arXiv AI

Open-World Hierarchical Perception: Taxonomic Abstraction over Class-Agnostic Proposals for the Safe Handling of Out-of-Vocabulary Road Objects

arXiv:2608. 07577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A closed-set detector for autonomous driving must assign every object one of a fixed set of labels.

arXiv AI
Sep 1

Background-Free Objectness Learning for Class-Agnostic Detection

Background-Free Objectness Learning (B-FOR) is a dense, class‑agnostic detection framework that learns objectness without treating unlabeled regions as background. It predicts multi‑scale object‑center and scale fields, using spatially structured soft targets to supervise only reliable annotated areas and introduces displacement‑aware scale fields to model object extent. Experiments on PASCAL VOC, MS‑COCO, and Open Images show B‑FOR improves recall by over +10 AR points compared to prior class‑agnostic baselines, with ablation studies confirming the importance of localized supervision and displacement‑aware scaling.

By Dania Batool, Liliana Lo Presti, Marco La Cascia, Filippo Vella
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Open-vocabulary 3D object detection with promptable segmentation

The paper introduces an open‑vocabulary 3D object detection pipeline that uses a promptable segmentation model (SAM3) to generate instance masks from six surround‑view cameras. These masks are converted into metric 3D boxes, achieving up to 0.413 mAP/0.555 NDS without any training when supervised box geometry is borrowed at inference. The approach also improves a supervised LiDAR‑only detector by 0.034 mAP through a camera‑witness rule, demonstrating that measurement precision, not 2D detection, limits performance.

By \"Omer Faruk Deniz, Mustafa Taha Ko\c{c}yi\u{g}it
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Contrastive Mask Fidelity: Reference-Free Auditing of Ground-Truth Masks in Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

arXiv:2608. 09101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic segmentation models are trained and evaluated against human-drawn masks, yet remote-sensing annotations are often coarse, incomplete, or misaligned; high overlap scores may then reflect agreement with imperfect labels rather than faithfulness to the image, creating an evaluation paradox.

By Shuaishuai Cao, Shuwei Peng, Meng Tang, Min Huang, Youjin Wang, Jie Chen, Jing Ouyang, Zhiwei Zhai
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Distance to Class Prototypes: Active Learning for Object Detection

The paper introduces a new active learning signal for object detection that relies on a supervised contrastive term added to the training objective. This term shapes an embedding space where distance reflects class membership, allowing an unlabeled detection to be scored by its distance from the predicted category’s region weighted by confidence—all from a single forward pass of one network. Experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS‑COCO show that this criterion outperforms the standard posterior and remains competitive with ensemble‑based methods while incurring only a modest 8.3% increase in parameters.

By Licheng Zhang, Zheng Gong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Three-Way Open-Set Detection for Robust Autonomous Navigation

The paper proposes a three-way open-set detection framework for autonomous navigation, classifying each detection as a known object, unknown object, or background based on a pretrained detector’s outputs. It introduces domain generalization and adaptation methods, evaluates them across various detector families and benchmarks, and demonstrates that this approach improves safety and efficiency in simulated navigation missions compared to binary detection methods.

By Spyridon Loukovitis, Vasileios Karampinis, Athanasios Voulodimos
arXiv AI
Sep 2

CoLT-Drive: Counterfactual Long-Tail Benchmarking and Knowledge-Preserving Adaptation for Driving Affordance Prediction

The paper introduces CoLT-Drive, a 3,536-sample counterfactual long‑tail benchmark for evaluating decision‑level driving affordance prediction, which tests whether models can infer how rare objects affect an ego vehicle’s high‑level actions. It also proposes KPA, a knowledge‑preserving adaptation framework that combines structured prompting, expert merging, and a regime‑aware LoRA mixture‑of‑experts module to improve small VLMs on driving tasks. Experiments show KPA achieves 60.8% pair accuracy on CoLT‑Drive, outperforming the Qwen3‑VL‑2B baseline and LoRA SFT while keeping competitive in‑domain performance.

By Zhengxu Tang, Guofeng Cui, Ziyu Gong, Xiaozhou Zhang, Ruifeng Deng, Chengzhi Qi, Ke Chen, Sachin Patil, Tianjun Xiao, Langechuan Liu, Pichao Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

An Open-Source Two-Stage Computer Vision Pipeline for Fine-Grained Vehicle Classification using Vision Transformers

arXiv:2606. 05149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vehicle body type is a significant determinant of cyclist injury severity in overtaking crashes, yet automated tools for classifying vehicles into injury-risk-relevant categories from naturalistic roadway video do not exist in the open literature.

By Gandhimathi Padmanaban, Fred Feng
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Generative Verification: Rethinking the Uncertainty Signal for Active Learning of Object Detection

Generative Verification introduces an active learning strategy for object detection that uses an independent generative model to re‑derive a detection’s label from the pixels inside its predicted box. The disagreement between the detector’s label and the verifier’s label serves as the acquisition signal, automatically combining localization and classification errors into a single scalar and eliminating the need for hand‑weighted terms. Experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS‑COCO show that this signal outperforms traditional uncertainty and ensemble criteria, improving mAP50 by about one point per round, especially in early rounds where confident detector errors are most common.

By Licheng Zhang, Zheng Gong
arXiv AI
Jul 21

What Do They See? Interpreting Complex Road Scenarios Through the Eyes of Vision-Language-Action Models for Safe and Trustworthy Autonomous Vehicle Learning

arXiv:2607. 16938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models are now able to navigate complex road scenarios, mapping raw sensor observations directly to observed paths for open-loop evaluation and often effective driving in closed-loop evaluation.

By Kalpana Panda, Wesley Maia, Vinti Agarwal, Ross Greer