An image editing service records which user requests each edit, but the edited image itself does not contain this account information. Once the image is downloaded and shared, the service cannot identify the requesting user from the image alone. Embedding a user-specific watermark could enable such attribution, but semantic editing may erase the signal. We propose Tracemark, an editor-aware watermarking framework for identifying users from edited images. A shared encoder embeds a user-specific signal before editing, and a shared detector recovers the user by comparing features of the edited image with learned reference vectors. Both components are trained jointly through an editor with fixed parameters. User identification errors encourage the encoder to produce watermarks that survive editing, while fidelity losses limit changes to the input image and intended edit. Each image domain and editing instruction uses a separately trained model shared across registered users. Experiments on three image domains show that editor-aware training improves user recovery with both reference-vector matching and binary watermark decoding. Separately trained models reach 87.5% mean identification accuracy among 500 users. When tested with a different editor without retraining, the watermark modules still recover user information. These results demonstrate that learning watermarks through the editing process enables user attribution without modifying the editor.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07632
Synthetic data from diffusion models can improve object detection, but long-tail performance is still limited by scarce rare classes and inflexible conditioning (e.g., text-only or layout-only inputs). In this paper, we propose Tail-SD, a layout-instruction conditioned stable diffusion framework that supports text, layouts, or their hybrid, enabling controllable synthesis from boxes, masks, and/or prompts to better cover the long-tail objects. To train a single model across heterogeneous conditions, we introduce a multi-task cross-attention module and multi-task embedding tokens, improving generation quality and diversity. Extensive experiments on COCO and LVIS demonstrate that diffusion synthesis with hybrid conditioning consistently benefits detection, e.g., on LVIS val, it achieves +4.89% / +5.68% rare Box/Mask AP, highlighting strong potential for addressing long-tail challenges.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07553
An experiment can be informative about the parameters of a working model and uninformative about whether that model is wrong. Adaptive design can reinforce this mismatch by repeatedly selecting settings where an incorrect model fits. We bound the power of any valid adequacy test in terms of the experimenter's own sampling distribution, then distinguish information absent from the selected data from information lost by the detector. A computable diagnostic measures unresolved error relative to a declared expansion of the working model. It motivates a training-free rule that reserves part of the design budget for falsification. The empirical record is mixed: the independently specified primary study fails detection eligibility, and a later numerator diagnostic fails its improvement criteria. After the frozen rule fails on fresh continuous-null panels, a disclosed secondary horizon-calibrated revision detects 35.8% of misspecified campaigns versus 31.7% for a class-separation control at T = 240, but has no resolved advantage at T = 480. In a corrected 289-unit measured replay it improves on random design and trails class-discrimination EIG. A conditional futility bound explains why remaining time matters without proving the gate constant or its power. These results support separating parameter learning, model checking and detector performance; they do not establish a universally superior design policy or prospective scientific discovery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07529
Self-attention has become the standard for modern sequence modeling, enabling Transformers to model long-range dependencies across a wide range of modalities. Despite these advances, its quadratic cost with respect to sequence length remains a significant computational bottleneck. Recent work addresses this limitation by introducing linear variants of self-attention, namely with kernel approximations of the softmax operator. However, their first-order aggregation restricts expressivity and struggles to capture higher-order structure. We propose Linear Stochastic Attention (LiSA), a linear attention plug-in module that enables higher-order token interactions via a stochastic diffusion process based on truncated random walks. LiSA incorporates adaptive locality, favoring semantically similar neighbors to preserve fine-grained structures, while maintaining stable and efficient training. We conduct extensive experiments on classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection tasks and show improved results over state-of-the-art methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04216
Radiologists read a screening mammogram by first forming a global impression of the four views and then selectively magnifying suspicious regions before assigning a BI-RADS assessment. MLLMs, in contrast, see the whole image at a fixed, reduced resolution, which makes sub-millimeter calcifications invisible, and they perform close to chance on mammography. Therefore, we present MammoSeek, a mammography agent that reproduces this reading process. After forming an impression of each breast, the agent performs selective zooming: it decides by itself which detector candidates deserve a closer look and inspects only those on full-resolution views. Guided by a BI-RADS assessment skill, it then assigns a category and generates a localized, lexicon-structured report for each breast; its assessment is combined with image-model scores in a decision layer to decide recall. On an internal (EMBED) and an external (VinDr-Mammo) dataset, \ours reaches exam-level AUCs of 0.824 and 0.818, far above other MLLMs, mammography agent and CNN classifiers. Selective zooming also outperforms both no zooming and forced zooming in localization, structured-report F1 and recall decisions at low cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07188
Knowing that a pedestrian is occluded is useful to a robot even when the detector cannot recover the hidden pixels, but occlusion estimators are normally trained on occlusion annotations that deployment settings rarely have. We show that occlusion can be read off two distance estimates a camera-only pipeline already computes. Apparent height is largely unchanged by occlusion, because the detected box still spans the whole person; monocular metric depth is pulled toward the occluder, because the nearest surface inside the box is what a depth map reports. Only their ordering matters, so no focal length, stature, or depth scale is needed, provided the depth model's error is close to a pure gain, a condition that can be checked without labels. The score detects heavy occlusion on KITTI with AUC 0.909 (0.888 over all annotated pedestrians, including those the detector misses), requires no training and no occlusion labels, and is not a proxy for range: within fixed distance bands it holds AUC 0.894-0.925 while true distance alone sits near chance. On synthetic CARLA scenes with measured visibility it reaches 0.819, against 0.644 for distance alone. We arrived here after measuring three standard architectural responses to occlusion, depth fusion, occlusion-simulating augmentation, and attention, none of which improved detection outside its training distribution in the configurations we tested, and after finding that a detector trained on German roads loses half its accuracy on self-annotated street scenes in Lagos, Nigeria. Signals that need no local annotation are worth more in settings that benchmarks do not represent.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06899
Ecological monitoring increasingly relies on camera traps and aerial surveys that generate large image collections. High-recall animal detectors can localize candidate animals at scale. However, they also produce many detections that still require expert review, including false positives, ambiguous cases, and animals difficult to identify at the species level. Since exhaustive review requires substantial effort, we propose training-free active prototype triage, where reviewed detections become reusable evidence to (1) Resolve supported foreground classes, (2) Clear likely background false positives, or (3) Defer insufficiently supported cases for expert review. Across camera-trap and aerial datasets, foreground recognition and false-positive rejection benefit from different pretrained representations: BioCLIP2 provides foreground evidence while DINOv3 provides background evidence, reducing erroneous foreground clearing while improving automatic foreground recovery. Deferring unsupported cases avoids the higher error rates caused by forced decisions. Compared with confidence-thresholded multiclass k-NN and uncertainty-sampling logistic regression, prototype triage improves foreground recovery while maintaining competitive or lower review burden. Acquisition goes beyond class discovery: even after classes are represented, prototype choice determines how reliably evidence propagates through the remaining detections. Our results suggest that once animal localization reaches high recall, the challenge shifts from finding animals to deciding which examples to review, how to reuse them, and when evidence does not support an automatic decision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01466
Psychological harms from interactions with large language models cannot be monitored directly because they may emerge over repeated interactions and depend strongly on subjective individual user context. We propose measuring risk, not harm: detecting observable AI behaviors that constitute risk factors for psychological harm at the AI response level and aggregating these signals to support longitudinal monitoring. We operationalize eight such behaviors and construct a synthetic multi-label corpus of 47,062 AI responses and 373,873 response-factor labels, with targeted human annotations for validation and evaluation. We then compare trained embedding-based classifiers, direct LLM judging, and a classifier--judge cascade. All detectors are model-agnostic and operate only on LLM outputs, requiring no access to internal model states. We apply these detectors to several out-of-distribution human-AI conversation data sets from prior research. On held-out human-labeled data, the best cascade achieves macro precision of 0.86, recall of 0.76, and F1 of 0.79. On WildChat, it reduces LLM-judge calls by 97.1\% relative to direct judging. On DelusionEval, risk-factor detections cluster within conversations. Together, our results show that response-level behavioral risk-factor detection can provide a scalable measurement layer for longitudinal psychological-safety monitoring without conflating observable AI behavior with latent user harm.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06806
Post-hoc out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is mature on far-OOD yet remains weak on near-OOD. These two settings differ in their use of class-characteristic feature directions: far-OOD inputs largely fail to activate those of their predicted class, whereas near-OOD inputs activate them much as in-distribution samples do. Because the axis separating far-OOD leaves near-OOD almost indistinguishable from ID, a score optimized for one setting is misaligned with the other; where a detector already saturates far-OOD, added near-OOD sensitivity is bought partly against it. This divergence motivates a targeted near-OOD signal designed to complement existing scores. We propose PLUS (Per-class Low-dimensional sUbspace Signal). For each class, PLUS selects the $m$ most class-active neurons from a sparse autoencoder, orthonormalizes the corresponding decoder directions to form a low-dimensional subspace, and scores an input by its per-class whitened squared Mahalanobis distance $z$ within the subspace of its predicted class. Designed as a dedicated complement rather than a standalone detector, the signal $z$ is fused additively with any calibrated base score at a single, fixed weight. This weight is a single global constant: no value is adjusted per backbone, per OOD dataset, or per deployment, and all calibration statistics are estimated from ID validation data alone. When applied to 18 existing detectors spanning diverse method families, $z$ consistently improves near-OOD AUROC in all 126 detector--backbone combinations. Far-OOD performance is broadly maintained or improved, with only marginal declines where the base score is near-optimal, making $z$ a robust, detector-agnostic complement across backbones.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06688
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based collaborative perception enables multiple agents to share complementary perceptual information, overcoming limitations such as occlusion and limited sensing range. Communication efficiency is a critical bottleneck, as UAVs operate under stringent bandwidth and computational constraints. However, existing spatial selection methods focus predominantly on foreground regions to reduce missed detections, neglecting perceptually ambiguous regions and leaving false detections unresolved. We propose UCP, an uncertainty-driven framework that characterizes collaborative value through observational uncertainty, identifying sensor-limited regions, and discriminative uncertainty, capturing model-level ambiguity near the decision boundary. These estimates drive spatial request and supply maps for efficient inter-agent communication, and the received messages are aggregated via U-Fusion, an uncertainty-guided cross-attention module. Experiments on three benchmarks across 3D object detection and trajectory prediction demonstrate a superior performance-bandwidth trade-off with high interpretability and strong generalizability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06635
Analytics on video archives are bottlenecked by decoding. In a dense pipeline that runs a detector on every frame, decoding is a small fraction of the runtime, but once the detector is restricted to selected frames, decoding takes over as the main cost. We introduce CoDecide, a retrospective analytics system that only decodes the frames where new content appears, using signals from the compressed bitstream to find them. Motion tells us something is moving, but not whether it is new to the scene or has been there the whole time. To make that distinction, we supervise a lightweight compressed-domain student on a label-free novelty signal from a frozen DINOv2 teacher, which fires on semantically new regions rather than on any motion. Consequently, the student model generalizes to new camera deployments without requiring per-camera retraining. At inference, it decides which frames to decode and which regions to reconstruct. Detections from the decoded frames are propagated to the skipped frames using motion vectors. We evaluate CoDecide with a leave-one-dataset-out protocol on VIRAT, MEVA, and ShanghaiTech. Against a dense per-frame detector, CoDecide recovers more moving-object detections than prior compressed-domain selectors at an equivalent decoding budget, outperforming even a competitor trained directly on the target camera. CoDecide runs 15 to 24x faster than a pipeline that decodes and detects every frame. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06455
Monocular 3D object detection offers a low-cost route to 3D perception, but it remains fundamentally ill-posed, since depth must be inferred from a single view. Recent transformer-based detectors learn geometry purely from image features and 3D box annotations, lacking the high-level semantic priors that vision-language models (VLMs) acquire from large-scale pretraining. VLMs offer such priors, but deploying one directly as a detector is impractical due to its heavy inference cost. We propose MonoLaDN, a language-guided denoising framework that transfers the geometric reasoning of a VLM into a monocular 3D detector while keeping the deployed model purely vision-based. During training, a frozen VLM produces structured reasoning about each object's occlusion, depth, dimension, and angle from the image and its ground-truth boxes. We encode this reasoning into queries, perturb them with noise, and train the detector to reconstruct the clean reasoning. Reconstructing the corrupted reasoning forces the detector's depth-guided features to internalize the VLM's geometric priors, so this knowledge remains available even after the reasoning path is discarded at inference, adding no latency or parameters to the deployed model. Experiments on KITTI 3D and nuScenes show that MonoLaDN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art detectors and generalizes well to new domains.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06282
Object detection research remains constrained by high annotation costs and the closed-set assumptions of supervised models, limiting scalability to novel categories. We present a target-dataset annotation-free object detection framework that eliminates the need for human labeling on the target dataset by leveraging the complementary strengths of pretrained foundation models, including segmentation and vision-language systems, combined with a self-refining training loop. To further reduce reliance on expensive LVLM queries, we introduce a landmark-based clustering mechanism that amortizes labeling across image clusters, improving label consistency while lowering computational cost. Our method autonomously generates segmentation proposals, assigns semantic labels through multimodal reasoning, and iteratively improves both localization and classification using a lightweight open-set detector. This modular pipeline enables adaptation to completely unseen object classes and domains without any human-provided target-dataset annotations, while maintaining compatibility with existing detection architectures. Evaluations on COCO, LVIS, ODinW-35, and Roboflow-100 demonstrate substantial performance gains over state-of-the-art open-vocabulary and long-tail detection methods, achieving 60.8 AP on COCO and 47.4 AP on LVIS under zero-shot settings. Beyond strong benchmark results, our approach provides a scalable foundation for real-world detection systems in unknown environments, where annotation is infeasible.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06195
Electron microscopy (EM) serves as a cornerstone in virology enabling the visualization of viral particles and is widely used in research, diagnostics and morphological characterization of pathogens. Computer-assisted image analysis can help facilitate and speed up this labor-intensive method, however, typical EM virus datasets are small and sparsely labeled, resulting in a lack of readily available deep learning models due to training limitations. To overcome data shortages and leverage content-rich, diverse sample backgrounds, we employed background-based data augmentation. To this end, we propose Bg-Mix, a form of data augmentation method, which decomposes training images into foreground objects and backgrounds and subsequently rearranges both into novel augmented images. This not only enhances the performance of object detection models but also increases the diversity of the training data. Using Bg-Mix provides an increase between +0.8 and +3.3 box mean average precision (mAP) points over the baseline when tested across two datasets using two architectures, thereby demonstrating its effectiveness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03455
Current speech deepfake detectors treat each utterance as a flat sequence of frames, limiting their ability to capture long-range spectral inconsistencies that span non-adjacent regions of an audio signal. We propose \textbf{GraphSeal}, which constructs a temporal-spectral graph over short speech segments and propagates artifact cues through graph attention layers before a global readout produces the bonafide-vs-spoof decision. Each node in the graph corresponds to a fixed-length segment; edges encode temporal adjacency and spectral similarity, letting the network attend to distant frames that share suspicious spectral patterns. A multi-head graph attention mechanism weights neighboring nodes according to both learned features and edge attributes, and a hierarchical readout aggregates node representations into a single utterance-level embedding for binary classification. GraphSeal is front-end agnostic: it operates on top of any self-supervised or handcrafted feature extractor. On ASVspoof 2019~LA, ASVspoof 2021~LA, ASVspoof~5, and the In-the-Wild dataset, GraphSeal achieves equal error rates of 0.52\%, 2.41\%, 8.17\%, and 5.24\%, respectively, matching or outperforming prior methods that rely on fixed-topology graph networks or purely sequential architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06171
Marine surface vehicles (MSVs) have attracted considerable attention for their commercial, scientific, and military applications. Owing to their favorable performance-to-cost ratio, shipboard cameras are widely used to detect and recognize potentially hazardous situations across diverse operational scenarios. However, visual perception is inevitably degraded by restricted conditions, including irregular motion of the imaging platform, adverse weather, and long imaging distances. To improve situational awareness and navigation capabilities, complementary sensors, such as the automatic identification system (AIS), radar, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR), etc., have become essential shipboard equipment. Multi-sensor fusion can provide richer perceptual information and help ensure navigational safety of MSVs in restricted visibility. This article reviews recent progress from intelligent vision to vision-centered multi-sensor fusion for newcomers and researchers in intelligent ship navigation and intelligent waterborne transportation system (IWTS). After introducing the generation of quality-degraded images in restricted visibility, we will review intelligent vision methods for four key issues, i.e., shipboard video stabilization, visual perception enhancement, object detection and tracking, and navigable area segmentation. We then examine vision-centered multi-sensor fusion methods, including infrared-visible image fusion, radar-vision fusion, LiDAR-vision fusion, AIS-vision fusion, and other multi-sensor fusion scenarios. Open-source datasets and safety-critical applications are also summarized and discussed. Finally, we highlight open challenges and future research directions. The collected maritime datasets are available at this https URL and will be regularly updated.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05818
Benchmarks for detecting AI-generated video take their real clips from a few curated collections, so a clip's label is collinear with where it came from. We call a score's dependence on this origin corpus identity, and we measure it on four benchmarks and six real collections. Three probes read a file's declared frame types, the motion vectors its codec stores, and the frames' appearance. Frame-type counts alone separate real from generated at AUC 0.999 on GenVidBench, and re-encoding every clip with one setting at a fixed length still leaves 0.61 to 0.63 on three benchmarks. We introduce a fixed frame-type pattern that removes this leak from every clip of at least 2 s. The same re-encode lowers the ReStraV detector on GenVidBench from 0.85 to 0.60, just above the 0.59 its features reach between two real collections, because its 8 fps repeats frames in real clips. Motion vectors alone separate real collections from one another at AUC 0.51 to 0.98, and only one benchmark ships the two labeled real sources needed to measure this separation within it. In deployment, with each threshold set to flag 5% of its training benchmark's real clips, the motion-vector and appearance probes and linear readouts on ReStraV and WaveRep features each flag 15% or more of another real collection. Choosing the threshold on real videos from the target collection brings the rate back to about 5%, at the cost of catching fewer generated clips. Clearing the real-vs-real level does not guarantee replication: of the six feature sets whose GenVidBench score clears it by 0.15 or more, only WaveRep's two keep their score on AIGVDBench. A benchmark score is therefore best read together with that level, a score on a second benchmark, and false-positive rates on other real collections. The toolkit and the clip lists of every evaluation set are at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31004
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hold promise for zero-shot video task-progress estimation in robot learning, yet existing frameworks frequently suffer from confirmation bias, hallucinating progress in failed executions due to implicit success assumptions or relative temporal ranking designs. Naive prompting of frontier models collapses into a binary success detector that fails to capture nuanced, non-linear progress and failures. While post-training approaches can mitigate this through explicit training, they demand expensive real-world robotics data and require computationally intensive post-training for every individual base model. To resolve these limitations, we introduce D&A (Describe & Assess): our approach decouples progress estimation into an objective, task-grounded textual description of scene dynamics followed by an assessment phase using explicit rubrics. By compelling the VLM to synthesize an explicit, text-based definition of absolute success before scoring, the framework anchors evaluations to an external, global criterion rather than the video's internal timeline. Empirical results demonstrate that our method calibrates zero-shot estimates and mitigates confirmation bias, providing fine-grained, partial progress metrics that accurately penalize failed executions while correctly interpolating successful runs. Being purely prompt-based, D&A generalizes across tasks, embodiments, and benchmarks---matching or surpassing post-trained reward models---and its reward estimates enable efficient downstream reinforcement learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03622
The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) demands reliable detection of human-authored versus synthetic text. However, current Transformer-based detectors often experience severe performance degradation during domain shifts and operate as opaque classifiers. This paper investigates the robustness and interpretability of fine-tuned Transformer models (DistilBERT, RoBERTa) by evaluating them against a custom out-of-distribution (OOD) dataset of hyper-local news synthesized via open-source LLMs (Llama 3, Mistral, Gemma). To analyze model decision boundaries, we apply a tripartite Explainable AI (xAI) framework using SHAP. Our analysis reveals three key phenomena: First, detectors often rely on a "Call-to-Action" syndrome inherent to instruction-tuned LLMs rather than generic machine text. Second, we observe a "Specificity Bias," where LLMs successfully bypass detection by hallucinating specific named entities and mimicking conversational imperfection. Finally, we illustrate the "Wikipedia Paradox," wherein formal, objective human writing is frequently misclassified as AI due to its low statistical burstiness. These findings demonstrate that purely statistical detection paradigms face systematic limitations in highly structured human domains, emphasizing the critical need for semantically-aware, interpretable detection architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03280
We propose a simple, linguistically motivated approach to detecting AI-generated peer reviews based on the inherently human trait of subjectivity. We capture subjectivity at two levels: the semantic level of evaluative language and modality and the pragmatic level of speech acts. Using features derived from speech act annotations and model-predicted subjectivity scores, we train a lightweight classifier that achieves an AUROC of 0.9566 with only these linguistic features. Combining its output with the state-of-the-art detector Sem-Detect raises the TPR at 1% FPR of Sem-Detect on the APRDB benchmark from 0.874 to 0.985, outperforming the current state of the art. Our results show that linguistic features of subjectivity provide an explainable source of information for detecting AI-generated peer reviews and can be readily integrated into existing detection methods. The code and models are publicly available on GitHub (this https URL\_ text\_detection\_hub) and Hugging Face (this https URL), respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03060