face forgery detectors often achieve strong results on controlled benchmarks, but their reliability under realistic image degradations remains limited. This paper presents a standardized benchmark for face forgery detection using the Multi-Dimensional Face Forgery Image (MFFI) dataset and evaluates performance on both clean and degraded test partitions. We compare six model families, including convolutional networks, transformer-based models, and a frozen self-supervised DINOv3 backbone, across spatial, spectral, and hybrid input representations. The results show that clean-set performance is not a reliable indicator of robustness under compression, resizing, and blurring. Xception with RGB obtains the best clean performance, reaching 0.884 mean ROC-AUC, but degrades substantially on the harder partition. In contrast, frozen DINOv3 achieves the strongest degraded-set result, with 0.726 mean ROC-AUC, while training only a linear classification head. The representation analysis indicates that Fourier-domain cues are most useful when combined with RGB information, whereas purely spectral inputs consistently underperform spatial representations. Qualitative attribution maps further suggest that convolutional detectors focus on localized artifacts, while DINOv3 relies on broader facial structure. These findings reinforce the need for degraded evaluation protocols and highlight self-supervised visual representations as a promising direction for robust face forgery detection. Our source code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01511
Cooperation in multi-UAV systems requires reliable relative perception so that follower vehicles can maintain formation and continue their mission safely even when absolute positioning sensors degrade or fail. This paper presents a vision-based cooperative formation framework running on a follower UAV that uses a front-facing RGB-D camera to detect, track, and localize a leader UAV in real-time. A lightweight YOLO-based detector is trained on a dedicated drone dataset and deployed onboard to predict leader bounding boxes, which are then fused with depth information via a pinhole camera model to estimate the leader's relative pose. These estimates provide a leader-follower position controller and can also be used as a backup when GPS or external localization is unavailable. This framework is implemented as a set of ROS nodes and evaluated in a physics-based multi-UAV simulation built on XTDrone, with sensor noise and communication dropouts. We evaluate detection accuracy, runtime, and formation-keeping error under nominal conditions and under simulated failures of the positioning sensors. The results show that the proposed framework maintains stable leader-follower formations with reasonable computational cost and provides a practical basis for extending vision-based cooperative formation control to real-world multi-UAV systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01420
Non-destructive X-ray and computed tomography (CT) testing are essential for ensuring the dimensional accuracy of manufactured components with complex internal structures, such as the cooling channels in gas turbine blades, which directly affect thermal performance and service life. This study presents a multipart 3D-2D rigid registration approach for aligning CAD models with X-ray projections as an alternative to CT reconstruction for part inspection and measurement. A greedy registration algorithm sequentially aligns the blade's exterior before registering its internal components by maximizing the mutual information between simulated and acquired X-ray images. This stepwise approach reduces problem complexity and improves alignment accuracy. View angles are optimized using a greedy method that iteratively selects angles to minimize dimensional measurement errors. The results indicate that a small number of oblique views provides the best accuracy, although a broad range of angles yields acceptable results. The method achieves subpixel registration accuracy, with errors below one-fifth of the magnified detector-pixel pitch. Image noise and defects reduce registration precision, but direct registration in projection space mitigates these effects compared with CT reconstruction. Appropriate view selection can therefore preserve acceptable subpixel accuracy in the presence of image noise and defects.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01368
Large language model (LLM) agent failures often contain multiple related errors rather than a single mistake. Existing attribution methods usually identify a responsible agent, step, or root cause, but do not explicitly model dependency between errors. We introduce EDGE, an Error Dependency Graph-guided multi-Error attribution framework. EDGE constructs an error dependency graph from observed error events and validates a reliable causal subset through counterfactual rollout. The inference graph guides a two-stage LLM-as-judge detector for error attribution, and the intervention-validated subgraph provides a more reliable basis for explanation and repair analysis. Experiments on TRAIL and MAST show that EDGE improves category-level multi-error attribution across most evaluated models and settings. Experiments with adapted Who&When-style prompts show that the graph helps across prompting strategies. These results suggest that dependency structure is a useful diagnostic prior for agent failures beyond isolated root-cause prediction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01360
Text-to-image (T2I) models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that elicit Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content, despite increasingly being guarded by heterogeneous, multi-layer safety stacks combining text filters, image classifiers, and cross-modal detectors. Existing jailbreak studies either optimize against individual filters or query the complete pipeline with aggregate feedback, making it difficult to identify the active constraint and adapt to conflicts across safety this http URL this paper, we introduce the \emph{Detection Surface}, a unified geometric framework that characterizes the decision boundaries induced by heterogeneous T2I safety filters and their joint effect on the jailbreak search space. This formulation reveals that successful evasion is governed by a sparse and non-convex region shaped by cross-layer conflicts, where mutations that bypass one filter may increase exposure to another. Motivated by this analysis, we propose \emph{CRACK}, a multi-agent debate framework for adaptive jailbreak search that decomposes jailbreak search into exploration, diagnosis, and arbitration. CRACK coordinates an Attack Agent, a Defense Agent, and a Judge Agent to iteratively generate prompt mutations, obtain layer-specific diagnostic feedback, and optimize mutation strategies through reward-guided refinement. Through repeated rounds of debate, CRACK adapts its search direction to the evolving cross-layer constraints while preserving the original harmful intent. Extensive experiments across multiple T2I models, datasets, and safety configurations show that CRACK achieves Attack Success Rates (ASR) of up to 99.63\% under composite defenses, while requiring fewer queries than existing methods and maintaining semantic fidelity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01168
Persistent entropy is a scalar summary of persistence barcodes widely used to detect regime changes, yet there is no account of when a structural change in a barcode must produce a detectable change in entropy. We establish a model-agnostic theorem supplying such conditions. Treating persistence diagrams as random objects indexed by a control parameter, we identify a dispersion-condensation mechanism in the normalized persistence weights and derive an explicit lower bound on the entropy difference between the two regimes, valid with high probability at finite sample size and insensitive to the absolute scale of bar lifetimes. We also give a procedure for verifying the hypotheses on empirical barcodes. Applied to convolutional networks, the criterion shows that the circular organization of learned filters reported by Gabrielsson and Carlsson emerges through a sharp topological phase transition, and locates its onset: within a few hundred iterations on MNIST, but an order of magnitude later on CIFAR-10. The same criterion detects the Kuramoto synchronization and Vicsek order-disorder transitions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09058
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection predicts whether a test image belongs to none of the predefined classes. To evaluate this task, benchmarks need images from outside the in-distribution (ID) data; typically, these are defined or collected in an ad hoc fashion. Since no ground truth is perfect, ID-labeled datasets themselves contain a natural source of OOD images. We exploit such annotation errors and present Fi-ImageNet-1k, an OOD dataset built from ImageNet-1k validation images that the recent ReImageNet reannotation effort assigned to no ImageNet-1k class. Each image was examined by expert human annotators supported by evidence from MLLMs, VLMs, and reverse image search, comparing it against all visually similar ID classes. We keep only images that could be assigned a specific class outside the ImageNet-1k label space. The resulting Fi-ImageNet-1k, with 655 images from 522 classes, is substantially more challenging than any commonly used OOD dataset. No evaluated combination of classifier and OOD detector achieves a false positive rate below 51% at 95% true positive rate (FPR@95). Compared to the recent NINCO, our dataset is 3.8x more challenging in the FPR@95 metric for state-of-the-art supervised OOD detection methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01027
Remote sensing visual models have continuously advanced various interpretation tasks. However, the research process behind model improvement still heavily relies on manual expertise, requiring extensive trial-and-error iterations in model design, data processing, and performance diagnosis. Existing agent-based approaches mainly focus on task execution and workflow orchestration, while lacking the capability of autonomous research iteration for continuous performance optimization. To address this issue, we propose RingMoClaw, an experience-inspired self-evolving multi-agent framework for remote sensing visual interpretation. RingMoClaw integrates a research branch, a quality-control branch, and a dual-stream dynamic experience bus to establish a closed-loop optimization process covering strategy generation, experiment execution, independent review, and experience accumulation. The heterogeneous Critic mechanism provides stage-wise diagnosis and feedback, while the dual-stream experience bus incorporates external knowledge and internal experimental experience to guide strategy evolution and eliminate ineffective searches. Extensive experiments on four remote sensing downstream tasks, including object detection, scene classification, semantic segmentation, and change detection, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of RingMoClaw. Compared with the corresponding baseline models, RingMoClaw improves performance by 1.84\% mAP$_{50}$ on object detection and achieves consistent gains across the other three tasks, while reducing the required evolution steps by over 40\% compared with existing research automation frameworks. These results suggest that RingMoClaw offers a feasible route from task execution toward continuous research driven model evolution in remote sensing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00814
The limitations of on-board sensors and blind spots caused by occlusion cause the reduction of perception quality in autonomous vehicles. In such cases, cooperative perception provides additional data via Vehicle-to-Everything communication to enhance local perception, causing a large volume of data transmission. The vehicle can focus on acquiring and utilizing relevant data according to the prevailing road context by identifying the current traffic situation. To achieve this, we propose a concept for the situation identification of the vehicle using Bird's-Eye-View images. Firstly, the situation around the vehicle is identified using object detection with semantic segmentation, followed by understanding the context of the traffic using a situation identification module consisting of an open-source projective transformation network Cam2BEV and a situation identification neural network. The concept was evaluated and validated by running the software on the CARLA simulator using the in-built RGB camera and the semantic segmentation camera. Additionally, the portability of the situation identification module for real-world applications was verified on Cityscapes and nuScenes urban driving datasets. Overall, the proposed situation identification approach enables efficient sensor data management by prioritizing relevant data to the current traffic situation. The source code is available in the following link: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05521
We present Voxel-Grounded Online Instance Manager (VOIM), a training-free voxel-grounded instance manager that builds open-vocabulary 3D instance maps from RGB-D or from monocular RGB alone, a regime no prior training-free system addresses. Online systems typically segment object instances and label them at first detection, committing when evidence is weakest. VOIM instead defers label and instance decisions until soft evidence from unmodified, off-the-shelf perception has accumulated per voxel across views. We show that the mapping stage, rather than the particular perception models, carries the result: across four perception configurations on ScanNet++, varying the region descriptor, the detector label prior and the mask source, the map exceeds the strongest online RGB-D system, OVO-SLAM, by between 4.8 and 11.7 mIoU. Perception is not neutral, and substituting that baseline's own descriptor family costs 4.1 of the margin, yet the baseline carries the marginally better 2D descriptor (33.7 vs. 31.5 mIoU over three scenes) and still realizes the weaker map. Under a like-for-like protocol VOIM reaches 44.07 mIoU on ScanNet++ against 32.37, winning all ten scenes and both aggregations (pooled 33.31 vs. 25.97), and the same system runs unchanged to fully monocular RGB, matching that baseline pooled on Replica (27.80 vs. 27.50). The advantage is regime-specific: under Replica's all-classes scoring, matched inputs give a split result, 28.60 vs. 27.50 pooled against 24.59 vs. 30.11 on the per-scene mean. Room scale is label-limited and building scale drift-limited. Labeling does not run in real time, dominated by per-class detection over the full vocabulary. The maps export occupancy grids and resolve free-form queries to object instances.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00775