Knowledge-Guided Failure Prediction: Detecting When Object Detectors Miss Safety-Critical Objects

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zimmermann, Jakob Paul, Holzbach, Gerrit, Lerch, David
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Zimmermann, Jakob Paul
Holzbach, Gerrit
Lerch, David
author_facet Zimmermann, Jakob Paul
Holzbach, Gerrit
Lerch, David
contents Object detectors deployed in safety-critical environments can fail silently, e.g. missing pedestrians, workers, or other safety-critical objects without emitting any warning. Traditional Out Of Distribution (OOD) detection methods focus on identifying unfamiliar inputs, but do not directly predict functional failures of the detector itself. We introduce Knowledge Guided Failure Prediction (KGFP), a representation-based monitoring framework that treats missed safety-critical detections as anomalies to be detected at runtime. KGFP measures semantic misalignment between internal object detector features and visual foundation model embeddings using a dual-encoder architecture with an angular distance metric. A key property is that when either the detector is operating outside its competence or the visual foundation model itself encounters novel inputs, the two embeddings diverge, producing a high-angle signal that reliably flags unsafe images. We compare our novel KGFS method to baseline OOD detection methods. On COCO person detection, applying KGFP as a selective-prediction gate raises person recall among accepted images from 64.3% to 84.5% at 5% False Positive Rate (FPR), and maintains strong performance across six COCO-O visual domains, outperforming OOD baselines by large margins. Our code, models, and features are published at https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/iosb_public/KGFP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_25499
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Knowledge-Guided Failure Prediction: Detecting When Object Detectors Miss Safety-Critical Objects
Zimmermann, Jakob Paul
Holzbach, Gerrit
Lerch, David
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
68T45, 68T05
Object detectors deployed in safety-critical environments can fail silently, e.g. missing pedestrians, workers, or other safety-critical objects without emitting any warning. Traditional Out Of Distribution (OOD) detection methods focus on identifying unfamiliar inputs, but do not directly predict functional failures of the detector itself. We introduce Knowledge Guided Failure Prediction (KGFP), a representation-based monitoring framework that treats missed safety-critical detections as anomalies to be detected at runtime. KGFP measures semantic misalignment between internal object detector features and visual foundation model embeddings using a dual-encoder architecture with an angular distance metric. A key property is that when either the detector is operating outside its competence or the visual foundation model itself encounters novel inputs, the two embeddings diverge, producing a high-angle signal that reliably flags unsafe images. We compare our novel KGFS method to baseline OOD detection methods. On COCO person detection, applying KGFP as a selective-prediction gate raises person recall among accepted images from 64.3% to 84.5% at 5% False Positive Rate (FPR), and maintains strong performance across six COCO-O visual domains, outperforming OOD baselines by large margins. Our code, models, and features are published at https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/iosb_public/KGFP.
title Knowledge-Guided Failure Prediction: Detecting When Object Detectors Miss Safety-Critical Objects
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
68T45, 68T05
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25499