arXiv subjects

Muhammad Zaigham Zaheer

Publications and source records attributed to Muhammad Zaigham Zaheer.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Beyond Similarity: Foundation Models as an Efficient Backbone for Training-Free Composed Video Retrieval

Composed video retrieval (CoVR) searches a gallery for the target video that realizes a natural-language modification of a source clip. However, at gallery scale, this creates a fundamental tension: compact embeddings enable efficient, reusable search but can miss the transient actions, state changes, and subtle constraints that demand fine-grained video reasoning, whereas applying large multimodal models uniformly sacrifices scalability. To address these limitations, we propose that frozen foundation models should instead occupy complementary roles, with inference depth adapted to query difficulty. Based on this premise, we introduce \methodname{}, a framework for training-free \methodexpansion{}. Specifically, a composed-query embedding first searches reusable video-only gallery representations; uncertain queries undergo bounded reranking and candidate expansion; ambiguous edits trigger target-description generation; and only close leading candidates reach multimodal verification. To support these roles, frame selection, spatial resolution, and time cues are adapted to each stage. Across complete target-gallery evaluations, our method reaches state-of-the-art performance among training-free approaches, with 89.55 and 93.43 R@1 on Dense-WebVid-CoVR and CoVR-R, respectively (with more than +35\% and +25\% absolute margins to the closest counterpart). These results show that adaptively orchestrating foundation-model capabilities can combine scalable retrieval with fine-grained reasoning without task-specific training. The source code and all relevant guidelines are available on https://github.com/demidovd98/CoVRAGE.

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arXiv2026

Cross-Domain Generalization in Machine Unlearning via Label-Conditioned Energy Magnitude Regularization

Machine unlearning removes the influence of specific data from a trained model. However, most methods treat the forgotten concept as isolated. In this paper, we study what happens to the rest of the model when a class is forgotten, using a label-conditioned energy-based model (EBM) that assigns per-class energies, making the effect directly observable. We forget a class by raising the energy of its image-label pairs, training with a forget term, a retain anchor to the pretrained model, a global margin, and an energy regularizer that stops the energy magnitudes from growing without limit. A propagation term applies the same forget signal to retain samples, weighted by each sample's DINOv2 similarity to the forget class, so forgetting reaches images that resemble it and leaves the rest untouched. We evaluate on two benchmark datasets: 1) On a subset of DomainNet across four visual domains, we forget tiger, lion, and scissors one at a time. Forgetting a class in the sketch domain also erases it from real, clipart, and painting, with forgetting error reaching 98% and 99% for lion and scissors, and the effect carrying over to the most similar class. 2) On CIFAR-10, we turn off the propagation term and forget each of the ten classes on its own. Forgetting is complete (100%), while the other nine classes retain 98.5% of their pre-unlearning accuracy on average.

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arXiv2026

SB-BEVFusion: Enhancing the Robustness against Sensor Malfunction and Corruptions

Multimodal sensor fusion has demonstrated remarkable performance improvements over unimodal approaches in 3D object detection for autonomous vehicles. Typically, existing methods transform multimodal data from independent sensors, such as camera and LiDAR, into a unified bird's-eye view (BEV) representation for fusion. Although effective in ideal conditions, this strategy suffers from substantial performance deterioration when camera or LiDAR data are missing, corrupted, or noisy. To address this vulnerability, we develop a framework-agnostic fusion module for camera and LiDAR data that allows for handling cases when one of the two modalities is missing or corrupted. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our module, we instantiate it in BEVFusion [1], a well-established framework to combine camera and LiDAR data for 3D object detection. By means of quantitative experiments on the MultiCorrupt dataset, we demonstrate that our module achieves favorable performance improvements under scenarios of missing and corrupted modalities, substantially outperforming existing unified representation approaches across a wide range of sensor deterioration scenarios and reaching state-of-the-art performance in scenarios of corrupted modality due to extreme weather conditions and sensor failure.

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arXiv2026

AI in Agriculture: A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Crops, Fisheries and Livestock

Crops, fisheries and livestock form the backbone of global food production, essential to feed the ever-growing global population. However, these sectors face considerable challenges, including climate variability, resource limitations, and the need for sustainable management. Addressing these issues requires efficient, accurate, and scalable technological solutions, highlighting the importance of artificial intelligence (AI). This survey presents a systematic and thorough review of more than 200 research works covering conventional machine learning approaches, advanced deep learning techniques (e.g., vision transformers), and recent vision-language foundation models (e.g., CLIP) in the agriculture domain, focusing on diverse tasks such as crop disease detection, livestock health management, and aquatic species monitoring. We further cover major implementation challenges such as data variability and experimental aspects: datasets, performance evaluation metrics, and geographical focus. We finish the survey by discussing potential open research directions emphasizing the need for multimodal data integration, efficient edge-device deployment, and domain-adaptable AI models for diverse farming environments. Rapid growth of evolving developments in this field can be actively tracked on our project page: https://github.com/umair1221/AI-in-Agriculture

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arXiv2026

Face Pyramid Vision Transformer

A novel Face Pyramid Vision Transformer (FPVT) is proposed to learn a discriminative multi-scale facial representations for face recognition and verification. In FPVT, Face Spatial Reduction Attention (FSRA) and Dimensionality Reduction (FDR) layers are employed to make the feature maps compact, thus reducing the computations. An Improved Patch Embedding (IPE) algorithm is proposed to exploit the benefits of CNNs in ViTs (e.g., shared weights, local context, and receptive fields) to model lower-level edges to higher-level semantic primitives. Within FPVT framework, a Convolutional Feed-Forward Network (CFFN) is proposed that extracts locality information to learn low level facial information. The proposed FPVT is evaluated on seven benchmark datasets and compared with ten existing state-of-the-art methods, including CNNs, pure ViTs, and Convolutional ViTs. Despite fewer parameters, FPVT has demonstrated excellent performance over the compared methods. Project page is available at https://khawar-islam.github.io/fpvt/

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arXiv2026

OpenEarthAgent: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Geospatial Agents

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has enabled agents that interpret imagery, connect it with language, and execute structured analytical tasks. Extending these capabilities to remote sensing remains challenging, as models must reason over spatial scale, geographic structures, and multispectral indices while maintaining coherent multi-step logic. To address this gap, we introduce \textit{OpenEarthAgent}, a unified framework for tool-augmented geospatial reasoning trained on satellite imagery, natural-language queries, and structured reasoning traces. Beyond serving as a benchmark, OpenEarthAgent establishes a cohesive agentic architecture built around a unified executable tool registry and trajectory-based policy learning. The framework standardizes heterogeneous visual, spectral, GIS, and georeferenced raster operations under a consistent callable schema, enabling modular orchestration and deterministic execution. Training is performed via supervised fine-tuning on structured reasoning trajectories with deterministic replay validation to ensure executability and spatial correctness. The accompanying corpus comprises 14,538 training and 1,169 evaluation instances with over 107K reasoning steps, spanning urban, environmental, disaster, and infrastructure domains and incorporating GIS operations alongside index analyses such as NDVI, NBR, and NDBI. Grounded in explicit reasoning traces, the learned agent demonstrates structured reasoning, stable spatial understanding, and interpretable tool-driven behaviour across diverse EO scenarios. We report consistent improvements over a strong baseline and competitive performance against recent open and closed-source models. Our code, data and trained models are publicly available: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/OpenEarthAgent

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arXiv2026

Face-Voice Association with Inductive Bias for Maximum Class Separation

Face-voice association is widely studied in multimodal learning and is approached representing faces and voices with embeddings that are close for a same person and well separated from those of others. Previous work achieved this with loss functions. Recent advancements in classification have shown that the discriminative ability of embeddings can be strengthened by imposing maximum class separation as inductive bias. This technique has never been used in the domain of face-voice association, and this work aims at filling this gap. More specifically, we develop a method for face-voice association that imposes maximum class separation among multimodal representations of different speakers as an inductive bias. Through quantitative experiments we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing that it achieves SOTA performance on two task formulation of face-voice association. Furthermore, we carry out an ablation study to show that imposing inductive bias is most effective when combined with losses for inter-class orthogonality. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first that applies and demonstrates the effectiveness of maximum class separation as an inductive bias in multimodal learning; it hence paves the way to establish a new paradigm.

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arXiv2025

Linking Faces and Voices Across Languages: Insights from the FAME 2026 Challenge

Over half of the world's population is bilingual and people often communicate under multilingual scenarios. The Face-Voice Association in Multilingual Environments (FAME) 2026 Challenge, held at ICASSP 2026, focuses on developing methods for face-voice association that are effective when the language at test-time is different than the training one. This report provides a brief summary of the challenge.

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arXiv2025

RobustA: Robust Anomaly Detection in Multimodal Data

In recent years, multimodal anomaly detection methods have demonstrated remarkable performance improvements over video-only models. However, real-world multimodal data is often corrupted due to unforeseen environmental distortions. In this paper, we present the first-of-its-kind work that comprehensively investigates the adverse effects of corrupted modalities on multimodal anomaly detection task. To streamline this work, we propose RobustA, a carefully curated evaluation dataset to systematically observe the impacts of audio and visual corruptions on the overall effectiveness of anomaly detection systems. Furthermore, we propose a multimodal anomaly detection method, which shows notable resilience against corrupted modalities. The proposed method learns a shared representation space for different modalities and employs a dynamic weighting scheme during inference based on the estimated level of corruption. Our work represents a significant step forward in enabling the real-world application of multimodal anomaly detection, addressing situations where the likely events of modality corruptions occur. The proposed evaluation dataset with corrupted modalities and respective extracted features will be made publicly available.

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arXiv2025

GenMix: Effective Data Augmentation with Generative Diffusion Model Image Editing

Data augmentation is widely used to enhance generalization in visual classification tasks. However, traditional methods struggle when source and target domains differ, as in domain adaptation, due to their inability to address domain gaps. This paper introduces GenMix, a generalizable prompt-guided generative data augmentation approach that enhances both in-domain and cross-domain image classification. Our technique leverages image editing to generate augmented images based on custom conditional prompts, designed specifically for each problem type. By blending portions of the input image with its edited generative counterpart and incorporating fractal patterns, our approach mitigates unrealistic images and label ambiguity, improving the performance and adversarial robustness of the resulting models. Efficacy of our method is established with extensive experiments on eight public datasets for general and fine-grained classification, in both in-domain and cross-domain settings. Additionally, we demonstrate performance improvements for self-supervised learning, learning with data scarcity, and adversarial robustness. As compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods, our technique achieves stronger performance across the board.

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arXiv2025

Face-voice Association in Multilingual Environments (FAME) 2026 Challenge Evaluation Plan

The advancements of technology have led to the use of multimodal systems in various real-world applications. Among them, audio-visual systems are among the most widely used multimodal systems. In the recent years, associating face and voice of a person has gained attention due to the presence of unique correlation between them. The Face-voice Association in Multilingual Environments (FAME) 2026 Challenge focuses on exploring face-voice association under the unique condition of a multilingual scenario. This condition is inspired from the fact that half of the world's population is bilingual and most often people communicate under multilingual scenarios. The challenge uses a dataset named Multilingual Audio-Visual (MAV-Celeb) for exploring face-voice association in multilingual environments. This report provides the details of the challenge, dataset, baseline models, and task details for the FAME Challenge.

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arXiv2025

A Survey of the Self Supervised Learning Mechanisms for Vision Transformers

Advances in deep learning are re-defining how visual data is processed and understand by the machines. Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently demonstrated prominent performance in computer vision related tasks. However, their performance improves with increasing numbers of labeled data, indicating reliance on labeled data. Humanly annotated data are difficult to acquire and thus shifted the focus from traditional annotations to unsupervised learning strategies that learn structures inside the data. In response to this challenge, self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising technique. SSL utilize inherent relationships within the data as a form of supervision. This technique can reduce the dependence on manual annotations and offers a more scalable and resource-effective approach to training models. Taking these strengths into account, it is necessary to assess the combination of SSL methods with ViTs, especially in the cases of limited labeled data. Inspired by this evolving trend, this survey aims to systematically review SSL mechanisms tailored for ViTs. We propose a comprehensive taxonomy to classify SSL techniques based on their representations and pre-training tasks. Furthermore, we highlighted the motivations behind the study of SSL, reviewed prominent pre-training tasks, and highlight advancements and challenges in this field. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis of various SSL methods designed for ViTs, evaluating their strengths, limitations, and applicability to different scenarios.

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arXiv2024

Modality Invariant Multimodal Learning to Handle Missing Modalities: A Single-Branch Approach

Multimodal networks have demonstrated remarkable performance improvements over their unimodal counterparts. Existing multimodal networks are designed in a multi-branch fashion that, due to the reliance on fusion strategies, exhibit deteriorated performance if one or more modalities are missing. In this work, we propose a modality invariant multimodal learning method, which is less susceptible to the impact of missing modalities. It consists of a single-branch network sharing weights across multiple modalities to learn inter-modality representations to maximize performance as well as robustness to missing modalities. Extensive experiments are performed on four challenging datasets including textual-visual (UPMC Food-101, Hateful Memes, Ferramenta) and audio-visual modalities (VoxCeleb1). Our proposed method achieves superior performance when all modalities are present as well as in the case of missing modalities during training or testing compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2024

Chameleon: Images Are What You Need For Multimodal Learning Robust To Missing Modalities

Multimodal learning has demonstrated remarkable performance improvements over unimodal architectures. However, multimodal learning methods often exhibit deteriorated performances if one or more modalities are missing. This may be attributed to the commonly used multi-branch design containing modality-specific streams making the models reliant on the availability of a complete set of modalities. In this work, we propose a robust textual-visual multimodal learning method, Chameleon, that completely deviates from the conventional multi-branch design. To enable this, we present the unification of input modalities into one format by encoding textual modality into visual representations. As a result, our approach does not require modality-specific branches to learn modality-independent multimodal representations making it robust to missing modalities. Extensive experiments are performed on four popular challenging datasets including Hateful Memes, UPMC Food-101, MM-IMDb, and Ferramenta. Chameleon not only achieves superior performance when all modalities are present at train/test time but also demonstrates notable resilience in the case of missing modalities.

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arXiv2024

Face-voice Association in Multilingual Environments (FAME) Challenge 2024 Evaluation Plan

The advancements of technology have led to the use of multimodal systems in various real-world applications. Among them, the audio-visual systems are one of the widely used multimodal systems. In the recent years, associating face and voice of a person has gained attention due to presence of unique correlation between them. The Face-voice Association in Multilingual Environments (FAME) Challenge 2024 focuses on exploring face-voice association under a unique condition of multilingual scenario. This condition is inspired from the fact that half of the world's population is bilingual and most often people communicate under multilingual scenario. The challenge uses a dataset namely, Multilingual Audio-Visual (MAV-Celeb) for exploring face-voice association in multilingual environments. This report provides the details of the challenge, dataset, baselines and task details for the FAME Challenge.

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arXiv2024

Exploiting Autoencoder's Weakness to Generate Pseudo Anomalies

Due to the rare occurrence of anomalous events, a typical approach to anomaly detection is to train an autoencoder (AE) with normal data only so that it learns the patterns or representations of the normal training data. At test time, the trained AE is expected to well reconstruct normal but to poorly reconstruct anomalous data. However, contrary to the expectation, anomalous data is often well reconstructed as well. In order to further separate the reconstruction quality between normal and anomalous data, we propose creating pseudo anomalies from learned adaptive noise by exploiting the aforementioned weakness of AE, i.e., reconstructing anomalies too well. The generated noise is added to the normal data to create pseudo anomalies. Extensive experiments on Ped2, Avenue, ShanghaiTech, CIFAR-10, and KDDCUP datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generic applicability of our approach in improving the discriminative capability of AEs for anomaly detection.

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arXiv2024

DiffuseMix: Label-Preserving Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models

Recently, a number of image-mixing-based augmentation techniques have been introduced to improve the generalization of deep neural networks. In these techniques, two or more randomly selected natural images are mixed together to generate an augmented image. Such methods may not only omit important portions of the input images but also introduce label ambiguities by mixing images across labels resulting in misleading supervisory signals. To address these limitations, we propose DiffuseMix, a novel data augmentation technique that leverages a diffusion model to reshape training images, supervised by our bespoke conditional prompts. First, concatenation of a partial natural image and its generated counterpart is obtained which helps in avoiding the generation of unrealistic images or label ambiguities. Then, to enhance resilience against adversarial attacks and improves safety measures, a randomly selected structural pattern from a set of fractal images is blended into the concatenated image to form the final augmented image for training. Our empirical results on seven different datasets reveal that DiffuseMix achieves superior performance compared to existing state-of the-art methods on tasks including general classification,fine-grained classification, fine-tuning, data scarcity, and adversarial robustness. Augmented datasets and codes are available here: https://diffusemix.github.io/

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arXiv2024

Collaborative Learning of Anomalies with Privacy (CLAP) for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection: A New Baseline

Unsupervised (US) video anomaly detection (VAD) in surveillance applications is gaining more popularity recently due to its practical real-world applications. As surveillance videos are privacy sensitive and the availability of large-scale video data may enable better US-VAD systems, collaborative learning can be highly rewarding in this setting. However, due to the extremely challenging nature of the US-VAD task, where learning is carried out without any annotations, privacy-preserving collaborative learning of US-VAD systems has not been studied yet. In this paper, we propose a new baseline for anomaly detection capable of localizing anomalous events in complex surveillance videos in a fully unsupervised fashion without any labels on a privacy-preserving participant-based distributed training configuration. Additionally, we propose three new evaluation protocols to benchmark anomaly detection approaches on various scenarios of collaborations and data availability. Based on these protocols, we modify existing VAD datasets to extensively evaluate our approach as well as existing US SOTA methods on two large-scale datasets including UCF-Crime and XD-Violence. All proposed evaluation protocols, dataset splits, and codes are available here: https://github.com/AnasEmad11/CLAP

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