CVPR 2026 Papers

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation via reinforcement learning (RL) have benefited from reward models that assess semantic alignment and visual quality. However, most existing reward models pay limited attention to fine-grained spatial relationships, often producing images that appear plausible overall yet contain inaccuracies in object positioning. In this work, we present SpatialReward, a verifiable reward model explicitly designed to evaluate spatial layouts in generated images. SpatialReward adopts a multi-stage pipeline: a Prompt Decomposer extracts entities, attributes, and spatial metadata from free-form prompts; expert detectors provide accurate visual grounding of object positions and attributes; and a vision-language model applies chain-of-thought reasoning over grounded observations to assess complex spatial relations that are challenging for rule-based methods. To more comprehensively evaluate spatial relationships in generated images, we introduce SpatRelBench, a benchmark covering object attributes, orientation, inter-object relations, and rendered text placement. Experiments on Stable Diffusion and FLUX show that incorporating SpatialReward into RL training consistently improves spatial consistency and overall generation quality, with results aligned more closely to human judgments. These findings indicate that verifiable reward models hold considerable potential for enabling more accurate and controllable optimization in text-to-image generation models.

This paper addresses the critical and underexplored challenge of long video understanding with low computational budgets.We propose LongVideo-R1, an active, reasoning-equipped multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent designed for efficient video context navigation, avoiding the redundancy of exhaustive search.At the core of LongVideo-R1 lies a reasoning module that leverages high-level visual cues to infer the most informative video clip for subsequent processing.During inference, the agent initiates traversal from top-level visual summaries and iteratively refines its focus, immediately halting the exploration process upon acquiring sufficient knowledge to answer the query.To facilitate training, we first extract hierarchical video captions from CGBench, a video corpus with grounding annotations, and guide GPT-5 to generate 33K high-quality chain-of-thought-with-tool trajectories. The LongVideo-R1 agent is fine-tuned upon the Qwen-3-8B model through a two-stage paradigm: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL), where RL employs a specifically designed reward function to maximize selective and efficient clip navigation.Experiments on multiple long video benchmarks validate the effectiveness of name, which enjoys superior tradeoff between QA accuracy and efficiency. All curated data and source code are provided in the supplementary material and will be made publicly available.

Prototype-based methods enhance interpretability in image recognition by establishing intermediate part-level prototypes to build interpretable classifiers, enabling transparent decision-making through localized evidence and reference to prototypical examples. However, most existing methods typically depend on unimodal visual supervision and constrain prototypes within the visual embedding space, which inherently restricts their alignment with language-conditioned semantic representations. In this paper, we present PRISM (Prototype-based Reasoning with Inter-modal Semantic Mining), a framework for interpretable image recognition that leverages natural language as an auxiliary modality to guide the learning of class-specific part prototypes. PRISM introduces an information-theoretic attribution mechanism to extract semantically relevant image regions conditioned on textual descriptions. By aligning attribution maps with prototype activation patterns, PRISM implicitly anchors visual part prototypes to semantically meaningful image regions without requiring explicit concept annotations. To promote better localization and reduce redundancy among prototypes, we introduce a spatial compactness constraint that encourages each prototype to attend to non-overlapping and spatially concentrated regions. Experiments on multiple fine-grained benchmarks demonstrate that PRISM not only improves classification performance but also provides faithful and semantically grounded visual explanations.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for general robotic manipulation. However, existing approaches typically omit intermediate reasoning steps and directly regress actions, limiting reasoning interpretability and performance in long-horizon or compositional tasks. Although recent studies introduce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into VLA models, their effectiveness remains suboptimal due to two key issues: (1) generating a full reasoning trajectory at every timestep introduces substantial redundancy, thereby hinders real-time deployment and (2) reasoning is performed independently, neglecting temporal consistency, which leads to planning conflicts.We propose TRM-VLA, a temporal-aware reasoning and memorization framework that integrates explicit temporal modeling into the VLA reasoning process. TRM-VLA consists of two core components: (1) Keyframe-Triggered Reasoning (KTR), which identifies task progress and performs hierarchical CoT reasoning only at key decision points to reduce redundant inference; and (2) Granularity-adaptable Context Memory (GCM), which dynamically stores and retrieves historical reasoning trajectories to maintain inter-frame coherence and global context. Built upon a dual-system architecture--combining a multimodal foundation model for slow reasoning (System 2) with a diffusion-based policy for fast execution (System 1)--TRM-VLA learns to plan and act efficiently in a unified manner. Extensive experiments on LIBERO-90, SIMPLER, and four real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that TRM-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance while improving reasoning efficiency.

Humans constantly reason about 3D proximity, the relations between their body and surrounding objects, to guide perception and action in daily life. Whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can perform such embodied 3D reasoning remains unclear. To this end, we introduce EgoProx, a benchmark for egocentric 3D proximity reasoning. We organize our tasks along a cognitive chain, covering intention, exploration, exploitation, and chain-of-actions reasoning. We also design an agent based data engine that produces diverse and consistent QA pairs at scale. We benchmark prevailing MLLMs on EgoProx and conduct additional analyses with dataset specific and task specific instruction tuning. We observe large cross-domain gains, indicating that current MLLMs contain some spatial knowledge; however, they still struggle to effectively leverage it for spatial reasoning VQA.

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) typically depends on a single visual modality when defending against presentation attacks such as print attacks, screen replays, and 3D masks, resulting in limited generalization across devices, environments, and attack types. Meanwhile, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved breakthroughs in image-text understanding and semantic reasoning, suggesting that integrating visual and linguistic co-inference into FAS can substantially improve both robustness and interpretability. However, the lack of a high-quality vision-language multimodal dataset has been a critical bottleneck. To address this, we introduce FaceCoT (Face Chain-of-Thought), the first large-scale Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset tailored for FAS. FaceCoT covers 14 spoofing attack types and enriches model learning with high-quality CoT VQA annotations. Meanwhile, we develop a caption model refined via reinforcement learning to expand the dataset and enhance annotation quality. Furthermore, we introduce a CoT-Enhanced Progressive Learning (CEPL) strategy to better leverage the CoT data and boost model performance on FAS tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained with FaceCoT and CEPL outperform state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmark datasets.

Despite remarkable progress, multimodal foundation models still exhibit surprising deficiencies in spatial intelligence. In this work, we explore scaling up multimodal foundation models to cultivate spatial intelligence within the SenseNova-SI family, built upon established multimodal foundations including visual understanding models (i.e., Qwen3-VL and InternVL3) and unified understanding and generation models (i.e., Bagel). We take a principled approach to constructing high-performing and robust spatial intelligence by systematically curating SenseNova-SI-8M: eight million diverse data samples under a rigorous taxonomy of spatial capabilities. SenseNova-SI demonstrates unprecedented performance across a broad range of spatial intelligence benchmarks: 68.8% on VSI-Bench, 43.3% on MMSI, 85.7% on MindCube, 54.7% on ViewSpatial, 47.7% on SITE, 63.9% on BLINK, 55.5% on 3DSR, and 72.0% on EmbSpatial, while maintaining strong general multimodal understanding (e.g., 84.9% on MMBench-En). More importantly, we analyze the impact of data scaling, discuss early signs of emergent generalization capabilities enabled by diverse data training, analyze the risk of overfitting and language shortcuts, present a preliminary study on spatial chain-of-thought reasoning, and validate the potential downstream application. All newly trained multimodal foundation models are publicly released.

Despite progress in multimodal sarcasm detection, existing datasets and methods predominantly focus on single-image scenarios, overlooking potential semantic and affective relations across multiple images. This leaves a gap in modeling cases where sarcasm is triggered by multi-image cues in real-world settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMSD3.0, a new benchmark composed entirely of multi-image samples curated from tweets and Amazon reviews. We further propose a Cross-Image Reasoning Model (CIRM), integrating a Dual-Stage Bridge Module and Relevance-Guided Fusion Module to model inter-image dependencies and cross-modal correspondences. Complementarily, we establish a comprehensive suite of strong and representative baselines and conduct extensive experiments, showing that MMSD3.0 is an effective and reliable benchmark that better reflects real-world conditions. Moreover, CIRM demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across MMSD, MMSD2.0, and MMSD3.0, validating its effectiveness in both single-image and multi-image scenarios. Dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/ZHCMOONWIND/MMSD3.0.

This paper explores parallel thinking for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), aiming to improve Chain-of-Thought (CoT) through multiple diverse reasoning paths. We guide the model to list multiple visual key points and develop an independent reasoning path for each. Therefore, we term this method PointThinker, which is characterized by starting each thinking path with a point. PointThinker offers two key advantages. (1) It amplifies the benefits of parallel thinking. While parallel thinking naturally benefits from multiple reasoning paths, explicitly listing key points further amplifies these benefits by eliminating redundancy and promoting path diversity, enabling the model to explore problems from more varied perspectives. (2) It uses a novel dense (point-wise) reward for reinforcement learning. We observe that during parallel thinking, some points are helpful while others are invalid, yet popular methods assign them the same rewards. Therefore, we propose allocating differentiated rewards to different points within the same chain-of-thought. This is implemented via a self-verification mechanism called Group Points Policy Optimization (GPPO), which combines rollout-level and point-level validation for reward assignment. On challenging benchmarks such as HallusionBench, PointThinker achieves 58.7% accuracy, improving reasoning quality and answer accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that parallel thinking with point improves performance, and GPPO further contributes non-trivial gains.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have made them highly effective at reasoning tasks. However, the principles underlying the construction of performant VL reasoning training datasets remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce several data curation approaches and study their impacts on VL reasoning capabilities by carefully controlling training and evaluation setups. We analyze the effects of context (image and question pair) sources, implement targeted data interventions, and explore scaling up images, questions, and chain-of-thought (CoT) solutions. Our findings reveal that (a) context source strategies significantly affect VLM performance, (b) interventions such as auxiliary signals from image captions and the inclusion of text-only reasoning yield substantial gains, and (c) scaling all data dimensions (e.g., unique questions per image and unique CoTs per image-question pair) consistently improves reasoning capability. Motivated by these insights, we introduce HoneyBee, a large-scale, high-quality CoT reasoning dataset with 2.5M examples consisting 350K image-question pairs. VLMs trained with HoneyBee outperform state-of-the-art models across model sizes. For instance, a HoneyBee-trained VLM with 3B parameters outperforms the SOTA model and the base model by 7.8% and 24.8%, respectively, on MathVerse. Furthermore, we propose a test-time scaling strategy that reduces decoding cost by 73% without sacrificing accuracy. Overall, this work presents improved strategies for VL reasoning dataset curation research.

Large-scale video diffusion models exhibit strong world-simulation and temporal reasoning capabilities, yet their potential as zero-shot image editors remains underexplored. We present \ifedit IF-Edit (Image Edit by Generating Frames), a tuning-free framework that repurposes pre-trained image-to-video diffusion models for instruction-driven image editing. \ifedit IF-Edit addresses three core obstacles--prompt misalignment, redundant temporal latents, and blurry late-stage frames--via: (1) a Chain-of-Thought Prompt Enhancement module that reformulates static editing instructions into temporally grounded reasoning prompts; (2) a Temporal Latent Dropout strategy that compresses frame latents after the expert-switch point, accelerating denoising while preserving global semantics and temporal coherence; and (3) a Self-Consistent Post-Refinement step that refines the sharpest late-stage frame through a brief still-video trajectory, leveraging the video prior for sharper and more faithful results. Extensive experiments across four public benchmarks--covering non-rigid deformations, physical and temporal reasoning, and general instruction editing--show that \ifedit IF-Edit achieves strong performance on non-rigid and reasoning-centric tasks while remaining competitive on general-purpose edits. Our study offers a systematic view of video diffusion models as image editors, revealing their unique strengths, limitations, and a simple recipe for unified video-image generative reasoning.

As efficient alternatives to softmax Attention, linear state space models (SSMs) achieve constant memory and linear compute, but maintain only a lossy, fading summary of the past, often leading to inferior performance in recall oriented settings. We propose Gated KalmaNet (GKA), a layer that reduces this gap by accounting for the full past when predicting the next token, while maintaining SSM-style efficiency. GKA is inspired by the Kalman Filter and solves ridge regression problems online at test time, with constant memory and linear time in the sequence length. An insight is that standard Kalman filter equations are numerically unstable in low-precision environments (e.g., bfloat16) and difficult to parallelize on modern GPUs. We address both challenges via two innovations: (1) an adaptive regularization strategy with input-dependent gating that controls the condition number of the problem, ensuring numerical stability and balancing memory retention; (2) the use of Chebyshev Iteration instead of conventional iterative solvers, which we show to be more stable in low-precision settings. To improve scalability, we implement Chebyshev Iteration in a hardware-aware, chunk-wise manner, along with custom kernels for backpropagating through our adaptive regularization and gating mechanisms. On short-context tasks, GKA shows strong language understanding capabilities and outperforms existing SSMs (e.g., Mamba2, and Gated DeltaNet). On long-context tasks, GKA excels at real-world RAG and LongQA tasks up to 128k tokens with more than 10% relative improvement over baselines. Finally, we show GKA outperforms Mamba when extended for ImageNet classification.

Multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) are increasingly deployed for vision-language tasks that produce explicit intermediate rationales. However, reasoning traces can contain unsafe content even when the final answer is non-harmful, creating deployment risks. Existing multimodal safety guards primarily evaluate only the input question and the final answer, neglecting the intermediate reasoning process. This oversight allows undetected harm, such as biased inferences or policy-violating use of visual context, to emerge during reasoning. We introduce GuardTrace-VL, a vision-aware safety auditor that monitors the full Question-Thinking-Answer (QTA) pipeline via joint image-text analysis, enabling detection of unsafe content as it emerges in the reasoning stage. To support training and evaluation, we construct the GuardTrace dataset, which is generated through diverse prompting strategies and refined via a MLRM- and human-based voting and verification pipeline. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage progressive training scheme combined with the data refinement process, enabling the model to learn nuanced and context-dependent safety preferences according to different risk levels. On our proposed test set covering both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, GuardTrace-VL model achieves an F1 score of 93.1% on unsafe reasoning detection tasks, representing a 13.5% improvement in F1 score compared to the previous strongest multimodal safety defense methods.The codes is available at https://github.com/xiangyx2020/GuardTrace-VL.

The misuse of AI-driven video generation technologies has raised serious social concerns, highlighting the urgent need for reliable AI-generated video detectors. However, most existing methods are limited to binary classification and lack the necessary explanations for human interpretation. In this paper, we present Skyra, a specialized multimodal large language model (MLLM) that identifies human-perceivable visual artifacts in AI-generated videos and leverages them as grounded evidence for both detection and explanation. To support this objective, we construct ViF-CoT-4K for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which represents the first large-scale AI-generated video artifact dataset with fine-grained human annotations.We then develop a two-stage training strategy that systematically enhances our model's spatio-temporal artifact perception, explanation capability, and detection accuracy. To comprehensively evaluate Skyra, we introduce ViF-Bench, a benchmark comprising 3K high-quality samples generated by over ten state-of-the-art video generators. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Skyra surpasses existing methods across multiple benchmarks, while our evaluation yields valuable insights for advancing explainable AI-generated video detection. Our code, models, and datasets will be made publicly available.

In medical image segmentation tasks, the domain gap caused by the difference in data collection between training and testing data seriously hinders the deployment of pre-trained models in clinical practice. Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to enable pre-trained models to adapt to continuously changing unlabeled domains, providing an effective approach to solving this problem. However, existing CTTA methods often rely on unreliable supervisory signals, igniting a self-reinforcing cycle of error accumulation that culminates in catastrophic performance degradation. To overcome these challenges, we propose a CTTA via Semantic-Prompt-Enhanced Graph Clustering (SPEGC) for medical image segmentation. First, we design a semantic prompt feature enhancement mechanism that utilizes decoupled commonality and heterogeneity prompt pools to inject global contextual information into local features, alleviating their susceptibility to noise interference under domain shift. Second, based on these enhanced features, we design a differentiable graph clustering solver. This solver reframes global edge sparsification as an optimal transport problem, allowing it to distill a raw similarity matrix into a refined and high-order structural representation in an end-to-end manner. Finally, this robust structural representation is used to guide model adaptation, ensuring predictions are consistent at a cluster-level and dynamically adjusting decision boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPEGC outperforms other state-of-the-art CTTA methods on two medical image segmentation benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jwei-Z/SPEGC-for-MIS.

We present GR3D, a spatial vision language model equipped with three complementary grounding capabilities--explicit 2D grounding, implicit 2D grounding, and monocular 3D grounding--within a single framework. GR3D introduces an implicit grounding mechanism that identifies entity mentions during generation and inserts the corresponding region tokens into the text stream, allowing the model to reference visual evidence on the fly when producing spatial chain-of-thought responses. In parallel, a region-prompted monocular 3D grounding design predicts 3D bounding boxes in the camera view from grounded region queries, supported by intrinsic-aware normalization and dense geometric supervision. Together, these grounding capabilities enable GR3D to decompose complex spatial understanding problems into grounded 2D perception followed by 3D inference. GR3D achieves consistent improvements across grounded and non-grounded spatial benchmarks, demonstrating grounding as an effective inductive bias for strengthening spatial understanding in VLMs. These grounding capabilities collectively enhance general spatial understanding beyond the grounding task itself.

Spatial reasoning focuses on locating target objects based on spatial relations in 3D scenes, which plays a crucial role in developing intelligent embodied agents. Due to the limited availability of 3D scene-language paired data, it is challenging to train models with strong reasoning ability from scratch. Previous approaches have attempted to inject 3D scene representations into the input space of Large Language Models (LLMs) and leverage the pretrained comprehension and reasoning abilities for spatial reasoning. However, models encoding absolute positions struggle to extract spatial relations from prematurely fused features, while methods explicitly encoding all spatial relations (which is quadratic in the number of objects) as input tokens suffer from poor scalability. To address these limitations, we propose QuatRoPE, a novel positional embedding method with an input length that is linear to the number of objects, and explicitly calculates pairwise spatial relations through the dot product in attention layers. QuatRoPE's holistic vector encoding of 3D coordinates guarantees a high degree of spatial consistency, maintaining fidelity to the scene's geometric integrity. Additionally, we introduce the Isolated Gated RoPE Extension (IGRE), which effectively limits QuatRoPE's influence to object-related tokens, thereby minimizing interference with the LLM's existing positional embeddings and maintaining the LLM's original capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. The code and data are available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/QuatRoPE.

Complex video reasoning, actually, relies excessively on fine-grained perception rather than on expert (e.g., Ph.D, Science)-level reasoning.Through extensive empirical observation, we have recognized the critical impact of perception.In particular, when perception ability is almost fixed, enhancing reasoning from Qwen3-8B to OpenAI-o3 yields only 0.7% performance improvement. Conversely, even minimal change in perception model scale (from 7B to 32B) boosts performance by 1.4%, indicating enhancing perception, rather than reasoning, is more critical to improve performance.Therefore, exploring how to enhance perception ability through reasoning without the need for expensive fine-grained annotation information is worthwhile.To achieve this goal, we specially propose APPO, the Attention-guided Perception Policy Optimization algorithm that leverages token-level dense rewards to improve model's fine-grained perception.The core idea behind APPO is to optimize those tokens from different responses that primarily focus on the same crucial video frame (called intra-group perception tokens).Experimental results on diverse video benchmarks and models with different scales (3/7B) demonstrate APPO consistently outperforms GRPO and DAPO (0.5% 4%). We hope our work provides a promising approach to effectively enhance model's perception abilities through reasoning in a low-cost manner, serving diverse scenarios and demands.

Advances in large reasoning models have shown strong performance on complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute through extended inference-time thinking. However, recent studies observe that in vision-dependent tasks, extended textual reasoning at inference time can often degrade performance as models progressively lose attention to visual tokens, increasingly relying on textual priors alone. To address this, prior works used reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning to route visual tokens or employ refocusing mechanisms during reasoning. While effective, these methods are computationally expensive, requiring large-scale data generation and policy optimization. To leverage the benefits of inference-time compute without additional RL fine-tuning, we propose VisRef, a visually grounded test-time scaling framework. Our key idea is to actively guide the reasoning process through re-injecting a coreset of visual tokens that are semantically relevant to the reasoning context yet diverse and globally representative of the image for more grounded multi-modal reasoning. Experiments on three visual reasoning benchmarks with state-of-the-art multi-modal large reasoning models demonstrate that under fixed inference-time compute budgets, VisRef consistently outperforms existing test-time scaling approaches by up to 6.4%.