Selecting synthetic degradations for dense prediction requires an estimate of their training utility, the generalization gain they bring under a finite training budget. Clean and degraded twins share content and labels, suggesting a score based on how much short training reduces the excess error caused by degradation. However, this gap can also shrink when clean performance deteriorates. Measuring the improvement on degraded images alone avoids that confound, but it still credits progress that the same amount of clean training would have produced. We propose the \textbf{controlled Reducible Degradation Gap} (cRDG) for regions defined by degradation type and severity. From a common checkpoint, cRDG runs two budget-matched probes that differ only in one augmentation slot, which holds either a synthetic degradation or a clean augmentation. The score is the gain on held-out degraded images relative to the clean-control probe. Clean harm is a separate feasibility constraint. cRDG reveals a correctable severity band in which training on the degradation yields high controlled gain under the available budget, and the band moves with the predictor, the starting checkpoint, and the training budget. \textbf{Curation of Reducible Bands} (\method) uses cRDG to select synthetic data without changing the predictor. On semantic segmentation and salient object detection, \method{} improves representative predictors under matched synthetic-data budgets and training schedules, extends to existing data-generation pipelines, and preserves clean performance. Code and supporting materials will be publicly released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09849
Video deepfakes targeting a specific individual, the Person-of-Interest (POI), are the most harmful ones, and, since a public figure is abundantly recorded, a detector can be built from genuine footage of that individual. Such detectors commonly describe a subject through a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) and adopt its coefficients as a whole, so which part of that description carries the signal has never been measured. We dissect it, holding the encoder, the training corpus and the enrollment protocol fixed and varying only what the encoder observes. The groups of coefficients prove largely redundant, since the shape block alone recovers almost all the accuracy of the full vector, and their temporal evolution contributes a real but bounded amount. We further show that the dense surface the same fit returns, which these detectors discard, carries identity information that the coefficients do not, and that it helps precisely where they are weakest. We assemble the best configuration into MOTIF, a visual-only detector trained on real videos only, with no manipulated video and no POI-specific data. It improves on both state-of-the-art POI detectors in every dataset and manipulation of our benchmark and at two quality levels. Our experimental code will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09830
Camouflaged object detection requires pixel-accurate masks, but obtaining such annotations is slow and costly, making synthetic training images an attractive alternative. Under a fixed generation budget, however, it remains unclear which real-image regions to target for synthetic data generation. We study an uncertainty-guided generation strategy that clusters the unlabelled real images, identifies clusters on which the model is least certain, allocates synthetic generation toward those clusters, and iteratively retrains the model. Across 103 training runs, uncertainty-based targeting does not outperform random allocation. Five independent controls further show that this null result is not an artifact: targeted training sets are measurably different from random sets, but the difference is explained by concentrating the generation budget rather than by where uncertainty is concentrated, as every concentration rule we test reproduces the effect and, on boundary accuracy, so does aiming at the clusters the model was most certain about. Separately, we find substantial data contamination in CHAMELEON, with 50 of its 76 images duplicated from training data despite the standard overlap check reporting zero overlap. Together, these results show that, under a fixed synthetic-data budget, budget concentration, not uncertainty-based targeting, accounts for the observed training-set effects.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09807
Watermarking diffusion-generated images requires balancing provenance signals with image quality, robustness, and computational cost. This work organizes methods along two axes: insertion mechanism and primary signal-bearing representation, and formalizes a representative $z_T$-Fourier pipeline for verification and identification. We then use the taxonomy to structure three protocol-bounded case studies. The first examines associations among frequency integrity, detection, quality, and cropping behavior. The second revisits persistence under seed-linked and seed-independent editing and formulates a scoped Semantic Imprinting Hypothesis without claiming a localized carrier or causal mechanism. The third studies single-shot VAE-latent phase modulation, including its efficiency, regeneration robustness, and robustness--quality operating points. Finally, we separate four content-level attack families from model/pipeline adaptation, propose corresponding evaluation protocols and testable conjectures for parameter-tuning threats, and identify additional temporal extensions for video. These analyses do not establish a universal ranking; instead, they provide a framework for matched, protocol-aware comparisons of watermarking systems for diffusion-generated images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09755
Ordinary prompt-based editing can cause latent watermark detection to fail without explicitly targeting the watermark. We benchmark eight watermark methods against five editors across four generative backbones, four editing strengths, and five semantic categories, with edit-validity and threshold checks. Separating editing from seven subsequent distortions reveals that editing alone primarily distinguishes Tree-Ring, while added distortions expose a broader spectrum of detection survival. Sequential edits reveal a second hidden difference: score separation can decline while detection rates remain near their ceiling. Across methods, standardized clean score separation ($d'$) organizes composite-survival tiers, whereas spatial overlap adds little to predicting edit-only survival beyond clean detectability. Embedding-strength interventions in two methods link higher clean separation to higher post-edit separation. In HSTR, the margin contrast is positive, while the angular layout contrast at matched clean separation remains unresolved. Together, outcome decomposition and continuous separation expose differences hidden by aggregate TPR. Method tiers are stable under threshold recalibration at the main operating points and alternative composite weights. Clean $d'$ is thus a useful empirical diagnostic within this benchmark, with mixed transfer to unseen methods. Code and supporting artifacts are planned for a separate release.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09702
Motion planning in robotics requires not only computing collision-free paths but also certifying infeasibility when no such path exists. Complete methods are limited to low-dimensional spaces, while sampling-based planners scale efficiently but cannot provide finite-time infeasibility certificates, leaving this problem largely unresolved in high-dimensional spaces. In this letter, we present a geometry-driven framework for certifying infeasibility through an explicit resolution-dependent analysis of configuration space topology. Leveraging signed distance field representations, the proposed method traces separating manifolds induced by obstacle boundaries directly in configuration space, enabling both detection of infeasibility and identification of the specific geometric cause. To address computational challenges, we develop a parallel frontier-expansion algorithm that exploits GPU acceleration for efficient simplicial reconstruction in high-dimensional spaces. We validate the approach on 4-DOF and 5-DOF robot scenarios, certifying infeasibility within seconds for 4-DOF cases and under four minutes for 5-DOF cases. We further discuss avenues for improving scalability to higher-dimensional spaces.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32806
Self-supervised anomaly detection is a promising paradigm for medical ultrasound, as normal images are often easier to obtain than exhaustive annotations of all possible pathologies. However, most existing evaluations are limited to a single anatomy or task, making it unclear whether models learn a robust notion of normal ultrasound appearance or only a source-specific representation. We introduce the SADUSI benchmark, a multi-source ultrasound dataset designed to train and evaluate anomaly detection methods across a broad range of anatomical regions, views, and acquisition protocols. The goal of SADUSI is to provide a diverse normal ultrasound distribution and a benchmark for visible structural anomalies that can be assessed from single images. We evaluate representative self-supervised anomaly detection methods and find that current approaches struggle in this setting. In particular, reconstruction-based diffusion methods such as AnoDDPM and DeCo-Diff achieve pixel-level AUROC values of 0.56-0.72 and maximum F1 scores of 0.10-0.26, indicating limited separation of pathology from normal image regions. Feature-based PatchCore variants perform better, reaching pixel-level AUROC values of 0.76-0.83, but remain limited with maximum F1 scores of 0.14-0.40. These findings suggest that broad multi-source ultrasound anomaly detection remains an open challenge and that SADUSI can serve as a resource for developing methods that generalize beyond anatomy-specific settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09677
Unsupervised anomaly detection, which learns only from normal images, is a central task in medical image analysis and remains an open problem. Reconstruction-based methods pass an image through an encoder-decoder network trained on normal data and detect anomalies from the residual between the image and its reconstruction. This works only if the information passed from the encoder to the decoder is limited; otherwise the network learns an identity mapping and reconstructs anomalies too. This limit is usually imposed through architectural choices, tuned per dataset, that cannot be stated in bits. We introduce the quasi-binarizing (QB) layer, which squashes each latent element into [0, 1] and adds Laplace noise of scale 1/epsilon. Each element is then epsilon-locally differentially private, and the mutual information between an image and its reconstruction is bounded by a quantity that depends only on epsilon and the number of QB elements, whatever the encoder and decoder. Placing a QB layer on every encoder-decoder path, including all skip connections, we build QBAE, a seven-level attention U-Net with 32,768 QB elements. On the seven datasets of the MedIAnomaly benchmark, QBAE with one architecture and one configuration reaches a mean image-level AUROC of 0.828, the highest among methods that do not adapt to each dataset, and the best reported results on BraTS2021 (AUROC 0.911, pixel-level AP 0.838). The noise is kept at test time, so that every reconstruction satisfies the bound. Without input corruption, the bottleneck alone prevents identity collapse (mean AUROC 0.805 vs. 0.590). Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09670
How can we verify whose music contributed to an AI-generated output? This paper demonstrates how input-based attribution can provide verifiable evidence of which audio sources were used in a generation and whether they shaped the output. To do so, we condition the generation solely on audio without any text input, then trace the inputs behind each output, and establish their musical effect. In prompt adherence tests and controlled input swaps, the stems generated by our generator, MixAudio, follow the prompt audio in timbre and the context audio in harmony. Yet these outputs may still reproduce training data not supplied as inputs. We therefore audit memorization with our musical version identification model, musicDNA, and find few reproductions outside the input records. On human-judged cases within the flagged pool, it achieves higher precision and recall than the other tested memorization detectors. The two evaluations suggest that input records and output analysis provide complementary evidence for attribution, on which rights-holder reporting and compensation can draw as the AI music economy takes shape. Audio examples are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09637
National-scale magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) repositories increasingly integrate data from different studies and institutions. However, subject identifiers that are valid only within individual datasets are no longer guaranteed to remain globally unique after aggregation, making it possible for the same subject to be assigned multiple identifiers, which we define as identity duplication. Such duplication can create leakage between training and test data and inflate apparent performance in downstream biomedical studies. Existing methods do not provide an end-to-end, image-based workflow for auditing this problem at repository scale. In this work, we present HAPPEN, a human-in-the-loop pipeline for auditing identity duplication in T1-weighted brain MRI repositories. It combines SHA-256 fingerprinting for exact-duplicate detection with supervised contrastive retrieval of non-identical scans that may originate from the same person. Retrieved pairs are reviewed as candidates in a locally hosted interface rather than automatically classified as duplicates. We deployed the workflow in a 95,129-scan aggregated repository and assessed end-to-end recovery using 54 genetic-reference pairs. Transferability was assessed by locally deploying the same workflow on 22,386 scans at an independent institution without model retraining or image transfer. Deployment in the study repository identified 1,316 exact-duplicate scan groups and 1,275 reviewer-supported near-duplicate subject groups. Of these groups, 56% and 82%, respectively, crossed dataset boundaries. All 54 genetic-reference pairs were recovered. The external team independently completed the full workflow using a locally selected operating threshold and review standard.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09614
Uterine contractions in fetal MRI are typically identified manually and discarded, limiting insights into contraction dynamics. We formalize Uterine Contractile Activity Detection (UCAD) as a weakly-supervised learning problem and introduce STORK, a multi-instance learning model trained on dynamic MRI series using only coarse, series-level labels. STORK factorizes 3D spatio-temporal convolutions into parallel branches across temporal hyperplanes to capture coherent tissue motion without the cost of full 4D convolutions. Per-frame embeddings, combining intensity and Demons-estimated displacement fields, are aggregated by a linear mean-pooling head. This ensures that frame-level contraction scores can be recovered post-hoc without frame-level training supervision. Evaluated on around 700 multi-vendor dynamic fetal MRI series, STORK achieves a series-level AUROC of 95.0% and AUPRC of 94.6%, substantially outperforming 3D ResNet and ConvNeXt baselines. Grad-CAM analysis suggests that the model draws on predictive features extending beyond the placenta into the uterine tissue, offering an automated tool for richer phenotyping of uterine behavior.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09598
Watermarking enables language model providers to identify text generated by their models. However, its desired properties can conflict (\ie~stronger watermark signals can degrade text quality), while designs that resist editing may also facilitate forgery. Providers address these trade-offs by choosing configurations that balance competing objectives or prioritize particular properties. Either approach imposes a shared operating point on requests with different requirements, potentially sacrificing quality where wording preservation matters or robustness where reliable attribution is essential. To allow flexible and adaptable designs, we introduce \emph{Constitution-Guided Watermarking}, a framework that selects request-appropriate trade-offs from provider requirements, listed as natural-language principles. \emph{Offline}, a pretrained reasoning agent examines constitutional rules alongside watermark implementations and iteratively refines rule-specific configurations using empirical feedback. \emph{At deployment}, a separate monitor identifies applicable rules and retrieves the corresponding policy, including watermarking exemptions, without modifying the serving model. Furthermore, our framework supports offline parallel optimization and refinement of rule-specific configurations based on evolving provider requirements without affecting deployment, and binds each deployed configuration to its evaluation evidence, making deployment decisions auditable. In a proof-of-concept evaluation using KGW and a five-rule constitution, our framework selects configurations responsive to provider priorities and improves post-paraphrase detection on robustness-prioritized requests by up to $14$ percentage points over fixed configurations, while matching or exceeding all baselines in aggregate quality and clean detection at a nominal $0.1\%$ false-positive rate.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09552
Real-world applications require 6D pose estimation to be accurate, fast, and scalable to unseen objects. This paper introduces WAPR, a zero-shot wide-angle pose refinement model that refines candidate poses with rotational deviations up to 90 degrees. With as few as 12 candidate poses per detected object instance, WAPR supports fast inference within 1 s per frame and reaches a pose-estimation throughput of up to 25 detected object instances per second. To support wide-angle training for rotationally symmetric objects, WAPR uses rotational symmetry priors to canonicalize symmetry-equivalent pose targets before loss computation. We further construct SA6D, a large-scale 6D training dataset with such priors. SA6D obtains KASAL-assisted rotational symmetry priors for 944 GSO scans and expands them through geometry and texture augmentation into about 50K augmented object instances and about 2M rendered RGB-D images. In addition, an angle-balanced loss stabilizes learning across different angular ranges by reducing the influence of uninformative large-error cases. Experiments on seven BOP core datasets show that WAPR achieves state-of-the-art performance in unseen-object 6D pose localization and detection under both fast and unconstrained inference settings. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09535
Aerial object detection faces substantial scale and density variations. Small objects are easily degraded by downsampling and feature compression, while medium and large objects require sufficient global context. Existing methods mainly follow two paradigms: image slicing provides clearer local evidence but relies on independent crop-level prediction and post-processing, whereas feature- and query-level optimization preserves unified inference but operates on already compressed full-image representations, limiting recovery of fine-grained information. This raises a key question: can aerial detection directly acquire high-fidelity local evidence before feature degradation and integrate it into a unified end-to-end framework? To this end, we propose LiG-DETR, an Efficient Global-Local Reassembly framework that reformulates image slicing as high-fidelity local feature acquisition. A shared encoder extracts global and locally magnified features, which are projected into the detector feature space. The projected local features are reassembled according to their original spatial locations to form a globally aligned local feature level, and a single DETR decoder jointly decodes global and local features. To reduce redundant computation, Context-Preserved Selective Reassembly focuses high-resolution encoding on informative regions while preserving a dense feature layout, and Density-Aware Adaptive Query Allocation adapts the decoder query budget using encoder proposal scores. Experiments show substantial gains on small and medium objects while retaining strong large-object performance, with favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-offs and improved cross-domain generalization. The code will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09511
Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) recognizes categories unseen during training through textual category queries, yet achieving strong generalization with real-time efficiency remains challenging. Beyond vocabulary scaling, zero-shot generalization may benefit from reusable visual--semantic cues learned from seen data, including attributes, actions, states, and contextual relations. Existing real-time OVD methods primarily emphasize vocabulary coverage and efficient region/query--text matching; under strict efficiency constraints, compact detectors may struggle to absorb rich instance semantics and scene context. We propose RT-DETR-World, a compact DETR-style detector that transfers the rich semantics conveyed by descriptions during training while retaining lightweight query--text matching at inference. We construct GroundingCapv2 with three levels of supervision: category names for standard OVD, object descriptions conveying instance-level semantics, and image descriptions conveying object relations and scene context. These descriptions serve only as training-time semantic supervision. To help the compact detector absorb these semantics, we propose Dual-Path Description Alignment (DDA), combining a deployment-consistent MiniLM pathway with a training-only LLM teacher. MiniLM provides query--category supervision and object-description alignment, while offline teacher features supervise matched queries and global visual representations at the object and image levels, respectively. All teacher features are precomputed, and the teacher-side modules are removed after training. We further propose Relation-Aware Negative Relaxation (RNR), which uses teacher-derived semantic similarities to relax related negatives while preserving exact positives. Experiments demonstrate competitive zero-shot accuracy and a favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-off. The code will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09502
Clinical vision models are often deployed as frozen black boxes with no access to internals, retraining, or ground truth at inference time. We introduce \textbf{SpatialUQ}, a post-hoc uncertainty method using only output probabilities. It measures the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the global prediction and the mean of five fixed spatial crops in six deterministic forward passes. The premise is simple, trustworthy predictions are spatially consistent. On NIH ChestX-ray14 (DenseNet-121, $N{=}25{,}596$), our Multicrop Uncertainty Score (MUS) reaches $0.784$ failure-detection AUC versus $0.664$ for MC-Dropout ($p{<}10^{-6}$) at one-fifth the compute, with native calibration ($\text{SCE}{=}0.049$ vs.\ $0.127$ for $\ell_1$), the best-calibrated among methods above 0.78 AUC. A supervised fusion of MUS with entropy, confidence, and $\ell_1$ reaches $0.832$, outperforming a five-member ensemble ($0.813$). MUS scales with model quality, reaching $0.899$ with BiomedCLIP ($\rho = 0.846$), while this relationship remains meaningful in-distribution ($\rho = 0.523$) but breaks down under severe distribution shift (VinBigData, $\rho = 0.027$). MUS is well-suited to diffuse findings but is less dependable for small focal lesions such as nodules. Code and experimental materials are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09498
Political discourse often uses rhetorical and persuasive language to frame narratives, influence public opinion, and mobilize audiences. While Bangla natural language processing has made progress in sentiment analysis and opinion mining, systematic benchmarking of transformer models for fine-grained rhetorical and persuasion technique detection in Bangla political speech remains largely underexplored. This paper presents a benchmark study of transformer-based models for detecting rhetorical form and persuasive intent in Bangla political discourse. Using BanglaRhet, a manually annotated corpus of 30,289 Bangla political speech segments collected from publicly available political news sources, we formulate two supervised single-label classification tasks: rhetorical technique detection (contrast, repetition, exaggeration, metaphor, rhetorical questions) and persuasion technique detection (blame assignment, call to action, unity call, moral, emotional, and logical appeals). We evaluate four transformer-based models, BanglaBERT, BanglaBERT-Base, SahajBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa-Base, against classical TF-IDF baselines. BanglaBERT achieves the highest performance, with 65.40% macro-F1 for rhetorical technique detection and 66.46% for persuasion technique detection, outperforming the best tuned classical baseline by 19.2 and 13.8 macro-F1 points, respectively. Class-level analysis indicates that errors are mainly associated with semantic overlap among labels, figurative language, and class imbalance. The results provide initial benchmark baselines for Bangla rhetorical and persuasion-aware political discourse analysis and highlight the need for context-aware and multi-label modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09464
Backdoored vision-language-action (VLA) policies can preserve benign task performance while producing malicious actions when a trigger appears. Detecting such activation is difficult because malicious behavior can comprise individually plausible actions, while unfamiliar tasks introduce legitimate changes in observations and behavior. We introduce TMT, a runtime backdoor detector based on Token Manifold and latent Transition modeling. Trained on benign rollouts, its two branches assess input-token structure and prediction errors in adjacent-layer latent dynamics. A suspicious rollout identified by the token manifold branch, once confirmed through latent deviations, guides transition selection for subsequent monitoring. We further explore policy purification through self-distillation: a frozen copy of the backdoored policy provides benign-input actions to supervise a student on paired benign and triggered observations, without requiring a separate clean reference policy. For evaluation, we adapt traditional backdoor detectors and repurpose anomaly and failure detection methods as VLA backdoor detectors. In a post-hoc comparison with ten baselines, TMT achieves state-of-the-art backdoor detection performance on unseen tasks across three VLA backdoor attacks. Our project page is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09462
Effective remote monitoring and surveillance using drones are frequently impeded by severe environmental and thermal clutter, dynamic vegetation, target camouflage, and system latency. Drawing inspiration from the hunting strategies of birds of prey that hover and stabilize their vision to isolate subtle ground motion, we introduce trACT (temporal revelation Airborne Camera Trap), a lightweight, real-time aerial robotics framework designed for autonomous consumer drones. The system integrates Temporal Max Pooling (TMP), a low-level signal processing method that transforms imperceptible movement across a rolling integration window into robust value and time encodings, with self-supervised motion anomaly detection to isolate target motion from background environmental motion caused by wind gusts and drone drift. To overcome mechanical and processing delays, trACT combines motion prediction with automated gimbal-stabilized optical zoom verification and equitable multi-target verification balancing. Extensive real-world field experiments in densely forested wildlife habitats and surveillance scenarios demonstrate that trACT successfully bridges the gap between wide-area aerial monitoring and precise, autonomous target verification under challenging operational conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09417
Human-robot interaction (HRI) failures remain a major barrier to deploying robots in real-world environments. Prior work often treats failures as isolated technical faults or focuses on post-hoc recovery behaviors. In practice, many breakdowns arise because humans and robots operate under inconsistent assumptions about the current world state. We propose WSM-Aware HRI, an IoT-enhanced modular framework that unifies diverse HRI breakdowns as World-State Mismatches (WSMs) between a human's instruction-implied assumptions and a robot's grounded world model built from multimodal perception and digital augmentation. A Large Language Model (LLM) is used to make implicit assumptions explicit, map them to a small set of mismatch types, and specify the evidence needed for verification against the robot's world state. WSM-Aware HRI shifts failure handling from execution-time recovery to proactive mismatch detection during intention formation, enabling interventions guided by safety, norm compliance, and multi-user coordination with transparent explanations. We evaluate mismatch identification in ten everyday cases spanning both visual and latent-state mismatches. The system can accurately produce the expected output results, and ablations show that reliable identification depends on appropriate grounding representations and verification-oriented refinement. These results indicate that treating interaction breakdowns as explicit world-state mismatches enables earlier detection of impending failures and offers a principled mechanism for integrating external evidence and social constraints into human-robot interaction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32336