CVPR 2025 Papers

High-quality view synthesis relies on volume rendering, splatting, or surface rendering. While surface rendering is typically the fastest, it struggles to accurately model fuzzy geometry like hair. In turn, alpha-blending techniques excel at representing fuzzy materials but require an unbounded number of samples per ray (P1). Further overheads are induced by empty space skipping in volume rendering (P2) and sorting input primitives in splatting (P3). We present a novel representation for real-time view synthesis where the (P1) number of sampling locations is small and bounded, (P2) sampling locations are efficiently found via rasterization, and (P3) rendering is sorting-free. We achieve this by representing objects as semi-transparent multi-layer meshes rendered in a fixed order. First, we model surface layers as signed distance function (SDF) shells with optimal spacing learned during training. Then, we bake them as meshes and fit UV textures. Unlike single-surface methods, our multi-layer representation effectively models fuzzy objects. In contrast to volume and splatting-based methods, our approach enables real-time rendering on low-power laptops and smartphones.

The growing adoption and capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) demand benchmarks that reflect real-world user interactions. We introduce VisionArena, the largest existing dataset of crowdsourced real-world conversations between users and VLMs. While most visual question-answering datasets focus on close-ended problems or synthetic scenarios, VisionArena contains a wide variety of closed and open ended problems across 230K conversations, 73K unique users, 138 languages, and 45 VLMs. VisionArena consists of VisionArena-Chat, a set of 200k single-turn and multi-turn chat logs with a VLM, VisionArena-Battle, a set of 30K conversations between a user and 2 anonymous VLMs with preference votes, and VisionArena-Bench, an automatic benchmark consisting of 500 diverse user prompts which can be used to cheaply approximate model rankings.We analyze these datasets and highlight the types of question asked by users, the influence of style on user preference, and areas where models often fall short. We find that more open-ended questions like captioning and humor are heavily influenced by style, which causes certain models like Reka Flash and InternVL which are tuned for style to perform significantly better on these categories compared to other categories. We show that VisionArena-Chat and VisionArena-Battle can be used for post-training to align VLMs to human preferences through supervised fine-tuning. Compared to the popular instruction tuning dataset Llava-Instruct-158K, finetuning the same base model on VisionArena results in a a 17 point improvement on MMMU and a 46 point improvement on the WildVision human preference benchmark. Lastly, we show that running automatic VLM evaluation on VisionArena-Bench results in a model ranking which is largely consistent with major online preference benchmarks. We release both VisionArena and our finetuned model to further VLM development.

Data-driven machine learning has made significant strides in medical image analysis. However, most existing methods are tailored to specific modalities and assume a particular resolution (often isotropic). This limits their generalizability in clinical settings, where variations in scan appearance arise from differences in sequence parameters, resolution, and orientation. Furthermore, most general-purpose models are designed for healthy subjects and suffer from performance degradation when pathology is present. We introduce UNA (Unraveling Normal Anatomy), the first modality-agnostic learning approach for normal brain anatomy reconstruction that can handle both healthy scans and cases with pathology. We propose a fluid-driven anomaly randomization method that generates an unlimited number of realistic pathology profiles on-the-fly. UNA is trained on a combination of synthetic and real data, and can be applied directly to real images with potential pathology without the need for fine-tuning. We demonstrate UNA's effectiveness in reconstructing healthy brain anatomy and showcase its direct application to anomaly detection, using both simulated and real images from 3D healthy and stroke datasets, including CT and MRI scans. By bridging the gap between healthy and diseased images, UNA enables the use of general-purpose models on diseased images, opening up new opportunities for large-scale analysis of uncurated clinical images in the presence of pathology.

We introduce a practical real-time neural video codec (NVC) designed to deliver high compression ratio, low latency and broad versatility. In practice, the coding speed of NVCs depends on 1) computational costs, and 2) non-computational operational costs, such as memory I/O and the number of function calls. While most efficient NVCs prioritize reducing computational cost, we identify operational cost as the primary bottleneck to achieving higher coding speed. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a set of efficiency-driven design improvements focused on minimizing operational costs. Specifically, we employ implicit temporal modeling to eliminate complex explicit motion modules, and use single low-resolution latent representations rather than progressive downsampling. These innovations significantly accelerate NVC without sacrificing compression quality. Additionally, we implement model integerization for consistent cross-device coding and a module-bank-based rate control scheme to improve practical adaptability. Experiments show our proposed DCVC-RT achieves an impressive average encoding/decoding speed at 125.2/112.8 fps (frames per second) for 1080p video, while saving an average of 21% in bitrate compared to H.266/VTM. The code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC.

Bird's-eye view (BEV) perception has gained significant attention because it provides a unified representation to fuse multiple view images and enables a wide range of downstream autonomous driving tasks, such as forecasting and planning. Recent state-of-the-art models utilize projection-based methods which formulate BEV perception as query learning to bypass explicit depth estimation. While we observe promising advancements in this paradigm, they still fall short of real-world applications because of the lack of uncertainty modeling and expensive computational requirement. In this work, we introduce GaussianLSS, an uncertainty-aware BEV perception framework that revisits the unprojection-based method, specifically the Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS) paradigm, and enhances it with depth uncertainty modeling. Our GaussianLSS represents spatial dispersion by learning a soft depth mean and computing the variance of the depth distribution, which implicitly captures object extents. We then transform the depth distribution into 3D Gaussians and rasterize them to construct uncertainty-aware BEV features. We evaluate GaussianLSS on the nuScenes dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance compared to unprojection-based methods. In particular, it provides significant advantages in speed, running 2x faster, and in memory efficiency, using 0.3x less memory compared to projection-based methods, while achieving competitive performance with only a 0.7% IoU difference.

Realistic 3D full-body talking avatars hold great potential in AR, with applications ranging from e-commerce live streaming to holographic communication. Despite advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for lifelike avatar creation, existing methods struggle with fine-grained control of facial expressions and body movements in full-body talking tasks. Additionally, they often lack sufficient details and cannot run in real-time on mobile devices. We present TaoAvatar, a high-fidelity, lightweight, 3DGS-based full-body talking avatar driven by various signals. Our approach starts by creating a personalized clothed human parametric template that binds Gaussians to represent appearances. We then pre-train a StyleUnet-based network to handle complex pose-dependent non-rigid deformation, which can capture high-frequency appearance details but is too resource-intensive for mobile devices. To overcome this, we "bake" the non-rigid deformations into a lightweight MLP-based network using a distillation technique and develop blend shapes to compensate for details. Extensive experiments show that TaoAvatar achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality while running in real-time across various devices, maintaining 90 FPS on high-definition stereo devices such as the Apple Vision Pro.

Pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly applied to real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) task. Given the iterative refinement nature of diffusion models, most existing approaches are computationally expensive. While methods such as SinSR and OSEDiff have emerged to condense inference steps via distillation, their performance in image restoration or details recovery is not satisfied. To address this, we propose TSD-SR, a novel distillation framework specifically designed for real-world image super-resolution, aiming to construct an efficient and effective one-step model. We first introduce the Target Score Distillation, which leverages the priors of diffusion models and real image references to achieve more realistic image restoration. Secondly, we propose a Distribution-Aware Sampling Module to make detail-oriented gradients more readily accessible, addressing the challenge of recovering fine details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TSD-SR has superior restoration results (most of the metrics perform the best) and the fastest inference speed (e.g. 40 times faster than SeeSR) compared to the past Real-ISR approaches based on pre-trained diffusion priors.

Self-supervised depth estimation from monocular cameras in diverse outdoor conditions, such as daytime, rain, and nighttime, is challenging due to the difficulty of learning universal representations and the severe lack of labeled real-world adverse data.Previous methods either rely on synthetic inputs and pseudo-depth labels or directly apply daytime strategies to adverse conditions, resulting in suboptimal results.In this paper, we present the first synthetic-to-real robust depth estimation framework, incorporating motion and structure priors to capture real-world knowledge effectively. In the synthetic adaptation, we transfer motion-structure knowledge inside cost volumes for better robust representation, using a frozen daytime model to train a depth estimator in synthetic adverse conditions.In the innovative real adaptation which targets to fix synthetic-real gaps, models trained earlier identify the weather-insensitive regions with a designed consistency-reweighting strategy to emphasize valid pseudo-labels.We further introduce a new regularization by gathering explicit depth distribution prior to constrain the model facing real-world data.Experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art across diverse conditions in multi-frame and single-frame settings. We achieve improvements of 7.5% in AbsRel and 4.3% in RMSE on average for nuScenes and Robotcar datasets (daytime, nighttime, rain). In zero-shot evaluation on DrivingStereo (rain, fog), our method generalizes better than previous ones. Our code will be released soon.

Synthesizing novel views from in-the-wild monocular videos is challenging due to scene dynamics and the lack of multi-view cues. To address this, we propose SplineGS, a COLMAP-free dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework for high-quality reconstruction and fast rendering from monocular videos. At its core is a novel Motion-Adaptive Spline (MAS) method, which represents continuous dynamic 3D Gaussian trajectories using cubic Hermite splines with a small number of control points. For MAS, we introduce a Motion-Adaptive Control points Pruning (MACP) method to model the deformation of each dynamic 3D Gaussian across varying motions, progressively pruning control points while maintaining dynamic modeling integrity. Additionally, we present a joint optimization strategy for camera parameter estimation and 3D Gaussian attributes, leveraging photometric and geometric consistency. This eliminates the need for Structure-from-Motion preprocessing and enhances SplineGS's robustness in real-world conditions. Experiments show that SplineGS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in novel view synthesis quality for dynamic scenes from monocular videos, achieving thousands times faster rendering speed.

Ensuring the safety of autonomous robots, such as self-driving vehicles, requires extensive testing across diverse driving scenarios. Simulation is a key ingredient for conducting such testing in a cost-effective and scalable way. Neural rendering methods have gained popularity, as they can build simulation environments from collected logs in a data-driven manner. However, existing neural radiance field (NeRF) methods for sensor-realistic rendering of camera and lidar data suffer from low rendering speeds, limiting their applicability for large-scale testing. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering, current methods are limited to camera data and are unable to render lidar data essential for autonomous driving. To address these limitations, we propose SplatAD, the first 3DGS-based method for realistic, real-time rendering of dynamic scenes for both camera and lidar data. SplatAD accurately models key sensor-specific phenomena such as rolling shutter effects, lidar intensity, and lidar ray dropouts, using purpose-built algorithms to optimize rendering efficiency. Evaluation across three autonomous driving datasets demonstrates that SplatAD achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality with up to +2 PSNR for NVS and +3 PSNR for reconstruction while increasing rendering speed over NeRF-based methods by an order of magnitude. Code to be released upon publication.

We present SpectroMotion, a novel approach that combines 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with physically-based rendering (PBR) and deformation fields to reconstruct dynamic specular scenes. Previous methods extending 3DGS to model dynamic scenes have struggled to represent specular surfaces accurately. Our method addresses this limitation by introducing a residual correction technique for accurate surface normal computation during deformation, complemented by a deformable environment map that adapts to time-varying lighting conditions. We implement a coarse-to-fine training strategy significantly enhancing scene geometry and specular color prediction. It is the only existing 3DGS method capable of synthesizing photorealistic real-world dynamic specular scenes, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in rendering complex, dynamic, and specular scenes. Please see our project page at https://cdfan0627.github.io/spectromotion/.

We propose an efficient radiance field rendering algorithm that incorporates a rasterization process on adaptive sparse voxels without neural networks or 3D Gaussians. There are two key contributions coupled with the proposed system. The first is to adaptively and explicitly allocate sparse voxels to different levels of detail within scenes, faithfully reproducing scene details with 65536^3 grid resolution while achieving high rendering frame rates. Second, we customize a rasterizer for efficient adaptive sparse voxels rendering. We render voxels in the correct depth order by using ray direction-dependent Morton ordering, which avoids the well-known popping artifact found in Gaussian splatting. Our method improves the previous neural-free voxel model by over 4db PSNR and more than 10x FPS speedup, achieving state-of-the-art comparable novel-view synthesis results. Additionally, our voxel representation is seamlessly compatible with grid-based 3D processing techniques such as Volume Fusion, Voxel Pooling, and Marching Cubes, enabling a wide range of future extensions and applications. Code at https://github.com/NVlabs/svraster

Snowfall presents significant challenges for visual data processing, necessitating specialized desnowing algorithms. However, existing models often fail to generalize effectively due to their heavy reliance on synthetic datasets. Furthermore, current real-world snowfall datasets are limited in scale and lack dedicated evaluation metrics designed specifically for snowfall degradation, thus hindering the effective integration of real snowy images into model training to reduce domain gaps. To address these challenges, we first introduce RealSnow10K, a large-scale, high-quality dataset consisting of over 10,000 annotated real-world snowy images. In addition, we curate a preference dataset comprising 36,000 expert-ranked image pairs, enabling the adaptation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to better perceive snowy image quality through our innovative Multi-Model Preference Optimization (MMPO). Finally, we propose the SnowMaster, which employs MMPO-enhanced MLLM to perform accurate snowy image evaluation and pseudo-label filtering for semi-supervised training. Experiments demonstrate that SnowMaster delivers superior desnowing performance under real-world conditions.

Modeling spatial-temporal interactions among neighboring agents is at the heart of multi-agent problems such as motion forecasting and crowd navigation. Despite notable progress, it remains unclear to which extent modern representations can capture the causal relationships behind agent interactions. In this work, we take an in-depth look at the causal awareness of these representations, from computational formalism to real-world practice. First, we revisit the notion of non-causal robustness studied in the recent CausalAgents benchmark. We show that existing representations are already partially resilient to perturbations of non-causal agents, and yet modeling indirect causal effects involving mediator agents remains challenging. To address this challenge, we introduce a metric learning approach that regularizes latent representations with causal annotations. Our controlled experiments show that this approach not only leads to higher degrees of causal awareness but also yields stronger out-of-distribution robustness. To further operationalize it in practice, we propose a sim-to-real causal transfer method via cross-domain multi-task learning. Experiments on trajectory prediction datasets show that our method can significantly boost generalization, even in the absence of real-world causal annotations, where we acquire higher prediction accuracy by only using 25% of real-world data. We hope our work provides a new perspective on the challenges and potential pathways toward causally-aware representations of multi-agent interactions. Our code is available in supplementary materials. Our code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/CausalSim2Real.

We introduce SemanticDraw, a new paradigm of interactive content creation where high-quality images are generated in near real-time from given multiple hand-drawn regions, each encoding prescribed semantic meaning. In order to maximize the productivity of content creators and to fully realize their artistic imagination, it requires both quick interactive interfaces and fine-grained regional controls in their tools. Despite astonishing generation quality from recent diffusion models, we find that existing approaches for regional controllability are very slow (52 seconds for 512 x 512 image) while not compatible with acceleration methods such as LCM, blocking their huge potential in interactive content creation. From this observation, we build our solution for interactive content creation in two steps: (1) we establish compatibility between region-based controls and acceleration techniques for diffusion models, maintaining high fidelity of multi-prompt image generation with x 10 reduced number of inference steps, (2) we increase the generation throughput with our new multi-prompt stream batch pipeline, enabling low-latency generation from multiple, region-based text prompts on a single RTX 2080 Ti GPU. Our proposed framework is generalizable to any existing diffusion models and acceleration schedulers, allowing sub-second (0.64 seconds) image content creation application upon well-established image diffusion models.

We present a snapshot imaging technique for recovering 3D surrounding views of miniature scenes. Due to their intricacy, miniature scenes with objects sized in millimeters are difficult to reconstruct, yet miniatures are common in life and their 3D digitalization is desirable. We design a catadioptric imaging system with a single camera and eight pairs of planar mirrors for snapshot 3D reconstruction from a dollhouse perspective. We place paired mirrors on nested pyramid surfaces for capturing surrounding multi-view images in a single shot. Our mirror design is customizable based on the size of the scene for optimized view coverage. We use the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation for scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. We overcome the challenge posed by our sparse view input by integrating visual hull-derived depth constraint. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on a variety of synthetic and real miniature scenes.

Advancements in Computer-Aided Screening (CAS) systems are essential for improving the detection of security threats in X-ray baggage scans. However, current datasets are limited in representing real-world, sophisticated threats and concealment tactics, and existing approaches are constrained by a closed-set paradigm with predefined labels. To address these challenges, we introduce STCray, the first multimodal X-ray baggage security dataset, comprising 46,642 image-caption paired scans across 21 threat categories, generated using an X-ray scanner for airport security. STCray is meticulously developed with our specialized protocol that ensures domain-aware, coherent captions, that lead to the multi-modal instruction following data in X-ray baggage security. This allows us to train a domain-aware visual AI assistant named STING-BEE that supports a range of vision-language tasks, including scene comprehension, referring threat localization, visual grounding, and visual question answering (VQA), establishing novel baselines for multi-modal learning in X-ray baggage security. Further, STING-BEE shows state-of-the-art generalization in cross-domain settings. Code, data, and models are available at https://divs1159.github.io/STING-BEE/.

In this paper, we introduce SLAM3R, a novel and effective system for real-time, high-quality, dense 3D reconstruction using RGB videos. SLAM3R provides an end-to-end solution by seamlessly integrating local 3D reconstruction and global coordinate registration through feed-forward neural networks. Given an input video, the system first converts it into overlapping clips using a sliding window mechanism. Unlike traditional pose optimization-based methods, SLAM3R directly regresses 3D pointmaps from RGB images in each window and progressively aligns and deforms these local pointmaps to create a globally consistent scene reconstruction - all without explicitly solving any camera parameters. Experiments across datasets consistently show that SLAM3R achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy and completeness while maintaining real-time performance at 20+ FPS. Code available at: https://github.com/PKU-VCL-3DV/SLAM3R.

We propose a one-stage framework for real-time multi-person 3D human mesh estimation from a single RGB image. While current one-stage methods, which follow a DETR-style pipeline, achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with high-resolution inputs, we observe that this particularly benefits the estimation of individuals in smaller scales of the image (e.g., those far from the camera), but at the cost of significantly increased computation overhead. To address this, we introduce scale-adaptive tokens that are dynamically adjusted based on the relative scale of each individual in the image within the DETR framework. Specifically, individuals in smaller scales are processed at higher resolutions, larger ones at lower resolutions, and background regions are further distilled. These scale-adaptive tokens more efficiently encode the image features, facilitating subsequent decoding to regress the human mesh, while allowing the model to allocate computational resources more effectively and focus on more challenging cases. Experiments show that our method preserves the accuracy benefits of high-resolution processing while substantially reducing computational cost, achieving real-time inference with performance comparable to SOTA methods. Code and models are available at https://ChiSu001.github.io/SAT-HMR/.