Papers for

security monitoring teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Vision conditioned model improves camouflaged object detection with text prompts

ViCo-SAM3: Vision-Conditioned Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Segmentation

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.

Mon 14 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Picking out camouflaged objects from pictures is hard, especially when you want to find things that the system hasn’t seen before, based only on text descriptions. The authors noticed that existing methods struggle because the connection between overall text meanings and tiny visual details is weak. They made a new method called ViCo-SAM3 that adjusts the text hints using clues from the image itself, so the text can better match what’s actually in the picture. This makes the system much better at segmenting camouflaged objects it hasn’t encountered before.
Open 2609.15418v1

Large audio language models improved for precise sound event timing

Augmenting Large Audio-Language Models with Frame-Level Grounding for Fine-Grained Temporal Perception

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.

Mon 14 SeptSoundArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Finding the exact timing of sounds in an audio clip is hard for many AI models that understand sound and language together. The authors improved such models by adding a dedicated part that looks closely at short moments (frames) in the audio to better locate the start and end of specific sounds. Their approach keeps the main model's ability to understand meaning while improving the timing accuracy. Tests showed that their method works well across various situations and helps explain why the model makes certain timing decisions.
Open 2609.15215v1

Dataset improves detection of falls and daily activities including wheelchair use

SAFER-Activities: A Dataset for Smart Assessment of Fall Events and Routine Activities

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/.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Detecting falls and everyday physical activities accurately can help keep people safe, especially those with mobility challenges. The authors created a large video dataset called SAFER-Activities that shows 30 different actions with detailed frame-by-frame labeling. This dataset also includes videos specifically showing wheelchair users. They tested different computer models to recognize these actions and found some work better when seeing new environments. Their dataset and code are now available to help develop better health monitoring systems.
Open 2609.08038v1

ReactVAU improves live video anomaly detection and explanation

ReactVAU: A Slow-Fast Decoupled Framework for Streaming Video Anomaly Understanding

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/

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting unusual events in live video streams is tricky because many methods need to look at the whole video in advance, which isn’t possible in real time. The authors offer ReactVAU, a system that quickly spots potential anomalies using a simple detector, remembers important details without losing them, and only uses a slower, detailed analyzer when something suspicious happens. This approach helps understand strange events as they happen without slowing down processing. Their tests show ReactVAU works well on standard benchmarks and runs more efficiently than previous methods.
Open 2609.07941v1

Trajectorydb organizes complex ai agent actions for easier analysis

TrajectoryDB: A New Database for Agent Trajectories

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.

Mon 7 SeptDatabases
The gist
AI agents perform many steps and make decisions while interacting with language models and tools, creating detailed records called trajectories. These records are currently scattered across different files and systems, making them hard to manage and analyze. The authors propose treating these trajectories as a special type of data with their unique features, such as hierarchical structure and linked events, and creating a system called TrajectoryDB to store and query them efficiently. This system designs how trajectories are taken in, stored, and explored so users can better understand and use AI agent workflows.
Open 2609.07782v1

DroneGround improves drone payload recognition with synthetic data and language models

DroneGround: Open-Vocabulary Drone Payload Characterization Using Synthetic Data and Grounded Vision-Language Models

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.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Identifying objects attached to drones from far away is hard because there aren’t many real pictures to learn from, and new types of objects keep showing up. The authors created a detailed set of fake drone images using a simulation engine and combined it with smart AI that understands both images and language. Their system, DroneGround, can spot drones, describe what’s attached to them in everyday words, and find parts of the image that show those objects, even if it hasn’t seen those exact objects before. This makes it better at recognizing all kinds of drone payloads, helping improve surveillance and safety.
Open 2609.07780v1

Large synthetic dataset improves fine-grained video anomaly understanding

AnomalyCraft-700K: Component-Level Controllable and Verifiable Synthetic Anomalies for Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding

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.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Video anomaly detection is hard because real unusual events are rare and difficult to collect with good details. The authors created a huge synthetic video dataset called AnomalyCraft-700K, with detailed, controllable anomalies and precise text descriptions that match video components. This dataset helps train models to better recognize subtle anomalies and understand them in fine detail. They also included tricky normal examples that look similar to anomalies to make the detection smarter.
Open 2609.06978v1