Watermarking is a central tool for provenance in generative models, yet its application to multivariate time series remains hindered by reliability failures under post-editing attacks. We show that existing detectors, which rely on globally coupled re-encoding, suffer from bidirectional drift of the null distribution: post-editing attacks can shift the z-score of non-watermarked samples in either direction, invalidating clean-calibrated thresholds. We argue that this instability is a property of the re-encoding, and that reliable detection requires each recovered unit to depend only on a bounded temporal neighborhood. Guided by this principle, we propose L-VQVAE, a generative model in which each discrete token is produced from a short contiguous window, and LVQMark, a watermarking method over this token space that combines logit-bias injection with robust re-encoding for attack-time detection. Experiments on four benchmarks spanning finance, energy, and neuroimaging show that our approach preserves generation quality while stabilizing both detection power and false-positive behavior under post-editing attacks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19727
Sparse keypoint extraction and matching underpin core tasks in geometric computer vision, including structure-from-motion, visual SLAM, augmented reality, and medical image registration. Learning robust local feature representations, however, typically requires accurate camera poses or depth supervision, which are often unavailable in real-world settings. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising alternative, requiring only the information if two images show the same scene or not. However, existing RL formulations such as RIPE rely on coarse binary rewards and carefully constructed negative training pairs, limiting training stability and descriptor discriminability. In this paper, we revisit RL-based keypoint learning and propose a reward that fully exploits the geometric consistency signal, deriving both reward and penalty from a single positive pair without contrasting against negatives. This richer signal provides sufficient supervisory contrast to learn discriminative detectors and descriptors from positive image pairs alone, enabling representation learning under extremely limited supervision. Furthermore, we show that the same RL objective can be extended to the matching stage by adapting LightGlue, raising AUC@5 on MegaDepth1500 from 56.58 to 59.65 and enabling weakly-supervised training of the full sparse matching pipeline from image pairs with partial visual overlap. We validate our approach on established benchmarks, demonstrating competitive results compared to fully-supervised methods. We further show that the method can be even trained on low texture medical video sequences, where camera poses are usually unavailable and standard SfM pipelines often fail. Code and data are available at this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19693
Financial AI systems often train information extractors on one textual register and deploy them across filings, news, and user-generated content, while standard F1 scores do not indicate which predictions remain safe to automate when the input distribution changes. We study confidence estimation and selective prediction for financial named entity recognition (NER) on a three-tier stress test spanning SEC filings, financial news, and general-topic social media as an extreme out-of-domain condition. We evaluate a BERT tagger and LoRA-tuned Qwen2.5-0.5B/1.5B models using five inference-time confidence signals, three training seeds, and bootstrap intervals. Confidence rankings themselves change under distribution shift: whole-output probability is the strongest in-domain error detector but deteriorates out of domain, whereas entity-span probability and self-consistency are more robust; self-consistency is also better calibrated without post-hoc fitting. Abstention reduces sentence error from 34.3% to below 2% on the highest-confidence 40% of in-domain inputs and remains useful on financial news, but recovers no usefully large clean subset under the extreme social-media shift. These results motivate a staged deployment strategy that detects severe distribution shift upstream before applying prediction-level confidence gating.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19558
While modern autonomous driving systems excel at perception tasks such as object detection and trajectory prediction, they lack the high-level causal reasoning required to interpret traffic accidents. In particular, determining responsibility, such as identifying who is at fault and which traffic rule was violated, remains largely unexplored in current benchmarks. To this end, we introduce CAViAR (Causal Accident Video and Incident Analysis Repository), a human-annotated dashcam benchmark comprising 2,249 real-world accident videos collected from CarCrashDataset (CCD) and Nexar. Each video is annotated with structured labels spanning environmental conditions, accident type, causal explanation, apparent At-Fault Agent, affected agent, and apparent rule-violation category. We benchmark state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs), including Cosmos-Reason2, Qwen3-VL, and InternVL3. Once class imbalance is accounted for with majority/random baselines and balanced metrics, perceptual competence is uneven--lighting is nearly solved, whereas weather and road-condition accuracy fall at or below the majority-class baseline---and all models degrade sharply on accident type and responsibility reasoning. Overall, CAViAR exposes a practical Perception--Reasoning Gap: current VLMs may recognize salient context, but do not reliably map visible agent actions to annotated rule-relevant responsibility categories in safety-critical driving scenarios. Code, annotation schema, prompts, and evaluation scripts are available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19380
Statistical watermarks for language models live in the freedom of the signifier: they choose among tokens that are nearly equivalent in meaning, and they are therefore eroded by exactly those transformations which move the form of a text while leaving its content in place. The literature measures such transformations by their endpoint, through the semantic similarity between the original and the rewritten text. We show that the endpoint is the wrong statistic. Adapting the formalism of linguistic loops, we prove that the invariant of a chain of meaning-preserving transformations factorises canonically into an endpoint part and a holonomy in the stabiliser of the initial state, the second of which the semantic deficit cannot see; the loop rotation is parallel transport on the unit sphere of the embedding space, so that the analogy with the Wilson loop becomes a theorem rather than a figure of speech. On the side of the detector we prove an exact identity: the residual statistic is proportional to the number of positions whose seeding window survived intact, from which the decay law $\rho^{h+1}$ follows as the independent-edit corollary. The identity has a disconcerting consequence, which we confirm to three decimal places: at one and the same retention rate the surviving signal may be one half of the original, one quarter of it, or exactly nothing, according only to where the edits fall.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19369
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly known as, drones pose increasing risks in civilian and defense settings, demanding accurate and real-time drone detection systems. However, detecting drones is challenging because of their small size, rapid movement, and low visual contrast. A modified architecture of YolovN called the YolovN-CBi is proposed that incorporates the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and the Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) to improve sensitivity to small object detections. A curated training dataset consisting of 28K images is created with various flying objects and a local test dataset is collected with 2500 images consisting of very small drone objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated on four benchmark datasets, along with the local test dataset. The baseline Yolov5 and the proposed Yolov5-CBi architecture outperform newer Yolo versions, including Yolov8 and Yolov12, in the speed-accuracy trade-off for small object detection. Four other variants of the proposed CBi architecture are also proposed and evaluated, which vary in the placement and usage of CBAM and BiFPN. These variants are further distilled using knowledge distillation techniques for edge deployment, using a Yolov5m-CBi teacher and a Yolov5n-CBi student. The distilled model achieved a mA@P0.5:0.9 of 0.6573, representing a 6.51% improvement over the teacher's score of 0.6171, highlighting the effectiveness of the distillation process. The distilled model is 82.9% faster than the baseline model, making it more suitable for real-time drone detection. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed CBi architecture, together with the distilled lightweight models in advancing efficient and accurate real-time detection of small UAVs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18046
Object detection models deployed in safety-critical applications remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks that cause targeted misbehaviors when a hidden trigger is present. Existing detection methods either rely on trigger inversion or exploit architecture-specific assumptions, and critically, representative existing methods fail to generalize reliably to scene-level attacks, where a single trigger induces anomalous behavior across all objects in the scene simultaneously. We present DistScan, a backdoor detection framework based on a simple but previously unexploited observation: backdoor injection systematically shifts a model's pre-NMS prediction class distribution away from its training class frequencies, even on clean inputs without any trigger present. DistScan aggregates intermediate class predictions over a clean validation set and flags a model as backdoored if the resulting distribution deviates significantly from the training class frequencies, requiring no model weight access, no trigger knowledge, and no additional training. Extensive experiments on MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC across two architectures and three scene-level attack scenarios demonstrate that DistScan substantially outperforms existing methods, improving average detection accuracy over the best-performing applicable baseline by 27.32 percentage points.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19088
Object detectors often produce over-confident predictions for objects outside their training categories, leading to so-called out-of-distribution (OoD) hallucinations. Existing approaches for detecting or mitigating such hallucinations typically either construct scoring functions directly over learned object detector representations or modify the object detector itself to suppress hallucination emergence. However, the latent priors implicitly encoded in these representations remain largely unexplored and have not been explicitly decoded for OoD detection. To uncover and exploit these latent priors, we propose Structured Prior Knowledge (SPK), a hallucination-oriented framework that explicitly elicits OoD-relevant priors from pretrained object detectors. Specifically, SPK leverages in-distribution data and hallucination-inducing samples as diagnostic supervision to elicit part-level semantic concepts underlying object detector decision-making, rather than using them merely for rejection or object detector adaptation. The elicited semantic priors are further integrated with geometric and contextual priors to form a compact five-dimensional SPK representation for OoD detection. Extensive experiments across diverse object detector architectures and multiple OoD benchmarks demonstrate that SPK achieves state-of-the-art OoD detection. Our findings reveal that pretrained object detectors already encode substantially richer latent knowledge than is typically exploited for OoD detection. More importantly, this knowledge can be explicitly elicited and organized into a compact, structured, and interpretable knowledge space for prediction reliability analysis. This suggests a promising proactive route for improving object detector reliability by explicitly uncovering and leveraging latent priors. Code and data are available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19080
Autonomous vehicles depend on fast and reliable perception systems to detect surrounding vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, traffic signs, and other road objects in real time. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and analysis of one-stage object detectors for autonomous driving rather than an implementation of a new detection system. The survey reviews the evolution of major one-stage detectors, including YOLOv1, SSD, RetinaNet, EfficientDet, anchor-free detectors such as FCOS and CenterNet, and recent real-time models such as YOLOv10. It compares these architectures through their design choices, feature-fusion strategies, loss functions, deployment trade-offs, and reported benchmark performance. The paper also summarizes commonly used autonomous-driving datasets, evaluation metrics, open challenges, and future research directions. Overall, this survey highlights how one-stage detectors balance speed, accuracy, efficiency, and robustness, while also emphasizing the remaining gap between benchmark results and dependable real-world autonomous-driving performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19014
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) object detection is an important part of remote sensing interpretation. However, because of variations in frequency band, resolution, background clutter, and target scattering responses, the performance of existing detectors often degrades when training and testing data are acquired from different SAR domains. Although domain adaptation methods offer a promising paradigm for solving this problem, most of them mainly pursue domain-invariant feature alignment and suppress sensor-dependent scattering characteristics that are useful for object detection. This problem becomes more challenging in few-shot scenarios, where only a few fully annotated target-domain SAR images are available. To address this issue, we propose a scattering-aware shared-specific feature decomposition framework for few-shot SAR domain adaptation object detection. We decompose detection features into a shared path and several soft-gated scattering-specific expert paths. The shared path learns transferable object structural information and is used for asymmetric domain alignment, while the scattering-specific experts adaptively compensate heterogeneous SAR responses. In addition, routing-domain auxiliary loss is introduced to encourage specific experts to capture sensor-dependent routing preferences, and an expert balancing loss is used to prevent routing collapse. Extensive experiments on four bidirectional heterogeneous SAR detection tasks between FARAD-X/FARAD-Ka and MiniSAR under different few-shot settings have been conducted and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance in both forward and reverse adaptation directions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18755
Text-to-video (T2V) services inherit their safety stack from image generation, pairing a keyword prompt filter with a per-frame checker that blocks a clip whenever one sampled frame looks unsafe. This stack has a blind spot unique to video. We prove that any moderator ignoring frame order accepts a harmful clip whenever it accepts that clip's benign shuffle, so harm carried by the ordering alone escapes. Empirically, the unmodified benchmark prompt already lands a clip in this moderation gap on 32.7% of Sequential-Action targets over four held-out seeds, and paraphrasing, scene splitting, and a feedback-driven prompt search show no significant improvement (paired McNemar $p\ge0.12$), so prompt engineering is not needed to expose the vulnerability. Dense-scoring all 97 rendered frames shows that about a third of the delivered clips merely hide an unsafe frame, while the rest stay harmful as ordered videos even though every frame passes, an order-blind residual the unmodified prompt reaches on a quarter of Sequential-Action targets. We also document a measurement pitfall, since scoring a searched prompt on its own render seed inflates a 7.5% per-generation rate into an apparent 46.7%. A user study confirms that people read these clips as harmful and their shuffles as safe. The fix is to read frame order, and an order-aware detector separates these clips from their own shuffles at AUC 0.74 where per-frame checking sits at chance, which is the signal deployed moderation throws away.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26233
Compact object detectors are suitable for resource-constrained visual perception, but their limited representation capacity creates an accuracy gap relative to large models. Conventional detector distillation often relies on prediction-level supervision or a single feature-alignment target, such as response, distribution, correlation, or frequency-domain matching. Frequency-Decoupled Cross-Attention Knowledge Distillation (FD-CanKD) is presented as a detector-oriented framework that transfers teacher knowledge at three complementary levels: head-level prediction supervision, relation-level non-local context transfer, and frequency-level component-selective alignment. Student features first aggregate teacher-side spatial context through cross-attention-based relation transfer, after which frequency-aware alignment preserves complementary structural and detail-sensitive cues. Under controlled Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) experiments, fixed 50-epoch from-scratch comparisons show that FD-CanKD remains competitive with representative detector knowledge distillation baselines. Post-distillation continued fine-tuning further produces a stronger refinement-ready student than detector-only fine-tuning, reaching 48.87 mean average precision (mAP) at intersection-over-union thresholds from 0.50 to 0.95 (mAP50:95), 65.84 mAP50, and 53.40 mAP75 after 20 additional epochs. All distillation modules are removed after training, leaving the deployed student unchanged at 19.7M parameters. The framework is instantiated and evaluated in a controlled YOLOv12 teacher-student setting as a representative compact-detector case study.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18590
Vision-based industrial anomaly detectors are calibrated on one distribution but may be deployed on another that differs in illumination, fixture placement, or sensor characteristics, sharply degrading an otherwise accurate detector. Adapting to the incoming lot is a natural response, but labeled anomalies are scarce. We therefore consider calibration using only a handful of verified-normal images available before scoring the rest of the lot. Existing fixes require backpropagation, detector-specific tuning, or choices about feature directions that few calibration samples cannot justify. We present SPARC, a few-shot calibration method that intercepts patch features between encoder and detector and removes a closed-form, spatially indexed estimate of deployment-time nuisance through per-cell subspace projection. It needs only $k \le 8$ verified-normal images and uses the algebraic saturation rank $r{=}k{-}1$ on the encoder's native patch grid. The correction requires no gradient or weight updates and works with memory-bank, density, prototype, and mutual detectors. On the shift-prone benchmarks, SPARC improves pooled Image AUROC and AU-PRO$_{0.3}$ for all seven detectors whose image scores depend on corrected patch features by $+13.8$ and $+3.5$ percentage points (pp), respectively; on benchmarks without engineered shift, the changes are small and mixed. Controls that give competing corrections the same calibration images attribute these gains to the per-cell subspace structure rather than the images alone. Further ablations support the saturation-rank choice and characterize sensitivity to backbone and calibration conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18585
Hardware Trojans (HTs) remain a critical threat because learning-based detectors often overfit to narrow trigger/payload patterns and small, stylized benchmarks. We introduce TrojanGYM, an agentic, LLM-driven framework that automatically curates HT insertions to expose detector blind spots. Given high-level HT specifications, a suite of cooperating LLM agents (instantiated with GPT-4, LLaMA-3.3-70B, Gemini-2.5Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5) proposes and refines RTL modifications that realize diverse triggers and payloads without impacting functionality of both the HT and the design under attack. TrojanGYM implements an agentic loop co-designed with HT detectors, in which constraint-aware syntactic checking, testbench-based functional verification, and GNN-based HT detectors provide feedback that iteratively refines HT specifications and insertion strategies to better surface detector blind spots. We further propose Robust-GNN4TJ, a new implementation of GNN4TJ with improved graph extraction, training robustness, and prediction reliability, especially on LLM-generated HT designs. On the most challenging TrojanGYM-generated benchmarks, Robust-GNN4TJ raises HT detection rates from 0% to 60% relative to prior art. We instantiate TrojanGYM on SRAM, AES-128, UART, and RISC-V designs at RTL, and show that it systematically produces diverse, functionally correct HTs that reach up to 68.75% evasion rates against modern GNN-based detectors, revealing robustness gaps that are not apparent when these detectors are evaluated on existing TrustHub-style benchmarks. We release all codes and artifacts at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17178
Diffusion-based generators have made synthetic images ubiquitous, but detectors often fail under simultaneous shifts in generator, prompt/style, and source-domain. We study AI-generated image detection as a transfer system described by training prior, frozen encoder feature space, and decision rule, and ask when classifier head training adds value beyond what is already separable in modern features. As a controlled diagnostic, we fit a prior-conditioned Gaussian discriminant ladder: closed-form heads built from first- and second-order feature statistics under nested covariance assumptions. On Percept-Lens, a unified protocol over 39 public datasets (7.1 million images), the best rung is frequently competitive with, and sometimes exceeds, released AI-generated image detector heads when matched on both prior and encoder. We further quantify strong sensitivity to the training prior, data-efficiency of moment-based heads, and representation dependence of Gaussian shift metrics, motivating (prior, encoder, head)-level reporting and stronger analytical baselines for AIGI transfer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18523
Online log anomaly detection is critical for maintaining the reliability of large-scale computing systems. Although recent language model-based log anomaly detectors achieve strong detection performance, their confidence estimates remain poorly calibrated. We show that these detectors frequently assign excessive confidence to incorrect predictions, particularly for anomalous logs under severe class imbalance. Moreover, confidence on erroneous predictions remains persistently high even when conventional calibration metrics indicate good calibration, creating a critical reliability gap for operational monitoring systems. To address this issue, we propose Log Reconstruction and Distance (LoRD), a lightweight post-hoc calibration framework for reliable log anomaly detection. LoRD learns prediction-route-specific reliability models from latent representations of correctly classified validation samples and estimates prediction reliability through route-wise reconstruction distances. Based on the estimated reliability, LoRD selectively recalibrates high-risk predictions to suppress overconfident errors while preserving reliable predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale log benchmark datasets and multiple language model-based detectors demonstrate that LoRD consistently improves confidence reliability and substantially reduces overconfident anomaly-related errors without sacrificing anomaly detection performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17965
Automatic Target Detection and Recognition (ATD/R) is critical for military decision support and (semi-)autonomous operations. Recent advances in object detection and artificial intelligence (AI) significantly boosted the potential performance of ATD/R. However, the scarcity of publicly available military datasets limits the application of these systems. As a solution, this paper explores the use of publicly available models and civilian datasets to achieve reasonable performance in military contexts. We benchmark several state-of-the-art models, including six iterations of the YOLO series and two variations on the DETR framework, on a newly acquired military relevant dataset. This dataset features military vehicles and challenging circumstances, including various degrees of occlusions and small targets. The out-of-the-box version of each model is validated alongside a version finetuned on the VisDrone dataset. This dataset features small objects, an Air-to-Ground (A2G) perspective and relevant classes, potentially generalizing to our military ATD/R task. We compare the performance of the models using mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95, across A2G and Ground-to-Ground (G2G) perspective, target size and model size, giving insight into the real-time capabilities of models. Our main findings are: (1) bigger models outperform smaller models, (2) DETR-based models show promising results compared to the YOLO series,(3) fine-tuning models on an out-of-domain A2G dataset, improves their A2G performance and slightly improves their performance on small objects, but (4) all models still struggle with detecting small objects in an A2G scenario. We conclude that, despite recent advances in object detection, in-domain training is still crucial for creating capable ATD/R systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17917
Visual-inertial SLAM on low-power edge platforms is constrained by the cost of dense feature extraction and loop closure. Prior GPU ports of ORB-SLAM trade accuracy for speed by approximating the ORB detector, altering the feature set and therefore the estimated trajectory. We present an accuracy-preserving GPU implementation of ORB-SLAM3 for the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, whose GPU ORB front end reproduces the reference CPU detector algorithmically to 94.7% exact keypoint agreement and 99.9% descriptor bit agreement. This work also makes CNN-based loop closure edge-viable through native TensorRT. The visual front end (feature extraction) is offloaded to the GPU while the mapping and optimization back end is kept on the CPU, matching each computation to the hardware it suits. The accuracy is verified by comparing four configurations: the GPU pipeline and the unmodified CPU reference, each run on both the Jetson Orin Nano and a desktop. On EuRoC dataset, all four agree to within 0.10cm in mean absolute trajectory error (SE(3)), so neither the GPU port nor the change of hardware shifts the estimated trajectory. The GPU-versus-CPU comparison is reproducible on TUM-VI and KITTI datasets, so the acceleration is accuracy-preserving rather than approximate. The proposed implementation is competitive with published ORB-SLAM3 on EuRoC, attains sub-centimeter accuracy on five of the six TUM-VI room sequences, and reaches sub-1% relative translation error on nine of eleven KITTI sequences. For loop closure, the generic ONNX-Runtime CUDA/TensorRT execution providers are unusable with our CosPlace ResNet-50 on the embedded platform, whereas a native libnvinfer FP16 engine reduces per-query inference to 2.2ms, a 180x speedup. Learned place recognition therefore runs concurrently with tracking on a 7W device. In monocular-inertial mode the system sustains 32FPS mean over the eleven EuRoC sequences.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17874
LLMs increasingly rely on external contexts, such as pre-defined system prompts or retrieved documents, to improve generation quality. However, processing these contexts alongside user queries creates an attack surface: adversarial inputs can induce models to disclose them. Prior probing studies suggest that leakage-related signals emerge in hidden states, yet the need to extract these states poses additional deployment challenges. In this paper, we explore whether this internal signal leaves a more accessible ``tell'' before decoding. We propose LeakGauge, which probes this response by appending a suffix that gauges leakage behavior and mapping its prefill token probabilities to an attack-risk score. While a direct gauge uses the initial tokens of confidential content, we find that a content-agnostic one that verbalizes leakage behavior yields more robust signals. Across 11 LLMs, including GLM-5.2 (753B) and Kimi-K3 (2.8T), LeakGauge reaches an AUROC range of 0.944--0.996 on unseen attacks. The signal remains stable when the content changes language or the attack shifts from verbatim to semantic disclosure. By activation-steering interventions, we further show that the risk score is sensitive to an internal leakage-related direction, relating the observable signal to the model's internal representation. In addition, LeakGauge enables an input detector with fewer than 0.5K extra parameters and added latency of 10.34 ms. Code: \href{this https URL}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17829
Cross-distribution generalization remains a critical bottleneck in deepfake detection. While recent efforts leverage the semantic priors of large-scale visual foundation models (VFMs), a noteworthy yet underexplored challenge remains: the susceptibility of these semantic priors to environmental interference from factors such as lighting and style. Crucially, this interference establishes spurious correlations between forgery cues and environmental patterns that severely limit generalization. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose an innovative Environment-Invariant Subspace Learning (EISL) framework. The core contribution of EISL is that it aims to disentangle features into orthogonal forgery-relevant invariant factors and environment-related residual factors via a learnable low-rank projection. To facilitate robust feature disentanglement, we also design an Environmental Intervention module that generates diverse and challenging intervention pairs, simulating out-of-distribution environmental shifts to guide the model toward discovering truly invariant forgery representations. Experiments across cross-dataset, cross-generator, whole-face synthesis, and corruption settings show consistent gains and competitive or leading performance against strong detectors, demonstrating improved robustness to unseen forgery types and environmental variations. This work provides a new perspective and a valuable exploration for understanding and tackling the generalization barriers of VFMs in deepfake detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17700