We present a systematic study of domain-dependent safety behavior in open-weight LLMs: 7 standardized experiments across 7 ethical domains, testing 5 models (12B--70B) in 4,200 interactions with dual-judge validation. Using a dual-condition methodology, each scenario tested in both an analytical framing (identify the harm) and an operational framing (help commit the harm), we find compliance rates vary from 14.7% (human trafficking) to 85.7% (surveillance design), a 71-percentage-point span with non-overlapping cluster-bootstrapped 95% CIs. Trustworthy deployment requires predictable safety behavior, yet we find compliance is highly context-dependent: the same model (Mistral Nemo 12B) provides surveillance designs in 100% of requests but assists with trafficking in only 26.7%. This unpredictability is opaque to deployers: the technical framing bypass, where harmful requests reframed as engineering problems override safety training without any external signal that refusal thresholds have shifted. Within-domain heterogeneity reaches 84.4pp, meaning safety behavior cannot be predicted even at the domain level. A replication on five frontier closed models (GPT-4.1/5.2, Claude Haiku/Sonnet/Opus 4.x; n=4,163 responses) accessed via the GitHub Copilot CLI deployed-product surface reproduces the same domain stratification, attenuated in absolute level but identical in shape, with the two low-codification domains (science fraud, surveillance) again the most permissive. These results show that current safety mechanisms lack the transparency and consistency required for trustworthy AI deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04035
Small edge devices such as IoT surveillance nodes and search-and-rescue (SAR) platforms are increasingly expected to run computer vision locally. On ultra-low-end hardware, however, object detection is limited by available memory and compute, by communication costs when several devices cooperate, and by the loss of accuracy caused by occlusion. The work evaluates occlusion-robust object detection on devices with less than 1 MB SRAM by combining an MCUNet backbone, a YOLOv2 detection head, and TensorFlow Lite quantisation. We evaluate two collaborative inference strategies: feature-level fusion, which concatenates intermediate feature maps, and decision-level fusion via Weighted Boxes Fusion (WBF). Under the tested occlusion settings, WBF outperforms feature-level fusion and gives gains of up to +0.2736 mAP in asymmetric occlusion scenarios. Extending fusion to three views improves accuracy further (up to +0.3827 mAP) while adding communication overhead (approximately 1.3 KB per exchange). The hardware experiments start with a host-assisted USB-relay baseline and then move to a Wi-Fi peer-to-peer deployment on two Coral Dev Board Micro units, where WBF runs on-device and communication energy remains small relative to inference. In a representative 301.9 s autonomous session comprising 108 frames, fused output is observed on 61 frames compared with 47 for Board 2 alone, a frame-level coverage gain of +29.8%. We also include a small exploratory decentralised federated learning (DFL) feasibility note, but do not treat it as a main result because performance remains limited under non-iid local data. The results support decision-level fusion as a viable option for improving occlusion robustness in small-scale edge object detection, including host-free multi-board operation on ultra-low-end hardware.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02894
Audio-visual speaker tracking aims to localize and track active speakers by leveraging auditory and visual cues, enabling fine-grained, human-centric scene understanding. This capability is essential for real-world applications such as intelligent video editing, surveillance, and human-computer interaction. However, existing datasets are largely limited to simple or homogeneous audio-visual scenes with coarse annotations. Such oversimplified settings bias evaluation toward static audio-visual co-occurrence, rather than rigorously assessing robust spatiotemporal modeling and cross-modal reasoning in complex, dynamic scenes. To address these limitations, we introduce AVTrack, a human-centric audio-visual instance segmentation (AVIS) dataset designed for dynamic real-world scenarios. AVTrack features diverse and challenging conditions, including camera motion, visual occlusions, and position changes. Evaluations of representative AVIS methods on AVTrack reveal substantial performance degradation, establishing AVTrack as a challenging benchmark for robust human-centric audio-visual scene understanding in complex environments. We further provide a simple yet effective baseline to facilitate future research. Project website: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02724
Self-harm is a major public health concern, but current surveillance relying on hospital presentations is inadequate due to the low sensitivity of diagnostic codes. Emergency Department (ED) triage notes, recorded at the initial point of contact, provide a succinct summary of presentations and an opportunity to identify self-harm. We developed a three-stage approach, augmenting traditional machine learning with large language model-based screening and evidence extraction to detect self-harm in ED triage notes. We assessed model transferability across three Australian hospitals. Our approach showed AUPRCs of 0.887 +/- 0.016 and 0.884 +/- 0.012 during internal and external validation. Prospectively, it achieved AUPRC of 0.881 +/- 0.008 at the development site, and 0.879 +/- 0.012 and 0.816 +/- 0.015 at two external sites without site-specific retraining. A key advantage of the approach is that it enables identification of the primary self-harm method with an accuracy of 95%, supporting more granular surveillance beyond binary classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02545
The detection and segmentation of infrared small targets have important application significance in the fields of surveillance and security, maritime rescue and so on. Due to the low occupancy of these targets in long-distance imaging, the mainstream visual state space model is inefficient and difficult to accurately model the target edge. The existing infrared state space models do not deviate from the mainstream visual state space structure framework from the structural properties of infrared small targets. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes the RPCASSM network based on the model paradigm of robust principal component analysis(RPCA), which aims to design the background state space module(BSSM) and the target state space module(TSSM) by the nature of the infrared small target in the spatial domain. The BSSM aims to use the saliency of spatial heterogeneous signals to design a spatial probe scanning mechanism(SPCM) to model background information. The TSSM designs a deformable prompt scanning mechanism(DPCM) by using the sparsity and local highlight of the target to focus on the deformable space of the target for state space modeling. According to the above design, we effectively solve the problem that the existing mainstream vision state space model is difficult to accurately model the edge structure of infrared small target. Experimental results on the existing benchmark data sets prove the effectiveness of the RPCASSM design. Our code will be made public at \href{this https URL}{RPCASSM}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01689
Video anomaly detection in surveillance settings must balance detection accuracy against real-time throughput, a tension that existing methods address either through stronger feature extractors or more efficient architectures, but rarely both. We present VigilFormer, a unified framework that combines deformable spatio-temporal attention with causal temporal modeling to detect anomalies in untrimmed surveillance video. The proposed Deformable Spatio-Temporal Encoder (DSTE) attends to a sparse set of informative locations across frames, avoiding the quadratic cost of dense attention while retaining the ability to capture irregular motion patterns. A Causal Anomaly Classifier (CAC) applies dilated causal convolutions over snippet-level features and optimizes a contrastive multiple-instance learning objective that separates anomalous and normal representations without frame-level labels. To meet deployment constraints, an Adaptive Confidence Scheduler (ACS) dynamically skips low-information frames at inference time, reducing redundant computation in static scenes. Evaluated on UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech, and CUHK Avenue, VigilFormer achieves AUC scores of 87.83%, 97.21%, and 89.74% respectively, at 41.5 FPS on a single GPU, outperforming recent weakly-supervised methods in both accuracy and speed.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14724
Accurate malaria forecasting remains a major challenge in sub-Saharan Africa, where strong seasonality, reporting uncertainty, and non-stationary transmission dynamics reduce the reliability of conventional models. In Ghana, district-level malaria surveillance requires forecasting frameworks that are probabilistically rigorous and robust under limited data. This study proposes a hybrid framework integrating Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) with Holt-Winters exponential smoothing for modelling monthly under-five malaria admissions. GPR captures non-linear behaviour and predictive uncertainty, while Holt-Winters stabilises long-horizon forecasts and preserves seasonal structure. Using ten years of district-level data (2014-2023), performance was evaluated via rolling-origin expanding-window validation. The hybrid model achieved $R^2 = 0.9906$ versus $0.8213$ for Holt-Winters alone, with $94.2\%$ of residuals within $\pm 2\sigma$ bounds. Forecasts for 2024-2028 project average monthly admissions from approximately 8{,}000 to 12{,}200 cases. Spatio-temporal analysis revealed pronounced ecological heterogeneity: northern high-burden districts exhibited stable relative patterns despite large absolute fluctuations. The framework provides a scalable probabilistic approach for malaria early warning and operational planning in endemic settings, supporting Ghana's national malaria control strategy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00834
Reliable quantification of malaria dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa is hindered by short, noisy, and spatially heterogeneous surveillance records. In Ghana, health-facility data from 2014 to 2023 reveal non-linear and age-specific fluctuations in hospital admissions, yet existing approaches struggle to capture stochastic variability or provide credible uncertainty bounds. This study develops a Bayesian nonlinear inference framework that integrates a cubic baseline with a damped oscillatory kernel, estimated via an affine-invariant ensemble Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler. The framework accommodates limited data, models parameter uncertainty, and generates probabilistic forecasts for children under five years and individuals aged five years or more. Results show strong empirical adequacy ($R^2 = 0.9958$ for $<5$ years; $R^2 = 0.9956$ for $\geq 5$ years) with residual errors below $2\%$ and well-mixed posteriors confirming convergence. District-level analysis reveals pronounced spatial heterogeneity, with coefficients of variation ranging from $<0.07$ in urban centres such as Kumasi to $>3.3$ in peripheral districts such as Mpohor and Bia East. Forecasts for 2024-2026 indicate a gradual resurgence: from 137,000 to 149,000 cases among children under five years and from 348,000 to 375,000 cases among older individuals, with uncertainty widening over time. By producing probabilistic forecasts, this Bayesian framework provides a principled tool for anticipating malaria fluctuations and strengthening data-driven decision-making in Ghana's national malaria control strategy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00783
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) play an important role in agricultural production but are also associated with environmental, public health, and disease surveillance concerns. Large-scale mapping of CAFOs from remote sensing imagery remains challenging due to heterogeneous infrastructure layouts, noisy location records, inconsistent annotations, and incomplete inventories. We introduce CAFOSat, a strongly annotated, infrastructure-aware dataset for CAFO mapping across the United States. CAFOSat integrates high-resolution National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery with multi-source CAFO inventories collected across multiple states and transforms weak geolocation records into refined annotations through a human-in-the-loop pipeline combining AI-assisted annotation, GradCAM-based localization, and geometric clustering. To improve dataset quality, we curate challenging negative samples using land-cover-guided sampling with spatial exclusion constraints and provide infrastructure-level annotations, including barns, manure ponds, and grazing-related features, through manual verification. The resulting dataset contains more than 45,000 image patches spanning 20 states and four major CAFO categories. We benchmark a diverse set of convolutional, transformer-based, and vision-language models, demonstrating the value of refined annotations and curated negative samples for CAFO classification and generalization. In addition, we introduce a synthetic augmentation pipeline that generates infrastructure-aware variations to increase training diversity and improve robustness under distribution shifts. CAFOSat provides a large-scale benchmark for advancing infrastructure-aware agricultural monitoring and CAFO mapping from high-resolution remote sensing imagery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00548
Efficient and robust 3D scene representation is crucial in autonomous driving, robotics, and related fields. While RGB images provide valuable content for 3D reconstruction, other modalities like thermal or depth can enable additional information on the environment. Lately, novel view synthesis methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting have started using multiple modalities to further boost their performance. But fusing or combining multimodal data can make the process slower and can bring in additional challenges. Therefore, our project aims to use single modality based on thermal infrared domain, by removing the reliance on visible light as much as possible. This single modality can be expected to be faster as it does not rely on multimodal data. We propose a method, Thermal-to-Depth Gaussian Splatting (TDg), that uses only thermal images and depth estimation in its architecture to derive the radiance fields. Our TDg method outperforms the MSMG (Multiple Single-Modal Gaussians) baseline in most cases on our test datasets, RGBT-Scenes and ThermalMix. On average, the rendering quality metrics such as learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of TDg are 1.12%, 0.034%, and 0.01% better than the baseline MSMG values. It also reduces the training time significantly, by 12 mins 47 secs (55% improvement). Overall, our method is successful in deriving these thermal radiance fields, which can ultimately have several applications, such as identifying heat sources critical in surveillance, search or rescue operations, and industrial inspections where temperature is widely used to monitor machines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30328
This study aims to enhance maritime security by using advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) techniques. For this purpose, it was designed and assessed intelligent object detection systems that can detect the presence of ships on the sea surface under different real-time environments. To achieve this goal, a maritime image dataset with 6,468 images was used, covering different weather conditions like cloudy, foggy, rainy, and sunny environments. Six deep learning architectures were evaluated, including a base Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, four transfer learning models (Xception, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetV2L), and a Vision Transformer (ViT) model. The models were compared using multiple performance indicators, including accuracy, Type I and Type II errors, model size, and video processing time. The results show that model performance varies depending on computational constraints and deployment conditions. While lightweight architectures are suitable for resource-limited devices, the ViT achieved the best overall performance, reaching 100% accuracy with the lowest error rates and the fastest video processing time. The findings highlight the potential of AI-driven computer vision systems for maritime surveillance, border protection, and autonomous navigation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14720
This thesis addresses group emotion recognition (GER) in-the-wild with a focus on privacy preservation. Unlike traditional emotion recognition methods that rely on individual-level cues such as face, gaze, or voice analysis, this work uses collective audio-video signals to infer emotions at the group level, reducing risks of individual monitoring and surveillance. Two complementary frameworks are proposed. The first is a cross-attention multimodal architecture for audio-video fusion, combined with Frames Attention Pooling (FAP) for temporal aggregation. It is supported by synthetic data augmentation and validated through ablation studies, demonstrating robustness in real-world GER conditions. The second framework, Variational Encoder Multi-Decoder (VE-MD), learns a shared latent space for emotion classification and structural representation prediction, including body and face cues. Two decoding strategies, DETR-based and heatmap-based, are explored to analyze the role of structural representations in group and individual settings. The thesis makes three main contributions: it clarifies the role of multimodality and structural cues in group-level affective computing; introduces two architectures for privacy-preserving multimodal GER; and shows that competitive performance can be achieved without using individual features as input data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07585
Identifying key individuals in video scenes is essential for applications such as automated video editing and intelligent surveillance. Current methods primarily focus on static images and immediate visual cues, overlooking the rich spatio-temporal information in videos. This leads to the phenomenon of Temporal Importance Shift (TIS), wherein individuals deemed significant in early frames may be demoted as the entire temporal context is considered. To address this, we introduce the Video Important Person (VIP) identification task, aimed at automatically identifying the most influential individuals in videos while providing textual rationales. We present Temporal-VIP, a large-scale rationale-annotated dataset consisting of 9,249 video segments across 11 categories with aligned importance rationales. To mitigate TIS, we develop the VIP-Net framework, which includes a Social Cue Encoder (SCE) for extracting multi-modal spatio-temporal cues, a Temporal Importance Rectifier (TIR) for hierarchical cue fusion and cross-modal alignment, and VIP Inference for ranking individuals. Experimental results show that VIP-Net achieves 67.3% accuracy, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models (37.5%-53.9%) and yielding a mean rationale similarity of 0.63 to ground truth through feature-guided LLM refinement. The dataset and code are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28604
Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UASs) have become a growing threat to the security of critical infrastructure, exploiting spatiotemporal gaps in sensor perimeters to infiltrate restricted airspace undetected. We formulate this interaction as a two-player zero-sum differential game between an adversarial UAS and a heterogeneous sensor network of directional and omnidirectional sensors. Unlike earlier game-theoretic approaches that restrict the defender to discrete placement graphs or fixed configurations, we introduce a continuous sensor redeployment technique in which each sensor slides freely along the convex building boundaries. This is enforced via a log-sum-exp smooth approximation that preserves differentiability at polygon vertices, enabling optimization with gradient-based methods. The attacker's best response is computed via a two-step approach combining STP-RRT* for feasible trajectory initialization and nonlinear programming for detection-minimization refinement. The joint optimization converges to a Local Nash Equilibrium (LNE) via alternating bilevel optimization, with analytical first-order stationarity conditions derived for both players, thereby establishing a deployable baseline for heterogeneous sensor placements in CUAS missions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27917
Epidemic forecasting faces a fundamental challenge: human behavior dynamically responds to disease spread, creating feedback loops that induce distribution shifts at policy intervention points. This renders data-driven models unreliable under distribution shift. We propose \textbf{SL-BiLEM} (Structured Learnable Behavior-in-the-Loop Epidemic Model), leveraging physical constraints as regularization for robust extrapolation. The framework decomposes effective transmission as $\beta_{\text{eff}}(t,g) = \beta_0(g) \times m_{\text{policy}}(t) \times m_{\text{media}}(t) \times m_{\text{comp}}(t,g)$, where monotonicity, smoothness, and bounded-jump constraints on the learned compliance function maintain predictive validity under novel policy regimes. Beyond forecasting, SL-BiLEM enables counterfactual analysis for intervention decision support. We validate forecasting on three real-world datasets (cruise ship, school influenza, and school-district COVID-19 surveillance) and evaluate counterfactual recovery on synthetic benchmarks with known ground truth. SL-BiLEM demonstrates: (1) 76\% improvement over neural-mechanistic baselines, with only 53\% OOD degradation versus 1142\% for neural baselines under policy-induced shift; (2) 100\% bootstrap CI coverage across 27 synthetic counterfactual experiments; and (3) Treatment Effect Accuracy exceeding 0.85. These results establish SL-BiLEM as an interpretable tool for public health decision-makers seeking accurate prediction and principled intervention planning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26704
Predicting the interaction between pedestrian and vehicle is essential for autonomous driving safety in unstructured and semi-structured scenarios; however, this task is severely hindered by the scarcity of public datasets that feature dense pedestrian-vehicle interactions. Most current studies rely on structured road data, leaving the complex, heterogeneous interactions found in unstructured environments insufficiently represented and researched. In this paper, we propose a dataset annotation framework based on video data from uncalibrated surveillance cameras and present PINNS (Pedestrian-vehicle Interaction dataset from uNcalibrated cameras in uNstructured Scenes). The dataset covers multiple countries and regions, includes diverse typical traffic scenarios, and considers variations in seasons, lighting conditions, and weather. It focuses on complex scenes with dense pedestrian-vehicle interactions and is designed to be easily extensible. The dataset is constructed and annotated according to the standard issued by the Chinese Association of Automation, providing both trajectory data and corresponding scene-level information. Furthermore, this paper analyzes current challenges and research directions in heterogeneous agent trajectory prediction, shows the necessity and usefulness of the proposed dataset. We hope our framework and dataset will facilitate research on trajectory prediction and autonomous driving in complex mixed traffic scenarios. PINNS is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25947
Women's safety and security are paramount for a modern society. Crimes against women occur in daylight as well as in low-light conditions. Often, such events are captured through real-world surveillance cameras that operate at lower resolutions. Despite substantial progress in CV-related research, video anomaly detection (VAD) focused on women's safety has not yet been adequately addressed. Existing video anomaly datasets contain well-lit, high-resolution, close-shot videos, and fail to represent women-centric anomalies such as chain snatching, stalking, inappropriate touch, and other subtle forms of crime against women. To address these problems, we propose the ExtrAnom dataset, a new multi-modal benchmark containing 1001 videos with textual descriptions, 500 normal and 501 anomalous, classified into 5 different types of women-centric crimes. The dataset comprises low-light (8%), low-resolution videos (13%), long-shot (15%), along with daylight (64%) anomalous videos. And it covers anomalous events like stalking (3.9%), chain snatching (17.6%), kidnapping (7.3%), assassinations (2.3%), harassment (18.9%), and normal (50%). Each video is supplemented with 4 textual annotations, including one human-generated and three LLM-generated descriptions, enabling cross-modal and VLM-based validations. The aim of creating a women-centric dataset is to accurately detect the women-centric anomaly patterns, which are possible to observe visually. The dataset supplements the VLMs to accurately generate video-level descriptions. ExtrAnom has been benchmarked against popular unimodal and multi-modal VAD datasets (e.g., XD-Violence, UCF-Crime, and UCA) and SOTA methods. Experiments reveal that the existing datasets are insufficient to train models for detecting women-centric anomalies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25806
AI-enabled military systems are a fixture of modern military conflict. Applications vary from autonomous drones for surveillance and attack to AI-supported target selection. The importance of AI for modern conflict shows also in public disputes between governments and technology companies over the conditions for military access to frontier AI. Both military uses and government attempts at enabling and steering them happen before a backdrop of public opinion, yet we still know little about how people think about military AI. Drawing on a preregistered survey of 9,000 respondents in nine countries, including China, Germany, and the United States, we examine whether support for military AI is shaped primarily by general attitudes toward AI, principled opposition to lethal autonomy, or foreign-policy and geopolitical orientations. Across six military AI scenarios that vary in lethality and human control, respondents who view AI as beneficial are substantially more supportive of military AI. Hawkish respondents are also more supportive. By contrast, principled opposition to lethal autonomy is not broadly associated with the full index but is related to the application of fully autonomous lethal force. Contrary to our expectation, perceived AI risks are positively associated with support. Cross-national differences are moderate and broadly consistent with geopolitical context. Overall, public opinion toward military AI appears conditionally permissive. Publics are not categorically opposed to various military uses of AI. Instead, unease is concentrated around fully autonomous lethal force.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25196
Detecting objects reliably under extreme low-light conditions is an open problem in computer vision, with practical urgency in applications ranging from nighttime surveillance to search-and-rescue robotics. Conventional RGB cameras degrade sharply at low photon flux, while event cameras which record asynchronous per-pixel brightness changes at microsecond resolution and high dynamic range provide complementary structural cues that are largely illumination-invariant. We present AdaFuse-Det, a dual-stream framework that fuses CLAHE-enhanced RGB frames with voxelized event tensors through an Adaptive Cross-Modal Fusion (ACMF) module grounded in minimum-variance linear estimation theory. We formally show that the learned attention map asymptotically recovers the Gauss-Markov optimal fusion weights, and establish event conservation and temporal resolution bounds for the voxelization stage. On the LLE-VOS benchmark, AdaFuse-Det achieves a Recall of $65.54\%$, Precision of $53.85\%$, and F1-Score of $59.12\%$ under severe illumination degradation, outperforming single-modality detectors in recall by a margin that reflects the theoretically predicted illumination-adaptation behavior.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24691
As AI-powered compliance monitoring becomes increasingly important in public governance and industrial safety, the ability to provide verifiable evidence and traceable accountability signals is essential. However, existing video anomaly detection datasets focus on event-level binary classification, lacking the rule-driven, explainable analysis required for real-world compliance scenarios. We introduce FoodMonitor, a benchmark for explainable compliance analysis in commercial kitchen surveillance. FoodMonitor comprises 477 video clips with 3,307 violation annotations across a dual-channel design covering both person-level and environment-level violations. Each annotation specifies which rule was violated, what non-compliant behavior occurred, and who committed it with frame-level bounding boxes. We establish a unified evaluation protocol with a two-stage matching mechanism that separately assesses spatial localization and semantic understanding, along with a composite metric ($C_{\text{score}}$) that balances environment and person detection performance. Systematic evaluation of several state-of-the-art multimodal large language models reveals that the best-performing model achieves only 0.360 $C_{\text{score}}$, with spatial localization and fine-grained rule understanding emerging as the primary bottlenecks. Our analysis identifies two distinct failure modes: localization-dominated errors and semantics-dominated errors, providing diagnostic insights for future model development.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24503