Language Prompt vs. Image Enhancement: Boosting Object Detection With CLIP in Hazy Environments

Object detection in real-world scenarios remains challenging due to diverse image degradations and heterogeneous object distributions, which significantly hinder the generalization of existing detectors. Conventional approaches, including scene-specific representation learning and end-to-end pipeline design, are inherently limited by their reliance on predefined conditions and lack adaptability to dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose DetAS, an agentic detection framework that formulates object detection as a dynamic decision process. Instead of relying on static pipelines, DetAS leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a central agent to adaptively compose detection workflows by selecting from a toolbox of restoration modules and specialized detectors. Specifically, DetAS consists of two key components: Self-Adaptive Image Restoration, which dynamically determines whether and how to enhance images for downstream detection, and Multi-Expertise Detection, which integrates multiple domain-specialized detectors and resolves their predictions through instance-level reasoning. To further improve decision quality under fine-grained conditions, we introduce Self-Evolving Experience Harvesting and extend the framework to DetAS-X, which accumulates node-level decision experience from a small set of annotated data and enables experience-aware reasoning during inference. This mechanism allows the system to progressively refine its decision policy and adapt to diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on six challenging benchmarks demonstrate that DetAS-X significantly outperforms existing MLLM-based detectors, achieving an average improvement of 28.36% in F1 score, with up to 37.01% gain on DarkFace. These results demonstrate the promise of agentic detection and establish a solid foundation for its application in complex and dynamic environments.

Object detection in adverse weather remains challenging because severe degradations weaken visual quality and disrupt semantic feature representations across diverse scenes. Existing methods usually rely on condition-specific designs, which limits their ability to generalize within a unified detector. In this paper, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine Scene Expert Network (C2FXNet) that achieves unified detection through hierarchical scene guidance. Specifically, C2FXNet introduces a dual-level guidance mechanism consisting of a Multi-step Reasoning Router (MRR), which performs GRU-based recurrent scene reasoning over compressed multi-scale visual cues and frozen coarse scene prototypes, and a Fine Scene Refinement (FSR) module, which uses image-specific semantic cues to modulate high-level features for local variation handling. Furthermore, a Scene-aware Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) dynamically combines scene-specific experts under the joint guidance of MRR and FSR. By coupling coarse scene reasoning with fine-grained semantic refinement, C2FXNet enables robust multi-scene detection without scene-specific training. Extensive experiments on RTTS, ExDark, and our newly constructed Adverse Weather Dataset (AWD) demonstrate that C2FXNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across foggy, dark, and clear conditions, reaching 63.70%, 71.14%, and 54.19% mAP on RTTS, ExDark, and AWD, respectively. The source code will be released at https://github.com/PolarisFTL/C2FXNet.

Real-world detectors must often interpret functional or ambiguous prompts, yet conventional models such as YOLO remain restricted to fixed class lists. Even open-vocabulary models like YOLO-World frequently misalign vague language with the intended objects. Building on our prior work Commonsense-Guided Open-World Object Detection Using LLMs and Visual-Semantic Matching, we address YOLO-World's limitations in grounding task-driven queries. We propose Vague2Detect, a hybrid pipeline in which a fine-tuned Sentence-BERT retrieves candidates from a structured household Knowledge Base (KB), and YOLO-World verifies their presence in the image. For prompts outside the KB, a large language model (GPT-3.5-turbo) generates candidate descriptions, dynamically expanding the KB to cover novel concepts. On a benchmark of household scenes using custom images and an Open Images V7 subset, YOLO-World alone achieves only 32% Vague Prompt Success Rate (VPSR), the ability to map ambiguous queries to correct detections. In contrast, Vague2Detect improves performance to 61% VPSR with high precision, and up to 85% when augmented with GPT fallback.