SDDF: Specificity-Driven Dynamic Focusing for Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Detection

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims to detect known and unknown objects in the open world by leveraging text prompts. Benefiting from the emergence of large-scale vision--language pre-trained models, OVOD has demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. However, when dealing with camouflaged objects, the detector often fails to distinguish and localize objects because the visual features of the objects and the background are highly similar. To bridge this gap, we construct a benchmark named OVCOD-D by augmenting carefully selected camouflaged object images with fine-grained textual descriptions. Due to the limited scale of available camouflaged object datasets, we adopt detectors pre-trained on large-scale object detection datasets as our baseline methods, as they possess stronger zero-shot generalization ability. In the specificity-aware sub-descriptions generated by multimodal large models, there still exist confusing and overly decorative modifiers. To mitigate such interference, we design a sub-description principal component contrastive fusion strategy that reduces noisy textual components. Furthermore, to address the challenge that the visual features of camouflaged objects are highly similar to those of their surrounding environment, we propose a specificity-guided regional weak alignment and dynamic focusing method, which aims to strengthen the detector's ability to discriminate camouflaged objects from background. Under the open-set evaluation setting, the proposed method achieves an AP of 56.4 on the OVCOD-D benchmark.

Consistency Beyond Contrast: Enhancing Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Robustness via Contextual Consistency Learning

Recent advances in open-vocabulary object detection focus primarily on two aspects: scaling up datasets and leveraging contrastive learning to align language and vision modalities. However, these approaches often neglect internal consistency within a single modality, particularly when background or environmental changes occur. This lack of consistency leads to a performance drop because the model struggles to detect the same object in different scenes, which reveals a robustness gap. To address this issue, we introduce Contextual Consistency Learning (CCL), a novel framework that integrates two key strategies: Contextual Bootstrapped Data Generation (CBDG) and Contextual Consistency Loss (CCLoss). CBDG functions as a data generation mechanism, producing images that contain the same objects across diverse backgrounds. This is essential because existing datasets alone do not support our CCL framework. The CCLoss further enforces the invariance of object features despite environmental changes, thereby improving the model's robustness in different scenes. These strategies collectively form a unified framework for ensuring contextual consistency within the same modality. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous approaches by +16.3 AP on OmniLabel and +14.9 AP on D3. These results demonstrate the importance of enforcing intra-modal consistency, significantly enhancing model generalization in diverse environments. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/bozhao-li/CCL.

Dual-Stage Invariant Continual Learning under Extreme Visual Sparsity

Continual learning seeks to maintain stable adaptation under non-stationary environments, yet this problem becomes particularly challenging in object detection, where most existing methods implicitly assume relatively balanced visual conditions. In extreme-sparsity regimes, such as those observed in space-based resident space object (RSO) detection scenarios, foreground signals are overwhelmingly dominated by background observations. Under such conditions, we analytically demonstrate that background-driven gradients destabilize the feature backbone during sequential domain shifts, causing progressive representation drift. This exposes a structural limitation of continual learning approaches relying solely on output-level distillation, as they fail to preserve intermediate representation stability. To address this, we propose a dual-stage invariant continual learning framework via joint distillation, enforcing structural and semantic consistency on both backbone representations and detection predictions, respectively, thereby suppressing error propagation at its source while maintaining adaptability. Furthermore, to regulate gradient statistics under severe imbalance, we introduce a sparsity-aware data conditioning strategy combining patch-based sampling and distribution-aware augmentation. Experiments on a high-resolution space-based RSO detection dataset show consistent improvement over established continual object detection methods, achieving an absolute gain of +4.0 mAP under sequential domain shifts.

CD-Buffer: Complementary Dual-Buffer Framework for Test-Time Adaptation in Adverse Weather Object Detection

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) enables real-time adaptation to domain shifts without off-line retraining. Recent TTA methods have predominantly explored additive approaches that introduce lightweight modules for feature refinement. Recently, a subtractive approach that removes domain-sensitive channels has emerged as an alternative direction. We observe that these paradigms exhibit complementary effectiveness patterns: subtractive methods excel under severe shifts by removing corrupted features, while additive methods are effective under moderate shifts requiring refinement. However, each paradigm operates effectively only within limited shift severity ranges, failing to generalize across diverse corruption levels. This leads to the following question: can we adaptively balance both strategies based on measured feature-level domain shift? We propose CD-Buffer, a novel complementary dual-buffer framework where subtractive and additive mechanisms operate in opposite yet coordinated directions driven by a unified discrepancy metric. Our key innovation lies in the discrepancy-driven coupling: Our framework couples removal and refinement through a unified discrepancy metric, automatically balancing both strategies based on feature-level shift severity. This establishes automatic channel-wise balancing that adapts differentiated treatment to heterogeneous shift magnitudes without manual tuning. Extensive experiments on KITTI, Cityscapes, and ACDC datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, consistently achieving superior results across diverse weather conditions and severity levels.

Knowledge-Guided Adversarial Training for Infrared Object Detection via Thermal Radiation Modeling

In complex environments, infrared object detection exhibits broad applicability and stability across diverse scenarios. However, infrared object detection is vulnerable to both common corruptions and adversarial examples, leading to potential security risks. To improve the robustness of infrared object detection, current methods mostly adopt a data-driven ideology, which only superficially drives the network to fit the training data without specifically considering the unique characteristics of infrared images, resulting in limited robustness. In this paper, we revisit infrared physical knowledge and find that relative thermal radiation relations between different classes can be regarded as a reliable knowledge source under the complex scenarios of adversarial examples and common corruptions. Thus, we theoretically model thermal radiation relations based on the rank order of gray values for different classes, and further quantify the stability of various inter-class thermal radiation relations. Based on the above theoretical framework, we propose Knowledge-Guided Adversarial Training (KGAT) for infrared object detection, in which infrared physical knowledge is embedded into the adversarial training process, and the predicted results are optimized to be consistent with the actual physical laws. Extensive experiments on three infrared datasets and six mainstream infrared object detection models demonstrate that KGAT effectively enhances both clean accuracy and robustness against adversarial attacks and common corruptions.

GeoReFormer: Geometry-Aware Refinement for Lane Segment Detection and Topology Reasoning

Accurate 3D lane segment detection and topology reasoning are critical for structured online map construction in autonomous driving. Recent transformer-based approaches formulate this task as query-based set prediction, yet largely inherit decoder designs originally developed for compact object detection. However, lane segments are continuous polylines embedded in directed graphs, and generic query initialization and unconstrained refinement do not explicitly encode this geometric and relational structure. We propose GeoReFormer (Geometry-aware Refinement Transformer), a unified query-based architecture that embeds geometry- and topology-aware inductive biases directly within the transformer decoder. GeoReFormer introduces data-driven geometric priors for structured query initialization, bounded coordinate-space refinement for stable polyline deformation, and per-query gated topology propagation to selectively integrate relational context. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, GeoReFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance with 34.5% mAP while improving topology consistency over strong transformer baselines, demonstrating the utility of explicit geometric and relational structure encoding.

Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.

CPUBone: Efficient Vision Backbone Design for Devices with Low Parallelization Capabilities

Recent research on vision backbone architectures has predominantly focused on optimizing efficiency for hardware platforms with high parallel processing capabilities. This category increasingly includes embedded systems such as mobile phones and embedded AI accelerator modules. In contrast, CPUs do not have the possibility to parallelize operations in the same manner, wherefore models benefit from a specific design philosophy that balances amount of operations (MACs) and hardware-efficient execution by having high MACs per second (MACpS). In pursuit of this, we investigate two modifications to standard convolutions, aimed at reducing computational cost: grouping convolutions and reducing kernel sizes. While both adaptations substantially decrease the total number of MACs required for inference, sustaining low latency necessitates preserving hardware-efficiency. Our experiments across diverse CPU devices confirm that these adaptations successfully retain high hardware-efficiency on CPUs. Based on these insights, we introduce CPUBone, a new family of vision backbone models optimized for CPU-based inference. CPUBone achieves state-of-the-art Speed-Accuracy Trade-offs (SATs) across a wide range of CPU devices and effectively transfers its efficiency to downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Models and code are available at https://github.com/altair199797/CPUBone.

V2U4Real: A Real-world Large-scale Dataset for Vehicle-to-UAV Cooperative Perception

Modern autonomous vehicle perception systems are often constrained by occlusions, blind spots, and limited sensing range. While existing cooperative perception paradigms, such as Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), have demonstrated their effectiveness in mitigating these challenges, they remain limited to ground-level collaboration and cannot fully address large-scale occlusions or long-range perception in complex environments. To advance research in cross-view cooperative perception, we present V2U4Real, the first large-scale real-world multi-modal dataset for Vehicle-to-UAV (V2U) cooperative object perception. V2U4Real is collected by a ground vehicle and a UAV equipped with multi-view LiDARs and RGB cameras. The dataset covers urban streets, university campuses, and rural roads under diverse traffic scenarios, comprising over 56K LiDAR frames, 56K multi-view camera images, and 700K annotated 3D bounding boxes across four classes. To support a wide range of research tasks, we establish benchmarks for single-agent 3D object detection, cooperative 3D object detection, and object tracking. Comprehensive evaluations of several state-of-the-art models demonstrate the effectiveness of V2U cooperation in enhancing perception robustness and long-range awareness. The V2U4Real dataset and codebase is available at https://github.com/VjiaLi/V2U4Real.

Knowledge-Guided Failure Prediction: Detecting When Object Detectors Miss Safety-Critical Objects

Object detectors deployed in safety-critical environments can fail silently, e.g. missing pedestrians, workers, or other safety-critical objects without emitting any warning. Traditional Out Of Distribution (OOD) detection methods focus on identifying unfamiliar inputs, but do not directly predict functional failures of the detector itself. We introduce Knowledge Guided Failure Prediction (KGFP), a representation-based monitoring framework that treats missed safety-critical detections as anomalies to be detected at runtime. KGFP measures semantic misalignment between internal object detector features and visual foundation model embeddings using a dual-encoder architecture with an angular distance metric. A key property is that when either the detector is operating outside its competence or the visual foundation model itself encounters novel inputs, the two embeddings diverge, producing a high-angle signal that reliably flags unsafe images. We compare our novel KGFS method to baseline OOD detection methods. On COCO person detection, applying KGFP as a selective-prediction gate raises person recall among accepted images from 64.3% to 84.5% at 5% False Positive Rate (FPR), and maintains strong performance across six COCO-O visual domains, outperforming OOD baselines by large margins. Our code, models, and features are published at https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/iosb_public/KGFP.