Daily Papers

The Semmeldetector, is a machine learning application that utilizes object detection models to detect, classify and count baked goods in images. Our application allows commercial bakers to track unsold baked goods, which allows them to optimize production and increase resource efficiency. We compiled a dataset comprising 1151 images that distinguishes between 18 different types of baked goods to train our detection models. To facilitate model training, we used a Copy-Paste augmentation pipeline to expand our dataset. We trained the state-of-the-art object detection model YOLOv8 on our detection task. We tested the impact of different training data, model scale, and online image augmentation pipelines on model performance. Our overall best performing model, achieved an AP@0.5 of 89.1% on our test set. Based on our results, we conclude that machine learning can be a valuable tool even for unforeseen industries like bakeries, even with very limited datasets.

With the rapid advancement of sophisticated synthetic audio-visual content, e.g., for subtle malicious manipulations, ensuring the integrity of digital media has become paramount. This work presents a novel approach to temporal localization of deepfakes by leveraging Audio-Visual Speech Representation Reconstruction (AuViRe). Specifically, our approach reconstructs speech representations from one modality (e.g., lip movements) based on the other (e.g., audio waveform). Cross-modal reconstruction is significantly more challenging in manipulated video segments, leading to amplified discrepancies, thereby providing robust discriminative cues for precise temporal forgery localization. AuViRe outperforms the state of the art by +8.9 AP@0.95 on LAV-DF, +9.6 AP@0.5 on AV-Deepfake1M, and +5.1 AUC on an in-the-wild experiment. Code available at https://github.com/mever-team/auvire.

Reliable visual monitoring of chemical experiments remains challenging in transparent glassware, where weak phase boundaries and optical artifacts degrade conventional segmentation. We formulate laboratory phenomena as the time evolution of phase interfaces and introduce the Chemical Transparent Glasses dataset 2.0 (CTG 2.0), a vessel-aware benchmark with 3,668 images, 23 glassware categories, and five multiphase interface types for phase-interface instance segmentation. Building on YOLO11m-seg, we propose LGA-RCM-YOLO, which combines Local-Global Attention (LGA) for robust semantic representation and a Rectangular Self-Calibration Module (RCM) for boundary refinement of thin, elongated interfaces. On CTG 2.0, the proposed model achieves 84.4% AP@0.5 and 58.43% AP@0.5-0.95, improving over the YOLO11m baseline by 6.42 and 8.75 AP points, respectively, while maintaining near real-time inference (13.67 FPS, RTX 3060). An auxiliary color-attribute head further labels liquid instances as colored or colorless with 98.71% precision and 98.32% recall. Finally, we demonstrate continuous process monitoring in separatory-funnel phase separation and crystallization, showing that phase-interface instance segmentation can serve as a practical visual sensor for laboratory automation.

Developing reliable defenses against patch attacks on object detectors has attracted increasing interest. However, we identify that existing defense evaluations lack a unified and comprehensive framework, resulting in inconsistent and incomplete assessments of current methods. To address this issue, we revisit 11 representative defenses and present the first patch defense benchmark, involving 2 attack goals, 13 patch attacks, 11 object detectors, and 4 diverse metrics. This leads to the large-scale adversarial patch dataset with 94 types of patches and 94,000 images. Our comprehensive analyses reveal new insights: (1) The difficulty in defending against naturalistic patches lies in the data distribution, rather than the commonly believed high frequencies. Our new dataset with diverse patch distributions can be used to improve existing defenses by 15.09% AP@0.5. (2) The average precision of the attacked object, rather than the commonly pursued patch detection accuracy, shows high consistency with defense performance. (3) Adaptive attacks can substantially bypass existing defenses, and defenses with complex/stochastic models or universal patch properties are relatively robust. We hope that our analyses will serve as guidance on properly evaluating patch attacks/defenses and advancing their design. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Gandolfczjh/APDE, where we will keep integrating new attacks/defenses.

Chronic wound management affects over 8.2 million patients in the United States and imposes substantial clinical and economic burden. Clinical wound assessment commonly involves three coupled tasks: identifying wound type, delineating wound boundaries, and localizing the wound region for measurement and monitoring. Despite this clinical coupling, existing machine learning approaches typically address wound classification, segmentation, and localization using separate models. We present WILLIE, a unified framework and benchmark for wound classification, segmentation and localization that enables systematic evaluation of multi-task wound analysis under a common protocol. WILLIE harmonizes three public wound datasets into a shared benchmark and compares unified models across three scaling configurations against 10 single-task baselines. The best model achieves 91.88% classification accuracy, 91.41% Dice, and 96.23% AP@0.5 while producing all three outputs in a single forward pass. Beyond aggregate performance, our results show that segmentation-derived localization outperforms dedicated detection baselines in this benchmark, suggesting that box-based localization may be unnecessary for spatially coherent wound targets. Our findings highlight that effective multi-task learning in healthcare imaging depends not only on shared representations, but also on task formulation, compatibility, and benchmark design.

Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) is a highly prevalent chronic musculoskeletal condition with no currently available treatment. The manifestation of KOA is heterogeneous and prediction of its progression is challenging. Current literature suggests that the use of multi-modal data and advanced modeling methods, such as the ones based on Deep Learning, has promise in tackling this challenge. To date, however, the evidence on the efficacy of this approach is limited. In this study, we leveraged recent advances in Deep Learning and, using a Transformer approach, developed a unified framework for the multi-modal fusion of knee imaging data. Subsequently, we analyzed its performance across a range of scenarios by investigating multiple progression horizons -- from short-term to long-term. We report our findings using a large cohort (n=2421-3967) derived from the Osteoarthritis Initiative dataset. We show that structural knee MRI allows identifying radiographic KOA progressors on par with multi-modal fusion approaches, achieving an area under the ROC curve (ROC AUC) of 0.70-0.76 and Average Precision (AP) of 0.15-0.54 in 2-8 year horizons. Progression within 1 year was better predicted with a multi-modal method using X-ray, structural, and compositional MR images -- ROC AUC of 0.76(0.04), AP of 0.13(0.04) -- or via clinical data. Our follow-up analysis generally shows that prediction from the imaging data is more accurate for post-traumatic subjects, and we further investigate which subject subgroups may benefit the most. The present study provides novel insights into multi-modal imaging of KOA and brings a unified data-driven framework for studying its progression in an end-to-end manner, providing new tools for the design of more efficient clinical trials. The source code of our framework and the pre-trained models are made publicly available.

Multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) has demonstrated promising results in prostate cancer (PCa) detection using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Recently, transformers have achieved competitive performance compared to CNNs in computer vision. Large-scale transformers need abundant annotated data for training, which are difficult to obtain in medical imaging. Self-supervised learning can effectively leverage unlabeled data to extract useful semantic representations without annotation and its associated costs. This can improve model performance on downstream tasks with limited labelled data and increase generalizability. We introduce a novel end-to-end Cross-Shaped windows (CSwin) transformer UNet model, CSwin UNet, to detect clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) in prostate bi-parametric MR imaging (bpMRI) and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed self-supervised pre-training framework. Using a large prostate bpMRI dataset with 1500 patients, we first pre-train CSwin transformer using multi-task self-supervised learning to improve data-efficiency and network generalizability. We then finetuned using lesion annotations to perform csPCa detection. Five-fold cross validation shows that self-supervised CSwin UNet achieves 0.888 AUC and 0.545 Average Precision (AP), significantly outperforming four state-of-the-art models (Swin UNETR, DynUNet, Attention UNet, UNet). Using a separate bpMRI dataset with 158 patients, we evaluated our model robustness to external hold-out data. Self-supervised CSwin UNet achieves 0.79 AUC and 0.45 AP, still outperforming all other comparable methods and demonstrating generalization to a dataset shift.

The development of autoregressive modeling (AM) in computer vision lags behind natural language processing (NLP) in self-supervised pre-training. This is mainly caused by the challenge that images are not sequential signals and lack a natural order when applying autoregressive modeling. In this study, inspired by human beings' way of grasping an image, i.e., focusing on the main object first, we present a semantic-aware autoregressive image modeling (SemAIM) method to tackle this challenge. The key insight of SemAIM is to autoregressive model images from the semantic patches to the less semantic patches. To this end, we first calculate a semantic-aware permutation of patches according to their feature similarities and then perform the autoregression procedure based on the permutation. In addition, considering that the raw pixels of patches are low-level signals and are not ideal prediction targets for learning high-level semantic representation, we also explore utilizing the patch features as the prediction targets. Extensive experiments are conducted on a broad range of downstream tasks, including image classification, object detection, and instance/semantic segmentation, to evaluate the performance of SemAIM. The results demonstrate SemAIM achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other self-supervised methods. Specifically, with ViT-B, SemAIM achieves 84.1% top-1 accuracy for fine-tuning on ImageNet, 51.3% AP and 45.4% AP for object detection and instance segmentation on COCO, which outperforms the vanilla MAE by 0.5%, 1.0%, and 0.5%, respectively.

Driver alerting from dashcam video requires sequential decision-making under partial observability: a system must decide not only whether a scene is risky, but also when the evidence is sufficient to warn. Most existing accident anticipation models output a binary risk score, leaving ambiguous scenes to be handled by thresholding. We propose VLAlert, a vision-language alerting framework that casts warning generation as a tri-action policy over SILENT, OBSERVE, and ALERT. The OBSERVE action acts as an internal evidence-gathering decision that delays uncertain warnings and changes the next observation window, creating a lightweight perception-action loop for adaptive alerting. VLAlert uses Qwen3-VL-4B as a safety-evidence generator and pools hidden states from structured belief spans to form compact representations for danger estimation and policy prediction. We evaluate VLAlert on VLAlert-Bench, a unified per-tick benchmark from four real-world dashcam alert datasets, and further test transfer to held-out naturalistic ADAS takeover clips. On VLAlert-Bench validation, VLAlert achieves the highest deployment-oriented utility among tested baselines, with DAUS 0.4878 compared with 0.4752 for Open-BADAS, and improves AUROC, AP_tick, F1_t, and balanced accuracy from 0.610, 0.176, 0.276, and 0.581 to 0.689, 0.195, 0.297, and 0.648, respectively. On 221 held-out ADAS-TO-Critic clips, VLAlert improves R@5s from 74.2% to 88.7% and F1 from 0.585 to 0.686. These results indicate that adaptive observation and safety-focused VLM representations provide measurable gains for driver-facing alert decisions.

Code search in large-scale ecosystems is often hindered by the lexical gap between user queries and implementation details, alongside the trade-off between the low latency of traditional Information Retrieval (IR) and the precision of Deep Learning (DL). We present MediaWiki Code2Code Search, a neural retrieval system for semantic code-to-code discovery. By indexing 1.29 million structural entities (functions, types, and templates) across 2,500+ MediaWiki repositories, our system enables retrieval based on computational intent rather than surface tokens. We employ a split-build architecture, decoupling GPU-intensive offline indexing from a CPU-only serving layer; our FAISS IVF-PQ index occupies 168.6 MB: a 96.6\% reduction compared to a flat float32 baseline, and achieves a median query latency of 1.85 seconds on commodity hardware, satisfying the 6 GiB RAM constraint of Wikimedia Toolforge. Our evaluation across a 27-query benchmark demonstrates superior performance over the BM25 baseline, achieving a P@10 of 0.87 compared to 0.64 (0.52 versus 0.34 for strict matching). Gains are most pronounced in name-obfuscated tasks where lexical methods fail. The system is available at https://code2codesearch.toolforge.org under the Apache 2.0 licence and provides an open RESTful API.