arXiv Machine Learning

Mechanistic Interpretability-Guided Selective Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Models for Centimeter-Level Flood Depth Estimation

arXiv:2608. 07562v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban flooding poses an escalating threat to transportation infrastructure, yet no operational system provides real-time, street-level flood-depth estimates at centimeter resolution.

arXiv AI
Jun 24

UniDrive: A Unified Vision-Language and Grounding Framework for Interpretable Risk Understanding in Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2606. 24759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision.

By Xiaowei Gao, Pengxiang Li, Yitai Cheng, Ruihan Xu, James Haworth, Stephen Law, Yun Ye
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 23

UniDrive: A Unified Vision-Language and Grounding Framework for Interpretable Risk Understanding in Autonomous Driving

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision. Models that rely on single-frame or low-resolution inputs often miss small, distant, or partially occluded hazards, while language-centric driving models frequently provide limited grounded evidence for their explanations.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

M3-Former: Multimodal Transformer with Mixture-of-Experts for Long-Term Vessel Trajectory Prediction

M3-Former is a multimodal transformer framework that uses large language models to encode vessel static attributes and navigational intent as semantic priors for long‑term trajectory prediction. It builds a unified multimodal representation space, aligns static semantic information with dynamic trajectory features via self‑attention, and employs a dual‑granularity Mixture‑of‑Experts architecture to capture both global route planning and fine‑grained maneuvering behaviors. A Steering‑Weighted Cross‑Entropy loss further improves accuracy on sparse turning events, and experiments on a Danish AIS dataset show consistent improvements over state‑of‑the‑art baselines, reducing ADE and FDE by up to 5.1% in 4‑hour predictions.

By Wenzhe Jin, Haina Tang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Knowledge-Guided Vision-Language Inference for Image-Based Urban Flood Depth Estimation

The paper introduces FloodVision, a knowledge-guided vision‑language framework that estimates urban flood depth from a single RGB image. It combines a general‑purpose vision‑language model with FloodKG, a domain knowledge base that encodes canonical object dimensions and component landmarks to promote component‑level reasoning. On 654 crowdsourced New York flood images, FloodVision cuts mean absolute error from 15.62 cm to 8.75 cm and median error from 14.35 cm to 7.75 cm, outperforming the VLM‑only baseline in 69.3 % of cases.

By Zhangding Liu, Neda Mohammadi, John E. Taylor
arXiv AI
Jul 28

ObsDriveBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Understanding under Adverse Weather with Observability Awareness

arXiv:2607. 23537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving under adverse weather remains a critical challenge, yet existing vision-language benchmarks mainly evaluate under standard conditions, synthetic corruptions, or single modality.

By Qiao Yan, Yihan Wang, Zhenghao Xing, Jiaqi Xu, Pheng-Ann Heng
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Seeing or Knowing? Visual Context Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper investigates why multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with vision‑centric tasks when visual evidence conflicts with pretrained language knowledge. Using image reconstruction and a new WhatIfVis benchmark, the authors show that MLLMs preserve coarse‑grained visual attributes but fail to consistently use them, and that supervised fine‑tuning and activation patching can improve controllability of visual context sensitivity. The study demonstrates that the main bottleneck lies in the models’ inability to reliably regulate their reliance on visual evidence rather than in visual perception itself.

By Jiaang Li, Chengzu Li, Zhaochong An, Yifei Yuan, Xi Liu, Serge Belongie, V\'esteinn Sn{\ae}bjarnarson
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Pedestrian Crossing Intent Classification From Event-Based Vision Using Convolutional Spiking Neural Networks With Temporal Augmentation

The paper presents an end‑to‑end system that converts driving footage into dynamic vision sensor (DVS) event streams, augments training with simulated DVS data, and trains a convolutional spiking neural network (Conv‑SNN) to classify pedestrian crossing intent as crossing or non‑crossing. The Conv‑SNN, trained with a class‑balanced loss and surrogate‑gradient learning, achieves high accuracy and F1 scores on JAAD and CARLA DVS datasets, outperforming or matching prior frame‑based methods while operating on sparse temporal representations. The study details architectural choices, neuron dynamics, and training protocols, and provides a convergence analysis and domain‑transfer evaluation.

By Henok Teklu, Mustafa Sakhai, Maciej Wielgosz, Matej Mertik
arXiv AI
Sep 10

SAFIRE: Safety-Critical Benchmark for Fine-grained Fire and Smoke Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

SAFIRE is a large-scale benchmark for fire and smoke understanding in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), featuring 83,000 captioned images across 20 scenarios and 193,000 multiple-choice VQA questions derived from a 9.7K-image subset. The benchmark evaluates 10 dimensions of performance, from basic perception to higher-order reasoning, and employs a GPT‑5.4-assisted verification pipeline to ensure annotation quality. Experiments on ten open-source MLLMs (8B–38B) reveal an average accuracy of 61.9%, highlighting significant gaps in safety-critical reasoning, while fine-tuning vision encoders on just 7% of SAFIRE data boosts fire-scene classification accuracy from 20.1% to 64.5%. All resources are publicly available at https://risys-lab.github.io/SAFIRE/.

By Pengfei Li, Naufal Suryanto, Sicheng Zhang, Mohammad Alsharid, Muzammal Naseer
arXiv AI
Jul 17

Parameter-efficient Prompt Tuning of Vision Foundation Model With Adaptive Focal Loss for Interpretable MCI Screening

arXiv:2607. 15047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mild Cognitive Impairment is a critical early stage of cognitive decline that frequently precedes Alzheimer's disease, yet its automated detection from neuropsychological drawing tests remains fundamentally constrained by data scarcity, class imbalance, and diagnostic ambiguity near clinical boundaries.

By Javad Khoramdel, Farhad Hoseyni, Amirhossein Nikoofard
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

DELUGE: Towards Continental-Scale Daily Pluvial Flood Damage Prediction via Interpretable Conditioning on Foundation Model Embeddings

arXiv:2607. 16050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pluvial (rainfall-driven) flooding accounts for 45% of National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) claims in the United States and is harder to predict than its riverine and coastal counterparts, with existing approaches limited to coarse resolution, regional domains, or computationally intensive process-based models unsuitable for daily continental-scale use.

By Yuya Kawakami, Daniel Cayan, Dongyu Liu, Kwan-Liu Ma, Tom Corringham
arXiv AI
Jun 18

LandslideAgent with Multimodal LandslideBench: A Domain-Rule-Augmented Agent for Autonomous Landslide Identification and Analysis

arXiv:2606. 18661v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intelligent landslide hazard interpretation is critical for disaster prevention, yet current paradigms struggle to simultaneously extract visual features and high-level geoscientific semantics, while general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from perceptual limitations and domain hallucinations in complex geological scenarios.

By Chengfu Liu, Dongyang Hou, Junwu Xiang, Cheng Yang, Xuezhi Cui, Zeyuan Wang, Liangtian Liu, Zelang Miao