Vision-language models (VLMs) have gained widespread attention for their strong zero-shot capabilities across numerous downstream tasks. However, these models assume that each test image’s class label is drawn from a predefined label set and lack a reliable mechanism to reject samples from emerging unknown classes when only unlabeled data are available. To address this gap, open-set domain adaptation methods retrain models to push potential unknowns away from known clusters. Yet, some unknown samples remain stably anchored to specific known classes in the VLM feature space due to semantic relevance, which is termed as Semantic Affinity Anchoring (SAA). Forcibly repelling these samples unavoidably distorts the native geometry of VLMs and degrades performance. Meanwhile, existing score‑based unknown detectors use simplistic thresholds and suffer from threshold sensitivity, resulting in sub‑optimal performance. To address aforementioned issues, we propose VLM-OpenXpert, which comprises two training‑free, plug‑and‑play inference modules. SUFF performs SVD on high-confidence unknowns to extract a low-rank "unknown subspace". Each sample’s projection onto this subspace is weighted and softly removed from its feature, suppressing unknown components while preserving semantics. BGAT corrects score skewness via a Box–Cox transform, then fits a bimodal Gaussian mixture to adaptively estimate the optimal threshold balancing known-class recognition and unknown-class rejection. Experiments on 9 benchmarks and three backbones (CLIP, SigLIP, ALIGN) under Source-Free OSDA settings show that our training-free pipeline matches or outperforms retraining-heavy state-of-the-art methods, establishing a powerful lightweight inference calibration paradigm for open-set VLM deployment.

As machine learning evolves, domain generalization (DG) and domain adaptation (DA) have become crucial for improving model robustness across diverse environments. Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) plays a central role in these tasks, offering strong zero-shot capabilities that allow models to operate effectively in unseen domains. Yet, despite CLIP's growing influence, no comprehensive survey has systematically examined its applications in DG and DA, underscoring the need for this review. This survey provides a unified and in-depth overview of CLIP-driven DG and DA. Before reviewing methods, we establish precise and complete scenario definitions covering source accessibility (SA vs. SF), source number (SS vs. MS), and label relations (CS, PS, OS, OPS), forming a coherent taxonomy that structures all subsequent analyses. For DG, we categorize methods into prompt optimization techniques that enhance task alignment and architectures that leverage CLIP as a backbone for transferable feature extraction. For DA, we examine both source-available approaches that rely on labeled source data and source-free approaches operating primarily on target-domain samples, emphasizing the knowledge transfer mechanisms that enable adaptation across heterogeneous settings. We further provide consolidated trend analyses for both DG and DA, revealing overarching patterns, methodological principles, and scenario-dependent behaviors. We then discuss key challenges such as realistic deployment scenarios, LLM knowledge integration, multimodal fusion, interpretability, and catastrophic forgetting, and outline future directions for developing scalable and trustworthy CLIP-based DG and DA systems. By synthesizing existing studies and highlighting critical gaps, this survey offers actionable insights for researchers and practitioners, motivating new strategies for leveraging CLIP to advance domain robustness in real-world scenarios.

A urine bag is a common medical appliance widely used in clinical treatment for patients with urinary frequency, urgency, or incontinence problems. The real-time monitoring and alarming of the liquid volume in the bag are necessary to avoid the infection caused by urine reflux. Current monitoring relies on manual observations of doctors and medical attendants, but it has problems with timeliness, especially in surgery or at night. In this paper, we propose Wi-Uro, a real-time, low-cost, and accurate urine bag monitoring and alarming system with commodity Wi-Fi devices. To solve the random deformation of urine bags possibly due to human postures, it integrates Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) with tension sensor readings to infer liquid volume in bags. Once the volume is exceeding the threshold, Wi-Uro system will prompt the alarm information immediately. Evaluations based on real urine bags show a satisfactory estimation accuracy (over 95%), which means that Wi-Uro can be applied in routine patient care.

Pantograph is one of the most important components in electrical railway vehicles. To guarantee steady power supply for the train, the surface of the pantograph slide plate should be smooth enough so that the catenary can move on it from one side to the other side steadily with low friction. In addition, the thickness of the pantograph slide plate cannot be smaller than the lower limit for the sake of safety. Therefore, periodical inspection and maintenance of the pantograph slide plate are significant in terms of safe and stable operation. In this paper, an innovative and intelligent method based on deep learning and image processing technologies is proposed for the online condition monitoring of the pantograph slide plate. In the first stage, the surface defect detection and recognition method of the pantograph slide plate is proposed. Four typical surface defects of the slide are considered, and a deep learning model, pantograph defect detection neural network (PDDNet), is trained for the defect detection and recognition. In the second stage, five key criteria for qualifying the wear condition are proposed. The wear edge estimation based on image processing technology is investigated in detail. Furthermore, they are used to calculate the wear depth and evaluate the wear condition of the pantograph slide. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed PDDNet can detect the surface defects and also recognize the four kinds of defects with a sound accuracy. The wear depth estimation results are compared with on-site measurement data, and the proposed method can achieve high estimation accuracy.