CVPR 2026 Papers

Self-reflection mechanisms that rely on purely text-based rethinking processes perform well in most multimodal tasks. However, when directly applied to long-form video understanding scenarios, they exhibit clear limitations. The fundamental reasons for this lie in two points: (1) long-form video understanding involves richer and more dynamic visual input, meaning rethinking only the text information is insufficient and necessitates a further rethinking process specifically targeting visual information; (2) purely text-based reflection mechanisms lack cross-modal interaction capabilities, preventing them from fully integrating visual information during reflection. Motivated by these insights, we propose REVISOR (REflective VIsual Segment Oriented Reasoning), a novel framework for tool-augmented multimodal reflection. REVISOR enables MLLMs to collaboratively construct introspective reflection processes across textual and visual modalities, significantly enhancing their reasoning capability for long-form video understanding. To ensure that REVISOR can learn to accurately review video segments highly relevant to the question during reinforcement learning, we designed the Dual Attribution Decoupled Reward (DADR) mechanism. Integrated into the GRPO training strategy, this mechanism enforces causal alignment between the model's reasoning and the selected video evidence. Notably, the REVISOR framework significantly enhances long-form video understanding capability of MLLMs without requiring supplementary supervised fine-tuning or external models, achieving impressive results on four benchmarks including VideoMME, LongVideoBench, MLVU, and LVBench.

Medical visual grounding serves as a crucial foundation for fine-grained multimodal reasoning and interpretable clinical decision support. Despite recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) for grounding tasks, existing approaches such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) suffer from severe reward sparsity when directly applied to medical images, primarily due to the inherent difficulty of localizing small or ambiguous regions of interest, which is further exacerbated by the rigid and suboptimal nature of fixed IoU-based reward schemes in RL. This leads to vanishing policy gradients and stagnated optimization, particularly during early training. To address this challenge, we propose MedLoc-R1, a performance-aware reward scheduling framework that progressively tightens the reward criterion in accordance with model readiness. MedLoc-R1 introduces a sliding-window performance tracker and a multi-condition update rule that automatically adjust the reward schedule from dense, easily obtainable signals to stricter, fine-grained localization requirements, while preserving the favorable properties of GRPO without introducing auxiliary networks or additional gradient paths. Experiments on three medical visual grounding benchmarks demonstrate that MedLoc-R1 consistently improves both localization accuracy and training stability over GRPO-based baselines. Our framework offers a general, lightweight, and effective solution for RL-based grounding in high-stakes medical applications. Code and checkpoints will be released after acceptance.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) delivered the first image of a black hole by capturing the light from its surrounding accretion flow, revealing structure but not dynamics. Simulations of black hole accretion dynamics are essential for interpreting EHT images but costly to generate and impractical for inference. Motivated by this bottleneck, BHCast presents a framework for forecasting black hole plasma dynamics from a single, blurry snapshot, such as those captured by the EHT. At its core, BHCast is a neural model that transforms a static image into forecasted future frames, revealing the underlying dynamics hidden within one snapshot. With a multi-scale pyramid loss, we demonstrate how autoregressive forecasting can simultaneously super-resolve and evolve a blurry frame into a coherent, high-resolution movie that remains stable over long time horizons. From forecasted dynamics, we can then extract interpretable spatio-temporal features, such as pattern speed (rotation rate) and pitch angle. Finally, BHCast uses gradient-boosting trees to recover black hole properties from these plasma features, including the spin and viewing inclination angle. The separation between forecasting and inference provides modular flexibility, interpretability, and robust uncertainty quantification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BHCast on simulations of two distinct black hole accretion systems, Sagittarius A* and M87*, by testing on simulated frames blurred to EHT resolution and real EHT images of M87*. Ultimately, our methodology establishes a scalable paradigm for solving inverse problems, demonstrating the potential of learned dynamics to unlock insights from resolution-limited scientific data.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown considerable potential in chart understanding and reasoning tasks. However, they still struggle with high information density (HID) charts characterized by multiple subplots, legends, and dense annotations due to three major challenges: (1) limited fine-grained perception results in the omission of critical visual cues; (2) redundant or noisy visual information undermines the performance of multimodal reasoning; (3) lack of adaptive deep reasoning relative to the amount of visual information. To tackle these challenges, we present a novel focus-driven fine-grained chart reasoning model, Chart-FR1, to improve perception, focusing efficiency, and adaptive deep reasoning on HID charts. Specifically, we propose Focus-CoT, a visual focusing chain-of-thought that enhances fine-grained perception by explicitly linking reasoning steps to key visual cues, such as local image regions and OCR signals. Building on this, we introduce Focus-GRPO, a focus-driven reinforcement learning algorithm with an information-efficiency reward that compresses redundant visual information for efficient focusing, and an adaptive KL penalty mechanism that enables flexible control over reasoning depth as more visual cues are discovered. Furthermore, to fill the gap in benchmarks for HID charts, we build HID-Chart, a challenging benchmark with an information-density metric designed to evaluate fine-grained chart reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments on multiple chart benchmarks demonstrate that Chart-FR1 outperforms state-of-the-art MLLMs in chart understanding and reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/phkhub/Chart-FR1.

Segmenting small lesions in medical images remains notoriously difficult. Most prior work tackles this challenge by either designing better architectures, loss functions, or data augmentation schemes; and collecting more labeled data. We take a different view, arguing that part of the problem lies in how the background is modeled. Common lesion segmentation collapses all non-lesion pixels into a single "background" class, ignoring the rich anatomical context in which lesions appear. In reality, the background is highly heterogeneous--composed of tissues, organs, and other structures that can now be labeled manually or inferred automatically using existing segmentation models.In this paper, we argue that training with fine-grained labels that sub-divide the background class, which we call BackSplit, is a simple yet powerful paradigm that can offer a significant performance boost without increasing inference costs. From an information theoretic standpoint, we prove that BackSplit increases the expected Fisher Information relative to conventional binary training, leading to tighter asymptotic bounds and more stable optimization. With extensive experiments across multiple datasets and architectures, we empirically show that BackSplit consistently boosts small-lesion segmentation performance, even when auxiliary labels are generated automatically using pretrained segmentation models. Additionally, we demonstrate that auxiliary labels derived from interactive segmentation frameworks exhibit the same beneficial effect, demonstrating its robustness, simplicity, and broad applicability.

Despite recent advances in multimodal reasoning, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle on complex tasks where initial visual perceptions can be misleading. This performance gap stems from a critical reasoning flaw we term Visual Inertia: while MLLMs excel at iterative reflection in textual contexts, they tend to uncritically commit to their initial visual interpretations and rarely revise them. To overcome this limitation, we introduce GThinker, an MLLM equipped with a novel adaptive visual rethinking capability. GThinker leverages Cue-Rethinking, a flexible reasoning pattern that not only grounds reasoning in visual cues but also strategically triggers a re-examination of these cues to resolve inconsistencies. To instill this capability, we introduce a novel two-stage training framework. It begins with a pattern-guided cold start, enhanced by a judge-guided selective mechanism to learn from failure cases, followed by incentive reinforcement learning. We further curate the GThinker-11K dataset to power the training with an iterative multimodal annotation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GThinker significantly mitigates visual inertia during reasoning, achieving a leading 81.5% on the M3CoT benchmark, which is rich in such challenges, surpassing the powerful o4-mini model. Furthermore, GThinker shows consistent improvements across a range of multimodal reasoning benchmarks with an average gain of 2.1%, showcasing the broad benefits of equipping MLLMs with the ability to rethink both what they see and how they think. Data, model, and code are available at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/GThinker.

Supervised open-loop training has been widely adopted for training traffic simulation models; however, it fails to capture the inherently dynamic, multi-agent interactions common in complex driving scenarios. We introduce RLFTSim, a reinforcement-learning-based fine-tuning framework that enhances scenario realism by aligning simulator rollouts with real-world data distributions and provides a method for distilling goal-conditioned controllability in scenario generation. We instantiate RLFTSim on top of a pre-trained simulation model, design a reward that balances fidelity and controllability, and perform comprehensive experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset. Our results show improvements in realism, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Compared with other heuristic search-based fine-tuning methods, RLFTSim requires significantly fewer samples due to a proposed low-variance and dense reward signal, and it directly addresses the realism alignment issue by design. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for distilling traffic simulation controllability through goal conditioning. Project page is available at https://ehsan-ami.github.io/rlftsim.

Long-form video reasoning remains a major challenge for Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs), as static uniform frame sampling leads to information dilution and obscures critical evidence. Furthermore, existing pixel-space video reasoning agents, which are designed to actively interact with the video to acquire new visual information, remain suboptimal due to their lack of rigorous reward mechanisms to enforce evidence purity and their inability to perform temporal information supplementation beyond pre-sampled frames. To address this critical gap, we propose a novel evidence-prioritized adaptive framework built upon our core philosophy: "Select Less, Reason More." Our core contribution is the evidence-aware reinforcement learning (EARL) framework, which transforms the model into an active interrogator of evidence. EARL is precisely engineered to dynamically select the most relevant frames and, crucially, to perform localized re-sampling around the selected key frames to access fine-grained temporal detail. Extensive experiments on five demanding video reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our EARL-trained model achieves new state-of-the-art among open-source Video LLMs, simultaneously learning an effective and high-purity visual evidence selection policy. Impressively, our 7B model achieves 59.8% on LongVideoBench, 69.0% on MVBench and 64.9% on VideoMME. These results highlight the importance of prioritizing evidence purity and the effectiveness of our framework.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a critical paradigm for grounding Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in external knowledge. Recent GraphRAG methods introduce structured entity-relation graphs to improve retrieval and reasoning. However, they remain limited by treating knowledge graphs as static data structures built offline and queried in a single pass. This static paradigm misaligns with the interactive, iterative nature of knowledge-intensive reasoning, creating three bottlenecks: (i) text-centric fragmentation that impedes cross-modal reasoning, (ii) frozen structures unable to incorporate new evidence or correct errors, and (iii) rigid single-pass retrieval without adaptive refinement. To overcome these limitations, we introduce EvoGraph-R1, a self-evolving GraphRAG framework that reconceptualizes knowledge graphs as dynamic environments shaped through agent interactions.We formulate retrieval as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) where the agent observes the graph state and executes actions to query (GraphRetrieve), expand (WebSearch), refine (GraphEdit), or terminate (Answer) the reasoning. These actions reshape the hypergraph structure and generate feedback signals that guide subsequent evolution.Through this closed loop, the hypergraph evolves by integrating new evidence, correcting errors, and refining structure to support multi-hop reasoning. Experiments on multimodal VQA and text QA benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements over existing RAG baselines in accuracy, coverage, and traceability, establishing self-evolving knowledge graphs as a fundamental paradigm across modalities.

Recent advancements in computer vision have accelerated the development of autonomous driving. Despite these advancements, training machines to drive in a way that aligns with human expectations remains a significant challenge. Human factors are still essential, as humans possess a sophisticated cognitive system capable of rapidly interpreting scene information and making accurate decisions. Aligning machine with human intent has been explored with Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). Conventional RLHF methods rely on collecting human preference data by manually ranking AI-generated outputs, which is time-consuming and indirect. In this work, we propose an electroencephalography (EEG)-guided decision-making framework to incorporate human cognitive insights into reinforcement learning (RL) for autonomous driving. We collected EEG signals from 20 participants in a realistic driving simulator and analyzed event-related potentials (ERP) in response to sudden environmental changes. Our proposed framework employs a neural network to predict the strength of ERP based on the cognitive information from visual scene information. Moreover, we explore the integration of such cognitive information into the reward signal of the RL algorithm. Experimental results show that our framework can improve the collision avoidance ability of the RL algorithm, highlighting the potential of neuro-cognitive feedback in enhancing autonomous driving systems.

Text-to-image generation powers content creation across design, media, and data augmentation. Post-training of text-to-image generative models is a promising path to improve human preference alignment, factuality, and aesthetics. We introduce SOLACE (Self-Originating LAtent Confidence Estimation), a post-training framework that replaces external reward supervision with an internal self-confidence signal: we re-noise the model's own outputs and measure how accurately it recovers the injected noise, treating low reconstruction error as high self-confidence. SOLACE converts this intrinsic signal into scalar rewards for reinforcement learning, requiring no external reward models, annotators, or preference data. By reinforcing high-confidence generations, SOLACE delivers consistent gains in compositional generation, text rendering, and text-image alignment. Integrating SOLACE with external rewards yields complementary improvements while alleviating reward hacking.

Video reasoning segmentation (VRS) endeavors to delineate referred objects in videos guided by implicit instructions that encapsulate human intent and temporal logic. Previous approaches leverage large vision language models (LVLMs) to encode object semantics into \SEG tokens for mask prediction. However, this paradigm suffers from limited interpretability during inference and suboptimal performance due to inadequate spatiotemporal reasoning. Drawing inspiration from seminal breakthroughs in reinforcement learning, we introduce Veason-R1, a specialized LVLM for VRS that emphasizes structured reasoning in segmentation. Veason-R1 is trained through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) augmented with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) initialization. To begin with, we curate high-quality CoT training data to instill structured reasoning trajectories, bridging video-level semantics and frame-level spatial grounding, yielding the supervised fine-tuned model Veason-SFT. Subsequently, GRPO fine-tuning encourages efficient exploration of the reasoning space by optimizing reasoning chains. To this end, we incorporate a holistic reward mechanism that synergistically enhances spatial alignment and temporal consistency, bolstering keyframe localization and fine-grained grounding. Comprehensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that Veason-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, surpassing prior art by significant margins (e.g., +1.3 \mathcal J &\mathcal F in ReVOS and +10.0 \mathcal J &\mathcal F in ReasonVOS), while exhibiting robustness to hallucinations (+8.8 \mathcal R ).

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual question answering tasks, but their reliance on large numbers of visual tokens introduces significant computational overhead. While existing efficient VLM approaches reduce visual tokens through fixed-ratio compression, they operate passively and lack the ability to adapt to varying task requirements. This motivates a fundamental question: Can VLMs autonomously determine the minimum number of visual tokens required for each sample? Inspired by human active vision mechanisms, we introduce AdaptVision, an efficient VLM paradigm that enables adaptive visual token acquisition through a coarse-to-fine approach. Our model initially processes compressed visual tokens from low-resolution images and selectively acquires additional visual information by invoking a bounding box tool to crop key regions when necessary. We train AdaptVision using a reinforcement learning framework that carefully balances accuracy and efficiency. Central to our approach is Decoupled Turn Policy Optimization (DTPO), which decouples the learning objective into two components: (1) tool learning, which optimizes correct tool utilization, and (2) accuracy improvement, which refines the generated responses to improve answer correctness. Based on this formulation, we further decouple advantage estimation by computing separate advantages for tokens associated with each objective. This formulation enables more effective optimization for AdaptVision compared to vanilla GRPO. Comprehensive experiments across multiple VQA benchmarks demonstrate that AdaptVision achieves superior performance while consuming substantially fewer visual tokens than state-of-the-art efficient VLM methods.

Understanding hand-object interaction (HOI) is fundamental to computer vision, robotics, and AR/VR. However, conventional hand videos often lack essential physical information, such as contact forces and motion dynamics, and are prone to frequent occlusions. To address these challenges, we present Glove2Hand, a framework that translates multi-modal sensing glove data in HOI videos into photorealistic bare-hand representations, while faithfully preserving the underlying physical interaction dynamics. We introduce a novel 3D Gaussian hand model that ensures both temporal and multi-view rendering consistency. The rendered hand is seamlessly integrated into the scene using a diffusion-based hand restorer, which effectively handles complex hand-object interactions and non-rigid deformations. Leveraging Glove2Hand, we introduce HandSense, the first multi-modal HOI dataset featuring multi-view bare-hand videos with synchronized tactile and IMU signals. We demonstrate that HandSense significantly enhances downstream bare-hand applications, including video-based contact estimation and hand tracking under severe occlusion.

Recent advances in video reward models and post-training strategies have improved text-to-video (T2V) generation. While these models typically assess visual quality, motion quality, and text alignment, they often overlook key structural distortions, such as abnormal object appearances and interactions, which can degrade the overall quality of the generative video.To address this gap, we introduce REACT, a frame-level reward model designed specifically for structural distortions evaluation in generative videos. REACT assigns point-wise scores and attribution labels by reasoning over video frames, focusing on recognizing distortions. To support this, we construct a large-scale human preference dataset, annotated based on our proposed taxonomy of structural distortions, and generate additional data using a efficient Chain-of-Thought (CoT) synthesis pipeline. REACT is trained with a two-stage framework: (1) supervised fine-tuning with masked loss for domain knowledge injection, followed by (2) reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and pairwise rewards to enhance reasoning capability and align output scores with human preferences. During inference, a dynamic sampling mechanism is introduced to focus on frames most likely to exhibit distortion.We also present REACT-Bench, a benchmark for generative video distortion evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that REACT complements existing reward models in assessing structural distortion, achieving both accurate quantitative evaluations and interpretable attribution analysis.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated remarkable potential in enhancing the reasoning capability of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, RLVR often drives the policy toward over-determinism, resulting in ineffective exploration and premature policy convergence. While promoting token-level diversity has shown promise in mitigating entropy collapse, we argue that the latent dynamics underlying token generation encode a far richer computational structure for steering policy optimization toward a more effective exploration-exploitation tradeoff. To enable tractable analysis and intervention of the latent dynamics of LRMs, we leverage Koopman operator theory to obtain a linearized representation of their hidden state dynamics. This enables us to introduce Dynamic Spectral Dispersion (DSD), a new metric to quantify the heterogeneity of the model's latent dynamics, serving as a direct indicator of policy exploration. Building upon these foundations, we propose Reasoning with Latent eXploration (ReLaX), a framework that explicitly incorporates latent dynamics to regulate exploration and exploitation during policy optimization. Comprehensive experiments across a wide range of multimodal and text-only reasoning benchmarks show that ReLaX consistently incentivizes reasoning capability and outperforms existing token-level methods. Our project is available at https://github.com/ZhangShimin1/ReLaX.

Accurately estimating task progress is critical for embodied agents to plan and execute long-horizon, multi-step tasks. Despite promising advances, existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) based methods primarily leverage their video understanding capabilities, while neglecting their complex reasoning potential. Furthermore, processing long video trajectories with VLMs is computationally prohibitive for real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we propose the Recurrent Reasoning Vision-Language Model (\text R ^2VLM). Our model features a recurrent reasoning framework that processes local video snippets iteratively, maintaining a global context through an evolving Chain of Thought (CoT). This CoT explicitly records task decomposition, key steps, and their completion status, enabling the model to reason about complex temporal dependencies. This design avoids the high cost of processing long videos while preserving essential reasoning capabilities. We train \text R ^2VLM on large-scale, automatically generated datasets from ALFRED and Ego4D. Extensive experiments on progress estimation and downstream applications, including progress-enhanced policy learning, reward modeling for reinforcement learning, and proactive assistance, demonstrate that \text R ^2VLM achieves strong performance and generalization, achieving a new state-of-the-art in long-horizon task progress estimation. The models and benchmarks are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/collections/zhangyuelin/r2vlm.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable success in text and image generation, yet its potential in 3D generation remains largely unexplored. Existing attempts typically rely on offline direct preference optimization (DPO) method, which suffers from low training efficiency and limited generalization. In this work, we aim to enhance both the training efficiency and generation quality of RL in 3D mesh generation. Specifically, (1) we design the first asynchronous online RL framework tailored for 3D mesh generation post-training efficiency improvement, which is 3.75xfaster than synchronous RL. (2) We propose Advantage-guided Ranking Preference Optimization (ARPO), a novel RL algorithm that achieves a better trade-off between training efficiency and generalization than current RL algorithms designed for 3D mesh generation, such as DPO and group relative policy optimization (GRPO). (3) Based on asynchronous ARPO, we propose Mesh-Pro, which additionally introduces a novel diagonal-aware mixed triangular-quadrilateral tokenization for mesh representation and a ray-based reward for geometric integrity. Mesh-Pro achieves state-of-the-art performance on artistic and dense meshes.

A reliable reward function is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) in image generation. Most current RL approaches depend on pre-trained preference models that output scalar rewards to approximate human preferences. However, these rewards often fail to capture human perception and are vulnerable to reward hacking, where higher scores do not correspond to better images. To address this, we introduce Adv-GRPO, an RL framework with an adversarial reward that iteratively updates both the reward model and the generator. The reward model is supervised using reference images as positive samples and can largely avoid being hacked. Unlike KL regularization that constrains parameter updates, our learned reward directly guides the generator through its visual outputs, leading to higher-quality images. Moreover, while optimizing existing reward functions can alleviate reward hacking, their inherent biases remain. For instance, PickScore may degrade image quality, whereas OCR-based rewards often reduce aesthetic fidelity. To address this, we take the image itself as a reward, using reference images and vision foundation models (e.g., DINO) to provide rich visual rewards. These dense visual signals, instead of a single scalar, lead to consistent gains across image quality, aesthetics, and task-specific metrics. Finally, we show that combining reference samples with foundation-model rewards enables distribution transfer and flexible style customization. In human evaluation, our method outperforms Flow-GRPO and SD3, achieving 70.0% and 72.4% win rates in image quality and aesthetics, respectively. Code and models has been released in https://github.com/showlab/Adv-GRPO.