ScenePilot-Bench: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Evaluation of Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving

In this paper, we introduce ScenePilot-Bench, a large-scale first-person driving benchmark designed to evaluate vision-language models (VLMs) in autonomous driving scenarios. ScenePilot-Bench is built upon ScenePilot-4K, a diverse dataset comprising 3,847 hours of driving videos, annotated with multi-granularity information including scene descriptions, risk assessments, key participant identification, ego trajectories, and camera parameters. The benchmark features a four-axis evaluation suite that assesses VLM capabilities in scene understanding, spatial perception, motion planning, and GPT-Score, with safety-aware metrics and cross-region generalization settings. We benchmark representative VLMs on ScenePilot-Bench, providing empirical analyses that clarify current performance boundaries and identify gaps for driving-oriented reasoning. ScenePilot-Bench offers a comprehensive framework for evaluating and advancing VLMs in safety-critical autonomous driving contexts.

Do VLMs Have a Moral Backbone? A Study on the Fragile Morality of Vision-Language Models

Despite substantial efforts toward improving the moral alignment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), it remains unclear whether their ethical judgments are stable in realistic settings. This work studies moral robustness in VLMs, defined as the ability to preserve moral judgments under textual and visual perturbations that do not alter the underlying moral context. We systematically probe VLMs with a diverse set of model-agnostic multimodal perturbations and find that their moral stances are highly fragile, frequently flipping under simple manipulations. Our analysis reveals systematic vulnerabilities across perturbation types, moral domains, and model scales, including a sycophancy trade-off where stronger instruction-following models are more susceptible to persuasion. We further show that lightweight inference-time interventions can partially restore moral stability. These results demonstrate that moral alignment alone is insufficient and that moral robustness is a necessary criterion for the responsible deployment of VLMs.

WAVE: Learning Unified & Versatile Audio-Visual Embeddings with Multimodal LLM

While embeddings from multimodal large language models (LLMs) excel as general-purpose representations, their application to dynamic modalities like audio and video remains underexplored. We introduce WAVE (\textbf{u}nified \& \textbf{v}ersatile \textbf{a}udio-\textbf{v}isual \textbf{e}mbeddings), the first LLM-based embedding that creates a unified representation space for text, audio, and video modalities. WAVE employs a novel hierarchical feature fusion strategy and a joint multi-modal, multi-task training approach to enable two key capabilities: any-to-any cross-modal retrieval and the generation of prompt-aware embeddings tailored to user instructions. Experimentally, WAVE sets a new state-of-the-art on the MMEB-v2 video benchmark and achieves superior results in audio and video-to-audio retrieval. Its prompt-aware nature also yields remarkable performance in multimodal question answering, significantly outperforming existing embedding models. Ablation studies validate our joint training strategy, demonstrating improved performance across all modalities. With a newly introduced benchmark for versatile audio-visual learning, WAVE opens up broad possibilities for cross-modal, any-to-any applications. Our code, checkpoints, and data will be released.

UAV-Based Intelligent Traffic Surveillance System: Real-Time Vehicle Detection, Classification, Tracking, and Behavioral Analysis

Traffic congestion and violations pose significant challenges for urban mobility and road safety. Traditional traffic monitoring systems, such as fixed cameras and sensor-based methods, are often constrained by limited coverage, low adaptability, and poor scalability. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based traffic surveillance system capable of accurate vehicle detection, classification, tracking, and behavioral analysis in real-world, unconstrained urban environments. The system leverages multi-scale and multi-angle template matching, Kalman filtering, and homography-based calibration to process aerial video data collected from altitudes of approximately 200 meters. A case study in urban area demonstrates robust performance, achieving a detection precision of 91.8%, an F1-score of 90.5%, and tracking metrics (MOTA/MOTP) of 92.1% and 93.7%, respectively. Beyond precise detection, the system classifies five vehicle types and automatically detects critical traffic violations, including unsafe lane changes, illegal double parking, and crosswalk obstructions, through the fusion of geofencing, motion filtering, and trajectory deviation analysis. The integrated analytics module supports origin-destination tracking, vehicle count visualization, inter-class correlation analysis, and heatmap-based congestion modeling. Additionally, the system enables entry-exit trajectory profiling, vehicle density estimation across road segments, and movement direction logging, supporting comprehensive multi-scale urban mobility analytics. Experimental results confirms the system's scalability, accuracy, and practical relevance, highlighting its potential as an enforcement-aware, infrastructure-independent traffic monitoring solution for next-generation smart cities.

Defending Deepfake via Texture Feature Perturbation

The rapid development of Deepfake technology poses severe challenges to social trust and information security. While most existing detection methods primarily rely on passive analyses, due to unresolvable high-quality Deepfake contents, proactive defense has recently emerged by inserting invisible signals in advance of image editing. In this paper, we introduce a proactive Deepfake detection approach based on facial texture features. Since human eyes are more sensitive to perturbations in smooth regions, we invisibly insert perturbations within texture regions that have low perceptual saliency, applying localized perturbations to key texture regions while minimizing unwanted noise in non-textured areas. Our texture-guided perturbation framework first extracts preliminary texture features via Local Binary Patterns (LBP), and then introduces a dual-model attention strategy to generate and optimize texture perturbations. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and LFW datasets demonstrate the promising performance of our method in distorting Deepfake generation and producing obvious visual defects under multiple attack models, providing an efficient and scalable solution for proactive Deepfake detection.

Spintronic Bayesian Hardware Driven by Stochastic Magnetic Domain Wall Dynamics

As artificial intelligence (AI) advances into diverse applications, ensuring reliability of AI models is increasingly critical. Conventional neural networks offer strong predictive capabilities but produce deterministic outputs without inherent uncertainty estimation, limiting their reliability in safety-critical domains. Probabilistic neural networks (PNNs), which introduce randomness, have emerged as a powerful approach for enabling intrinsic uncertainty quantification. However, traditional CMOS architectures are inherently designed for deterministic operation and actively suppress intrinsic randomness. This poses a fundamental challenge for implementing PNNs, as probabilistic processing introduces significant computational overhead. To address this challenge, we introduce a Magnetic Probabilistic Computing (MPC) platform-an energy-efficient, scalable hardware accelerator that leverages intrinsic magnetic stochasticity for uncertainty-aware computing. This physics-driven strategy utilizes spintronic systems based on magnetic domain walls (DWs) and their dynamics to establish a new paradigm of physical probabilistic computing for AI. The MPC platform integrates three key mechanisms: thermally induced DW stochasticity, voltage controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA), and tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR), enabling fully electrical and tunable probabilistic functionality at the device level. As a representative demonstration, we implement a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) inference structure and validate its functionality on CIFAR-10 classification tasks. Compared to standard 28nm CMOS implementations, our approach achieves a seven orders of magnitude improvement in the overall figure of merit, with substantial gains in area efficiency, energy consumption, and speed. These results underscore the MPC platform's potential to enable reliable and trustworthy physical AI systems.

HCOMC: A Hierarchical Cooperative On-Ramp Merging Control Framework in Mixed Traffic Environment on Two-Lane Highways

Highway on-ramp merging areas are common bottlenecks to traffic congestion and accidents. Currently, a cooperative control strategy based on connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) is a fundamental solution to this problem. While CAVs are not fully widespread, it is necessary to propose a hierarchical cooperative on-ramp merging control (HCOMC) framework for heterogeneous traffic flow on two-lane highways to address this gap. This paper extends longitudinal car-following models based on the intelligent driver model and lateral lane-changing models using the quintic polynomial curve to account for human-driven vehicles (HDVs) and CAVs, comprehensively considering human factors and cooperative adaptive cruise control. Besides, this paper proposes a HCOMC framework, consisting of a hierarchical cooperative planning model based on the modified virtual vehicle model, a discretionary lane-changing model based on game theory, and a multi-objective optimization model using the elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm to ensure the safe, smooth, and efficient merging process. Then, the performance of our HCOMC is analyzed under different traffic densities and CAV penetration rates through simulation. The findings underscore our HCOMC's pronounced comprehensive advantages in enhancing the safety of group vehicles, stabilizing and expediting merging process, optimizing traffic efficiency, and economizing fuel consumption compared with benchmarks.

Fair Deepfake Detectors Can Generalize

Deepfake detection models face two critical challenges: generalization to unseen manipulations and demographic fairness among population groups. However, existing approaches often demonstrate that these two objectives are inherently conflicting, revealing a trade-off between them. In this paper, we, for the first time, uncover and formally define a causal relationship between fairness and generalization. Building on the back-door adjustment, we show that controlling for confounders (data distribution and model capacity) enables improved generalization via fairness interventions. Motivated by this insight, we propose Demographic Attribute-insensitive Intervention Detection (DAID), a plug-and-play framework composed of: i) Demographic-aware data rebalancing, which employs inverse-propensity weighting and subgroup-wise feature normalization to neutralize distributional biases; and ii) Demographic-agnostic feature aggregation, which uses a novel alignment loss to suppress sensitive-attribute signals. Across three cross-domain benchmarks, DAID consistently achieves superior performance in both fairness and generalization compared to several state-of-the-art detectors, validating both its theoretical foundation and practical effectiveness.

Trust-MARL: Trust-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Framework for Cooperative On-Ramp Merging Control in Heterogeneous Traffic Flow

Intelligent transportation systems require connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) to conduct safe and efficient cooperation with human-driven vehicles (HVs) in complex real-world traffic environments. However, the inherent unpredictability of human behaviour, especially at bottlenecks such as highway on-ramp merging areas, often disrupts traffic flow and compromises system performance. To address the challenge of cooperative on-ramp merging in heterogeneous traffic environments, this study proposes a trust-based multi-agent reinforcement learning (Trust-MARL) framework. At the macro level, Trust-MARL enhances global traffic efficiency by leveraging inter-agent trust to improve bottleneck throughput and mitigate traffic shockwave through emergent group-level coordination. At the micro level, a dynamic trust mechanism is designed to enable CAVs to adjust their cooperative strategies in response to real-time behaviors and historical interactions with both HVs and other CAVs. Furthermore, a trust-triggered game-theoretic decision-making module is integrated to guide each CAV in adapting its cooperation factor and executing context-aware lane-changing decisions under safety, comfort, and efficiency constraints. An extensive set of ablation studies and comparative experiments validates the effectiveness of the proposed Trust-MARL approach, demonstrating significant improvements in safety, efficiency, comfort, and adaptability across varying CAV penetration rates and traffic densities.

VisAlgae 2023: A Dataset and Challenge for Algae Detection in Microscopy Images

Microalgae, vital for ecological balance and economic sectors, present challenges in detection due to their diverse sizes and conditions. This paper summarizes the second "Vision Meets Algae" (VisAlgae 2023) Challenge, aiming to enhance high-throughput microalgae cell detection. The challenge, which attracted 369 participating teams, includes a dataset of 1000 images across six classes, featuring microalgae of varying sizes and distinct features. Participants faced tasks such as detecting small targets, handling motion blur, and complex backgrounds. The top 10 methods, outlined here, offer insights into overcoming these challenges and maximizing detection accuracy. This intersection of algae research and computer vision offers promise for ecological understanding and technological advancement. The dataset can be accessed at: https://github.com/juntaoJianggavin/Visalgae2023/.