How do large language models (LLMs) organize moral knowledge? Models detect moral content broadly, but detection is a low bar. We ask whether they go further, distinguishing moral foundations from one another and organizing the relationships between them geometrically. We train six independent linear probes on open-weight language models, one per Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) category (care/harm, fair/cheat, lib/oppress, loy/betray, auth/subv, sanc/degrade), and examine how the resulting directions relate to each other in representation space. We find the directions neither collapse into a single moral detector nor isolate from one another. Rather, they span a near-maximal number of independent dimensions while sharing a positive common component. The shared component is the signature of integration, and it is moral-specific relative to a matched non-moral concept battery built identically (mean pairwise cosine 0.26 vs. 0.013). The geometry is consistent across architectures and scale and reaches its integration regime early in pre-training, well before probe accuracy saturates. The structure the model discovers shows no evidence of the individualizing/binding distinction predicted by Moral Foundations Theory (an underpowered test: only 20 candidate partitions exist) but rather reflects corpus statistics. Extending to moral dilemmas, each dilemma direction partially composes from its component foundations, at 2.7x a mismatched-pair baseline, while the majority of its variance encodes conflict-specific structure. The model represents moral tension itself, not a pre-resolved judgment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27402
AI-generated text detection is commonly framed as a binary document-level judgment about whether a text is human-written or machine-generated. This framing breaks down for mixed-origin writing, where content origin and expression origin may differ. We cast mixed-origin detection as dimension-to-composition source attribution, inferring content origin and expression origin before composing them into four collaboration types. We propose Dimension-to-Composition Routing (D2C-Routing), which routes content-side and expression-side evidence to supervised dimension heads before a learned gated composition layer predicts the final label. On MixD2C, a reconstructed split derived from the HART mixed-origin benchmark, our disclosed D2C-Routing-based detector system reaches 0.8603 four-way Avg TPR@1%FPR, 6.5 points above the same-split RACE-local rerun. Core ablations support the routing design, while error analysis shows that distinguishing AI-content/human-expression from fully AI-generated text remains the hardest boundary. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27380
Most single-stage 3D object detectors complete different tasks with the same extracted features. Nevertheless, it is impossible to project features into a common space that is adaptive for all the tasks. We present a novel task-aware deformable prediction (TADP) method for single-stage 3D object detection to solve this problem. Firstly, a triple feature refinement aggregation module is designed to extract three-level features adaptively. Additionally, we design the multi-scale feature aggregation block to fuse multi-scale features in a scale-aware manner. Finally, the prediction of each task is deformed with the designed plug-and-play task-aware deformation head. It can percept the emphasis and interaction of each task. We also designed three different deformation modules. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed deformation head shows good results on other detection methods. The experimental results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that the car mAP is 80.91%, surpassing many state-of-the-art methods on the KITTI benchmark.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27282
Open World Object Detection (OWOD) built on multimodal foundation models often suffers from semantic ambiguity caused by unidirectional text-to-vision matching, while rigid outlier penalties may over-suppress unknown objects near known-class decision boundaries. We propose CODE (Cross-Modal Calibration and Dynamic Suppression), a unified inference-time framework with three complementary components. Cross-Modal Joint Confidence Calibration injects global visual prototypes to calibrate text-driven known-class predictions. Uncertainty-Guided Universal Objectness Enhancement measures classification hesitation from local visual responses to strengthen potential unknown objects. Dynamic Outlier Suppression via Confidence Margin replaces rigid suppression with a margin-aware adjustment that preserves ambiguous out-of-distribution instances. Experiments on the Real-World Detection benchmark demonstrate that, with the OWL-ViT L/14 backbone, CODE achieves 21.7 U-mAP and 40.8 K-mAP in Task 1, surpassing the previous state of the art by 2.6 and 2.3 points, respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27214
Keypoint detection under motion blur remains a significant challenge, as blur distorts local image structure and degrades the repeatability of feature localization. Existing approaches either rely on computationally expensive deblur-then-detect pipelines that may introduce restoration artifacts, or learn to regress the image positions of handcrafted keypoints extracted on sharp images, which reflects the assumptions of the handcrafted detector rather than what is truly repeatable under blur. We present SSMB, a deblur-free, self-supervised keypoint detector for motion-blurred images that requires neither handcrafted detectors nor external pseudo-labels. SSMB introduces the Local Discriminability Enhancement (LDE) module, which restores fine-grained local discriminability after global feature mixing. Training is performed in two stages. First, geometric pretraining on synthetic shapes bootstraps spatially discriminative keypoint detection without any external detector, just from the rendered geometry. Second, blur-aware training on real sharp-blur image pairs learns blur-invariant detection through a multi-component self-supervised objective that enforces cross-domain consistency, geometric alignment, and spatial coverage. Extensive evaluations on keypoint detection, image matching, relative pose estimation, and visual localization under motion blur demonstrate that SSMB establishes a new state-of-the-art among sparse keypoint detectors, consistently outperforming both supervised and self-supervised baselines across all tasks. Code, models, and datasets will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27181
Accurate state estimation for autonomous underwater vehicles performing close-range seafloor sampling remains challenging. In low-altitude operation, down-looking cameras over featureless planar seabeds produce scale ambiguity, lateral degeneracy, and inconsistent feature tracking. Meanwhile, inertial-Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) fusion alone provides no mechanism for structural drift correction. We propose a Contact-Aided Factor-Graph Localization framework that treats physical interaction as an informative geometric constraint within a smoothing-based localization formulation. The method tightly fuses suction-based manipulator contact events with adaptive visual odometry, learned object detections, and on-board sensors. Visual odometry relative-pose factors and landmark bearing-range factors are uncertainty-scaled according to inlier statistics to prevent visually weak frames from destabilizing the estimator, while contact events are modeled as high-confidence factors that induce implicit loop closures without appearance-based place recognition. Furthermore, the system can fully initialize online during motion. Experimental evaluation in tanks, harbor, and simulation environments demonstrates that contact-induced constraints significantly reduce trajectory drift and improve object revisit accuracy compared to filtering-based navigation and contact-free graph formulations. These results highlight the role of embodied physical interaction as a localization primitive in perception-degraded underwater environments
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26932
AI text detectors are increasingly employed in academic settings, but it remains unclear whether their outputs reflect AI authorship itself or broader linguistic features associated with polished academic English. Previous studies have reported high false-positive rates (FPRs) for non-native English writing, but population-level comparisons confound authorship with differences in topic, domain, and writing style. Professional editing provides a useful setting for examining this issue because it changes the linguistic form of manuscripts while preserving authorship and content. We examined 135,389 document pairs from a professional English editing service (2018-2025), comprising non-native manuscripts and their native-edited versions, to assess how editing affects detector responses controlling for content and authorship. For the 13 AI text detectors, FPRs for human-written texts varied widely, from 0.0% to 100.0%. Responses varied across detectors: the same edits increased AI scores in some detectors but decreased them in others. Notably, score changes correlated with the extent of editing. The findings identify professional editing style as a key confounding variable in AI detector outputs, rather than establishing a full separation of text origin from linguistic style, raising concerns about fairness and reliability in academic settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26710
Maritime vessel detectors often face scenes where hulls are small, low-contrast, or blurred, while wakes are longer and easier to detect. This creates a wake-reliance problem: detectors may miss slow or stationary vessels with weak wakes, or produce false positives on wake-like water clutter. We propose HullWake, a hull-first wake-second framework for robust maritime vessel detection. HullWake separates proposal-centered hull evidence from directional wake context, extracts wake cues with bidirectional proposal-anchored corridors, and suppresses wake-dominant predictions through wake response supervision, wake-attenuated consistency, wake-only confidence suppression, and hull--wake decorrelation. We also introduce a wake-oriented evaluation protocol covering weak/no-wake vessels, wake-like hard negatives, worst-group AP, and confidence drop after wake attenuation. Experiments are conducted on Curated-Wake, a wake-oriented maritime dataset of about 10,000 images curated from Ships/Vessels in Aerial Images, the SMD benchmark, and SeaDronesSee, with newly added detection- and segmentation-level wake annotations. Compared with box-only detectors and mask-supervised segmentation baselines, HullWake improves overall AP, weak/no-wake robustness, wake-like false positives, worst-group AP, and confidence stability after wake attenuation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26665
Many synthetic-image detectors produce accurate predictions but offer limited insight into how those decisions are formed. This paper introduces Hierarchical Channel Stacking (HCS), a compact framework for AI-generated image detection that converts intermediate CNN activations into a structured 60-dimensional representation organized across three progressively deeper backbone stages. HCS uses per-channel Level-1 classifiers and a Level-2 aggregator to produce image-level predictions while preserving explicit hierarchical structure for analysis. On a benchmark spanning GAN and diffusion generators, HCS achieves 86.7% accuracy and 86.7% macro-F1 on the held-out test set. Stage ablation shows that the full three-stage system outperforms reduced single-stage and two-stage variants, indicating that the hierarchy carries complementary predictive information. Stage-level contribution analysis further shows that, in the analyzed detector setting, fake GAN and fake diffusion images exhibit distinct stage-level contribution profiles. These results position HCS not simply as a compact detector, but as a structured framework for studying how synthetic-image detectors assemble evidence across representation levels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26648
Text-to-SQL systems are increasingly deployed on production databases, where queries that pass benchmark evaluation can still produce results that distort downstream workflows. Standard set-based execution accuracy (Set-EX) collapses duplicate rows and can therefore miss multiplicity errors, including missing DISTINCT, inflated aggregates, and Cartesian-style join explosions. We call this the Multiplicity Blind Spot (MBS) and introduce Multiset-EX, a multiplicity-preserving evaluation criterion that exposes such failures. Across released DeepEye-SQL artifacts from three backbones (Qwen2.5-Coder-32B, Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B, and Gemma-3-27B) on executable BIRD-Dev N=1532, we find a consistent 5.81--6.79 pp gap between Set-EX and Multiset-EX. The gap is not specific to DeepEye-SQL: it persists on released DAIL-SQL+GPT-4 (5.22 pp) and BIRD GPT-3.5-turbo (3.39 pp) predictions. We further introduce ModularSQL, a lightweight post-selection runtime guardrail that probes executed results for multiplicity anomalies and applies deterministic patches or low-cost LLM rescue only to flagged queries. Integrated with DeepEye-SQL using Qwen3-Coder, ModularSQL preserves Set-EX at 72.06% while improving Multiset-EX from 65.86% to 67.75% (+1.89 pp). It flags 77 high-risk anomalies, while adding only $0.0076 in total LLM cost and 120 ms amortized latency per query. Cross-pipeline evaluation shows that the candidate-free detector and deterministic patches also transfer to independently released prediction sets. Overall, these results show that benchmark accuracy does not necessarily imply execution-safe SQL, and that lightweight, multiplicity-aware runtime guardrails can narrow this gap with modest computational overhead.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29573
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish human writing from machine-generated text. Training-free detection offers a scalable solution, yet common confidence-based metrics mainly measure average token probabilities and often miss the signal fluctuations that characterize human writing, which we call "generative vitality". Spectral analysis offers a way to capture this vitality, but its mechanism and practical boundaries remain underexplored. In this paper, we analyze spectral detection from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We connect spectral energy to variance in proxy log-probability trajectories and explain how broader human token choices create the fluctuations used by frequency-domain indicators. We further show that the strength of this signal depends on text length and sampling range: spectral evidence is clearest for long, continuous, constrained generation, while short, fragmented, mixed, and edited settings require complementary confidence and fluctuation views. These findings clarify when frequency-domain detection works and provide guidance for future multi-dimensional detector design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25944
Publicly-acceesible face-manipulation tools have made deepfake creation accessible to non-expert users. Against these, existing defenses are mostly post-hoc, detecting only after forgery has occurred, and operating on still images rather than videos. Research is lacking in i) the proactive protection of published facial videos against black-box manipulation tools, and in (ii) understanding its perceptual effect on human viewers. We introduce TaintedPixels, a proactive video-protection method built around an asymmetric visibility trade-off: the embedded watermark should remain inconspicuous in the published video but become obvious once a downstream tool manipulates the video. TaintedPixels injects structured periodic perturbations into the blue channel of facial regions and refines them under stripe-visibility, color-cast, and video-level LPIPS budgets, with lightweight motion-adaptive deployment. We believe TaintedPixels is the first proactive defense designed specifically against black-box manipulation tools rather than image-level pipelines or specific surrogate generators. Across three publicly available off-the-shelf video manipulation tools and two off-the-shelf detectors, TaintedPixels attains the highest forgery fake rate while keeping perturbations small (LPIPS = 0.0042). Our non-expert human study, conducted on a diverse set of 300 video stimuli spanning different lighting conditions, backgrounds, and skin tones, shows that protected source videos draw a 3.26% suspicion rate, while forgeries from protected sources are identified as fake much more often than forgeries from unprotected sources (90.72% vs. 56.71%). This validates the effectiveness of TaintedPixels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27492
Self-supervised learning (SSL) encoders are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, posing threats to both visual SSL encoders and vision-language encoders. Existing defenses are typically designed for only one of these paradigms and rely on restrictive assumptions such as access to uninfected in-distribution data or precomputed pseudo-labels, which are difficult to satisfy in practice. To address these limitations, we propose DEFUSE, a generalizable backdoor detection framework for SSL encoders. Inspired by Bayesian posterior inference, we reformulate backdoor detection as a representation-conditioned image likelihood estimation problem parameterized by a conditional diffusion generative model. Uninfected representations tend to yield semantically consistent reconstructions, whereas backdoored ones are more likely to be mapped to the attacker's target class or semantically meaningless images, deviating from the original semantics and thereby exposing the backdoor. However, we find that the exact likelihood is intractable, because highly abstracted representations discard the low-level information necessary for pixel-faithful reconstruction. We therefore relax the objective to semantic reconstruction and evaluate it in a well-separated representation space provided by a reference encoder. Rather than training from scratch, we fine-tune a pretrained diffusion model, leveraging its generative prior to map data onto the natural image manifold while preserving semantic content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DEFUSE substantially outperforms existing detectors across diverse attack settings, generalizing to both visual SSL and vision-language encoders. Notably, our method greatly reduces the reliance on prior knowledge about the victim encoder or the attack strategy. The source code is available at this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25851
Object detection knowledge is fragmented across independently trained, heterogeneous detectors with complementary category supports. In socialized learning, this knowledge resides in a society, and learning aims to evolve the society collectively through exchange. However, aggregation-based socialization does not explicitly plan transfer order, whereas progressive multi-teacher distillation considers order but remains a one-way student enhancement in a shared category space. Building on Socialized Learning, we formulate Socialized Detector Learning (SDL) for heterogeneous, category-specialized object detectors and propose Trajectory-Guided and Reciprocal Distillation (TGRD).TGRD estimates directed operational Inter-Detector Transfer Difficulty (IDTD) from held-out feature-alignment residuals, precomputes a fixed score table, and greedily constructs a carrier trajectory. Along the trajectory, knowledge is progressively consolidated into a union-category carrier and then returned to experts through reciprocal transfer. A conditional proxy-certificate analysis shows that, under stated assumptions, the progressive certificate is no larger than an aggregated-target counterpart. On MS COCO with four heterogeneous experts and two carrier initializations, final carriers outperform epoch-matched simultaneous aggregation controls by 2.6 AP in both settings. Reciprocal detectors attain 20.8--28.4 AP on previously unsupported categories while remaining within 1.3 AP of original expert-specific performance. These results support order-aware progressive consolidation followed by reciprocal transfer as a viable mechanism for detector-society evolution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25836
Recent years have witnessed the growing potential of panoramic salient object detection in robotic vision, virtual reality, and related applications. However, projecting spherical scenes onto 2D planes inevitably introduces geometric distortions, which fundamentally limit the effectiveness of existing projection-based methods. Specifically, Equirectangular Projection (ERP) suffers from severe polar stretching distortions, while cube map projection introduces discontinuities across cube-face boundaries, resulting in degraded feature discriminability and compromised geometric consistency. To address these limitations, we propose TDFNet, the first Tri-projection Deformable Fusion Network for panoramic salient object detection, exploiting complementary projection representations to alleviate geometric distortions and improve detection this http URL, we design a cross-projection deformable attention (CDA) module that leverages spatial correspondences between different projections to construct geometry-aware sampling locations, guiding deformable attention for cross-projection contextual aggregation and enhancing robustness against projection-induced deformations. Furthermore, we introduce a latitude-guided fusion module, which utilizes spherical latitude priors to construct geometric confidence weights for adaptively balancing ERP and CMP features. Meanwhile, LGF incorporates distortion-reduced semantic references from Tangent Projection to achieve cross-projection feature refinement and spatial this http URL constructing a three-branch encoding architecture based on ERP, CMP, and Tangent Projection, TDFNet simultaneously preserves global spatial continuity, local geometric details, and fine-grained boundary information.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25808
The existing methods for saliency detection task focus on the application of multi-level features, aiming to take advantage of the respective strengths of high- and low-level features. However, because the inputs of these models are single-size images, their multi-level features have difficulty in learning the knowledge of size variations of salient objects. Object-scale variation learning has great potential for detecting multi-scale objects, which has not been fully explored by existing methods. To improve the recognition ability of a model for objects with different sizes, we are inspired by the image pyramid to propose a Multi-scale Input and Multi-scale Output Network (MIMONet). In MIMONet, we extract multi-level features for three images with different resolutions to form three encoder branches, and information will be exchanged between the branches. The advantage of this approach is that the features of one branch can learn the knowledge of target size variation from the features of the other two branches. In addition, we design a Multi-scale Perception (MSP) module, in which the input feature layer is divided into several sub-layers with different resolutions. Capturing the multi-level structure information of the objects in these sub-layers can make the objects more fully perceived. For network training, we propose a Joint Saliency Loss (JSL), which can constrain multiple saliency maps output by the network to identify the same foreground objects, and induce their boundaries to be preserved clearly. Experimental results show that MIMONet has stronger detection capabilities and harvests better evaluation scores on multiple datasets compared to existing models. The code of our model will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25733
In recent years, distinguishing between AI-generated text and human-written text has remained a challenge. In this paper, we introduce VietAIDetector, an open-source tool designed specifically for detecting Vietnamese AI-generated text. It allows users to interact through a Gradio web interface with inputs ranging from raw Vietnamese text to common text file formats, including scanned documents and exceptionally long texts that exceed the context size of the employed Large Language Models (LLMs). The core component of the tool employs a Zero-Shot approach to detect AI-generated text without requiring domain-specific training data, building upon the previous VietBinoculars and Binoculars research. The tool is built upon a Vietnamese-specific language model and has been evaluated on out-of-domain datasets, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing methods primarily developed for English. Additionally, users can select optimal detection thresholds based on F1 score, accuracy, or TPR@0.05FPR requirements. The results are presented through the web interface, allowing users to easily review and verify suspicious texts or download them as a PDF report. The tool is publicly available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25478
Chain-of-thought prompting can expose and amplify demographic stereotypes within an LLM's intermediate reasoning and create a failure mode that final-answer debiasing alone cannot address. Mitigating such bias during generation presents a fundamental timing problem: intervening too late allows biased reasoning to propagate, while unnecessarily intervening can disrupt otherwise correct reasoning. Existing approaches largely avoid this decision by either evaluating completed reasoning chains post hoc or intervening at predetermined steps, leaving open when a developing reasoning trajectory provides sufficient evidence to warrant correction. We formulate this decision as an online change-point detection problem. A per-step bias signal updates a CUSUM statistic and a targeted correction is injected only when accumulated evidence crosses a detector-specific threshold calibrated on held-out data. We instantiate the framework with a white-box signal derived from next-token probabilities and a black-box signal obtained from an LLM judge, enabling deployment with both open-weight and hosted models. On gpt-4o-mini adaptive black-box triggering recovers most of the disambiguated-context accuracy lost under fixed-interval intervention while requiring substantially fewer interventions. That result holds even with an independent judge. Across six open-weight models, the white-box signal improves ambiguous-item accuracy on all six but reduces disambiguated-item accuracy on five because it cannot distinguish unsupported stereotype reliance from correct, stereotype-congruent evidence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25379
Underwater unimodal object detection faces many challenges in sensor imaging, such as optical images limited by underwater noise and visible distance, and sonar images limited by less object structural information. While, optical images have rich object structural information, and sonar images are less affected by underwater noise and have a longer visible distance. Optical (RGB modality) and sonar (Sonar modality) images have complementary information underwater. In this paper, we create an RGB-Sonar multimodal object detection dataset, \textbf{R}GB-\textbf{S}onar \textbf{Fusion} (RSFusion) and propose evaluation metrics for the benchmark. And we propose the \textbf{R}GB-\textbf{S}onar \textbf{Fusion} \textbf{Det}ector (RSFusionDet) with a new RGB-Sonar multimodal object detection result expression for RGB-Sonar multimodal object detection. We analyze the features of RGB and Sonar modal information, and design a Cross-Attention Fusion (CAFusion) module to fuse RGB-Sonar spatial misalignment features and Object Matching Head (OMHead) with Loss (OMLoss) to match identical objects in RGB-Sonar modalities. Our RSFusionDet achieves 76.4/48.6 AP (RGB/Sonar) for object detection and 83.4 \(\text{F1-Score}_{match}\) for object matching, on RSFusion, which outperforms other object detection models. Compared with the DINO baseline, our method improves by 0.7/1.4 AP (RGB/Sonar) while simultaneously providing reliable cross-modal object matching. The code and datasets are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25367
Partial deepfake speech, where only limited segments of an utterance are synthesized or manipulated, poses a significant challenge to existing deepfake detection systems. As the proportion of spoofed regions decreases, passive detectors become increasingly unreliable, and accurate detection and restoration remain challenging. In this paper, we revisit audio steganography from a new perspective and propose its use as a proactive defense against partially deepfaked audio. In particular, we consider a self-embedding strategy in which a clean speech signal embeds a compressed representation of itself, enabling post-hoc extraction of reference content. We demonstrate how existing audio steganography methods can be repurposed to support detection of partial deepfakes through codec-based restoration. Experiments on a benchmark dataset show that the proposed approach complements passive defenses. Remarkably, the proposed method operates without any training, providing a robust and data-efficient alternative for partial deepfake detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25285