Synthesizing the Kill Chain: A Zero-Shot Framework for Target Verification and Tactical Reasoning on the Edge

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13324v1
• Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:00:19 GMT
• Title: Synthesizing the Kill Chain: A Zero-Shot Framework for Target Verification and Tactical Reasoning on the Edge
• Abstract summary: This paper introduces a hierarchical, zero-shot framework that cascades lightweight object detection with compact Vision-Language Models (VLMs)<n>We evaluate this pipeline on 55 high-fidelity synthetic videos from Battlefield 6 across three tasks: false-positive filtering (up to 100% accuracy), damage assessment (up to 97.5%), and fine-grained vehicle classification (55-90%)
• Score: 12.201060368447251
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Deploying autonomous edge robotics in dynamic military environments is constrained by both scarce domain-specific training data and the computational limits of edge hardware. This paper introduces a hierarchical, zero-shot framework that cascades lightweight object detection with compact Vision-Language Models (VLMs) from the Qwen and Gemma families (4B-12B parameters). Grounding DINO serves as a high-recall, text-promptable region proposer, and frames with high detection confidence are passed to edge-class VLMs for semantic verification. We evaluate this pipeline on 55 high-fidelity synthetic videos from Battlefield 6 across three tasks: false-positive filtering (up to 100% accuracy), damage assessment (up to 97.5%), and fine-grained vehicle classification (55-90%). We further extend the pipeline into an agentic Scout-Commander workflow, achieving 100% correct asset deployment and a 9.8/10 reasoning score (graded by GPT-4o) with sub-75-second latency. A novel "Controlled Input" methodology decouples perception from reasoning, revealing distinct failure phenotypes: Gemma3-12B excels at tactical logic but fails in visual perception, while Gemma3-4B exhibits reasoning collapse even with accurate inputs. These findings validate hierarchical zero-shot architectures for edge autonomy and provide a diagnostic framework for certifying VLM suitability in safety-critical applications.

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