Robust Multi-UAV Cooperative Maritime Object Recognition Under Dynamic Aerial Perspectives via Conflict-Modulated Generative Continual Learning Framework

Multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cooperative maritime object recognition aims to maintain high accuracy under dynamic aerial perspectives for maritime search and rescue missions. Existing continual learning methods retain knowledge by approximating the global distribution of prior data but fail to address cross-perspective knowledge conflicts caused by distribution shifts across aerial perspectives, leading to gradient perturbations that harm consistency and accuracy in dynamic maritime environments. To address the issues, we propose a conflict-modulated generative continual learning (ConMod) framework, comprising generative perspective-robust conflict estimation and conflict-modulated continual learning modules. The generative perspective-robust conflict estimation employs a perspective-aware scene generator that embeds maritime knowledge priors as perspective constraints to augment the data distribution, thereby facilitating explainable cross-perspective conflict association and promoting robust conflict index estimation. It also incorporates a dual-modal conflict index estimator that integrates geometric distortion and environmental variation branches to estimate conflict indices by associating simulated scenes with perspective-robust data distributions. Furthermore, conflict-modulated continual learning introduces a perspective-specific triplet loss to regularize consistency by aligning geometric and environmental features within perspective-specific representation space. Additionally, a conflict-modulated loss treats conflict indices as modulation weights to identify and reinforce representative conflict experiences from a cross-perspective memory buffer, guiding gradient updates toward global optimization. Results on the SeaDronesSee-CL and SeaDronesSee-CL-v2 datasets show that ConMod effectively improves multi-UAV cooperative maritime object recognition by identifying and mitigating cross-perspective knowledge conflicts.