WiSE-OD: Benchmarking Robustness in Infrared Object Detection

Object detection (OD) in infrared (IR) imagery is critical for low-light and nighttime applications. However, the scarcity of large-scale IR datasets forces models to rely on weights pre-trained on RGB images. While fine-tuning on IR improves accuracy, it often compromises robustness under distribution shifts due to the inherent modality gap between RGB and IR. To address this, we introduce LLVIP-C and FLIR-C, two cross-modality out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks built by applying corruptions to standard IR datasets. Additionally, to fully leverage the complementary knowledge from RGB and infrared-trained models, we propose WiSE-OD, a weight-space ensembling method with two variants: WiSE-ODZS, which combines RGB zero-shot and IR fine-tuned weights, and WiSE-ODLP, which blends zero-shot and linear probing. Evaluated using four RGB-pretrained detectors and two robust baselines on our benchmark and in the real-world out-of-distribution M3FD dataset, our WiSE-OD improves robustness across modalities and to corruption in synthetic and real-world distribution shifts without any additional training or inference costs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/heitorrapela/wiseod.