CVPR 2026 Papers

Articulated object pose estimation is a core task in embodied AI and computer vision. Existing methods typically regress poses in a continuous space, but often struggle with 1) navigating a large, complex search space and 2) failing to incorporate intrinsic kinematic constraints. In this paper, we introduce DICArt (DIsCrete Diffusion for Articulated Object Pose Estimation), a novel framework that formulates pose estimation as a conditional discrete diffusion process. Instead of operating in a continuous domain, DICArt progressively denoises a noisy pose representation through a learned reverse diffusion procedure to recover the ground-truth pose.To improve modeling fidelity, we propose a flexible flow decider that dynamically determines whether each token should be denoised or reset, effectively balancing the real and noise distributions during diffusion. Additionally, we incorporate a hierarchical kinematic coupling strategy, estimating the pose of each rigid part hierarchically to respect the object's kinematic structure.We validate DICArt on both synthetic and real-world datasets with multi-hinged articulated objects. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance and robustness over state-of-the-art baselines. By integrating discrete generative modeling with structural priors, DICArt offers a new paradigm for reliable category-level 6D pose estimation in complex environments. Codewill be publicly available upon acceptance.

Modern vision-language models (VLMs) are expected to have abilities of spatial reasoning with diverse scene complexities, but evaluating such abilities is difficult due to the lack of benchmarks that are not only diverse and scalable but also fully customizable. Existing benchmarks offer limited customizability over the scene complexity and are incapable of isolating and analyzing specific VLM failure modes under distinct spatial conditions. To address this gap, instead of individually presenting benchmarks for different scene complexities, in this paper we present InfiniBench, a fully automated, customizable and user-friendly benchmark generator that can synthesize a theoretically infinite variety of 3D scenes with parameterized control on scene complexity. InfiniBench uniquely translates scene descriptions in natural language into photo-realistic videos with complex and physically plausible 3D layouts. This is achieved through three key innovations: 1) a LLM-based agentic framework that iteratively refines procedural scene constraints from scene descriptions; 2) a flexible cluster-based layout optimizer that generates dense and cluttered scenes previously intractable for procedural methods; and 3) a task-aware camera trajectory optimization method that renders scenes into videos with full object coverage as VLM input. Experiments demonstrate that InfiniBench outperforms state-of-the-art procedural and LLM-based 3D generation methods in prompt fidelity and physical plausibility, especially in high-complexity scenarios. We further showcased the usefulness of InfiniBench, by generating benchmarks for representative spatial reasoning tasks including measurement, perspective-taking and spatiotemporal tracking. The source codes of InfiniBench are available at https://github.com/pittisl/infinibench, and some sample benchmarks being generated by InfiniBench are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Haoming645/infinibench.

Earth observation data presents a unique challenge: it is spatial like images, sequential like video or text, and highly multimodal. We present Helios: a multimodal, spatio-temporal foundation model that employs a novel self-supervised learning formulation, masking strategy, and loss all designed for the Earth observation domain. Helios achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to 12 other foundation models across a variety of research benchmarks and real-world tasks from external partners. When evaluating embeddings Helios achieves the best performance on 15 out of 24 tasks, and with full fine-tuning it is the best on 19 of 29 tasks. We deploy Helios as the backbone of an end-to-end platform for data collection, labeling, training, and inference of Earth observation models. The Helios platform puts frontier foundation models and powerful data management tools into the hands of non-profits and NGOs working to solve the world's biggest problems. Helios source code, training data, and pre-trained weights are available at REDACTED.

Despite recent advances in personalized image generation, existing models consistently fail to produce reliable multi-human scenes, often merging or losing facial identity. We present Ar2Can, a novel two-stage framework that disentangles spatial planning from identity rendering for multi-human generation. The Architect predicts structured layouts, specifying where each person should appear. The Artist then synthesizes photorealistic images, guided by a spatially-grounded face matching reward that combines Hungarian spatial alignment with identity similarity. This approach ensures faces are rendered at correct locations and faithfully preserve reference identities. We develop two Architect variants, seamlessly integrated with our diffusion-based Artist model. This is optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using compositional rewards for count accuracy, image quality, and identity matching. Evaluated on the MultiHuman-Testbench, Ar2Can achieves substantial improvements in both count accuracy and identity preservation, while maintaining high perceptual quality. Notably, our method achieves these results using primarily synthetic data, without requiring real multi-human images. Project page: https://qualcomm-ai-research.github.io/ar2can/

This work tackles a key challenge in test-time energy adaptation: prohibitive time overhead arising from recent state-of-the-art test-time adaptation (TTA) methods, which are built on energy models relying on iterative Monte Carlo or Langevin dynamics sampling with multiple stochastic updates per test instance to approximate energy gradients. We tackle the problem from an innovative control system perspective by i) describing the energy as a complex-valued wave, where the amplitude encodes energy uncertainty and the phase characterizes its evolution, and ii) maintaining a time-dependent wave equation that interprets TTA as a control system evolution process. By enforcing the control system law of probability current conservation, our method directs probability current away from high-energy (error-prone) regions toward low-energy (accurate) ones, achieving adaptive energy redistribution without additional stochastic sampling while preserving the overall normalization of the energy landscape. Experimentally, the proposed method significantly outperforms baseline methods across several public benchmark datasets, with adaptive time being only 1/3 1/7 of that required by the compared Top-1 to Top-3 baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/wongzbb/APT.

We propose Bijective Universal Scene-Specific Anomalous Relationship Detection (BUSSARD), a normalizing flow-based model for detecting anomalous relations in scene graphs, generated from images. Our work follows a multimodal approach, embedding object and relationship tokens from scene graphs with a language model to leverage semantic knowledge from the real world. A normalizing flow model is used to learn bijective transformations that map object-relation-object triplets from scene graphs to a simple base distribution (typically Gaussian), allowing anomaly detection through likelihood estimation. We evaluate our approach on the SARD dataset containing office and dining room scenes. Our method achieves around 10% better AUROC results compared to the current state-of-the-art model, while simultaneously being five times faster. Through ablation studies, we demonstrate superior robustness and universality, particularly regarding the use of synonyms, with our model maintaining stable performance while the baseline shows 17.5% deviation. This work demonstrates the strong potential of learning-based methods for relationship anomaly detection in scene graphs. Our code is available at https://github.com/mschween/BUSSARD.

Many audio-visual learning methods have focused on aligning audio and visual information, either through semantic or temporal correspondence. However, most of these works have utilized monaural audio, which does not contain information about the spatial location of the sound source. In contrast, humans and other animals utilize binaural hearing to perceive this spatial information. Combining spatial sound and visual perception enables powerful high-level reasoning: for example, a person looking for their phone may hear the ringing sound coming from a backpack sitting on a table, and quickly infer that the missing phone is inside the backpack. In this paper, we investigate the problem of Audio-Visual Spatial Reasoning. We design a spatial audio-visual question answering dataset to cover scenarios where semantic correspondence between audio and visual signals is absent but spatial alignment exists, as well as cases with multiple audio-visual semantic correspondences that require spatial reasoning to disambiguate. We propose a model that learns spatial comprehension across the audio and vision modalities by connecting them with a large language model and experimentally demonstrate that spatial sound perception is an essential part of our task.

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a significant paradigm for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), using a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) for new task adaptation. However, its performance is sensitive to demonstration configurations and computationally expensive. Mathematically, the influence of these demonstrations can be decomposed into a dynamic mixture of the standard attention output and the context values. Current approximation methods simplify this process by learning a "shift vector". Inspired by the exact decomposition, we introduce High-Fidelity In-Context Learning (HiFICL) to more faithfully model the ICL mechanism. HiFICL consists of three key components: 1) a set of "virtual key-value pairs" to act as a learnable context, 2) a low-rank factorization for stable and regularized training, and 3) a simple end-to-end training objective. From another perspective, this mechanism constitutes a form of context-aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). Extensive experiments show that HiFICL consistently outperforms existing approximation methods on several multimodal benchmarks.

Diffusion-based video super-resolution (VSR) achieves remarkable fidelity but suffers from prohibitive sampling cost. While distribution matching distillation (DMD) accelerates diffusion models to one-step generation, directly applying it to VSR leads to training instability and degraded, insufficient supervision.To address these issues, we propose DUO-VSR, a three-stage framework centered on a DUal-Stream Distillation strategy that integrates distribution matching and adversarial supervision for One-step VSR.We first adopt a Progressive Guided Distillation Initialization to stabilize subsequent training through trajectory-preserving distillation.We then introduce a Dual-Stream Distillation Strategy to jointly optimize DMD and Real-Fake Score Feature GAN (RFS-GAN) streams, with the latter providing complementary adversarial supervision using features from both real and fake score models.Finally, a Preference-Guided Refinement aligns the student with perceptual quality preferences.Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that DUO-VSR achieves superior visual quality and efficiency over previous one-step VSR methods.

Recent advances in text-to-video diffusion models have enabled high-fidelity and temporally coherent video synthesis. However, current models are predominantly optimized for single-event generation. When handling multi-event prompts, without explicit temporal grounding, such models often produce blended or collapsed scenes that break the intended narrative. To address this limitation, we present SwitchCraft, a training-free framework for multi-event video generation. Our key insight is that uniform prompt injection across time ignores the correspondence between events and frames. To this end, we introduce Event-Aligned Query Steering (EAQS), which steers frame-level attention to align with relevant event prompts. Furthermore, we propose Auto-Balance Strength Solver (ABSS), which adaptively balances steering strength to preserve temporal consistency and visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SwitchCraft substantially improves prompt alignment, event clarity, and scene consistency compared with existing baselines, offering a simple yet effective solution for multi-event video generation.

Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for each neuron remains challenging in practice: excessive sparsity might lead to poor reconstruction, whereas insufficient sparsity harms interpretability. While existing activation functions such as ReLU and TopK provide certain sparsity guarantees, they typically require additional sparsity regularization or cherry-picked hyperparameters. We show in this paper that adaptive sparse attention mechanisms using sparsemax can bridge this trade-off, due to their ability to determine the number of concepts in a data-dependent manner.Specifically, we first explore a new class of SAEs based on the cross-attention architecture with the latent features as queries and the learnable dictionary as the key and value matrices. To encourage sparse pattern learning, we employ a sparsemax-based attention strategy that automatically infers a sparse set of concepts according to the complexity of each neuron, resulting in a more flexible and efficient activation function. Through comprehensive evaluation and visualization, we show that our approach successfully achieves lower reconstruction loss while producing high-quality concepts. Moreover, the sparsity level automatically determined by our approach can serve as tuning guidance to improve existing SAEs. The code is available at https://github.com/qyj-bkjx/Sparsemax-SAE.

Text-conditioned human motion in-betweening leverages keyframes for spatio-temporal control, with text providing high-level semantic guidance for the transitions. However, existing methods are unable to establish a coherent alignment between textual semantics and the spatio-temporal constraints provided by keyframes, often resulting in insufficiently constrained motions with unintended behavior. Moreover, they struggle with precise spatial control, often generating motions that deviate from keyframe constraints. To address these issues, we propose a multi-level diffusion framework that integrates textual semantics with implicit cues from keyframe sequences to modulate global motion dynamics, while leveraging individual keyframes to guide local transitions around them. During inference, to ensure strict keyframe adherence, we propose a novel trajectory refinement strategy that adjusts the root positions of the generated motion, followed by diffusion imputation to refine the poses of the generated keyframes. Additionally, our framework enables semantics-preserving motion editing, allowing for plausible modifications while retaining the original motion semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates high-quality motions that strictly satisfy keyframe constraints while achieving precise semantic alignment.

The rapid advancement of educational applications, artistic creation, and AI-generated content (AIGC) technologies has substantially increased practical requirements for comprehensive Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA), particularly demanding methods capable of delivering both quantitative scoring and professional understanding. Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based IAA methods demonstrate stronger perceptual and generalization capabilities compared to traditional approaches, yet they suffer from modality bias (score-only or text-only) and lack fine-grained attribute decomposition, thereby failing to support further aesthetic assessment. In this paper, we present: (1) ArtiMuse, an innovative MLLM-based IAA model with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding capabilities; (2) ArtiMuse-10K, the first expert-curated IAA dataset comprising 10,000 images spanning 5 main categories and 15 subcategories, each annotated by professional experts with 8-dimensional attributes analysis and a holistic score. Both the model and dataset will be made public.

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.

Diffusion-based planners have emerged as a promising approach for human-like trajectory generation in autonomous driving. Recent works incorporate reinforcement fine-tuning to enhance the robustness of diffusion planners through reward-oriented optimization in a generation-evaluation loop. However, they struggle to generate multi-modal, scenario-adaptive trajectories, hindering the exploitation efficiency of informative rewards during fine-tuning. To resolve this, we propose PlannerRFT, a sample-efficient reinforcement fine-tuning framework for diffusion-based planners. PlannerRFT adopts a dual-branch optimization that simultaneously refines the trajectory distribution and adaptively guides the denoising process toward more promising exploration, without altering the original inference pipeline. To support parallel learning at scale, we develop nuMax, an optimized simulator that achieves 10 times faster rollout compared to native nuPlan. Extensive experiments shows that PlannerRFT yields state-of-the-art performance with distinct behaviors emerging during the learning process.

MLLMs are beginning to appear in clinical workflows, but their ability to perform complex medical reasoning remains unclear. We present Med-CMR, a fine-grained Medical Complex Multimodal Reasoning benchmark. Med-CMR distinguishes from existing counterparts by three core features: 1) Systematic capability decomposition, splitting medical multimodal reasoning into fine-grained visual understanding and multi-step reasoning to enable targeted evaluation; 2) Challenging task design, with visual understanding across three key dimensions (small-object detection, fine-detail discrimination, spatial understanding) and reasoning covering four clinically relevant scenarios (temporal prediction, causal reasoning, long-tail generalization, multi-source integration); 3) Broad, high-quality data coverage, comprising 20,653 Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs spanning 11 organ systems and 12 imaging modalities, validated via a rigorous two-stage (human expert + model-assisted) review to ensure clinical authenticity. We evaluate 18 state-of-the-art MLLMs with Med-CMR, revealing GPT-5 as the top-performing commercial model: 57.81 accuracy on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and a 48.70 open-ended score, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro (49.87 MCQ accuracy, 45.98 open-ended score) and leading open-source model Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B (49.34 MCQ accuracy, 42.62 open-ended score). However, specialized medical MLLMs do not reliably outperform strong general models, and long-tail generalization emerges as the dominant failure mode. Med-CMR thus provides a stress test for visual-reasoning integration and rare-case robustness in medical MLLMs, and a rigorous yardstick for future clinical systems.

With the rapid progress in diffusion models, image synthesis has advanced to the stage of zero-shot image-to-image generation, where high-fidelity replication of facial identities or artistic styles can be achieved using just one portrait or artwork, without modifying any model weights. Although these techniques significantly enhance creative possibilities, they also pose substantial risks related to intellectual property violations, including unauthorized identity cloning and stylistic imitation. To counter such threats, this work presents Adapter Shield, the first universal and authentication-integrated solution aimed at defending personal images from misuse in zero-shot generation scenarios. We first investigate how current zero-shot methods employ image encoders to extract embeddings from input images, which are subsequently fed into the UNet of diffusion models through cross-attention layers. Inspired by this mechanism, we construct a reversible encryption system that maps original embeddings into distinct encrypted representations according to different secret keys. The authorized users can restore the authentic embeddings via a decryption module and the correct key, enabling normal usage for authorized generation tasks. For protection purposes, we design a multi-target adversarial perturbation method that actively shifts the original embeddings toward designated encrypted patterns. Consequently, protected images are embedded with a defensive layer that ensures unauthorized users can only produce distorted or encrypted outputs. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art defenses in blocking unauthorized zero-shot image synthesis, while supporting flexible and secure access control for verified users.

The adoption of vision neural networks in regulated industries requires formal robustness guarantees, especially in safety-critical domains such as healthcare, autonomous vehicles, and aerospace. However, current approaches are confined to incomplete statistical verification or robustness to p-norm and affine transforms, which cover only a narrow subset of perturbations to the image formation process. In particular, robustness to camera motion remains an open problem despite being key to deploy many vision applications. We present a formal verification approach that targets robustness against 3D motion perturbations of the capturing camera. We first establish a closed-form mapping from camera pose to pixel values. By analyzing the continuity properties of the resulting homographies, we show that recent work on Lipschitz optimization and piecewise continuity can be extended to derive tight linear bounds on perturbed pixel values. Our approach applies to scenes with predominantly planar structure, such as ground planes in augmented reality, road markings and traffic signs in autonomous driving, or planar workspaces in robotic manipulation. This enables the first formal verification of projective geometry transforms, without complex simulation, surrogate networks, or explicit image-formation models. Our implementation achieves up to 89% speedup and 7% tighter bounds over prior work. We evaluate our method on the VNN-COMP benchmark and reveal systematic weaknesses to projective perturbations. Finally, we demonstrate a real-world case study on a safety-critical runway classifier, addressing a key challenge in the certification of learned models. Data and code are available at https://github.com/jeangud/homography-verification.

3D vision foundation models like Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) have advanced greatly in geometric perception. However it is time-consuming and memory-intensive for long sequences, limiting application to large-scale scenes beyond hundreds of images. To address this, we propose LiteVGGT, achieving up to 10x speedup and substantial memory reduction, enabling efficient processing of 1000-image scenes. We derive two key insights for 3D reconstruction: 1) tokens from local image regions have inherent geometric correlations, leading to high similarity and computational redundancy; 2) token similarity across adjacent network layers remains stable, allowing for reusable merge decisions. Guided by these, we design a simple yet efficient strategy, dubbed geometry-aware cached token merging . We analyze each token's geometric importance, optimizing anchor token selection to better preserve key information for reconstruction. We also cache and reuse merge indices across layers, substantially reducing latency with minimal accuracy impact. This strategy retains VGGT's core performance, enabling efficient fine-tuning and FP8 quantization for further gains. Extensive experiments validate LiteVGGT's effectiveness, scalability, and robustness.