Perimeter triage faces a latency/semantics trade-off: signature engines are fast and format-safe but blind to unseen attacks, while generative models are semantic but slow and produce unparseable output. In late 2026 a class of commercial System One decision models (TypeSafe Jev; Microsoft-Decision-1) began selling typed decision primitives - binary gates, closed-set choices, ordinal scores - as product APIs, with no academic treatment. We present VX-One: a small multi-head network (100K-10M parameters) whose outputs are these primitives - a calibrated gate, a choice over a closed candidate set that always includes an explicit unknown option, and an ordinal score, trained multi-task, temperature-calibrated per head (~0.7-1.7 ms p50 on CPU). We evaluate it on UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS2017, EMBER2024 against calibrated XGBoost, Random-Forest, MLP, Kitsune, and measure a two-phase cascade (Suricata with 52,674 Emerging-Threats rules -> VX-One) over five days of CIC-IDS2017. Findings: (i) VX-One wins detection (AUROC/FPR@95%TPR) on UNSW-NB15 and under temporal drift on CIC-IDS2017 (0.711 vs 0.637), but XGBoost wins multi-class attribution on all three benchmarks; (ii) leave-one-family-out gate detects never-seen families on 9/9 UNSW folds yet drops below chance on CIC recon family, and abstention threshold transfers poorly across benchmarks; (iii) on payload-less reconstructions signature engines resolve ~0.1% of flows - gray zone ~99.9% of traffic, recovered by Phase 2 (combined recall >=0.978); (iv) calibration collapses under temporal drift (ECE 0.04->0.40) for every method while ranking partially survives. We provide a measured account of where typed calibrated decisions help perimeter triage, and where they fail.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30090
AI-generated text detectors are increasingly deployed in consequential settings---peer review, education, admissions, journalism, and content moderation---where their outputs directly affect individuals. Yet the strongest detectors are fine-tuned neural classifiers whose decisions are opaque, while transparent alternatives (stylometric and linguistic-feature classifiers) underperform them by wide margins. We present a pipeline that converts a fine-tuned neural detector into a classifier that operates on human-readable concepts. We accomplish this by training sparse autoencoders (SAEs) directly on a detector's residual stream, assigning auto-interpretation labels to each SAE feature, and retaining only features whose generated descriptions pass a global fidelity threshold. We then train a lightweight classifier on just the interpretable features. We find that our SAEs recover latent concepts that correspond to highly specific and predictive linguistic "tells" of AI-generated text. Classifiers built on these extracted features are not only highly interpretable but exhibit stronger performance on out-of-distribution texts than either neural or stylometric alternatives.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30006
Thermal cameras can watch over older people living alone without capturing faces, and multimodal large language models (LLMs) can judge a short video without task-specific training. We evaluate a production multimodal LLM, Gemini 3.8 Flash at temperature 0, as the decision stage of an event-triggered fall screener, used exactly as a deployed prototype uses it: one request per short thermal clip, with its sound track when there is one, and its predecessor Gemini 3.7 Flash on the same requests. On 438 staged falls and 563 non-fall windows that we located by hand in a public 32x24 thermal dataset, the deployed request called 69% of the held-out subjects' falls (67% over all subjects; bed falls excluded) and none of 499 non-fall windows, including people lying on the floor and getting up. Over 76 h of ordinary life in an occupied room, recorded at 160x120 with sound, it called none of 395 clips a fall (95% upper bound 1.2 false alarms per day) and caught 4 of the 9 staged falls the camera could see. One cautionary sentence in the prompt ("a person who goes out of view ... is not a fall") accounted for many of the misses: removing it raised sensitivity on the held-out subjects from 69% to 83% on 3.8 Flash and from 80% to 92% on Gemini 3.7 Flash, and in the home from 4 to 9 of the 9 visible falls, with no false call in ordinary living but at the price of calling deliberate lie-downs a fall. Sensitivity collapsed at 8x6 pixels (34%); identical requests disagreed on 4% of windows; and when the model called a fall, its explanation placed it within a second of the annotated landing 99% of the time. Two conventional detectors trained on the laboratory data caught nearly every held-out laboratory fall but raised 14.2 and 23.9 false alarms per day in the home. We release the frame-level fall annotations of the public dataset and every model answer on it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29913
Code-switching is a natural linguistic phenomenon, yet its impact on high-level reasoning tasks remains largely unexplored in under-resourced languages like Romanian. Natural language processing tasks, such as satire detection, rely heavily on nuanced cultural and syntactic cues that large language models struggle to capture. In this paper, we investigate four methods (i.e., random replacement, phrase translation, dependency parsing, and large language models) for generating synthetic code-mixed Romanian sentences with English, German, French, and Italian. We start with an existing dataset for satire detection, compiled from Romanian news articles and annotated at the sentence level by humans, and augment it with over 600k samples, namely CS-SeLeRoSa. We provide an in-depth analysis of the dataset generation process. Then, we evaluate several multilingual large language models across zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and fine-tuning regimes on both the synthetic corpus and a human-adjudicated gold benchmark, namely CS-SeLeRoSa-Gold. While older open models suffer substantial degradation (dropping to 37%-55% macro-F1), newer models like Gemma 4 31B achieve 68.1% zero-shot, rivaling frontier models like GPT-5 mini (69.5%). Furthermore, fine-tuning significantly reduces formatting errors and improves the results, increasing Gemma 4 31B to 77.5% on CS-SeLeRoSa and 72.6% on the gold standard, outperforming frontier zero-shot baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29907
Since the rise of supervised deep learning models, researchers have attempted to solve infrared small target detection using various models like convolutional neural networks, GANs, Transformers, Mixture of Experts and recent graph/hypergraph neural networks. Moreover, these deep neural network methods have surpassed the traditional unsupervised models and the low-rank and sparse decomposition unsupervised models reviewed in "Traditional and Recent Approaches for Infrared Small Target Detection : Overview, Challenges and Perspectives (Part 1)". In this context, the aim of this paper is to provide a complete survey of the deep learning models in infrared small target detection. First, we categorize the different approaches found in the literature in terms of their modeling strategies. Then, we discuss them in terms of the critical situations that they claim to handle. Furthermore, we present the specific performance evaluation protocols. Then, we conclude with several promising directions for future research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18291
Reliable uncertainty estimation is important across visual recognition tasks, providing information about the confidence and reliability of model predictions. Many uncertainty estimation methods obtain predictive diversity through mechanisms that can suppress intermediate features, perturb the input, or require substantial additional computation. Stochastic activation functions, where network units randomly select between multiple nonlinearities during a forward pass, have previously been used to improve optimization behavior, mitigate limitations of fixed ReLU activations, and increase output diversity. In this work, we reframe stochastic activation switching as a lightweight mechanism for uncertainty estimation. The proposed method samples between nonlinear activation functions, inducing predictive diversity while keeping intermediate feature pathways active. This enables uncertainty estimation from a single trained model without the training cost of ensembles, task-specific uncertainty heads, or architectural redesign. We evaluate the proposed approach across classification, semantic segmentation, and out-of-distribution detection using convolutional and transformer-based architectures on diverse datasets. Across these settings, stochastic activation switching improves uncertainty quality while preserving competitive primary-task performance, showing that stochastic nonlinearities provide an effective and information-preserving source of predictive variation for visual recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29875
Infrared small target detection is often used in different civilian and military applications to detect static or moving targets in scenes like in ground, air and sea surveillance. Research in this field started more than three decades ago, and the last two decades have witnessed very significant publications in this field following the rise of low-rank and sparse decomposition (model-based methods) and deep learning models (data-based methods). Furthermore, several surveys can be found in the literature but none of them addresses an overall review in this field. In this context, the aim of this paper is to provide a complete survey of the traditional and recent approaches in infrared small target detection. First, we categorize the different approaches found in the literature in terms of the modeling models, i.e mathematical models, machine learning models and signal processing models. Then, we have discussed them in terms of the critical situations that they claim to handle. Furthermore, we present the available resources, datasets and libraries. Then, we conclude with several promising directions for future research. For the sake of reading, this survey is divided into two parts: 1) "Traditional and Recent Approaches for Infrared Small Target Detection: Overview, Challenges and Perspectives (Part 1)" about conventional and low-rank and sparse decomposition (model-based methods), and 2) "Traditional and Recent Approaches for Infrared Small Target Detection: Overview, Challenges and Perspectives (Part 2)" about deep learning models (data-based methods).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18276
Deep learning models for chest X-ray anomaly detection remain vulnerable to subtle distributional shifts (e.g., acquisition technique, patient-related factors, and preprocessing). Traditional error analysis often relies on semantic metadata or model embeddings, which can mask low-level signal variations that degrade performance. In this work, we propose a data-centric framework for automated failure mode discovery using spectral analysis. We project images into the frequency domain and extract a compact profile summarizing the distribution of signal energy across frequency bands. By performing unsupervised clustering on these spectral profiles, we demonstrate that model failures are not randomly distributed, but are strongly concentrated within specific spectral clusters. This method effectively isolates "blind spots", enabling the prediction of model reliability and the discovery of performance-degrading data slices without requiring ground-truth failure annotations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29830
This paper presents a novel strategy for UAV detection through visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) fusion, in order to improve accuracy and precision in harsh environments and weather conditions. In this research, two opposite approaches have been studied and implemented: the first concerns image-level (early) fusion, which merges two different spectra into a single image to which one detector is applied. On the other hand, the second approach, called decision-level (late) fusion, focuses on blending together the output bounding boxes of two different detection pipelines, aiming to create a common result that can be applied to both spectra simultaneously. Both strategies have been extensively tested in a dedicated environment, which included alternating low and high brightness scenes, different backgrounds (sky and ground), distances (5, 25 and 60 m), altitudes and zoom levels (1X, 2X and 4X). These tests allowed for the assessment of actual detection capabilities and system reliability in real-world applications. Furthermore, the two fusion strategies were evaluated and compared over a set of aligned images in order to highlight the better approach of the two. The results indicate that early fusion achieves better raw performance, since it incorporates the thermal information from the beginning of the training process. However, late fusion presents an innovative and useful detection workflow that can be applied in cases of sensor or frame misalignment. Both positive and negative aspects have also been pointed out and discussed, in order to give a more comprehensive overview. Finally, the paper outlines implementation considerations and practical recommendations based on operational priorities. Overall, the findings contribute to the research in RGB-IR fusion modalities, with the goal of enhancing UAV detection capabilities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29828
Object detection models rely on large-scale annotated datasets that require substantial manual annotation effort. The labeling costs further increase when annotation uncertainty is captured through soft labels, as multiple annotations must be collected for each object. We address this challenge by introducing a semi-supervised framework for the uncertainty-aware annotation of object detection datasets. Our approach leverages open-vocabulary object detectors to generate region proposals and semantically meaningful object representations. Based on these representations, we construct an object-level similarity graph and propagate probabilistic label information. Our framework assigns soft labels to previously unlabeled objects, quantifying both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. We evaluate our method on four object detection benchmarks with soft-label annotations and demonstrate that high-quality annotations can be obtained with only a small fraction of manually labeled objects. Furthermore, we show that detectors trained on semi-automatically annotated data achieve performance comparable to models trained on fully manually annotated data. We achieve state-of-the-art downstream detection performance for the task of semi-supervised object detection on the COCO dataset, with 40.5% AP virtually matching the performance of the model trained on fully manually constructed data (40.9%) at only 1% of labeling costs. These results highlight the potential of open-vocabulary models and graph-based label propagation for efficient, accurate and uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29788
Vision-language perception has achieved impressive progress in aligning natural language with visual observations, yet grounding high-level semantics into part-level physical interaction remains challenging. To address this gap, we propose UniRAP, a unified model for inferring part-level physical affordances and mapping language instructions to actionable geometric representations. UniRAP formulates this problem as a conditional multimodal generation task, integrating visual inputs, textual instructions, and optional prompts into a shared spatiotemporal representation space through a unified interface token mechanism. To predict executable contact geometry, we introduce a Unified Affordance Decoder (UAD), which jointly performs object detection, part-level affordance segmentation, and 4-DoF interaction pose estimation by leveraging intermediate segmentation features. In addition, we propose a curriculum-based transfer training strategy that progressively adapts the model from general visual parsing to interaction-aware perception, improving data efficiency under limited textual annotations. Experiments show that UniRAP achieves state-of-the-art performance on referring expression segmentation, affordance grounding, and interaction pose estimation, while maintaining strong spatiotemporal consistency in dynamic video scenarios. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of UniRAP as a unified perception framework for language-guided physical manipulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29768
Video anomaly detection (VAD) is a challenging task for surveillance systems due to the scarcity and diversity of anomalous events. While semi-supervised VAD approaches have advanced the field, many rely on computationally intensive optical flow networks to capture motion dynamics. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are also widely used for spatial encoding, but their effective receptive field is highly local. To address these limitations, we introduce MS2CAST, an end-to-end semi-supervised predictive VAD framework. For spatial encoding, we employ a multi-scale cross-attention encoder that fuses the hierarchical feature representations from a vision transformer (MViTv2-S) and a CNN (ConvNeXt-T) to exploit their distinct receptive fields. To model spatiotemporal dynamics without optical flow estimation, we integrate two interchangeable spatiotemporal modules in the latent space. One module (SwinLSTM) incorporates a Swin Transformer, while the other (VMRNN) integrates Vision Mamba blocks. Our objective function combines L1 loss, Gradient Difference Loss (GDL), and Multi-Scale Structural Similarity Index Measure (MS-SSIM) to ensure pixel-wise accuracy, sharpness, and structural integrity. Evaluations across the UCSD Ped2, CUHK Avenue, and ShanghaiTech datasets demonstrate frame-level Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Area Under the Curve (AUC) scores that are competitive with top-tier techniques while maintaining a peak GPU memory usage of under 1 GB.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29649
Object detection models for autonomous driving commonly experience substantial performance drops when deployed under adverse weather due to the domain shift between training data and real-world operating conditions. This degradation is especially evident when models trained on clear-weather images encounter foggy environments with reduced visibility and contrast. To address this challenge, we introduce FogTTA, an online test-time adaptation framework designed to improve the robustness of Transformer-based object detectors in fog. Using RF-DETR as the underlying object detector, FogTTA enables real-time adaptation to the streaming target domain without requiring source data or retraining. The framework follows a teacher-student design, where the deployed model serves as the teacher and generates pseudo labels from weakly augmented target inputs. These predictions are subsequently refined through non-maximum suppression and confidence filtering. The student model then learns from strongly augmented target sample using the Varifocal loss to mitigate pseudo-label noise. The teacher is updated via exponential moving averaging to ensure stable and continuous adaptation. Experiments show that FogTTA outperforms prior baselines, delivering improved detection accuracy and stability while maintaining real-time performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29618
Iris recognition systems are vulnerable to presentation attacks (PAs), including textured contact lenses, print replays, and synthetic irises. Existing PAD methods rely on supervised learning with attack data, limiting generalization to unseen attacks and new sensors. We propose Diff-IrisPAD, an unsupervised framework based on Brownian Bridge Diffusion that models bona fide iris distributions without using attack samples. The method reconstructs clean iris textures from degraded inputs and detects attacks via reconstruction inconsistency using ViT scoring and pixel-level measures. Experiments on a large-scale multi-sensor dataset (125K+ images, NIR and VIS, 8 attack types) show that Diff-IrisPAD achieves an overall ACER of 30.52, significantly outperforming diffusion-based baselines while demonstrating strong generalization to unseen attacks. These results highlight the effectiveness of diffusion-based bona fide modeling for robust and scalable iris PAD.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29611
Deep neural networks deployed on smart glasses must adapt to changes in the distribution of incoming data while adhering to strict privacy and device constraints. We present No Frames, Just Frequencies, a bandwidth-efficient source-assisted adaptation framework that characterizes distribution shifts using compact frequency descriptors computed on-device. Rather than transmitting camera frames, the glasses compute and send frequency descriptors to a host device that contains a replica of the model. The host device maps the received frequency descriptor to a distribution shift operator that synthesizes out-of-distribution data and adapts a model replica using a pre-defined adaptation protocol. We evaluate the framework on mixtures of ImageNet-C corruptions using convolution-based (ConvNeXtV2-Femto), self-attention-based (DeiT-Tiny), and hybrid (TinyViT-5M) vision models, on person classification (Visual Wake Words), and on object detection (MS-COCO). Our results reveal that adaptation driven solely by the transmitted descriptors recovers $93-95\%$ of the supervised oracle adaptation gain on all three architectures, $82\%$ on Visual Wake Words and $94$--$98\%$ on MS-COCO. Notably, adaptation quality degrades gracefully as the descriptor resolution decreases from $224 $ to $28$ pixels, consistently across architectures, enabling bandwidth reductions from $213\times$ to $784\times$ across the frequency descriptors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29607
Recent advances in generative models have enabled highly realistic face forgeries, yet generalizing deepfake detectors to unseen manipulation pipelines remains a major challenge. One critical yet underexplored issue is that the learned forensic representation itself may fail to remain stable across different manipulation sources. In this paper, we provide new evidence that naively fine-tuned vision models suffer from severe \textit{forensic representation collapse}: their extracted cues are often entangled with unstable, dataset-specific artifacts, resulting in structurally fragile representations and poor cross-domain generalization. Leveraging this insight, we propose \textbf{H}ierarchical \textbf{S}patial \textbf{P}rototype (\textbf{HSP}) regularization, which explicitly models the forgery manifold by learning a structured prototype subspace over spatial features. We further introduce prototype orthogonality and second-order assignment balance, which jointly preserve the geometric independence of latent forgery factors and promote high-effective-rank utilization of the forensic representation, thereby reducing reliance on dataset-specific shortcuts. Empirical results demonstrate that our method substantially improves generalizability, yielding average frame-level AUC gains of 5.6\% and 5.3\% in the cross-dataset and cross-manipulation settings, respectively. Moreover, when used as a plug-in module, HSP boosts the average video-level AUC of existing state-of-the-art detectors to 95.3\% (+1.8\%). These results demonstrate the practical value of HSP as an easy-to-adopt regularization module for enhancing deepfake detectors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29442
Promptable segmentation models such as SAM 3 achieve remarkable open-vocabulary performance but require dedicated architectures, large-scale annotation engines, and task-specific training. We ask a different question: can a general-purpose multimodal large language model (MLLM) segment images directly, without an added segmentation head, mask decoder, or training? We present LLMSeg, a training-free pipeline that turns a vision-capable LLM into a text-prompted image segmenter. LLMSeg decomposes segmentation into three LLM-driven stages. First, detect localizes all instances matching a free-form text query and describes their coarse morphology. Next, segment traces each instance using closed periodic B-splines confined to its detected box. These splines define an outer boundary and optional hole loops. Finally, refine iteratively proposes focus boxes around residual errors and retraces confined splines. The process ends when the mask stabilizes or the pass budget is exhausted. The output is a binary mask with inspectable intermediate geometry. We evaluate LLMSeg across ten referring and reasoning segmentation splits (ReasonSeg and RefCOCO/+/g). We also evaluate open-vocabulary instance segmentation (LVIS, COCO, and SA-Co), semantic segmentation, and zero-shot detection (ODinW13 and RF-100VL). With an off-the-shelf Gemini-3.7-Flash backend, LLMSeg is competitive with and often surpasses the specialist SAM 3 model on identical items. It reaches 71.5 cIoU on ReasonSeg val without additional segmentation-specific training. Backend model updates can improve accuracy without retraining the pipeline. The code is available at this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29409
Automated optical inspection of precision components with tiny surface defects remains challenging when different regions of the same component exhibit different defect characteristics and, therefore, different acceptance criteria. This paper presents a region-aware, dual-model inspection framework that combines instance segmentation of localized seat-region defects with image-level classification of global shaft-region anomalies. Rather than treating these two model detections as sufficient evidence for component rejection, a deterministic decision fusion layer that formalizes industrial Standard Operating Procedures is applied to the model outputs to make the final component level decision. A PLC-synchronized imaging system acquires 18 seat and 18 shaft images over a full 360-degree rotation to provide multi-view circumferential coverage. The framework was evaluated on 380 automotive fuel injector needles, covering representative operational defect types, using identical model predictions in all configurations. Direct model-output aggregation via simple union logic (where any single-view detection flags a rejection) identified all 104 non-conforming components but produced a component level false rejection rate of 57.6%. Inclusion of a complete decision layer maintained the observed non-conforming (NOK) recall of 100% while reducing the false rejection rate to 10.9%, corresponding to an 81.1% reduction in false-positive component decisions. The results demonstrate that formalized manufacturing acceptance criteria can complement sensitive visual models by translating frame-level detections into practical and traceable component-level decisions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29398
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) is a challenging task due to the extremely small size of targets, low signal-to-noise ratios, and heavy background clutter in infrared imagery. While the progress of deep learning has advanced this field, existing methods primarily adopt discriminative paradigms that directly map images to target masks, overlooking the potential of generative modeling. In this paper, we propose DiffIRSTD, a novel generative framework that reformulates infrared small target detection as a background reconstruction problem. Instead of explicitly predicting target regions, we reinterpret small targets as noise-like signals and leverage a diffusion-based model to recover a clean, target-free background from a perturbed input image. The residual between the reconstructed background and the original image is then exploited to highlight candidate target regions, providing explicit cues for subsequent detection. To address the computational cost typically associated with diffusion sampling, we introduce a one-step denoising strategy that enables efficient background reconstruction while maintaining practical inference speed. Furthermore, we present a frequency-guided perception loss to preserve high-frequency background details and focus more on the reconstruction quality of target regions. More importantly, our DiffIRSTD operates as a plug-and-play framework, compatible with existing IRSTD models without increasing the computational complexity of detectors. Extensive experiments on IRSTD-1K, NUAA-SIRST, and NUDT-SIRST datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving state-of-the-art performance across three benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29361
Stance classifiers make errors that can be costly to identify under limited human-review budgets. Prioritizing potentially incorrect predictions remains challenging, particularly across heterogeneous base models. We introduce B-CARE (Blind Classwise Assessment of Relative Evidence for Stance Error Ranking), a prediction-blind framework for identifying high-risk stance predictions. Given only a target and text, a fixed LLM verifier assigns ordinal evidence scores to all candidate stance labels without observing the base model's prediction or confidence. B-CARE constructs a comparative risk score by contrasting the strongest alternative-class evidence with the evidence supporting the predicted class. The resulting classwise evidence profile can be reused across multiple base models without training a separate error detector or calibrating risk scores. We evaluate B-CARE on four stance benchmarks and three heterogeneous base LLMs, covering 12 dataset-model settings and 5,206 unique test instances. Evaluation includes error-ranking discrimination (AUROC and AUPRC), selective prediction (E-AURC), and review effectiveness (ErrorCapture at fixed review budgets). B-CARE achieves a mean AUROC of 0.735 and a mean AUPRC of 0.524, capturing 41.06% of errors within the highest-risk 20% of predictions. Although B-CARE does not uniformly outperform strong confidence-based baselines, it provides a reusable, complementary evidence signal for prioritizing potentially incorrect stance predictions across heterogeneous models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29350