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.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. (a) Existing methods: Separate models for each scene. (b) Our C2FXNet: Single unified model via coarse-to-fine text guidance.
Figure 2. Overview of proposed C2FXNet. It consists of three key modules: the Multi-step Reasoning Router (MRR) compresses multi-scale visual cues and performs GRU-based recurrent scene reasoning under coarse text-guided prototypes to generate interpretable routing weights, the Fine Scene Refinement (FSR) refines visual features using fine-grained textual cues, and the Scene-aware Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) dynamically fuses fog, dark, and clear experts under the joint guidance of MRR and FSR, enabling robust and scene-consistent detection. Among them, γ and β denote two learnable linear layers.
Figure 3. Feature-level interpretability of FSR in clear, dark, and foggy scenes. FSR refines noisy SMoE activations into more coherent, object-centric, and weather-consistent feature responses.
Figure 4. t-SNE visualization of feature embeddings. C2FXNet produces more compact and better-separated clusters than the baseline for fog, dark, and clear scenes.
Dataset
Scene
#Img
#Bounding Boxes / Class
Pers.
Bic.
Car
Moto.
Bus
AWD (Train)
Fog/Dark/Clear
41,685
157,707
4,014
26,064
4,875
3,489
AWD (Test)
Fog/Dark/Clear
8,805
33,012
948
5,796
1,113
855
RTTS
Fog
4,322
7,950
534
18,415
862
1,838
ExDark
Dark
7,363
7,460
1,120
2,927
1,072
706
Table 1. Statistics of datasets used for training and evaluation.
Method
Dataset
Publication
Params ↓
FLOPs ↓
Bicycle
Bus
Car
Motorbike
Person
mAP (%) ↑
TogetherNet ( Wang et al., 2022 )
RTTS
CGF’22
15.7M
26.1G
49.50
27.06
70.86
46.69
81.66
55.15
IA-YOLO ( Liu et al., 2022 )
AAAI’22
58.9M
65.6G
39.06
17.87
41.29
30.63
58.76
37.52
GDIP-YOLO ( Kalwar et al., 2023 )
ICRA’23
68.0M
105.2G
45.89
11.58
49.50
32.96
71.98
42.38
YOLOv9s ( Wang et al., 2024b )
ECCV’24
7.1M
26.4G
40.73
23.41
61.13
33.17
79.76
47.64
YOLOv10s ( Wang et al., 2024a )
NeurIPS’24
7.6M
24.5G
42.22
23.65
60.42
33.60
78.72
47.72
YOLOv11s ( Jocher and Qiu, 2024 )
-
9.0M
21.5G
53.64
37.68
72.56
53.23
82.87
60.00
Table 2. Comparison of C2FXNet with previous detectors on RTTS, ExDark, and AWD datasets. C2FXNet attains optimal parameter efficiency while achieving the highest detection accuracy. The best and second-best results are boldfaced and underlined.
Figure 5. Visual comparison on the RTTS dataset under foggy conditions. C2FXNet detects more objects with clearer boundaries and higher confidence, especially for small or distant targets that other methods miss.
Figure 6. Visual comparison on the ExDark dataset under low-light conditions. C2FXNet achieves more accurate and confident detections, successfully identifying objects in dark and overexposed areas.
Figure 7. Visual comparison on the AWD dataset under dark, foggy, and clear conditions. C2FXNet maintains consistent detection quality and higher confidence across scenes, highlighting its strong cross-weather adaptability.
Method
Scene
Bicycle
Bus
Car
Motorbike
Person
mAP (%) ↑
Baseline
Fog
33.07
61.34
45.77
54.58
65.67
52.09
C2FXNet (Ours)
34.46
63.58
45.01
56.94
66.42
53.28
Baseline
Dark
30.48
62.62
44.61
49.38
63.11
50.04
C2FXNet (Ours)
31.66
63.91
44.13
53.17
63.61
51.30
Baseline
Clear
41.79
65.47
54.63
57.88
72.48
58.45
C2FXNet (Ours)
42.61
68.57
54.58
60.14
73.77
59.22
Table 3. Comparison of C2FXNet and the baseline on the AWD dataset under fog, dark, and clear scenes. C2FXNet yields consistent gains across most categories, highlighting the effectiveness of scene-aware adaptation.
Ablation
MRR
FSR
Text Encoder
SMoE
Aggregation
mAP (%) ↑
RTTS
ExDark
AWD
(a)
✗
✗
✗
✗
–
61.99
69.16
53.53
(b)
✓
✗
✗
1×
–
58.91 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0,0.7,0}-3.08}}}
69.74 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0.8,0,0}+0.58}}}
48.61 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0,0.7,0}-4.92}}}
(c)
✗
✓
✗
1×
–
60.05 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0,0.7,0}-1.94}}}
69.57 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0.8,0,0}+0.41}}}
48.80 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0,0.7,0}-4.73}}}
(d)
✓
✗
all-MiniLM-L6-v2
1×
–
61.38 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0,0.7,0}-0.61}}}
69.95 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0.8,0,0}+0.79}}}
52.09 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0,0.7,0}-1.44}}}
(e)
✓
✓
ViT-B-32
1×
–
59.72 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0,0.7,0}-2.27}}}
71.03 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0.8,0,0}+1.87}}}
50.16 {}_{\text{{\color[rgb]{0,0.7,0}-3.37}}}
Table 4. Ablation for C2FXNet components on all-weather benchmarks. We adopt two frozen text encoders: all-MiniLM-L6-v2 and ViT-B-32 . “ n × SMoE” denotes the number of expert groups, each containing three sub-experts corresponding to the above scenes, while multiple groups are fused by different aggregation strategies ( mean , sum , concat ). “✓” and “✗” denote with and without each component, respectively.
Figure 8. Visualization of detection results produced by C2FXNet on the VOC-Rain and VOC-Snow datasets.
Method
Dataset
Bicycle
Bus
Car
Motorbike
Person
mAP (%)↑
Baseline
Rain
40.94
67.57
50.11
46.72
65.26
54.12
C2FXNet (Ours)
37.65
74.96
48.82
46.40
68.22
55.21
Baseline
Snow
31.33
59.27
30.18
30.81
52.32
40.78
C2FXNet (Ours)
28.28
61.42
33.50
30.90
55.85
41.99
Table 5. Quantitative evaluation on VOC-Rain and VOC-Snow, comparing the baseline model with our C2FXNet across five object categories and the overall mAP.
Object detection under adverse weather remains challenging due to severe visual degradations and domain shifts. Existing enhancer-based approaches attempt to improve detection by cascading an enhancer with a detector, but they introduce redundant feature extraction and incur high computational cost with limited accuracy gains when paired with SOTA detectors. We propose FR-DETR, a detector-centric framework that refines features rather than images, focusing enhancement on regions of interest and leveraging frequency-domain cues. Specifically, we design (I) a Frequency Refinement Module that dynamically separates and reweights low- and high-frequency components to improve foreground-background discrimination, and (II) a Recurrent Focus Refinement Module (RFRM) that iteratively refines features using coarse predictions as guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FR-DETR achieves superior detection accuracy under adverse weather while being significantly more computationally efficient than enhancer-based methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/ducnt1210/FR-DETR.
Tuan-Duc Nguyen, Duc-Trong Le
FPT Software AI Center · VNU University of Engineering and Technology
Robust 3D object detection under adverse weather conditions is crucial for autonomous driving. However, most existing methods simply combine all weather samples for training while overlooking data distribution discrepancies across different weather scenarios, leading to performance conflicts. To address this issue, we introduce AW-MoE, the framework that innovatively integrates Mixture of Experts (MoE) into weather-robust multi-modal 3D object detection approaches. AW-MoE incorporates Image-guided Weather-aware Routing (IWR), which leverages the superior discriminability of image features across weather conditions and their invariance to scene variations for precise weather classification. Based on this accurate classification, IWR selects the top-K most relevant Weather-Specific Experts (WSE) that handle data discrepancies, ensuring optimal detection under all weather conditions. Additionally, we propose a Unified Dual-Modal Augmentation (UDMA) for synchronous LiDAR and 4D Radar dual-modal data augmentation while preserving the realism of scenes. Extensive experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate that AW-MoE achieves ~ 15% improvement in adverse-weather performance over state-of-the-art methods, while incurring negligible inference overhead. Moreover, integrating AW-MoE into established baseline detectors yields performance improvements surpassing current state-of-the-art methods. These results show the effectiveness and strong scalability of our AW-MoE. We will release the code publicly at https://github.com/windlinsherlock/AW-MoE.
Hongwei Lin, Xun Huang, Chenglu Wen +1
Fujian Key Laboratory of Urban Intelligent Sensing and Computing and the School of Informatics, Xiamen University, Xiamen, FJ 361005, China · Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China
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.