security monitoring teams

Abstract: When AI agents share channels and credentials, one agent can press another to break its operator's rule, a first step towards collusion. Output filters check only what an agent has already written. Can an overseer tell beforehand that an agent is about to give in? We show that a linear probe on the agent's activations can, in a controlled multi-agent setting. Across six scenarios, a peer presses a target for up to 20 rounds to reveal a secret, such as a deploy token; the target often refuses, then gives in. Read at each model call before its output is written, the probe picks out the one that leaks. On held-out Qwen3-32B episodes, at a threshold set to flag 5% of benign calls, it catches 82% of leaking calls. At a similar flag rate, a zero-shot decision-model monitor catches 26%. On gpt-oss-20b, a probe on its reasoning reaches AUROC 0.91. A bag-of-words classifier trained on the same calls comes close, so most of the gain comes from training on labels, not activations. The probe also flags permitted disclosures: it reads the coming disclosure more than the violation. The warning is short-range, and halting on any alarm would stop most benign episodes, which a second text check does not fix. A warning raised before generation could let an overseer stop an agent that is about to give in, ahead of others acting on its messages or recruitment spreading through a swarm.

Abstract: Eigenvalues are a workhorse of graph machine learning: spectral clustering, spectral graph neural networks, and graph kernels all summarize a network by the eigenvalues of a matrix. These eigenvalues are almost always treated as a static list of numbers. When a graph changes, however, its eigenvalues move, and when the matrix is not symmetric, they move in the complex plane, where they can wind around each other. The pattern of this winding is a braid, a classical object from topology. We propose spectral braids, a methodology for dynamic directed networks: each snapshot is aggregated into a community-level transition matrix, its complex eigenvalues are tracked over time, and the braid they trace is read off as a word. The word is then mapped to a matrix by the Burau representation, which gives a fixed-size feature vector for any classifier. The braid has a concrete meaning: each eigenvalue describes how a group of communities behaves, and each crossing records one group overtaking another. We evaluate the method on dynamic network classification, using synthetic networks of online communities whose labels describe how the network evolved between the same starting and ending states. Our experimental results show that the proposed features reach 97.1% accuracy on four classes, against 44.5% for the best feature set that does not track eigenvalues, and that the Burau features also separate networks containing the same events in a different order, which simple counts of crossings cannot do. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that defines braids and braid monodromy on graph data and uses them as features for learning on dynamic networks.

Abstract: Text-based Person Anomaly Search (TPAS) retrieves a target pedestrian using natural-language descriptions of appearance and normal or anomalous behavior. Unlike conventional text-based person retrieval, TPAS must preserve identity cues while distinguishing fine-grained behaviors. It presents two challenges: same-identity, different-behavior hard negatives cause gradient conflict during granular alignment, while strong appearance cues can obscure weak behavioral evidence during aggregation. We propose GradCO (behavior-aware Gradient-Conflict Offloading), comprising three complementary components. Behavior-Aware Mixture-of-Experts (B-MoE) forms appearance, normal-behavior, and anomalous-behavior streams whose roles are learned from retrieval objectives without expert-specific semantic labels. Conflict Offload Learning (COL) uses pair-conditioned offload anchors in similarity computation to reduce the conflicting-gradient burden on the main text representations. Hierarchical Intent Alignment (HIA) aggregates expert similarities and features using query-conditioned weights. Experiments on five TPAS/TIPR benchmarks show GradCO significantly surpasses SOTA methods and validate our design.

Abstract: Visual perception is evolving from passive recognition toward active, task-oriented observation. We investigate GUI grounding as a scalable source of spatial supervision for learning observation behaviors that transfer beyond interfaces. We introduce LBS (Look Beyond Screens), a vision-language model trained through supervised initialization on teacher-generated GUI grounding trajectories, followed by reinforcement learning for multi-turn crop-and-inspect decisions. Under fixed inference settings, LBS models based on Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen3.8-27B consistently improve over their corresponding baselines. Gains beyond supervised fine-tuning transfer to PerceptionBench for both backbones and to HR-Bench and ChartQAPro for Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, supporting observation strategies that generalize beyond GUI-specific imitation. Further analysis suggests complementary roles for the two stages: SFT establishes visual inspection primitives, while RL improves their downstream effectiveness. These findings support GUI grounding as a practical supervision paradigm for transferable active visual perception and broader multimodal reasoning. Our code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/UI-Venus/tree/LBS and https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI/LBS-27B, respectively.

Abstract: Multi-view tracking extends visual coverage beyond a single camera, providing complementary observations when targets are occluded or leave the view. This raises a question: how can observations from different views be matched to the correct identities without offline scene-specific training or camera calibration? Progress toward this goal remains limited because many offline formulations assume such deployment-specific knowledge, while online adaptation can amplify association errors. We study this problem as online multi-view identity maintenance (OMIM): targets are initialized once per view, with no further identity labels provided after each initialization. To this end, we introduce OmniGlimpse, an asymmetric propose-verify framework that separates adaptive association from stable identity consolidation. At the representation level, short-term local and cross-view evidence is mapped into target-specific adaptive spaces to propose associations, whereas long-term identity distributions are maintained for verification in a canonical space defined by a frozen encoder. At the update level, short-term evidence may guide current associations, whereas, after bootstrapping, only verified observations may update persistent memory or drive adaptation. Under a unified target-specified evaluation protocol, OmniGlimpse improves over the best evaluated online baseline for each metric by 9.1 IDF1 and 22.1 CVIDF1 points on M3Track. The corresponding gains on MvMHAT are 20.3 and 26.2 points. Despite using no offline scene-specific training, it outperforms offline-trained references in IDF1 and remains competitive in cross-view association. These results support an approach to online identity maintenance that adapts to changing appearances while consolidating reliable evidence into stable identity anchors.

Abstract: Effective video agents must learn not only how to answer, but also where to look next. Transferring this capability to smaller models is challenging because each observation serves two purposes: supporting an answer and guiding the search for further evidence. Textual descriptions may capture what is currently visible while omitting cues needed for subsequent acquisition. We introduce Latent Agentic Reasoning for Video Analysis (LARVA), a framework that distills multi-round video agents through jointly learned latent reasoning and visual observations. Rather than communicating through captions, an observer passes compact continuous representations to a reasoner that selects the next acquisition action or produces the final answer. Crucially, action and answer supervision propagate through this interface, training the observer to communicate information useful for downstream decisions. Observation reconstruction and reasoning-distribution alignment provide auxiliary supervision from textual teacher trajectories. Across five video-understanding benchmarks, LARVA achieves strong performance with 4B and 7B backbones. On VideoHolmes, Video-MME, and LVBench, the 7B model outperforms a textual CoT student trained on the same teacher trajectories by 5.1, 2.5, and 3.7 percentage points, respectively. These results highlight the value of jointly learning how agents represent evidence and act on it when distilling video-understanding capabilities.

Abstract: This study develops an audio-visual emotion recognition system that integrates automatic utterance segmentation with multimodal fusion. Unlike conventional methods that rely on manually annotated utterance boundaries, the proposed system automatically generates candidate segments from continuous dialogue and extracts the corresponding audio and visual features for emotion classification. To address the challenges introduced by automatic segmentation, the proposed AGF-Net integrates Audio-Guided Fusion (AGF), Multimodal Negative Learning (MNL), and Predictive Dynamic Fusion (PDF) to improve cross-modal fusion, modality balance, and robustness to varying modality quality. Experimental results show that AGF-Net achieves 64.92% Accuracy and 65.47% F1-score under clean conditions, 62.13% Accuracy and 63.08% F1-score under moderate noise, and 58.19% Accuracy and 59.41% F1-score under higher noise. Overall, the proposed framework reduces reliance on manually annotated utterance boundaries and maintains competitive performance under automatically segmented and noisy audio-visual inputs.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: Autonomous industrial inspection requires strictly deterministic real-time inference under tight memory and computational constraints. However, existing Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) models suffer from prohibitive scaling: dense temporal memory grows with spatial resolution and sequence length, while fixed-capacity decoders fail to exploit the inherent sparsity of industrial scenes, creating a practical memory wall on resource-constrained edge platforms. We present DetM-Tracker, a streamlined VIS framework for autonomous industrial inspection, where target objects often exhibit highly similar appearance under constrained "micro" fields of view. DetM-Tracker eliminates architectural redundancy through three synergistic components: (1) Compact Scalar Memory, which condenses high-dimensional instance features into four-scalar descriptors, reducing temporal memory complexity from $O(T \cdot N \cdot R)$ to $O(T \cdot \hat{N})$. This mechanism effectively compresses frame-level representations into a bank of active instances, where $R$ denotes resolution, $N$ and $\hat{N}$ represent global and window-specific instance counts, respectively and $T$ the temporal window size; and (2) Dynamic Instance Channels, which adaptively allocate query capacity according to the actual number of visible objects; and (3) Entropy-Gated Skip Connection, which concentrates computational budget on high-uncertainty spatial regions to refine object boundaries in a single forward pass without auxiliary refinement heads. Our approach effectively bridges the gap between modern VIS models and the practical demands of industrial edge deployment, reducing inference latency by approximately 20$\times$ and VRAM consumption by 6$\times$ compared to state-of-the-art dense-feature baselines.

Abstract: Modern large-scale cloud systems continuously generate massive and multimodal observability data, such as time-series metrics, log records, and system dependency graphs, which reflect the health state of the system. To ensure reliable cloud system operation, anomaly detection models identify abnormal states by analyzing these multimodal observations. However, existing approaches rely on simple fusion strategies and graph learning, ignoring the semantic gap among modalities and the asynchronous spatio-temporal dependencies across system instances over time. To this end, we propose BEACON, a framework to Bridge multimodal sEmantics and Asynchronous propagation for Cloud system anOmaly detectioN. Specifically, we introduce a Dynamic Interpretable Multimodal Aggregator (DIMA) that leverages an information-bottleneck mechanism to compress information from the semantics and temporal dynamics of metrics, and aligns them with logs in a shared prototype space. Furthermore, we propose an Asynchronous Spatio-Temporal Propagator (ASTP) that captures temporal dependencies with multi-scale temporal attention and models spatial relations with topology-aware aggregation. This enables asynchronous propagation of anomalies across system instances. Extensive experiments on three real-world cloud system datasets demonstrate that \textbf{BEACON} consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in anomaly detection.

Abstract: While VideoLLMs have made significant progress in understanding short video benchmarks, they often struggle to summarize long-form ones. This is mainly due to performance degradation caused by long-context prompts, the inherent difficulty of preserving temporal continuity and a lack of semantically rich concepts in event descriptions. To tackle these issues, this paper introduces the first recursive Video Language Summarization Model (RVLSM) designed for video processing and tailored to long-form video-to-text summarization. RVLSM recursively decomposes videos into semantically coherent segments and delegates chunk-level reasoning to VideoLLM sub-models and external tools. It employs (1) Semantic Temporal Decomposition (STD), which preserves temporal coherence and continuity through a scene-aware chunking strategy that dynamically partitions videos according to semantic boundaries, and (2) Adaptive Multimodal Tool Calling (AMTC), which ensures semantic richness of the summary via a routing mechanism that selectively invokes auxiliary modules such as action recognition, optical character recognition, automatic speech recognition, and object detection. Experiments on the VideoXum and MixTyVSum benchmarks show that RVLSM consistently improves over zero-shot VideoLLM baselines across multiple model settings and performance metrics, and is competitive with a state-of-the-art fine-tuned model for video-to-text summarization. Importantly, the named entities in the RVLSM's summaries align more closely with those detected in the ground-truth summaries than those detected by baseline and state-of-the-art methods, confirming the saliency of the event descriptions it generates.

Abstract: Diffusion models have recently achieved encouraging results in real-world image dehazing. However, restoring high-resolution images remains challenging due to spatially non-uniform haze and inconsistent predictions across local patches. To address these issues, we propose Hihaze, a one-step diffusion framework for high-resolution real-world dehazing. Hihaze adopts two haze-aware modulation modules: attentive skip compensation (ASC) and a spatial degradation adapter (SDA). ASC selectively transfers reliable encoder information to the variational autoencoder (VAE) decoder, preserving structural details while suppressing haze-degraded features. SDA extracts multi-scale spatial degradation representations and injects them into the U-Net to guide restoration according to local haze variations. Furthermore, we design a training-free global-guided patch fusion (GPF) method. It uses a global prediction to align patch appearance and downweight unreliable predictions, followed by structure-guided detail compensation. Notably, this training-free design also makes GPF a plug-and-play module for other dehazing models. Experiments across four real-world benchmarks show that Hihaze surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in both visual quality and inference speed. Specifically, it delivers PSNR improvements of 3.62~dB on Dense-Haze and 3.69~dB on NH-HAZE compared with the strongest baselines. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/Hihaze.

Abstract: Real-time streaming video question answering with vision-language models must answer queries that arrive at any time with low latency while sustaining the video-processing rate required by the application. Existing systems construct key-value (KV) caches for the entire video as it arrives, although a query typically uses only a few of the preceding frames as evidence. This highlights a fundamental trade-off: performing more computation as video arrives reduces query-time computation but can increase processing lag, whereas deferring computation can increase the video-processing rate but requires additional query-time computation for retrieved content. We present StreamAhead, an algorithm-system co-design that exploits this trade-off through adaptive precomputation: dynamically controlling how much computation to complete for each video segment before a query arrives. StreamAhead encodes video segments independently and lets each remain at a different representation level, from inexpensive visual features to costly KV caches, completing KV caches only for the retrieved segments when a query arrives. StreamAhead profiles offline the cost of advancing a segment to each representation level. Its runtime uses these profiles to schedule segment computation concurrently with query execution, pipelining it across heterogeneous CPU and GPU resources while maintaining the required video-processing rate. StreamAhead achieves accuracy competitive with state-of-the-art methods with up to 10.4x lower time-to-first-token (TTFT), and up to 5.9x lower TTFT than state-of-the-art streaming systems. It sustains 30 FPS with P95 TTFT under 0.5 s, and up to 57 FPS with P95 TTFT under 2 s. To our knowledge, StreamAhead is the first real-time streaming video QA system with competitive accuracy, setting a new Pareto frontier between video-processing rate and TTFT.

Abstract: Recent RGB-infrared multi-object tracking (MOT) methods have substantially improved cross-modal representation learning and multimodal information integration. However, most existing methods compress RGB and infrared evidence into a unified descriptor. When one modality is temporarily degraded, the tracker can no longer regulate its contribution separately; unreliable evidence may distort association and contaminate appearance memory. We therefore propose RCA-MOT, a reliability-consistent appearance modeling framework that preserves cross-modal complementarity while retaining post-representation evidence controllability. RGB-specific, infrared-specific, and fused identity representations are maintained as jointly accessible appearance states. For each detection, a simple training-free target-scene estimator produces branch-wise appearance reliability used across the two temporal roles of appearance: relative reliability regulates different identity branches, absolute reliability calibrates borderline candidates near the ReID acceptance boundary, and the same branch-wise reliability controls how strongly matched descriptors update historical appearance memory. The individual components are intentionally simple, focusing evaluation on reliability-controllable appearance organization rather than elaborate fusion or learned reliability-estimation modules. RCA-MOT sets new SOTA results on VT-MOT and UniRTL, improving the previous best HOTA by 5.402/6.075 points and IDF1 by 11.549/12.789 points, respectively, while post-hoc analyses further validate reliability as an informative control signal. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Abstract: Reliable 3D person detection is important for rescue robotics to give first responders situational awareness. Yet most multimodal 3D detection research targets automotive scenarios in which pedestrians mostly appear in a narrow range of upright, near-road poses. It is therefore unclear how much of the reported performance transfers to rescue settings, as a person may be lying, partially occluded, or in unstructured indoor and outdoor environments. To investigate this gap, we introduce TriSAR-3D, a multimodal person detection dataset recorded with a high-resolution 128-channel LiDAR, an RGB camera, and a thermal camera. It captures varied poses in indoor as well as outdoor locations at different times of day to study their influence on 3D object detector performance. Furthermore, we propose a novel trimodal 3D detection pipeline, PaintFusion, that fuses PointPainting-based evidence using a simple MLP. We show that the derived method reaches 65.4 AP@50 and thereby outperforms strong LiDAR-only (CenterPoint, 53.4), RGB+LiDAR (BEVFusion, 60.5), and adapted trimodal (Tri-BEVFusion, 60.7) baselines on the dataset. At the same time, it is substantially faster than other fusion-based methods such as BEVFusion, with a per-frame latency of 51.6 ms compared to 101 ms. Additionally, we test how the performance of different 3D object detectors generalizes to unseen pose categories. Removing lying instances from training data collapses the lying-pose AP@50 to near zero across all evaluated detectors. The results indicate that dataset diversity exerts a large effect on 3D object detection performance. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/MarkusKramer1/3D-Trimodal-People-Detection.

Abstract: Temporal graph data are recorded in different representations, but whether these differences also determine the scope of learned knowledge reuse remains unclear. This study investigates whether predictive structure learned from relational histories can be reused between continuous-time dynamic graphs (CTDGs) and temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs). Bidirectional reuse emerges while retaining distinct input and prediction interfaces and independent vocabularies, and sources with the same representation are not always more useful. Controlled reorganizations of source histories show that the organization contributing to reuse varies across source-target conditions. We show that learned aspects of Relational Dynamics, the predictive structure present in relational histories, can be reused across conventional representation boundaries. Independently pretrained TKG and CTDG learners can also be fused at the score level to improve prediction on a third dataset without entity or relation-semantic alignment. Two proofs of concept in recommendation and security detection illustrate that external temporal sources without direct alignment can also become useful pretraining resources.

Abstract: Training-free language-based video anomaly detection (VAD) uses frozen vision--language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) to localize abnormal events without task-specific model-weight optimization. Existing approaches increasingly exploit broader temporal and semantic context, yet generic context does not necessarily foreground abnormal events or specify how video-level semantics should modify local anomaly scores. We introduce a training-free semantic feedback framework that uses VAD-guided active observation for video anomaly understanding (VAU) and returns the resulting anomaly-focused description to refine temporal detection. Starting from an upstream anomaly-score curve, we adapt reasoning-based iterative frame selection: high-score regions seed the observations, and anomaly scores together with VLM relevance assessments guide subsequent temporal exploration. A frozen video-language model generates a single open-ended anomaly description from the selected frames. The description is returned through two complementary feedback levels: video-level feedback determines whether the score distribution should be suppressed, preserved, or sharpened, with selective visual rechecking, while local feedback retrieves event-related windows and promotes scores only after target-local visual verification. All model weights remain frozen, and feedback is applied once without regenerating the description. On the HIVAU video-summary evaluations of UCF-Crime and XD-Violence, VAD-guided observation improves GPT-rated reasonability, detail, and consistency over the matched CLIP-guided variant. For VAD, semantic feedback improves the re-evaluated upstream detector from 84.36% to 86.25% AUC on UCF-Crime and from 68.07% to 72.58% AP on XD-Violence, where the final AUC is 91.74%.

Abstract: Forecast-based models are fundamental to network traffic management and anomaly detection. However, it is essential to evaluate these forecasting models over extended periods of time in order to assess their adaptability to unexpected phenomena and shifts in underlying patterns. This kind of long-term evaluation requires multi-year data to account for yearly seasonality and behavioral drift. Existing public datasets are too short to support such long-horizon forecasting tasks. We introduce CESNET-TimeSeries26, comprising 995 days of continuous traffic time series from the CESNET3 network, together with a single subnet spanning approximately 4.5 years. The dataset captures 278,466 IP addresses, 285 institutions, and 566 institutional subnets at three aggregation intervals. The dataset provides a definitive longitudinal benchmark for evaluating forecasting models in both operational management and security monitoring. We demonstrate that annual seasonality is the dominant periodic component. Moreover, we show that a forecasting model can exploit the annual component only when its training window covers at least one complete annual cycle, which no sub-year dataset provides.

Abstract: Selective state-space models are an efficient approach to long-sequence video modeling. However, their recurrent computation makes it difficult to determine which video tokens drive a prediction. Existing attribution methods often require additional backward passes or repeated model evaluations, making them substantially more expensive than the forward inference they aim to explain. In this work, we introduce READ, a parameter-free attribution method for selective state-space models that unrolls the recurrence at the position read by the classifier. READ traces the contribution accumulated in the recurrent state back to the video tokens that contribute to the final prediction. By anchoring attribution at the classifier's readout, it produces a single spatiotemporal relevance map from which frame- and region-level relevance can be obtained directly. Despite requiring only one forward pass, READ achieves competitive faithfulness and localisation compared with substantially more expensive attribution methods. Experimental results show that READ avoids the systematic relevance biases of existing methods while recovering meaningful temporal and class-specific structure across datasets and backbones. More broadly, our results show that the recurrence underlying selective state-space models is not only an efficient mechanism for inference, but also a direct source of interpretable evidence for their predictions.

Abstract: Linking people's appearance and actions to character identities is essential for understanding video narratives. We present a framework for identity-aware video captioning and person-centric question answering that combines automatic character identification, explicit spatial grounding, and task-specific adaptation. Starting from LSMDC v2 movie clips, our pipeline matches detected faces to actor reference images, tracks characters across frames, and builds inputs with identity-linked bounding boxes. A strong vision-language model generates identity-aware captions and questions, which are manually verified and filtered to create a benchmark of 750 captioned clips and 3,000 person-centric questions. We study five grounding strategies combining textual coordinates with visual face or estimated person boxes across Video-MLLM families at roughly 2B, 4B, and 8B parameters and larger frontier models. Combining visual face boxes with textual coordinates yields the most consistent performance across scales and significantly improves overall performance over coordinates alone. Smaller models tend to over-assign known identities when the queried person is not grounded, while larger models better recognize such UNIDENTIFIED cases. We introduce BAC by LoRA fine-tuning Qwen models at 2B, 4B, and 8B scales on about 32K identity-aware captioned clips. Across all scales, BAC outperforms every other evaluated model family of comparable size. BAC-8B reaches 93.20\% overall QA accuracy, ranking behind only GPT-5.6 Sol among the frontier models evaluated in our study. Overall, explicitly communicating who is where, together with lightweight task-specific adaptation, substantially improves identity-aware video understanding without changing the underlying architecture. We release the benchmark, training data, code, and BAC checkpoints at https://github.com/momentslab/beyond-anonymous-captions.

Abstract: 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 https://github.com/polimi-ispl/MOTIF.

Abstract: Audio-visual multi-segment grounding (AV-MSG) in untrimmed videos, reasoning over audio-visual evidence and predicting multiple segments for a query, is a fundamental problem but remains challenging. Visual-only models overlook complementary acoustic cues, while audio-visual models often fail to calibrate the number of events - a phenomenon we refer to as count miscalibration. We present TiTok, an audio-visual large language model (AV-LLM) that localizes an arbitrary number of temporal event segments for each query. For precise boundary prediction, we introduce the Time Token Interleaving (TTI) method, which explicitly injects special time tokens into the audio-visual stream to align input-side temporal perception with output-side temporal prediction. We further propose decoupled, multi-segment-oriented rewards for reinforcement learning, consisting of global, local, count, precision, and format rewards, optimized with Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (GDPO). To assess the performance on AV-MSG, we establish a new UnAV-100-based evaluation protocol, and propose the CountF1 metric for quantifying count miscalibration that overlap metrics fail to capture. TiTok reaches 65.7 mIoU and 0.58 CountF1, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at this link.

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation and ground-mobile navigation, yet language-conditioned control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in smart warehouses remains largely unexplored, hindered by the lack of benchmarks that jointly provide continuous low-level flight actions, fine-grained natural-language target descriptions, and realistic industrial environments. This paper introduces WareFly-VLA, a photorealistic UAV VLA framework and dataset for language-guided human search, localization, and tracking in warehouse environments. It contains 507 human-teleoperated flight episodes and 8,504 high-resolution RGB transitions collected in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, each paired with a human-written appearance description of the target worker and a synchronized four-degree-of-freedom control command. Two aerial tasks are covered: target approach and person following, under occlusion, long-range search, altitude variation, and clutter. A unified benchmark of four open-source VLA architectures (SmolVLA, GR00T N1.7, pi_0 and OpenVLA) is established under a leakage-free episode-level protocol at two control rates. The results show that language-conditioned aerial control in warehouses is far from solved: performance drops substantially under strict generalization settings, continuous action modeling consistently outperforms discrete action tokenization, only the forward channel is reliably learnable from a single frame, and current foundation-model interfaces transfer poorly from ground and humanoid embodiments to aerial platforms. The synchronized video, language, action, pose, and difficulty annotations further support world-model research. The dataset, baselines, and evaluation protocol are released to support language-grounded aerial autonomy in smart warehouses.

Abstract: Audio benchmarks are built around short, pre-segmented clips, limiting model design to brief inputs or fixed vocabularies. To close this gap, we introduce Logbook, a benchmark for hour-scale audio understanding, with recordings ranging from ten minutes to six days. Given a continuous audio recording and an event label vocabulary, a system must predict a gap-free segmentation with an event label and a description per segment. We compare 52 systems, end-to-end and cascaded, and ablate fine-tuning, context length, and reasoning budget. We find the task tractable, though the best systems remain below the human reference. Also, over-segmentation is pervasive, and fine-tuning partially mitigates it. Finally, end-to-end are often better than cascaded systems, but degrades with longer context.

Abstract: Multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL) addresses inexact supervision in both the instance and label spaces, which can be applied to video classification. However, bag-level labels do not explicitly supervise the correspondence between candidate classes and temporal evidence. We propose {\ours}, which couples label disambiguation with temporal evidence allocation through a joint class--time assignment. Occupancy-regularized spherical matching associates contextualized video features while learning nonuniform temporal mass and discouraging excessive concentration. During training, candidate-restricted inference recomputes the assignment within the candidate label set. A dual-marginal KL projection then constructs a structured teacher that incorporates momentum-refined class beliefs while preserving the proposal's temporal occupancy. A single plan-level KL objective aligns the full-space predictor with this teacher. Our analysis characterizes when candidate re-solving differs from masking and shows that, under the stated construction, the joint objective decomposes into class-marginal and class-conditional temporal supervision. We construct VCMIPL benchmarks from Breakfast, DoTA, and FineAction using model-generated candidate labels and evaluate the method across four feature representations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PIVOTMIPL outperforms existing MIPL algorithms in both effectiveness and efficiency.

Abstract: Existing streaming vision-language models (VLMs) continuously perceive and reason over visual streams, but their computational pathways remain fixed throughout inference. Consequently, they cannot adapt computation to evolving scene dynamics, where different future events demand different levels and forms of perception. We show that streaming VLMs inherently possess the ability to anticipate the immediate future, and leverage this capability to dynamically configure future computation in a training-free manner. Realizing such anticipatory computation, however, is very challenging: future anticipation must be sufficiently reliable to guide computation, planning must run concurrently with streaming inference, and online reconfiguration must incur negligible overhead. To address these challenges, we introduce FORESIGHT, a dual-stream architecture comprising two Siamese LLMs with shared weights, input encoders, and KV cache. The first LLM continuously processes incoming tokens, while the second runs ahead of the stream to anticipate future context, plan future computation, and generate task responses without interrupting streaming inference. Each plan decides when to reason next, what to check then, and how densely to sample, keeping transient evidence separate from persistent control. The resulting computation plan is executed online through an efficient reconfiguration protocol with schemaguided decoding and lightweight diff-based updates, enabling dynamic adaptation with low overhead. With a frozen Qwen3-VL-8B backbone, FORESIGHT achieves 23.0 mean joint F1 on OmniPro Online evaluation beating strongest trained baseline by 9.5%, while improving the backbone by 6.7 on StreamingBench and 15.4 on OVO-Bench, with the largest gain of 18.7 when evidence arrives later in the video stream. Our source code will be made publicly available.

Abstract: Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) remain prone to cross-modal hallucinations, where one modality incorrectly affects predictions about another. Although contrastive decoding reduces hallucinations in vision-language models, its direct extension to AV-LLMs overlooks a key challenge: different questions require different perceptual evidence, including audio, video, or their interaction. Notably, we observe that joint audio-visual inference can weaken the prediction even when a model can recover the correct answer from a single informative modality. For example, when asked which instrument is heard, a model may correctly predict violin from the audio alone. Once a video showing a guitar is added, its confidence in violin may drop. In this paper, we introduce Relevant Evidence Decoding (RED), a training-free method that identifies question-relevant evidence and selectively strengthens its contribution. RED uses pointwise mutual information to quantify the predictive support provided by audio and video beyond the question alone. It decomposes their joint contribution into audio, video, and residual interaction components. A question-only inference pass determines the required evidence type, after which the model augments the original audio-visual prediction with the corresponding PMI contribution. Across three audio-visual hallucination benchmarks and three AV-LLMs, RED improves accuracy over standard decoding by up to 7% on CMM, 6.3% on AVHBench, and 3.8% on SVHalluc, with an average relative time to first token of 1.5x standard decoding.

Abstract: Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to temporally localize abnormal events in videos. Most existing approaches rely on dataset-specific training and curated annotations, limiting generalization in open-set scenarios. Recent zero-shot methods based on Large Vision- Language Models (LVLMs) alleviate this dependency but often lack temporal continuity and structured reasoning. We propose Cog-VADU, a fully training-free framework that reformulates VAD as a sequential cognitive reasoning task. Cog-VADU introduces Chain-of- Anomaly Detection Thought Prompting (CoADTP), which unrolls an LVLM into a recurrent reasoning chain across video segments. By propagating structured rationales over time, the model maintains implicit temporal memory, enabling robust discrimination between com- plex anomalies and high-motion normal activities. To improve reliability, we further design a cross-modal re-ranking stage that aligns textual rationales with visual embeddings, enforcing semantic consistency and temporal coherence for refined and stable predictions. Extensive experiments on multiple public VAD benchmarks demonstrate that Cog-VADU achieves competitive zero-shot performance. Moreover, cross-model evaluations show that CoADTP consistently enhances reasoning-based anomaly detection in a model-agnostic manner, pro- viding interpretable and generalizable anomaly understanding for real-world applications.

Abstract: Answering questions about long videos often requires connecting events involving the same objects across hours or days. Chronological descriptions and text-derived entities can leave physical identity unresolved: different objects may share a description, while observations of the same object remain disconnected across events. Retrieving relevant events therefore does not necessarily recover the "biography" of the particular entity a question concerns. To address this, we introduce Grounded Entity Biographies (GEB), a long-video memory framework that groups visually grounded observations of the same physical instance across clips into retrievable biographies while preserving the context of each moment. During question answering, the biography is retrieved alongside episodic evidence, allowing the model to follow an entity through events using identity links established during memory construction. Evaluations across four benchmarks, including day-long and week-long recordings, demonstrate improvements over prior memory frameworks in both multiple-choice and open-ended question answering. On EgoLifeQA, GEB achieves 72.0% accuracy, 4.4 percentage points above the best published result. Ablations show that grounded identity association and biography reading both contribute to the gains, which additional descriptions alone do not fully recover.

Abstract: Deep Support Vector Data Description (Deep SVDD) has become a prominent framework for unsupervised anomaly detection by learning latent representations that compactly characterize normal data around a center. Despite its empirical success, anomaly decisions produced by Deep SVDD are typically made solely based on anomaly scores without rigorous statistical guarantees, thereby limiting their reliability in safety-critical and high-stakes applications where false positives must be strictly controlled. In this paper, we propose PADI (Post-Anomaly Detection Inference), a novel framework that equips a trained and frozen Deep SVDD detector with statistically valid inference by leveraging the Selective Inference framework. Specifically, PADI performs inference conditional on the event that a test instance is identified as anomalous by Deep SVDD, thereby enabling rigorous statistical assessment of anomaly decisions. Based on this formulation, we derive valid selective p-values that quantify the statistical significance of the detected anomaly. Using these p-values, we theoretically establish control of the false positive rate (FPR) at a user-specified significance level $α$ (e.g., $α=0.05$). Furthermore, we extend the proposed framework to Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection (Deep SAD), providing a principled approach for statistically reliable inference in semi-supervised anomaly detection settings. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets robustly support the theoretical findings. The results demonstrate that PADI consistently achieves proper FPR control while attaining superior true positive rates compared with existing approaches.

Abstract: Language-guided multi-camera tracking must preserve a target identity across unobserved gaps, where similar candidates and uncertain returns can make early associations unreliable. A wrong match can corrupt the history used to predict later observations and propagate identity errors across subsequent camera handoffs. We propose ReWorld-Track, a recursive event world model that carries association uncertainty into future predictions. Candidate matches and continued waiting define alternative target states, whose posterior probabilities are used to update a persistent recurrent belief. This representation preserves uncertainty about alternative trajectories through successive observations. This belief predicts the next camera, arrival time, and entry region, while appearance and language evidence guide association. By training across successive handoffs, the model learns to retain uncertainty that remains useful for later predictions and identity decisions. ReWorld-Track achieves HOTA scores of 65.19 on CityFlowV2 and 45.36 on MTMMC, with improved identity continuity across repeated handoffs. On MTMMC, its structured posterior update gains 0.50 HOTA points over a similarly sized generic updater and 0.94 points over fixed-moment soft association, raising next-camera accuracy from 86.03% to 87.41% and reducing median arrival-time error from 0.78 s to 0.71 s for subsequent target returns.

Abstract: Query-agnostic streaming video understanding requires vision-language models to continuously compress an indefinitely growing visual stream into a bounded memory before future queries are known. The performance depends critically on the memory mechanism--what observations to preserve, how to represent and consolidate them, and what information to retrieve when a query eventually arrives. Rather than designing a single memory architecture by hand, we formulate memory design as a search problem over executable memory programs. We introduce a lightweight domain-specific language that expresses memory mechanisms through structured primitives for representation, admission, retention, consolidation, budgeting, and retrieval, while enforcing causal and bounded-memory constraints. Although structured, the derived program space remains large and contains heterogeneous, conditionally dependent design choices whose effects can only be assessed via downstream execution. We therefore propose MemEvo, an LLM-driven auto-research framework that uses pretrained LLM as a semantics-aware proposal model to iteratively generate and refine candidate memory programs based on accumulated experimental feedback. At runtime, a deterministic evaluation pipeline validates and evaluates each candidate, while the underlying vision-language model remains frozen throughout discovery. We finally produce a training-free, bounded-memory mechanism. Extensive experiments on StreamingBench and OVO-Bench demonstrate strong streaming video understanding performance together with substantial context and inference efficiency.

Abstract: Existing online video segmentation methods struggle to track objects in long, complex videos with long-term occlusions. We hypothesize that this limitation is caused by (i) the inability of their temporal propagation mechanism to adaptively select the object information that is propagated across time, and (ii) their inability to be trained on long videos due to memory requirements and vanishing gradients. To address the first limitation, we propose to use a lightweight GRU-based temporal propagation module that can learn to select which information it keeps in memory and propagates across time. Second, to allow training on long videos, we introduce Truncated Query Propagation (TQP), a training strategy in which the model processes a video in chunks of frames, where information about tracked objects is propagated between chunks but backpropagation is only conducted in individual chunks, enabling longer temporal supervision without out-of-memory issues, inference overhead, or vanishing gradients. The resulting model is called the Long-term Video Mask Transformer (LVMT). Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that LVMT sets a new state of the art across a range of video segmentation tasks, while retaining the speed of the highly efficient model it is based on, making it 10X faster than the prior state of the art. Code: https://www.tue-mps.org/lvmt

Abstract: Video temporal grounding (VTG) aims to localize the video interval corresponding to a language query. Recent large vision-language models (LVLMs) show great potential in solving such a multi-modal reasoning task. However, long videos often contain large amounts of redundant information that disturbs LVLMs to mine query-relevant evidence. Instead of dense frame sampling which incurs prohibitive training memory, previous reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) works typically utilize sparse sampling, which makes training feasible but may miss critical evidence. In this paper, we propose a ``summarize before grounding'' framework (named ``SumGround'') for long-video temporal grounding. The key of SumGround is to perform query-guided chunk condensation to aggregate and retrieve query-relevant evidence. Specifically, we split the video into several chunks and perform two-level chunk condensation. First, we introduce query-guided latent summaries, which is represented as KV states of query-guided prompts, to compress redundant visual tokens into compact query-relevant chunk summaries. Furthermore, we design an associative summary retrieval scheme to rank and select chunk summaries that are most likely to contain the event interval. Both query-guided latent summary and associative summary retrieval schemes are enabled by RLVR. To reduce memory consumption, we propose a length-aware gradient gating module to selectively stop gradient back-propagated to visual tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SumGround performs favorably against previous state-of-the-art methods across multiple downstream datasets, with remarkable gains on long videos.

Abstract: Visual anomaly detectors identify deviations from known-normal data, but their anomaly signals may mix evidence of actual anomalies with benign visual variation. We investigate whether automated interpretability can augment visual anomaly detectors by identifying and intervening on different components of this signal. We decompose PatchCore nearest-normal residuals into sparse features using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), and provide high-activation and contrastive non-active examples to a Multimodal LLM, which describes each feature and labels it as anomaly, distractor, or uncertain. These labels guide interventions in the SAE hidden representation, where distractor features are suppressed and anomaly features amplified. The edited representation is then used to reconstruct patch embeddings, which are rescored with PatchCore. Across 40 categories from four benchmarks, applying both interventions jointly improves macro-average image-level AUROC from 0.8724 to 0.8857 on source data and from 0.8066 to 0.8210 under synthetic corruptions. On three additional RobustAD categories with real acquisition shifts, the same interventions improve AUROC from 0.8745 to 0.9056 on source data and from 0.6069 to 0.6599 under real acquisition shifts. Finally, individual feature interventions across all 43 categories show that the MLLM labels are aligned in aggregate with how features differently affect normal and anomalous images.

Abstract: Training-free online video anomaly detection (VAD) with frozen multimodal language models faces two coupled challenges: extracting reliable current-window semantics under causal and computational constraints, and maintaining temporal continuity without repeatedly transmitting high-dimensional history. Encoding history through text can compress visual evidence and introduce semantic bias, whereas retaining visual history expands multimodal context. We introduce PARSEE-VAD, a two-module framework that separates semantic evidence acquisition from score-state evolution. Proposition-Aware Reasoning (PAR) extracts structured propositional evidence from the current causal window and conditionally activates more specific queries when coarse evidence warrants further refinement. By sharing a reusable causal visual prefix across queries, PAR reduces redundant computation through selective execution. Streaming Evidence Escalation (SEE) maps the acquired proposition evidence into a compact score-domain event state through current evidence escalation, then propagates only the resulting bounded state across decisions to support temporal continuity. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate strong training-free online performance while selective routing reduces specialist computation and score-state propagation remains sparse. These results support a current-first principle for streaming multimodal inference: resolve present semantics first, then use compact historical state only to repair residual continuity gaps.

Abstract: Open-prompt detectors allow users to specify targets with text, visual exemplars, or both. We argue that existing designs underuse the visual modality in two ways. First, multiple exemplars are commonly compressed into a single class-level embedding. This textualizes visual prompting: the resulting vector plays the role of another class name, is often aligned to or injected into the text pathway, and may be suboptimal when only a few heterogeneous exemplars are available. Second, existing methods interact primarily in prompt or representation space, before modality-specific detection states are formed. We address both issues from a set perspective: \setopd preserves modality-specific decoding states from a shared prompt-conditioned initialization and performs explicit multimodal collaboration at the candidate-state level. For the first issue, we introduce \br prompting, which reads every boxed exemplar in its full scene context and decomposes the pooled support evidence into a Base anchor and a learned Residual correction; the resulting prompt has fixed capacity regardless of the number of examples and drives its own visual detection pathway. For the second, we recast text--visual collaboration from representation-level fusion into a candidate-set modeling problem. Paired-Query Arbitration (\pqa) then performs explicit cross-modal state arbitration only after modality-specific candidate states have been formed. The two readers share query initialization so their candidates are paired by index; a learned gate arbitrates within each pair, followed by a permutation-equivariant module that reasons over the fused set.

Abstract: Facial micro-expressions are spontaneous, brief, and subtle facial movements that reveal suppressed emotions in high-stakes environments. In contrast to classic expression analysis, detecting action unit (AU) yields a finer representation of facial movements, serving as a preliminary step before defining expression classes and other downstream tasks. Therefore, it represents a crucial upstream task in facial analysis, and improving an AU detection module increases the precision of facial analysis. Despite that, detecting AU is challenging because of the constrictive nature of the AU activation regions, leading to confusion among different AUs known as AU ambiguity. To model the fine-scale changes, we propose \textbf{MoTop}, a motion-topological model that is augmented with a learnable motion context, yielding regional soft guidance for facial activity, followed by facial landmarks that capture the fine-scale topological changes of micro AUs. To increase the micro facial landmark representations, we amplify the encoded facial landmark transitions via linear extrapolation, thereby increasing the spatial proximity of landmarks and enhancing the low-intensity landmark dynamics. In addition, we design anatomical facial clusters that enhance the hierarchical representation, facilitating multi-scale modelling of facial geometry and improving micro-topological representations. With these contributions, we have achieved state-of-the-art performance on the CD6ME protocol for the micro AU detection task.

Abstract: Multi-view video understanding requires integrating spatial and temporal evidence across multiple, often non-overlapping camera streams: tracking entities as they transition between viewpoints, aligning events across time, and reasoning about latent 4D continuity rather than any single visible frame. We introduce MVVBench, a benchmark for multi-view video reasoning built from real world multi camera datasets. Questions are curated to be monocular-ambiguous along both the view and the temporal axis: each question is unanswerable from any single view in the designated input set, and the majority are further unanswerable from any single moment. Each question becomes uniquely solvable only by jointly reasoning across views and across time. MVVBench spans diverse dynamic scenes and probes six capabilities: implicit/explicit attribute identification, implicit/explicit relative distance, relative camera pose, and compositional counting, with human-authored QA and rigorous verification. Beyond benchmarking, we provide an extensive analysis of when and why current vision language models succeed or fail, characterizing errors due to temporal mis-localization, cross-view identity breaks, and brittle multi-hop reasoning. We then study inference-time elicitation strategies that unlock latent multi-view competence---task-specific chain-of-thought scaffolds and structured cross-view evidence aggregation---yielding substantial gains without retraining. Finally, we present preliminary evidence that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards can elicit some latent multi-view competence in the base model, pointing to training-time approaches as a promising direction for future work. Together, MVVBench offers a rigorous evaluation of 4D multi-view reasoning and a foundation for future progress toward reliable embodied perception.

Abstract: Scene safety understanding plays a life-or-death role in situational awareness in various critical domains. Traditional methods that rely on learning direct mappings between scenes and safety levels often lack interpretability, limiting their reliability in critical applications. An effective approach to overcoming this challenge lies in interpreting human cognitive processes and equipping machine models with analogous cognitive capabilities. This work explores an effective way of integrating scene safety cognitive process modeling and process supervision. Specifically, we first construct a hierarchical cognitive safety structure, which motivates the development of a novel, high-quality scene safety understanding dataset based on multi-step reasoning with process labels. This dataset serves both as a benchmark and a resource to improve the safety reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), while also enabling a granular analysis of intermediate reasoning steps through information flow and saliency-based techniques. Building upon this foundation, we introduce a modular and flexible process supervision framework that reflects the hierarchical nature of human cognition. This framework leverages LLMs as the core architecture and incorporates Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) strategies to enable specialization and collaboration among expert modules, each tasked with specific sub-processes of the overall reasoning chain. Systematic experimental evaluations and analyses confirm that our framework exhibits superior interpretability and performance characteristics compared to traditional approaches.

Abstract: Generative vision-language models (VLMs) offer a counting paradigm in which one model produces both a count and a natural-language account of the scene, yet their raw counting accuracy sits in the range of sub-million-parameter specialist regressors. The open question is whether auxiliary guidance from a pretrained specialist can lift them into useful territory, and through which channel that guidance is best routed. We evaluate Qwen2.5-VL-7B on four widely used crowd counting benchmarks (ShanghaiTech A and B, UCF-QNRF, NWPU-Crowd). Zero-shot prompting rarely produces a parseable count, so LoRA supervised fine-tuning establishes the baseline at overall MAE 81.64. Conditioning on a P2PNet-derived density heatmap as an auxiliary visual signal fails in every encoding we tested, and an adversarial-swap protocol shows the model reads the heatmap but applies it counterproductively. We propose CrowdCue, a family that supplies the same specialist's already-integrated integer count to the VLM as a discrete symbol. The text-channel variant reaches MAE 72.04. The visual-channel variant, which renders the integer as printed digits and supplies it as a second image, reaches MAE 62.65, the strongest result in this paper and well ahead of the cue-supplying specialist alone (84.45 on the same split). In the late-fusion VLM we study, the binding constraint is not the channel but the abstraction level at which the specialist signal is delivered.

Abstract: Vision-language model (VLM) agents combine specialized perception, tools, and reasoning to address complex visual tasks. In multi-agent settings, different agents inspect different image regions, video frames, or visual representations, so collaboration extends beyond distributed reasoning to distributed perception. This makes shared visual context a central problem in VLM agent collaboration. In this paper, we frame memory hierarchy, cross-agent sharing, and consistency mechanisms around the need to reconcile interpretations and update dependent reasoning. Effective collaboration requires agents to build on contributions from other agents, recover missing visual context, and reconcile differing interpretations as new evidence emerges. Shared visual memory preserves not only images or textual summaries but also the dependencies among observations, agent interpretations, and subsequent reasoning. Together, these design considerations shape how information flows and evolves across VLM agents. The proposed framework provides a foundation for building reliable and resource-efficient agent teams.

Abstract: As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become increasingly prevalent in consumer and defense settings, classifying them reliably from limited, modality-specific data is an urgent challenge. The dominant approach, large pretrained networks fully fine-tuned on task data, carries a substantial computational and memory weight that is hard to bear in resource-constrained UAV deployments, where edge inference and rapid retraining for emerging platforms are both required. This paper systematically scales across both model architectures and fine-tuning methods for UAV audio classification, asking when that weight is justified and when lighter alternatives prevail. Using a custom dataset of 3,100 audio clips spanning 31 drone classes, we evaluate transformer (ViT, AST) and convolutional (custom CNN, ResNet-18/152, MobileNet-V3-S/L, EfficientNet-B0/B7) backbones under full fine-tuning, classifier-only fine-tuning, and four parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods: SSF, IA3, OFT, and selective batch-norm tuning. All configurations are evaluated with 5-fold cross-validation across accuracy, training time, trainable-parameter share, and inference-time memory footprint. Selective batch-norm fine-tuning of EfficientNet-B7 with three-fold augmentations achieves the highest validation accuracy (97.65% +- 0.30) while updating under 0.5% of model parameters. Across the sweep, lightweight CNNs consistently outperform transformers on both accuracy and efficiency. For UAV audio classification under data scarcity, scaling the method outperforms scaling the model.

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive video understanding, yet their ability to reason over long-form narratives is often masked by visual-centric evaluations and inefficient context processing. Existing benchmarks over-rely on visual heuristics while marginalizing auditory cues, effectively reducing models to "silent observers" that bypass genuine cross-modal reasoning. Moreover, standard dense sampling creates an evidence-context trade-off: increasing frames to capture evidence inevitably leads to attention distraction and token explosion. To bridge these gaps, we present Video-HolmesV2, a novel benchmark designed for Deep Audio-Visual Coupling. Unlike previous works, it enforces an Evidence-Based Evaluation, requiring models to justify answers with precise spatio-temporal audio-visual evidence, thereby reducing confounding effects of guessing and hallucinated evidence. To support this, we introduce: (1) a Multi-Model Cross-Verification pipeline to ensure task rigor; (2) a Spatio-temporal Evidence-Aware Metric for fine-grained calibration. Furthermore, we propose an Audio-Text Guided Token Compression framework. By fusing task intent with auditory anchors, our method distills high-value reasoning cues to mitigate long-context noise. In our evaluation, even strong proprietary models achieve below 60% accuracy, while our approach outperforms comparable open-source omni-models.

Abstract: Scaling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to long-form video understanding is bottlenecked by the explosion of visual tokens, which saturates context windows and incurs prohibitive costs. Current solutions predominantly rely on auxiliary models for token reduction but face a fundamental dilemma: lightweight encoder-driven approaches often overlook critical semantic information, whereas heavyweight MLLM-driven reduction negates the efficiency gains. {In this work, we identify a more fundamental inefficiency underlying this dilemma: while fine-grained visual details are essential for detailed understanding, they are largely redundant for the preliminary task of selecting semantically relevant regions. } Motivated by this, we introduce \textbf{VideoMM}, which marks a paradigm shift from model-centric downsizing to adaptive perceptual granularity. Specifically, our framework {decouples selection from reasoning} by executing semantic filtering on a cost-effective \textit{Macro Proxy} (derived from downscaled frames), and projecting the selected regions onto high-fidelity \textit{Micro Tokens} for detailed understanding only when necessary. Extensive evaluations show that VideoMM significantly outperforms existing solutions. It achieves a 6.13$\times$ speedup and a 7.4\% accuracy gain over full-context baselines on LongVideoBench, and further accelerates inference by 2.73$\times$ over current leading methods, establishing a highly scalable paradigm for long-video understanding. Our code is available at: https://github.com/adfh917k/VideoMM.

Abstract: Open-vocabulary camouflaged object segmentation (OVCOS) aims to segment unseen camouflaged objects under text guidance. We observe that SAM3 still suffers from a pronounced semantic gap between global textual semantics and fine-grained pixel-level visual cues in OVCOS. Meanwhile, fully fine-tuning the text encoder introduces heavy parameter overhead and risks overfitting to training categories, which compromises open-vocabulary representation flexibility. To address these issues, we propose ViCo-SAM3, a Vision-Conditioned alignment framework designed for OVCOS. Specifically, we introduce vision-conditioned (ViCo) module, which dynamically modulates text embeddings with global visual context, enabling textual representations to adapt to the current image content and thereby effectively bridging the semantic gap between vision and text. Building on this, we further design a vision-conditioned cross-modal binding (ViCoBind) module to enhance cross-modal interaction and semantic alignment between visual and textual representations. Without bells and whistles, ViCo-SAM3 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OVCamo benchmark and demonstrates strong generalization.

Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have substantially advanced general audio understanding, yet they remain limited in fine-grained temporal perception, particularly in precise event localization. Existing approaches primarily post-train LALMs to predict event boundaries as timestamp tokens. However, this generative formulation lacks explicit correspondence between the timestamp predictions and fine-grained acoustic evidence, limiting the precision and reliability of temporal localization. To address this issue, we augment the LALM with a dedicated frame-level grounding model while leveraging its semantic modeling capability to represent the event query. Specifically, the frozen LALM encodes the event query with audio as context, and the grounding model combines these query representations with fine-grained audio features to localize the target event at the frame level. Extensive experiments across diverse temporal grounding benchmarks demonstrate strong and consistent improvements over existing methods. Further evaluation shows that the grounding model can provide temporal evidence to support downstream reasoning.

Abstract: Facial emotion recognition (FER) in real-world environments remains challenging due to unconstrained imaging conditions, including multiple faces, occlusions, pose variations, and complex lighting. Most existing studies focus on individual facial emotion classification and do not address the analysis of collective emotional states at the event level. This paper proposes an end-to-end pipeline for event-level emotion recognition from photographs. The approach detects faces in each image, classifies facial expressions using a deep convolutional neural network, and aggregates face-level emotion probabilities to estimate the overall emotional distribution of a public event. A comparative evaluation of several CNN architectures on the FER- 2013 and RAF-DB datasets demonstrates that transfer learning with EfficientNet-B2 trained on RAF-DB is more suitable for real-world RGB data. The proposed method is evaluated on a real-world event dataset containing 1658 images. Experimental results show stable emotion distributions across event subsets, confirming the effectiveness of event-level aggregation for emotion analysis in the wild.

Abstract: Smart healthcare monitoring systems require precise action recognition to ensure well-being and timely intervention in critical situations such as falls, particularly for mobility-challenged individuals. Existing datasets are often clip-based, lacking the frame-level detail needed to recognize actions online, as they unfold. To address this, we introduce SAFER-Activities, a dataset for fall detection and physical activity monitoring, with a dedicated subset for wheelchair use scenarios. It comprises over 66 hours of video data captured by multiple cameras, with 85,310 action instances and frame-level annotations for 30 action classes. We benchmark action recognition on SAFER-Activities with 2D and 3D skeleton models, RGB models with frozen backbones, and multimodal fusion strategies, and evaluate on in-lab, out-of-distribution, and cross-dataset test sets. Skeleton-based models generalize best under domain shift; fusing frozen RGB features with the skeleton stream improves in-domain recognition over the baseline CNN1D, most clearly on the wheelchair subset, but degrades out of distribution. Cross-dataset and qualitative evaluations confirm that models trained on SAFER-Activities transfer well to unseen environments and external fall data. To support research on robust fall detection and activity monitoring, we release the dataset and code at https://safer-activities.github.io/.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose ReactVAU, a Slow-Fast Decoupled Framework for real-time streaming Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU). Existing VAU methods rely on offline inference with global temporal sampling, which violates causality and prevents deployment in live surveillance streams. Conversely, general streaming video models satisfy causal access but dilute rare transient anomalies during memory compression and often invoke heavyweight MLLMs uniformly over long normal intervals. React VAU addresses this gap with three synergistic components: a lightweight Fast Detection Module based on Spatial Grid Folding (SGF) for continuous anomaly filtering; an Anomaly-Aware Persistent Memory (AAPM) that protects critical visual cues from temporal decay; and a heavyweight Slow Reasoning Module that remains dormant during normal streams and is awakened only by suspicious events for semantic verification and causal description. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ReactVAU operates under strict streaming constraints while simultaneously achieving competitive performance in both anomaly detection and causal reasoning, alongside significantly enhanced computational efficiency by minimizing heavyweight MLLM invocations. Project page is available at https://huiyuiui.github.io/React_VAU/

Abstract: AI agents generate rich execution trajectories that capture their interactions with large language models, tools, and external environments. These trajectories are increasingly valuable for downstream tasks such as memory extraction, model fine-tuning, runtime optimization, and security and cost monitoring. Yet trajectory data today is fragmented across files, databases, and observability systems, with no persistent data management system designed around its unique structure and access patterns. We argue that trajectories should be treated as a distinct data type. A trajectory combines hierarchical execution structure, large volumes of text whose analysis often requires semantic reasoning, and rich dependencies and lineage among events, intermediate states, and derived artifacts. These properties introduce new requirements throughout the data lifecycle. Ingestion must reconstruct and preserve execution structure and lineage; storage must efficiently organize large but highly redundant contexts while maintaining relationships among records; and query processing must jointly reason over structure, temporal order, semantics, and lineage. We therefore envision TrajectoryDB, a trajectory-native data management system that co-designs ingestion, storage, and query processing to efficiently manage and analyze agent execution trajectories.

Abstract: Automated drone surveillance has become increasingly important for public safety, critical infrastructure protection,and restricted airspace monitoring. While existing vision-based systems achieve strong performance for drone detection and tracking, reliable payload characterization remains highly challenging under long-range imaging conditions due to limited availability of annotated real-world datasets, and substantial distribution shifts encountered during deployment. Existing approaches formulate payload characterization as a closed-set object detection problem, limiting their ability to recognize previously unseen payloads and generalize beyond the training distribution. To address these challenges, we generate a photorealistic synthetic drone-payload dataset using Unreal Engine 5 and Cosys-AirSim and propose DroneGround: Grounded Vision-Language Payload Characterization, a two-stage framework for robust open-vocabulary payload analysis. DroneGround first employs a YOLO26s detector to localize drones and extract drone-centric image crops, followed by a LoRA-fine-tuned PaliGemma vision-language model that generates seman- tic descriptions of the detected drones and their attached payloads, enabling open-vocabulary payload characterization beyond predefined categories. An occlusion-based grounding module further provides interpretable payload localization by identifying image regions responsible for the generated descriptions. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world drone imagery demonstrate that DroneGround substantially improves robustness under synthetic-to-real distribution shifts, outperforming a conventional closed-set payload detector by improving the F1-score from 82.5% to 96.3%, while achieving significantly better generalization to previously unseen payload categories (80.4%versus 42.7% F1). Dataset and code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

Abstract: Progress in video anomaly understanding (VAU) has long been limited by inherent deficiencies of real-world anomaly videos, which are hard to collect and offer little control over their content. Synthetic anomaly approaches partially alleviate data scarcity, yet their generation remains largely controlled at the category or prompt level. They also lack component-level verification of video-text consistency and provide insufficient hard normal samples near the normal-anomaly boundary. To address this, we present AnomalyCraft-700K, a component-controllable synthetic anomaly dataset for fine-grained VAU, containing over 40K videos and over 700K task-level textual annotations. From fine-grained semantic components and a progressive three-stage pipeline, we craft anomaly events that are richly detailed, semantically controlled, and temporally structured, and additionally construct per-category hard normal samples to prompt the model to discriminate based on anomaly semantics rather than surface visual cues. Moreover, using the components as verification units, AnomalyCraft-700K further performs component-wise correction of video-text discrepancies introduced during generation, providing reliable annotations with verified cross-modal alignment for six tasks that progress from anomaly detection, through anomaly retrieval and captioning, to fine-grained anomaly reasoning. Evaluations of widely used methods under both traditional and MLLM-based protocols demonstrate that AnomalyCraft-700K serves as an effective source of supervision, from anomaly detection to fine-grained anomaly understanding.