# A Self-Evolving Defect Detection Framework for Industrial Photovoltaic Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14869/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07569/) (2018)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Deep Long-Tailed Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04596/) (2021)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [Equalization Loss for Long-Tailed Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05176/) (2020)
- [AIDE: AI-Driven Exploration in the Space of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13138/) (2025)
- [AI Research Agents for Machine Learning: Search, Exploration, and Generalization in MLE-bench](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02554/) (2025)
- [Automatic Classification of Defective Photovoltaic Module Cells in Electroluminescence Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02894/) (2018)
- [AutoMLGen: Navigating Fine-Grained Optimization for Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08511/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable photovoltaic (PV) power generation requires timely detection of module defects that may reduce energy yield, accelerate degradation, and increase lifecycle operation and maintenance costs during field operation. Electroluminescence (EL) imaging has therefore been widely adopted for PV module inspection. However, automated defect detection in real operational environments remains challenging due to heterogeneous module geometries, low-resolution imaging conditions, subtle defect morphology, long-tailed defect distributions, and continual data shifts introduced by evolving inspection and labeling processes. These factors significantly limit the robustness and long-term maintainability of conventional deep-learning inspection pipelines. To address these challenges, this paper proposes SEPDD, a Self-Evolving Photovoltaic Defect Detection framework designed for evolving industrial PV inspection scenarios. SEPDD integrates automated model optimization with a continual self-evolving learning mechanism, enabling the inspection system to progressively adapt to distribution shifts and newly emerging defect patterns during long-term deployment. Experiments conducted on both a public PV defect benchmark and a private industrial EL dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Both datasets exhibit severe class imbalance and significant domain shift. SEPDD achieves a leading mAP50 of 91.4% on the public dataset and 49.5% on the private dataset. It surpasses the autonomous baseline by 14.8% and human experts by 4.7% on the public dataset, and by 4.9% and 2.5%, respectively, on the private dataset.