cs.CVMar 24, 2026

YOLO with Kolmogorov-Arnold networks and vision-language foundation models for interpretable object detection with trustworthy multimodal AI in computer vision perception

Authors: Marios Impraimakis, Daniel Vazquez, Feiyu Zhou

Organizations: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK. · Department of Civil Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.

Read PDF
Ask AI
Cite

Copy citation

DOINot available for this paper

Abstract

The trustworthy object detection capabilities of a novel Kolmogorov-Arnold network framework are examined here. The approach addresses a key limitation in computer vision for vehicle detection perception, and beyond. These systems offer limited transparency regarding the reliability of their confidence scores in visually degraded or ambiguous scenes. To this end, a Kolmogorov-Arnold network is employed as an interpretable post-hoc surrogate to model the trustworthiness of the You Only Look Once (Yolov10) detections using seven geometric and semantic features. The additive spline-based structure of the Kolmogorov-Arnold network enables direct visualisation of each feature's influence. This produces smooth and transparent functional mappings that reveal when the model's confidence is well supported and when it is unreliable. Furthermore, a bootstrapped language-image (BLIP) foundation model generates descriptive captions of each scene. This tool enables a lightweight multimodal interface without affecting the interpretability layer. Experiments on both Common Objects in Context (COCO), and images from the University of Bath campus demonstrate that the framework accurately identifies low-trust predictions under blur, occlusion, or low texture. This provides actionable insights for acceptance, review, or downstream risk mitigation. The resulting system delivers interpretable object detection with trustworthy confidence estimates. It offers a powerful tool for transparent and practical perception component for autonomous and multimodal artificial intelligence applications.

More in this topic

Explainable Object Detection

See all 8 papers

Explore similar work

CardsList
May 29, 2025

To Trust Or Not To Trust Your Vision-Language Model's Prediction

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in aligning visual and textual modalities, enabling a wide range of applications in multimodal understanding and generation. While they excel in zero-shot and transfer learning scenarios, VLMs remain susceptible to misclassification, often yielding confident yet incorrect predictions. This limitation poses a significant risk in safety-critical domains, where erroneous predictions can lead to severe consequences. In this work, we introduce TrustVLM, a training-free framework designed to address the critical challenge of estimating when VLM's predictions can be trusted. Motivated by the observed modality gap in VLMs and the insight that certain concepts are more distinctly represented in the image embedding space, we propose a novel confidence-scoring function that leverages this space to improve misclassification detection. We rigorously evaluate our approach across 17 diverse datasets, employing 4 architectures and 2 VLMs, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with improvements of up to 51.87% in AURC, 9.14% in AUROC, and 32.42% in FPR95 compared to existing baselines. By improving the reliability of the model without requiring retraining, TrustVLM paves the way for safer deployment of VLMs in real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/EPFL-IMOS/TrustVLM.

Hao Dong, Moru Liu, Jian Liang +2

ETH Zürich · Technical University of Munich · NLPR & MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences +2

Confidence Estimation for VLMsSelective Prediction for VLMs
AskPDF
Mar 9, 2026

UNBOX: Unveiling Black-box visual models with Natural-language

Ensuring trustworthiness in open-world visual recognition requires models that are interpretable, fair, and robust to distribution shifts. Yet modern vision systems are increasingly deployed as proprietary black-box APIs, exposing only output probabilities and hiding architecture, parameters, gradients, and training data. This opacity prevents meaningful auditing, bias detection, and failure analysis. Existing explanation methods assume white- or gray-box access or knowledge of the training distribution, making them unusable in these real-world settings. We introduce UNBOX, a framework for class-wise model dissection under fully data-free, gradient-free, and backpropagation-free constraints. UNBOX leverages Large Language Models and text-to-image diffusion models to recast activation maximization as a purely semantic search driven by output probabilities. The method produces human-interpretable text descriptors that maximally activate each class, revealing the concepts a model has implicitly learned, the training distribution it reflects, and potential sources of bias. We evaluate UNBOX on ImageNet-1K, Waterbirds, and CelebA through semantic fidelity tests, visual-feature correlation analyses and slice-discovery auditing. Despite operating under the strictest black-box constraints, UNBOX performs competitively with state-of-the-art white-box interpretability methods. This demonstrates that meaningful insight into a model's internal reasoning can be recovered without any internal access, enabling more trustworthy and accountable visual recognition systems.

Simone Carnemolla, Chiara Russo, Simone Palazzo +5

University of Catania. · Technical University of Munich. · Helmholtz Munich.

Neural Network InterpretabilityExplainable Image ClassificationBlack-Box Model Auditing
AskPDF
Jan 30, 2026

A Comparative Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models for 2D Object Detection under SOTIF Conditions

Reliable environmental perception remains one of the main obstacles for safe operation of automated vehicles. Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF) concerns safety risks from perception insufficiencies, particularly under adverse conditions where conventional detectors often falter. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate promising semantic reasoning, their quantitative effectiveness for safety-critical 2D object detection is underexplored. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of ten representative LVLMs using the PeSOTIF dataset, a benchmark specifically curated for long-tail traffic scenarios and environmental degradations. Performance is quantitatively compared against two specialized detectors: the anchor-based YOLOv5 and the transformer-based RT-DETRv4. Experimental results reveal a critical trade-off: top-performing LVLMs (e.g., Gemini 3) surpass the YOLOv5 in recall by over 25% and closely match RT-DETRv4 under natural visual degradation, while specialized detectors retain an advantage in geometric precision for handcrafted perturbations. These findings highlight the complementary strengths of semantic reasoning versus geometric regression, supporting the use of LVLMs as high-level safety validators in SOTIF-oriented automated driving systems.

Ji Zhou, Yilin Ding, Yongqi Zhao +4

Institute of Automotive Engineering, Graz University of Technology, 8010 Graz, Austria · Independent Researcher, 200000 Shanghai, China · School of Intelligent Connected Vehicle, Hubei University of Automotive Technology, 442002 Shiyan, China +1

VLM EvaluationLarge Vision-Language ModelsAutonomous Driving PerceptionObject Detection
AskPDF