TriCLE: Tri-Modal Vision-Language Reasoning for Edge-Deployed Fine-Grained Clustering
arXiv:2608.04175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Edge platforms used for aerial observation must interpret aircraft imagery under limited memory, limited compute, and intermittent connectivity. This setting is difficult for standard RGB-only recognition models and general-purpose vision-language models, especially when calibrated thermal and LiDAR aircraft data are unavailable. We present TriCLE, an application-oriented tri-modal vision-language system for aircraft taxonomic grouping under edge constraints. From a single RGB aircraft image, TriCLE generates a structure-preserving FLIR-style thermal view and a pseudo-LiDAR depth projection, then fuses the aligned views with task instructions in a compact Qwen3-VL backbone. The model is aligned to an expert aircraft taxonomy based on propulsion, airframe family, size, design era, and configuration, so its outputs reflect engineering-relevant similarity rather than only surface appearance. We evaluate supervised fine-tuning, rotation-preserving SFT, and three policy-alignment strategies: GRPO, GSPO, and DAPO. Sequence-level GSPO gives the strongest validation performance, reaching 88.33\% validation accuracy and 0.91 weighted F1 on valid aircraft outputs. On a held-out aircraft test partition, GSPO achieves 78.00\% accuracy and 0.793 weighted F1 while preserving 94.00\% parseable output formatting. After 4-bit quantization and attention-memory optimization, the aligned 4B model fits an 8GB deployment target and processes each tri-modal triplet in 1.48 seconds. These results support TriCLE as a practical prototype for interpretable, edge-feasible aircraft grouping, while emphasizing the need for further validation on real aligned thermal and LiDAR sensor streams.
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[Submitted on 4 Aug 2026]
Title:TriCLE: Tri-Modal Vision-Language Reasoning for Edge-Deployed Fine-Grained Clustering
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Abstract:Edge platforms used for aerial observation must interpret aircraft imagery under limited memory, limited compute, and intermittent connectivity. This setting is difficult for standard RGB-only recognition models and general-purpose vision-language models, especially when calibrated thermal and LiDAR aircraft data are unavailable. We present TriCLE, an application-oriented tri-modal vision-language system for aircraft taxonomic grouping under edge constraints. From a single RGB aircraft image, TriCLE generates a structure-preserving FLIR-style thermal view and a pseudo-LiDAR depth projection, then fuses the aligned views with task instructions in a compact Qwen3-VL backbone. The model is aligned to an expert aircraft taxonomy based on propulsion, airframe family, size, design era, and configuration, so its outputs reflect engineering-relevant similarity rather than only surface appearance. We evaluate supervised fine-tuning, rotation-preserving SFT, and three policy-alignment strategies: GRPO, GSPO, and DAPO. Sequence-level GSPO gives the strongest validation performance, reaching 88.33\% validation accuracy and 0.91 weighted F1 on valid aircraft outputs. On a held-out aircraft test partition, GSPO achieves 78.00\% accuracy and 0.793 weighted F1 while preserving 94.00\% parseable output formatting. After 4-bit quantization and attention-memory optimization, the aligned 4B model fits an 8GB deployment target and processes each tri-modal triplet in 1.48 seconds. These results support TriCLE as a practical prototype for interpretable, edge-feasible aircraft grouping, while emphasizing the need for further validation on real aligned thermal and LiDAR sensor streams.
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.04175 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2608.04175v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04175
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Md. Mahfuzur Rahman [view email] [v1] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 19:34:08 UTC (15,177 KB)
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