Anirudh Potlapally, Brijesh Nanda Brunda Yogananda, Jianyang Gu, Maanav Jajodia, Luke Meyers, Wei-Lun Chao, Hari Subramoni
Ecological monitoring increasingly relies on camera traps and aerial surveys that generate large image collections. High-recall animal detectors can localize candidate animals at scale. However, they also produce many detections that still require expert review, including false positives, ambiguous cases, and animals difficult to identify at the species level. Since exhaustive review requires substantial effort, we propose training-free active prototype triage, where reviewed detections become reusable evidence to (1) Resolve supported foreground classes, (2) Clear likely background false positives, or (3) Defer insufficiently supported cases for expert review. Across camera-trap and aerial datasets, foreground recognition and false-positive rejection benefit from different pretrained representations: BioCLIP2 provides foreground evidence while DINOv3 provides background evidence, reducing erroneous foreground clearing while improving automatic foreground recovery. Deferring unsupported cases avoids the higher error rates caused by forced decisions. Compared with confidence-thresholded multiclass k-NN and uncertainty-sampling logistic regression, prototype triage improves foreground recovery while maintaining competitive or lower review burden. Acquisition goes beyond class discovery: even after classes are represented, prototype choice determines how reliably evidence propagates through the remaining detections. Our results suggest that once animal localization reaches high recall, the challenge shifts from finding animals to deciding which examples to review, how to reuse them, and when evidence does not support an automatic decision.
Visual-token compression is usually evaluated by clean accuracy and efficiency, but these averages do not reveal failures that compression introduces under an image shift where the uncompressed model stays correct. We introduce VTC-AUDIT, which estimates this incremental risk only on pairs where the full model is correct on both images and the compressed model is correct on the clean image. The four arms then cross two binary choices: which image selects the retained token positions, and which image supplies the visual features. We audit three open 8-9B vision-language models on four tasks and eight pre-specified shifts. We evaluate two training-free compressors---hard-pruning DivPrune and prune-and-merge ApET---at a matched 25% retained-position budget, producing 708,000 inference records. Reselecting positions on the shifted image, rather than reusing the clean-image positions, raises the failure rate in all six model-compressor settings. The increase is 3.04-9.60 percentage points for DivPrune and 2.05-4.20 percentage points for ApET, with every 95% interval above zero. Repeating the audit on a separately resampled second manifest reproduces all six increases. In a pooled monitor audit across the four benchmarks, support Jaccard instability fails the practical AUROC criterion of 0.65 in all six settings, whereas clean compressed-model uncertainty clears it. Thus, support turnover is a weak ranking signal under the audited benchmark mixture, while clean compressed-model uncertainty is substantially more informative. These results suggest that future visual-token compression evaluations should report conditional reliability alongside clean accuracy and efficiency.
Mengxiao Zhu North China University of Technology, Haixu Chen, Jiu Sha Minzu University of China, Jie Liu North China University of Technology, Ge Shi
Low-resource multilingual OCR faces a dual challenge: complex script structures and severe data scarcity. In such settings, existing OCR models often struggle, as coarse visual representations combined with weak linguistic priors lead to frequent errors among visually similar characters.To address this, we present BASA (Beyond Atomic Sub-character Alignment), a OCR framework built upon high-resolution visual and language backbones with a novel glyph-aware interface. The core technical contribution is the Glyph-Aware Fine-grained Adapter (GAFA). Unlike standard linear projectors, GAFA employs learnable glyph prototypes to actively align sub-character structural primitives (e.g., strokes and radicals) with visual features, explicitly resolving topological ambiguities during vision–language alignment. To complement this, we introduce a two-stage curriculum learning strategy supported by a Glyph-Aware Reverse Synthesis pipeline, which generates large-scale multilingual training corpora with automatic, zero-cost component labels. Furthermore, we construct BASA-Bench, a representative benchmark spanning 11 languages with diverse script structures and 23 authentic scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that BASA achieves consistent improvements over strong OCR baselines, particularly on scripts with complex compositions. Our model and benchmark will be available at https://github.com/NcutLLM/BASA.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Embacher, Felix, Uhrig, Jonas, Cordts, Marius, Enzweiler, Markus
Retrieving rare and safety-critical driving scenarios from large-scale datasets is essential for building robust autonomous driving (AD) systems. As dataset sizes continue to grow, the key challenge shifts from collecting more data to efficiently identifying the most relevant samples. We introduce SearchAD, a large-scale rare image retrieval dataset for AD containing over 423k frames drawn from 11 established datasets. SearchAD provides high-quality manual annotations of more than 513k bounding boxes covering 90 rare categories. It specifically targets the "needle-in-a-haystack" problem of locating extremely rare classes, with some appearing fewer than 50 times across the entire dataset. Unlike existing benchmarks, which focused on instance-level retrieval, SearchAD emphasizes semantic image retrieval with a well-defined data split, enabling text-to-image and image-to-image retrieval, few-shot learning, and fine-tuning of multi-modal retrieval models. Comprehensive evaluations show that text-based methods outperform image-based ones due to stronger inherent semantic grounding. While models directly aligning spatial visual features with language achieve the best zero-shot results, and our fine-tuning baseline significantly improves performance, absolute retrieval capabilities remain unsatisfactory. With a held-out test set on a public benchmark server, SearchAD establishes the first large-scale dataset for retrieval-driven data curation and long-tail perception research in AD: https://iis-esslingen.github.io/searchad/
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cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表