Domain Generalization

Latest papers 231

Sep 9, 2026cs.CV

FreqFLD: Towards All-in-One Facial Landmark Detection via Frequency Modulation

Recent progress in deep learning has significantly advanced facial landmark detection. However, most existing methods process features in a spatial-domain manner under a dataset-specific training paradigm, which overlooks the fact that facial landmark detection is inherently geometry-driven and sensitive to frequency variations, thereby limiting cross-dataset generalization under complex scenarios and hindering the development of a facial landmark detection model. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{FreqFLD}, a \textbf{freq}uency-modulated framework towards All-in-One \textbf{f}acial \textbf{l}andmark \textbf{d}etection. Specifically, FreqFLD introduces a Frequency Modulation Module (FreqMoM) to explicitly induce the frequency prior by decoupling and modulating low- and high-frequency components, which is then injected into subsequent feature modeling to enable balanced modeling of global facial structure and local landmark details. Furthermore, FreqFLD employs a Frequency-Modulated Mixture-of-Experts (FreqMoE), with expert selection adaptively conditioned on frequency-modulated priors, enabling flexible modeling of heterogeneous facial landmark patterns under diverse and challenging scenarios. To regularize frequency-consistent modeling under the All-in-One paradigm, we further introduce a Frequency-Consistent Routing (FreqCR) loss, which constrains the routing and assignment of frequency-aware experts to promote balanced expert utilization across diverse facial scenarios, thereby enabling stable expert specialization and achieving robust facial landmark detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed FreqFLD achieves comparable performance on popular datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/jkj1059657014/FreqFLD.
Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

ARCOS: Zero-shot Boundary Localization for Corneal Layer Segmentation Across Optical Coherence Tomography Devices

Accurate segmentation of corneal layers in optical coherence tomography (OCT) is essential for quantitative assessment of corneal morphology, including layer thickness and structural changes associated with disease or surgery. However, automatic segmentation remains challenging because corneal interfaces are thin, affected by speckle noise, and variable across acquisition devices. In this work, we propose ARCOS, a patch-based zero-shot boundary localization framework for corneal layer segmentation in clinical anterior-segment OCT images. Rather than performing conventional region classification, the method predicts boundary heatmaps for the main corneal interfaces from overlapping native-resolution patches. Patch-level predictions are stitched across the full B-scan and converted into boundary locations to obtain continuous, anatomically ordered layer segmentations. The network combines multi-scale feature fusion with a self-conditioned refinement module that uses intermediate boundary information to improve local heatmap predictions while preserving spatial detail. The method was evaluated on clinical OCT images acquired from multiple devices and compared with representative segmentation baselines using boundary localization and derived thickness metrics. The proposed method achieved an off-by-one boundary localization accuracy of 95.1% and a mean absolute boundary error of 0.514 pixels on the matched-device test set. In zero-shot cross-device evaluation, it maintained an average off-by-one accuracy of 84.3% and a mean absolute boundary error of 0.855 pixels across unseen acquisition devices, outperforming the baseline models. Thickness estimates derived from the predicted boundaries showed low error across corneal regions, supporting the method's use for quantitative corneal OCT analysis.
Sep 2, 2026cs.RO

Toward Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation for Real-World Deployment: Evaluation under Coarse Labels, Adverse Conditions, and Domain Shifts

LiDAR-based semantic segmentation is a core perception module for autonomous vehicles and mobile robots. Despite the strong performance of recent state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks, existing evaluation protocols remain focused on clean, single-domain settings and fine-grained label taxonomies, leaving deployment readiness largely unassessed. Real-world systems must handle safety-critical label semantics, degraded sensing conditions, and cross-domain variability, yet no unified protocol currently addresses all three aspects together. In this paper, we propose a structured evaluation protocol that assesses the deployment readiness of LiDAR semantic segmentation models along three complementary dimensions: (i) coarse-label evaluation aligned with autonomous driving safety priorities, revealing how label granularity affects different methods; (ii) robustness under eight types of LiDAR corruptions designed to emulate real-world atmospheric, geometric, and sensor degradations; and (iii) domain generalization across datasets without adaptation. The evaluation includes inference speed measured on an embedded Jetson AGX Orin platform, directly reflecting deployment constraints. Our results show that fine-grained benchmark rankings do not always reflect safety-relevant performance, that all methods experience substantial degradation under corruptions with architecture-dependent robustness characteristics, and that current domain generalization remains insufficient for reliable deployment. These findings expose concrete gaps between benchmark performance and deployment readiness, and provide a reference protocol for more practically grounded evaluation of LiDAR semantic segmentation.
Sep 2, 2026cs.CV

Generalizable Brain Tumor Segmentation with Self-Training and Tumor-Aware Deformations

This work presents an approach to the Generalizability Across Tumors (BraTS-GoAT) task of the BraTS 2026 Challenge, which focuses on robust segmentation of brain tumor sub-regions across a heterogeneous patient population. The proposed method employs the nnU-Net framework with a large residual encoder architecture, integrating a semi-supervised learning technique with pseudo-labels generated from the unlabeled training data and a tumor-aware deformable augmentation that locally deforms the lesion while preserving the surrounding anatomy. We evaluate the individual contributions of each component, as well as their combination, using varying proportions of the most confident pseudo-labeled cases. The submitted configuration for the generalization task achieves Dice and NSD scores of 0.881 and 0.473 for Whole Tumor, 0.817 and 0.490 for Tumor Core, and 0.775 and 0.533 for Enhancing Tumor on the BraTS-GoAT validation set, improving over the labeled-only baselines across all tumor regions and confirming that self-training and the proposed augmentation are complementary. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Henrique-zan/brats-goat-2026/.
Sep 2, 2026cs.CV

RGB-to-IR image translation for infrared vehicle detection in unseen UAV domains

Synthetic training data is crucial for developing vision AI when real-world data is scarce, as in thermal infrared (IR) aerial vehicle detection. While abundant UAV RGB imagery motivates RGB-to-IR translation for data augmentation, unobservable thermal traits (e.g., engine heat) make learning transferable mappings challenging. This work investigates whether modern generative translators can overcome this cross-modal gap to improve infrared vehicle detection on unseen UAV target domains. Translators are trained on paired RGB-IR source datasets and applied to RGB training images from held-out target datasets to generate synthetic IR data. Evaluated methods include supervised GANs, ControlNet-based diffusion models, and foundation-model editing via LoRA. The resulting synthetic IR imagery is used to train RF-DETR vehicle detectors, which are evaluated on unseen IR target test splits across five aerial datasets, with Kust4K and VTUAV serving as target domains. Synthetic IR consistently outperforms RGB and grayscale baselines. Stable Diffusion 3.5 with ControlNet yields the best results, improving mAP from 50.8 to 60.1 on Kust4K and from 25.6 to 38.4 on VTUAV compared to models trained only on source-domain IR data. Increasing output diversity via multiple seeds (+1.1 mAP) and prompt variations (+3.3 mAP) provides additional gains on VTUAV. Although a performance gap to real target IR data remains, generative RGB-to-IR translation effectively mitigates IR data scarcity and improves cross-domain aerial vehicle detection.
Sep 2, 2026cs.CV

Domain shift-robust object detection with GenAI image editing

Object detectors often degrade under domain shifts such as changes in lighting, weather, or occlusion. These shifts alter object appearance and expose a reliance on visual shortcuts learned from the training distribution that do not generalize across domains. Acquiring sufficient real-world samples to capture such domain variation is particularly difficult in specialized, low-data settings. Recent advances in diffusion-based generative image editing have shown promise for improving the in-domain performance of object detectors through synthetic data augmentation. However, their potential to improve out-of-domain robustness remains largely unexplored. We hypothesize that generative image editing can simulate a controlled domain shift in training data, effectively bridging the gap between source and target domains. To test this, we studied camouflaged military vehicle detection as a challenging domain shift scenario. Detectors trained on uncamouflaged data demonstrate substantial degradation on real test imagery containing foliage, netting, and multi-spectral camouflage across 15 vehicle classes in close-up, ground-level imagery. We used two diffusion-based editing models, Qwen Image Edit 2509 and Flux.2 Dev, to synthetically add camouflage to the training data, alongside a LoRA fine-tuned version of Qwen. A non-generative black-bar occlusion baseline served as a lower bound on augmentation quality. Using a GroundingDINO detector trained on real and synthetic data, generative camouflage augmentation yielded substantial mAP improvements for foliage (+20.1) and netting (+14.4) camouflage. Generating multi-spectral camouflage proved more challenging, but LoRA fine-tuning improved performance by 4.4 mAP over the uncamouflaged baseline.
Sep 2, 2026cs.CV

Disease Burden over Skin Tone: Decomposing the Dermatology-AI Generalization Gap

Dermatology artificial intelligence (AI) models are predominantly trained on light-skinned, cancer-focused image collections, yet they are increasingly proposed for deployment in resource-constrained settings where patients differ from training populations along two confounded axes: skin tone and disease distribution. We investigate whether poor generalization is primarily caused by skin-tone underrepresentation or disease-distribution shift. We evaluate a cancer-trained baseline (ResNet-50 fine-tuned on HAM10000 and ISIC 2019), two dermatology foundation models (DermLIP and MONET), and a general-purpose vision model (DINOv3) as frozen feature extractors. Models are evaluated on a tone-stratified disease-matched dataset (Diverse Dermatology Images, DDI) and a disease-shifted tone-diverse dataset (Skin Condition Image Network, SCIN). Our results show that disease-distribution shift contributes more than skin tone in the evaluated settings. The cancer baseline decreases from 0.62 to 0.21 balanced accuracy when transferred to unfamiliar clinical conditions, while the within-disease skin-tone gap is smaller (0.10-0.18) and inconsistent. Label-free representation analysis shows that this failure reflects a representational limitation rather than only missing output labels: cancer-specialized features poorly cluster unfamiliar conditions (kNN purity lift +0.06 over chance), whereas dermatology-pretrained features retain stronger transferable structure (+0.23). Finally, we show that representation quality predicts recoverable performance under lightweight adaptation. Starting from dermatology foundation models, approximately ten labeled examples per clinical category recover most attainable performance. We release the evaluation protocol and code to support reproducible auditing of dermatology AI generalization.
Sep 1, 2026cs.LG

CATeye: Coupled Attribute-Topology Invariance Learning for Voucher Abuse Detection

Voucher abuse poses a major challenge in e-commerce, where malicious users exploit promotional vouchers for profit. Unfortunately, fraud patterns evolve rapidly over time and across regions, causing distribution shifts that degrade existing detection models unless retrained frequently. To tackle this, we propose the Coupled Attribute-Topology Invariance Learning framework (CATeye). The key challenge arises from coupled attribute-topology shift, where edges built from attribute proximity cause environment-driven attribute shift to induce shifted topology, thereby amplifying variant signals through GNN message passing. CATeye sees through such coupled shifts with two learnable selectors. First, an Attribute Invariance Selector (AIS) learns node-adaptive masks to filter out non-invariant attributes. Then, conditioned on retained invariant attributes, an Edge Invariance Selector (EIS) samples an invariant subgraph and isolates non-invariant edges. Using the resulting invariant and non-invariant components, CATeye constructs multiple views and applies view-specific objectives to emphasize domain-invariant representations while suppressing domain-specific variations. Experiments on both a proprietary dataset from Lazada, a major Southeast Asian e-commerce platform, and a public benchmark show that CATeye consistently outperforms nine strong domain generalization and graph anomaly detection baselines, achieving up to an 8.61% improvement in average F1 score over the strongest baseline. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Tian0426/CATeye.
Sep 1, 2026cs.SD

TUTTI: Toward generalizable audio-to-score transcription via fully synthesized data

Generalizable Audio-to-Score (A2S) transcription is fundamentally constrained by the severe scarcity of high-quality, real-world paired data. Relying solely on existing human-annotated datasets often restricts the generalization of A2S models, limiting their efficacy primarily to single-instrumentation domains. To break this dependency on scarce real-world data, we introduce TUTTI (Transformer for Unified audio-To-score Transcription trained on Synthetic multi-Instrumentation Data), a pre-training paradigm driven by a purely synthetic, large-scale dataset. Rather than using human-composed scores, we leverage a symbolic music generation model to generate a massive, highly scalable multi-instrumentation corpus and create audio-score pairs with expressive acoustic characteristics. Capitalizing on the generated data, we employ a standard Transformer encoder-decoder architecture. We empirically demonstrate that pre-training a unified attention-based model on generated, multi-instrumentation data yields a consistently stronger foundational representation than single-instrumentation training. When fine-tuned with downstream real-world datasets, TUTTI outperforms previous approaches, establishing new overall state-of-the-art results across various A2S baselines. Notably, TUTTI shows remarkable cross-instrument transferability, effectively adapting to unseen instruments with highly competitive performance. The source code and the TuttiCorpus dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/a-musiclover/TUTTI.
Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

VeriCam: A Verification Baseline for the Classification of Unknown Data

The advent of foundation models have enabled a new era in zero-shot classification. Yet, key challenges persist. Despite their impressive generalization power that leverages the immense pre-training knowledge, both foundation models for image and text as well as vision-text hybrids lack the representational power needed for fine-grained, minutiae-based class separation that some real-world tasks require. To address the current gaps in the literature, we propose VeriCam, a pipeline designed to learn highly specialized features that enable classification of unknown classes in unseen data. VeriCam works by leveraging the representation power of image models trained for the verification task, where the model develops an intricate feature space that incorporates fine-grained details. By training a model to discriminate between pairs of images from the same and different classes, a relational graph is constructed, representing the class relationships between data points. We then present two approaches for graph clustering: a naive algorithm and a specific setup for the Leiden graph clustering algorithm. The pipeline is validated on the LPLCv2 dataset, which comprises real-world traffic surveillance images. We show that the dataset carries an inherent capture device bias that is posed as a generalization challenge for downstream License Plate recognition tasks such as OCR. As such, we dynamically identify capture devices with a label-agnostic approach, enabling the construction of a fair and unbiased benchmark. In the cross-device scenario, our pipeline reaches an F1-Score of 93.45 in the verification baseline and a V-Measure score of 80.13 in the clustering step. All code is publicly available at https://github.com/lmlwojcik/VeriCam
Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

Rad-R: A Raw-ADC Radar Dataset and Capture-Invariant SSM for Hardware-Fault Diagnosis

Automotive mmWave radar can develop vibration, antenna misalignment, radome blockage, and receive-channel degradation that corrupt the signal before perception begins. Data for these faults are scarce because each condition must be induced and measured on physical hardware. We introduce Rad-R, a raw-ADC dataset captured with a 4-chip 77GHz TI MMWCAS-RF-EVM cascade (192 virtual channels). Unlike existing raw-radar datasets, Rad-R pairs each recording with a controlled hardware fault at a calibrated severity, an independent physical severity measurement, and frame-synchronised IMU, temperature, GPS, and camera streams. Rad-R is a single-session dataset, so our generalisation claims are confined to a controlled cross-severity protocol in which train and test use physically distinct captures. A reproducible benchmark evaluates seven representative vision backbones and the proposed raw-IQ Mamba SSM (RadrNet) under within-clip, chirp-wise anytime, few-shot cross-capture, and controlled cross-severity protocols. Within-clip performance is near-saturated (>0.98>0.98 macro-F1), whereas cross-severity generalisation remains difficult: the absolute-phase RadrNet-DS falls to 0.490.49 macro-F1. RadrNet-DS-CI replaces absolute phase with per-frame-standardised magnitude and relative chirp-to-chirp phase and ranks first on the controlled benchmark (0.6630.663 vs. 0.6280.628 for the strongest RD-CNN; three seeds); the RadrNet family also leads on the anytime and few-shot budgets. A descriptive cross-modal analysis further finds that radar micro-Doppler covaries with independently measured IMU vibration energy (pooled Spearman ρ=0.41ρ=0.41 across conditions). The complete dataset and code will be released publicly under permissive licences.
Aug 19, 2026cs.CV

Simple, Safe, and Overlooked: Reclaiming Sustainable Domain Generalization with Statistical Color Matching

Hardware shifts, color variations, and changing patient characteristics between development and deployment routinely break trained medical image classifiers. Existing remedies fall short: standard color jittering provides insufficient diversity, while deep generative style transfer algorithms hallucinate features, destroy clinically relevant structures, and waste massive compute resources. To address this, we revisit classical statistical color matching and repurpose it as Colorist, a highly efficient data augmentation strategy that applies global mean-standard deviation matching directly in the RGB color space. We demonstrate that this training-free, fully interpretable approach safely generates structurally intact domain variations, outperforming deep generative models in structural fidelity and color alignment. Across out-of-distribution histopathology, peripheral blood, dermatology, and retinal datasets, it improves balanced accuracy by up to +9% over state-of-the-art domain generalization regularizers and by +13% over an unaugmented baseline. Moreover, by avoiding neural networks in the augmentation loop, Colorist preserves anatomical structure, minimizes carbon footprint, and integrates seamlessly into standard dataloaders. Together, these findings establish statistical matching as a safe, interpretable, yet overlooked alternative to deep architectures for clinical robustness. Source code is available at https://github.com/sdoerrich97/colorist.
Aug 13, 2026cs.LG

Beyond Simulated Benchmarks: Evaluating Motion Representations for Fall Detection Under Real-World Data Scarcity

Falls are a major health concern for older adults, and wearable sensors have been widely explored for detecting falls and enabling timely intervention. However, real-world falls are extremely rare: collecting 100 of them requires an estimated 100,000 days of monitoring, resulting in severely limited labelled data for training machine learning models. Consequently, many approaches rely on simulated datasets, often reporting high laboratory performance but limited real-world generalisation. We present a systematic evaluation of motion representations for wearable fall detection under real-world data scarcity. Using accelerometer signals, we compare interval-based, kernel-based, symbolic, and foundation model representations. As an interpretable baseline, we additionally investigate a lightweight symbolic representation that converts short motion segments into symbolic sentences augmented with physically-grounded impact descriptors. Experiments use FallAllD, a simulated falls dataset, and FARSEEING, a clinically verified real-world falls dataset. Through cross-validation, controlled data scarcity, and cross-dataset transfer, we examine how representation choices affect robustness under realistic deployment. Our results reveal that highly parameterised kernel and foundation models excel on simulated data but degrade severely under both data scarcity and domain shift. Although the interval-based representation achieves the strongest absolute real-world performance, augmenting a symbolic representation with physically-grounded impact descriptors yields the smallest degradation under domain shift and retains detection sensitivity under extreme scarcity, albeit at lower precision. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating beyond simulated benchmarks and show that representation choice is critical for deployable fall detection given the scarcity of real-world data.
Aug 12, 2026cs.RO

Enhancing Visual Domain Robustness in Behaviour Cloning via Saliency-Guided Augmentation

In vision-based behavior cloning (BC), conventional image augmentations such as Random Crop and Color Jitter often fall short under substantial visual domain shifts, including changes in shadows, distractors, and backgrounds. Superimposition-based augmentations, which blend in-domain and out-of-domain images, have shown promise for improving generalization in computer vision, but their suitability for BC remains uncertain because task-critical semantics, spatiotemporal relationships, and agent-target interactions must be preserved. To address this, we introduce RoboSaGA, a Saliency-Guided Augmentation method within the superimposition family tailored for vision-based BC. RoboSaGA dynamically adjusts augmentation intensity at the pixel level using policy-driven saliency, enabling aggressive augmentation in task-irrelevant regions while preserving task-critical information. It integrates seamlessly into existing architectures without requiring structural modifications or additional learning objectives. Experiments in both simulated and real-world settings show that RoboSaGA preserves in-domain performance while substantially improving robustness to visual domain shifts, including distractor and background changes, as well as lighting and shadow variations. Code is available at https://github.com/Zheyu-Zhuang/RoboSaGA.
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

STAR: A Spatial-Topology Aware Routing Framework for Generalizable 3D Scene Understanding

Constructing a unified 3D scene understanding model has long been hindered by the topological discrepancies across sensor modalities. While applying the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is a flexible approach for multi-domain 3D understanding, we observe that conventional feature-only MoE routers may underrepresent local sampling topology under semantic supervision, making expert allocation difficult when semantic consistency coexists with geometric heterogeneity. To overcome this challenge, we propose STAR (Spatial-Topology Aware Routing Framework). Specifically, we introduce a multi-attribute self-supervised pre-training branch, covering topological and textural variations, to anchor cross-domain structural priors. Building upon this, we design a domain-aware expert branch with two mechanisms: Domain-Spatial-Guided Routing (DSR), which captures local topological variations from spatial context, and Entropy-controlled Dynamic Allocation (EDA), which adjusts the number of activated experts according to routing uncertainty. Together, these branches combine stable cross-domain representation learning with adaptive expert allocation. Extensive experiments across various tasks, encompassing both indoor and outdoor scenes, demonstrate the effectiveness of STAR. It achieves 80.1% mIoU on the ScanNet validation set and 77.2% mIoU on S3DIS, consistently improving over strong baselines. Code is available at our project page (https://xmw666.github.io/STAR/).
Aug 12, 2026eess.AS

Robust Multi-Tier Infant-Centered Audio Understanding with Whisper via Structured Speaker Conditioning

Recent advances in model design and self-supervised audio representations have improved speech and audio understanding, yet infant-centered naturalistic recordings remain challenging due to limited labeled data, low signal-to-noise ratio, and cross-family domain shifts. We present a family-conditioned, multi-tier audio tagger that combines a LoRA-finetuned Whisper encoder with a lightweight, target-speaker-aware Transformer for long-context inference and framewise prediction across tiers. To improve temporal coherence, we incorporate a simple sequence-level smoothing loss, and to enhance robustness across households, we introduce a factorized speaker-token design with a shared tier token and a learned family-specific offset, reducing family bias and promoting generalizable representations. Together, these choices enable efficient and effective infant-centered audio tagging of daylong audio recordings in home environments.
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

MammoMix: Leveraging Mixture of Experts for Robust Mammogram Breast Detection

Breast lesion detection in mammography remains a challenging task due to variations in image quality, lesion appearance, and population demographics across datasets. While current object detectors such as YOLO and DETR achieve strong results on individual datasets, their performance often degrades when trained on or applied across heterogeneous sources. To address this, we propose MammoMix, a novel framework based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm for robust and generalizable lesion detection. In MammoMix, each expert model is trained on a specific domain, allowing it to specialize in distinct characteristics of its source data. A gating mechanism adaptively weighs contributions from each expert based on input image, combining their outputs to enable domain-adaptive inference. To improve reliability, we further incorporate a calibration module, MoCAE, which adjusts confidence scores to reflect true predictive uncertainty. We evaluate MammoMix on 3 public mammography datasets: CSAW, DDSM, and DMID, covering diverse clinical settings. Results show that MammoMix outperforms baseline detectors in both average precision and reliability, particularly on datasets with greater variability. Our findings demonstrate that expert specialization and calibrated ensemble fusion significantly enhance model generalization and robustness. MammoMix offers a promising step toward dependable AI-assisted breast cancer screening across real-world clinical domains.
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

GeoSeg-OV: Bridging Geospatial Gaps with Structural Guidance for Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Segmentation

Open-vocabulary remote sensing segmentation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables pixel-level recognition of arbitrary categories specified by natural language, including classes unseen during training. However, geospatial domain shifts caused by heterogeneous regions, spatial resolutions, and acquisition platforms weaken visual-text matching and limit cross-dataset generalization. Recent attempts have begun to incorporate auxiliary vision foundation models (VFMs), typically coupling their features with text embeddings as additional matching evidence. However, this strategy may introduce inconsistent matching signals while leaving the structure-sensitive representations of VFMs insufficiently exploited. We therefore propose GeoSeg-OV, which decouples auxiliary VFM features from visual-text matching and repurposes them as structural guidance for cost aggregation and decoding. GeoSeg-OV constructs an orientation-robust cost volume from multi-rotation CLIP features, while a frozen VFM extracts multi-scale structure-sensitive features in parallel. We propose Structure-Guided Aggregation (SGA), which integrates cost tokens and CLIP semantic guidance with VFM-derived pairwise structural biases for coherent spatial propagation, followed by text-conditioned class-wise reasoning. We further introduce Cost-Aware Decoding (CAD) to adaptively refine and fuse multi-scale semantic and structural guidance based on the current decoder context. On the global High-Resolution Land Cover (HRLC) benchmark spanning seven datasets across six continents, GeoSeg-OV outperforms the state-of-the-art by +2.5 and +2.7 average mIoU under two training settings. A large-scale zero-shot case study further demonstrates its generalization across geographic domains and category systems without target-domain annotations or retraining.
Aug 10, 2026eess.IV

BreastMammo and DenseMammo: Benchmarks for Mammography Domain Generalization

Breast density classification is a critical component of breast cancer risk assessment, yet AI models often struggle to generalize across clinical sites due to vendor-specific acquisition styles. In this work, we introduce two new datasets, BreastMammo and DenseMammo, to facilitate robust multi-view mammography research. We propose a domain generalization framework that utilizes a foreground-only histogram matching protocol to resolve the domain shift issue arising from disparate clinical sources. Internal evaluation using a 5-fold cross-validation protocol demonstrates the efficacy of our approach, with the Swin Transformer backbone achieving a peak AUC of 98.32% for density classification. External evaluation on the TNMammo and LUMINA datasets demonstrates that the proposed approach consistently reduces domain shift, significantly outperforming prominent domain generalization paradigms, including MixStyle and Discrete-Fourier-Transform-based frameworks.
Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

SwissCrop25: A National Multi-Year Benchmark for Operational Crop Mapping

Operational crop mapping requires models that generalise across years, resolve fine-grained crop taxonomies, and distinguish cropland from surrounding landscapes. However, existing crop mapping datasets enable evaluation of these requirements only in isolation. We therefore introduce SwissCrop25, a national-scale crop mapping benchmark dataset spanning seven growing seasons (2019-2025). SwissCrop25 combines Sentinel-2 time series, daily temperature observations, a fine-grained 73 crop taxonomy including grassland management types, and 5 explicit non-crop land cover classes. To evaluate realistic deployment conditions, we define a leave-one-year-out protocol with joint cropland delineation and crop classification for benchmarking representative crop mapping architectures. Evaluating U-TAE (convolutional temporal-attention model), TSViT (transformer-based spatio-temporal model), and Galileo (EO foundation model) reveals differences between architectures hidden by conventional benchmarks. In this setting, domain-specific models outperform Galileo, with TSViT achieving the best overall performance and a 12 pp macro-mIoU advantage over U-TAE. SwissCrop25 also exposes substantial interannual distribution shifts and shows that incorporating temperature-derived phenological information improves robustness. Finally, in-season evaluation reveals a trade-off between models, with U-TAE performing better early in the season and TSViT gaining an advantage later through improved rare-class discrimination. SwissCrop25 provides a challenging testbed for evaluating crop mapping systems under realistic operational conditions and is publicly released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/EOA-team/SwissCrop25 .
Aug 9, 2026cs.CV

LASA: Language-and-Source-Anchored Alignment for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

Domain Generalization Semantic Segmentation (DGSS) focuses on generalizing knowledge from labeled source domains to unseen target domains where data is unavailable during the training phase. While conventional methods utilize style randomization or feature normalization to mitigate domain shifts, they often impair feature integrity. Specifically, style randomization distorts the underlying feature manifold due to its coarse-grained nature, while feature normalization suppresses discriminative, domain-sensitive semantic details owing to its rigid design. To address these limitations, we propose the Language-and-Source-Anchored Alignment (LASA) framework, which comprises three synergistic components: Text-and-Source-Guided Style Transfer (TSGST), Domain-Aware Query Adapter (DAQA), and Domain-Aware Decoder Optimizer (DADO). Concretely, the TSGST module addresses manifold distortion by utilizing source features as structural anchors and vision-language model (VLM) priors as fine-grained guidance. To restore suppressed discriminative and domain-sensitive details, the DAQA module recalibrates object queries via categorical guidance and domain-aware signatures, while the DADO module aligns the resulting query distributions with a shared classifier to ensure consistent categorical responses across domains. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
Aug 9, 2026cs.LG

Domain-Aware Pruning: Sparsity and Domain Generalization via Regularized Probabilistic Masking

Domain generalization (DG) and neural network pruning are conventionally treated as distinct objectives, targeting out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness and model efficiency, respectively. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing Domain-Aware Pruning (DAP), a framework that leverages network sparsity as a mechanism to implicitly enhance generalization to unseen domains. Diverging from standard binary mask optimization, DAP learns a continuous parameter retention probability p∈[0,1]p \in [0, 1], framing network compression as a continuous probabilistic masking problem. By introducing a regularization objective that actively penalizes the retention of domain-sensitive weights during the mask training, DAP identifies a domain-invariant subnetwork. Empirical results across five DG benchmark datasets demonstrate that DAP achieves significant sparsity while consistently matching or exceeding the OOD performance of its dense counterparts. Crucially, DAP is an algorithm-agnostic framework that integrates seamlessly with existing DG pipelines without necessitating post-hoc fine-tuning. Beyond efficiency and generalization, we show that DAP natively provides increased robustness to adversarial perturbations and yields highly interpretable models, where the retained weights reliably encapsulate the most domain-invariant and task-critical representations.
Aug 8, 2026eess.SY

Failure-Mechanism Transferability of Cumulative-Damage Features for Health State Estimation of SiC Power Modules

Data-driven health-state estimators for SiC (Silica-Carbide) power modules typically report their performance on a single accelerated-aging campaign, and how that performance transfers to a different failure mechanism is rarely tested. We benchmark five reference methods from the prognostics and condition-monitoring literature against a physics-informed NODE (Neural Ordinary Differential Equation) on two SiC power-cycling campaigns driven by structurally different failure mechanisms, solder-layer fatigue and wire-bond lift-off, under a per-module kk-fold protocol. The NODE is evaluated under two input regimes that share the rest of the pipeline: the baseline electrical precursors and a set of cumulative thermoelectric features. Every reference method degrades on the wire-bond campaign, with average errors growing and precision decreasing with respect to their performance on the soldered campaign. The NODE fed with the cumulative features keeps its soldered-campaign metrics on both mechanisms, with differences inside the fold-to-fold variance, while the same architecture fed with the baseline precursors falls back to the reference-method cluster. The input representation contributes at least as much as the architecture to failure-mechanism transferability of a health-state estimator.
Aug 8, 2026cs.LG

Biologically Informed Representation Learning for Robust Cross-Center Generalization of MALDI-TOF Mass Spectrometry

Machine learning models for MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry have shown considerable promise for clinical microbiology tasks such as microbial identification and antimicrobial resistance prediction. However, their deployment across institutions remains limited by domain shift, as acquisition-specific variability often leads models to capture technical artifacts rather than transferable biological information. Existing representation learning approaches primarily address this problem through statistical domain alignment while largely overlooking the biological supervision naturally available in microbiology datasets. We introduce DALMA, a probabilistic representation learning framework that jointly models acquisition-specific variability and biological supervision to learn biologically structured latent representations. By combining domain-specific reconstruction with biologically guided representation learning, DALMA learns transferable representations that generalize across heterogeneous clinical centers without requiring institution-specific components at inference, enabling zero-shot deployment on previously unseen sites. We evaluate DALMA on a multi-center benchmark comprising seven datasets from three countries. DALMA consistently achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot microbial identification across two held-out clinical centers, while the learned representations also transfer effectively to antimicrobial resistance prediction. Furthermore, latent-space novelty estimation enables reliable selective prediction under previously unseen domain shifts. These results demonstrate that biologically informed representation learning provides an effective strategy for robust and transferable ML in clinical microbiology.
Aug 7, 2026cs.CV

LoRSA: Toward Generalizable Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Biomedical Downstream Tasks

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning enables the adaptation of vision foundation models to biomedical tasks under limited computational resources, but a single low-rank update can constrain all task-specific changes to one narrow parameter subspace. This restriction may prevent the model from simultaneously representing globally shared task structure and localized residual directions required for generalization to unseen imaging domains. We introduce LoRSA, a global--residual adaptation framework that jointly learns a dense low-rank component and a dynamically structured-sparse low-rank component. The dense component captures globally coordinated task adaptation, while the structured component provides complementary residual corrections whose support evolves during training. We characterize the representational capacity, approximation properties, rank structure, and singular-subspace complementarity of this decomposition. We evaluate LoRSA for four-class breast-density classification using DINOv3-Base, with VinDr-Mammo as the source domain and MammosighTR and RSNA as unseen external domains. LoRSA remains competitive on the internal validation set and achieves the best external macro-F1 on both target datasets, improving upon the strongest competing method by 2.15 percentage points on MammosighTR and 3.09 percentage points on RSNA. Weight-matrix analysis further shows that approximately 92%92\% of the energy of each adaptation component lies outside the bilateral singular subspace of the other, indicating that the two components learn largely complementary update directions. These results suggest that organizing adaptation capacity into distinct global and residual paths can improve the external-domain generalization of parameter-efficiently adapted biomedical vision models.
Aug 7, 2026eess.AS

Assessing AI-generated music detection in real-world broadcast monitoring

The proliferation of AI-generated music in broadcast media raises concerns about transparency and fair compensation, but reliable detection under real broadcast conditions remains unresolved. Existing studies report substantial performance degradation in this domain, yet their evaluations are limited to synthetic broadcast data. To address this gap, we introduce BAMM (Broadcast AI-Music Monitoring), a 40-hour dataset of real-world television recordings containing AI-generated and human-made music. We compare clean-trained and broadcast-trained CNN variants across three progressively more challenging scenarios: Clean Foreground Music (CFM), Synthetic TV Broadcast (STB), and Real TV Broadcast (RTB). Both models achieve near-perfect performance on CFM but degrade substantially under synthetic broadcast conditions. Broadcast-oriented training improves robustness compared with clean training, although performance remains limited. On RTB, evaluated using BAMM, both models degrade further and show substantial score overlap between AI-generated and human-made music. These results expose a critical domain gap and show that current training approaches on CNN-based detectors remain insufficient for reliable AI-generated music detection in broadcast monitoring.
Aug 7, 2026cs.CV

Understand Before Detect: Vision--Language Learning for Omni-Domain Infrared Small Target Detection

Omni-domain infrared small target (IRST) detection is crucial for infrared surveillance, yet remains challenging due to heterogeneous imaging domains and inconsistent target characteristics. Previous deep learning-based methods have been developed for visual-only paradigms and achieved promising performance on domain-specific tasks. However, existing methods follow the task-specific supervised learning paradigm. This paradigm simplifies the full-scene infrared observations to sparse target supervision, discarding the semantics that remain invariant across heterogeneous domains. Consequently, detection performance suffers substantially under domain shifts. To handle this issue, we introduce \textbf{``understand before detect''}, a paradigm that formulates omni-domain IRST detection as an understanding-driven process, where holistic infrared target understanding precedes precise detection. Building on this paradigm, we propose \textbf{JinSight}, which first develops holistic IRST understanding through language supervision and then transfers the learned cross-domain representations to precise small-target detection. By grounding infrared representations in language semantics, JinSight enables a single model to generalize across heterogeneous infrared domains. We then introduce Latent Semantic Interaction (LSI), which exchanges language-aligned global semantics with fine-grained spatial features in a compact low-rank space. To address the lack of multimodal omni-domain IRST benchmarks, we build \textbf{OmniIRST-VL}, the first large-scale, highly diverse vision--language dataset for omni-domain IRST detection. It comprises over 39k annotations across six complementary instruction tasks covering both scene-level understanding and target-centric reasoning.
Aug 6, 2026cs.CV

Robust-WAM: Bridging Generative Pretraining and Semantic Foresight in World-Action Models

Mainstream World-Action Models (WAMs) adapt pretrained video generation models (VGMs) for robot control, transferring their learned dynamics prior for action prediction. These VGMs are typically trained in a variational autoencoder (VAE) latent space. However, the VAE latent space is optimized for pixel reconstruction, which rewards fine appearance detail and leaves the action prediction fragile under visual shifts. Recent works build WAMs in semantic latent space, which are more robust to appearance shifts. However, these models cannot leverage the large-scale VGM pretraining that exists only in VAE space. To overcome this dilemma, we propose Robust-WAM, a general post-training method for video-generation-based WAMs that preserves the VAE-based generative path and adds a lightweight semantic foresight alignment objective on the action stream. This retains the large-scale VGM pretraining while grounding actions in appearance-invariant dynamics that stay reliable under illumination shifts and other visual out-of-distribution conditions. Specifically, we employ learnable query tokens to bring future-scene semantics into the action stream by aligning their output hidden states with the semantic foresight of future ground-truth frames. To establish the temporal correspondence between each query and the future step it describes, we give it the positional encoding of the matching action tokens. Experiments on out-of-distribution generalization simulation benchmarks and a real-robot setup show that our Robust-WAM consistently improves the success rates of multiple WAM baselines without sacrificing in-distribution performance.
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

Distilled Roads: Generalisable Road Network Extraction Across Sensors, Resolutions, and Region

Road network segmentation from satellite imagery remains challenging due to large geographic variation in road appearance, occlusions, and domain shifts introduced by differing resolutions and sensors. Existing models, typically trained under narrow resolution--region combinations, generalise poorly to unseen environments such as rural settings, regions with distinct road materials, or imagery from new satellite platforms, often producing broken or disconnected predictions. Adapting these models to new domains usually requires retraining or fine-tuning, which is costly and risks catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we reframe global road extraction as a continual adaptation problem rather than an architectural one. Our framework combines cross-resolution knowledge distillation across a resolution-decreasing curriculum, multi-sensor training, and topology-aware supervision, yielding a single model that generalises across 0.3−1.00.3-1.0 m imagery from multiple satellite platforms across continents. On publicly available benchmarks, including City-Scale and Global-Scale, our model outperforms state-of-the-art results by up to 2222 F1 points and 1515 APLS points, while remaining the most efficient, with 3×3\times faster inference. Our results suggest that improved robustness across diverse sub-meter satellite imagery can be achieved through targeted training strategies, such as data curricula, distillation, and topology-aware losses, rather than increasingly complex architectures.
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

Open-Linguistic Concept Unified Learning for Cross-Site Interpretable Dermatology Image Diagnosis

Human-interpretable computer-aided diagnosis is crucial for clinical decision making. Concept-based models excel by providing transparent reasoning and enabling post-hoc, clinician-in-the-loop interventions. However, their rigid dataset-specific adaptation inherently restricts cross-site generalization. Applying them across diverse modalities, such as dermoscopic and clinical photographs, is challenging due to heterogeneous concept taxonomies varying in availability, granularity, and semantics across cohorts. Consequently, adapting Foundation Vision-Language Models (FVLMs) demands costly label engineering and repeated post-training. Existing intervention mechanisms remain rigidly tied to predefined concepts, lacking adaptability and hindering scalable dermatology CAD deployment. To address these bottlenecks, we propose UniCon, an open-linguistic unified concept learning framework for multimodal interpretable vision-language diagnosis. UniCon resolves these challenges through three contributions: (1) A shared semantic representation space via a unified concept prototype codebook, seamlessly coordinating heterogeneous concept systems across modalities without dataset-specific retraining. (2) Open-linguistic based multi-faceted semantic specifications to overcome sparse textual label limitations, improving boundary sensitivity in uncertain clinical contexts. (3) A robust, cross-site adjustable intervention interface powered by reliability-gated bottleneck aggregation, enabling consistent reasoning and transferable clinician corrections. Extensive experiments demonstrate that beyond securing top-tier diagnostic accuracy, UniCon successfully bridges disparate clinical taxonomies, unlocking unprecedented cross-site intervention capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/wuchengyu123/UniCon.