CVPR 2026 Papers

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Decision breakdown

4,042papers

Counted from the official paper list; may differ slightly from the number the conference announced.

  • Oral
    1383.4%
  • Poster
    3,90496.6%

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TopoSlide: Topologically-Informed Histopathology Whole Slide Image Representation Learning

Shahira Abousamra, Asmita Sood, Sylvia Plevritis

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Histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) are gigapixel images that present significant challenges in generating effective representations that capture both local histological features and their global spatial organization. Current pathology foundation models focus primarily on local patch-level features while neglecting the complex spatial relationships that pathologists rely on for diagnosis and prognosis. We introduce TopoSlide, a novel self-supervised representation learning framework that leverages persistent homology from topological data analysis to capture the global spatial organization of tissue architecture in WSIs. Our method decomposes slides into histologically meaningful clusters using patch-level embeddings, then characterizes their spatial arrangement through topological descriptors. We train a vision transformer to predict cluster topology from slide-level embeddings using a conditional multi-task objective that integrates local patch features with their topological attributes. Evaluated across lung adenocarcinoma and breast cancer cohorts, TopoSlide achieves superior performance improving histologic pattern retrieval by up to 15% in majority voting macro F1 score, and competitive survival and gene mutation predictions, while training on only hundreds of slides compared to hundreds of thousands for foundation models. Our results demonstrate that topology-aware learning provides a powerful inductive bias for pathology representation learning, enabling both improved performance and novel topology-based conditional retrieval capabilities for clinical applications. Our code and models are publicly available.

Poster
VideoWeaver: Multimodal Multi-View Video-to-Video Transfer for Embodied Agents

George Eskandar, Fengyi Shen, Mohammad Altillawi, Dong Chen, Yang Bai, Liudi Yang, Ziyuan Liu

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Recent progress in video-to-video (V2V) translation has enabled realistic resimulation of embodied AI demonstrations, a capability that allows pretrained robot policies to be transferable to new environments without additional data collection. However, prior works can only operate on a single view at a time, while embodied AI tasks are commonly captured from multiple synchronized cameras to support policy learning. Naively applying single-view models independently to each camera leads to inconsistent appearance across views, and standard transformer architectures do not scale to multi-view settings due to the quadratic cost of cross-view attention. We present VideoWeaver, the first multimodal multi-view V2V translation framework. VideoWeaver is initially trained as a single-view flow-based V2V model. To achieve an extension to the multi-view regime, we propose to ground all views in a shared 4D latent space derived from a feed-forward spatial foundation model, namely, Pi3. This encourages view-consistent appearance even under wide baselines and dynamic camera motion. To scale beyond a fixed number of cameras, we train views at distinct diffusion timesteps, enabling the model to learn both joint and conditional view distributions. This in turn allows autoregressive synthesis of new viewpoints conditioned on existing ones. Experiments show superior or similar performance to the state-of-the-art on the single-view translation benchmarks and, for the first time, physically and stylistically consistent multi-view translations, including challenging egocentric and heterogeneous-camera setups central to world randomization for robot learning.

Poster
InterRVOS: Interaction-Aware Referring Video Object Segmentation

Woojeong Jin, Seongchan Kim, Jaeho Lee, Seungryong Kim

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Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment objects in a video described by a natural language expression. However, most existing approaches focus only on the referred object (typically the actor), even when the expression clearly describes an interaction involving multiple objects with distinct roles. In this paper, we introduce Interaction-Aware Referring Video Object Segmentation (InterRVOS), a novel task that focuses on explicit interaction modeling by requiring separate segmentation of actor and target objects.This formulation enables fine-grained understanding of object relationships, as many video events are defined by such interactions rather than individual objects. We present InterRVOS-127K, a large-scale dataset of over 127K automatically annotated expressions with distinct actor-target mask pairs, and propose ReVIOSa, a MLLM-based architecture that introduces interaction-aware special tokens and attention mask loss (AML) to enhance interaction-aware segmentation. We also propose a new evaluation protocol that separately evaluates actor and target segmentation for more accurate role distinction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that ReVIOSa outperforms existing baselines on the proposed InterRVOS-127K benchmark, with further analyses validating the necessity and effectiveness of both ReVIOSa and InterRVOS-127K.

Poster
STUR3D: Spatio-Temporal Unified Representation Learning for 3D Object Detection

Huijie Fan, Pengrui Huang, Qiang Wang, Baojie Fan, Jiahua Dong, Liangqiong Qu

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Existing surrounding-view 3D object detectors initialize high-confidence queries using current 2D information, while leveraging historical 3D features as priors. However, such heavy reliance on 2D cues introduces spatio-temporal inconsistencies between 2D and 3D representations. Specifically, 2D cues lack sufficient spatial information, limiting 3D localization capability. Moreover, insufficient temporal interaction often leads to object omission under occlusion. To address these challenges, we propose STUR3D, a unified framework establishing spatio-temporal alignment between 2D and 3D perception. First, we project temporal 3D features to the 2D image plane, empowering the 2D detector to distill representations essential for 3D localization, harmonizing cross-dimensional information. Second, we inject temporal cues into 2D detection, fostering spatio-temporal reasoning, and ensuring robust 3D detection under dynamic scenes and occlusion. Additionally, we embed depth-aware geometric cues into features for 2D-to-3D lifting, mitigating inherent ambiguities. Extensive nuScenes experiments validate STUR3D, achieving SOTA on the test set with 57.9% mAP and 64.6% NDS.

Poster
Mitigating Instance Entanglement in Instance-Dependent Partial Label Learning

Rui Zhao, Bin Shi, Kai Sun, Bo Dong

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Partial label learning is a prominent weakly supervised classification task, where each training instance is ambiguously labeled with a set of candidate labels. In real-world scenarios, candidate labels are often influenced by instance features, leading to the emergence of instance-dependent PLL (ID-PLL), a setting that more accurately reflects this relationship. A significant challenge in ID-PLL is instance entanglement, where instances from similar classes share overlapping features and candidate labels, resulting in increased class confusion. To address this issue, we propose a novel Class-specific Augmentation based Disentanglement (CAD) framework, which tackles instance entanglement by both intra- and inter-class regulations. For intra-class regulation, CAD amplifies class-specific features to generate class-wise augmentations and aligns same-class augmentations across instances. For inter-class regulation, CAD introduces a weighted penalty loss function that applies stronger penalties to more ambiguous labels, encouraging larger inter-class distances. By jointly applying intra- and inter-class regulations, CAD improves the clarity of class boundaries and reduces class confusion caused by entanglement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CAD in mitigating the entanglement problem and enhancing ID-PLL performance. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanZhaoIc/CAD.git.

Poster
Multimodal Semantic Bias Mitigation for Diverse Text-To-3D Generation

Yukuan Min, Muli Yang, Jinhao Zhang, Yuxuan Wang, Yihang Zhu, Jiexi Yan, Cheng Deng

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The latest progress in text-to-3D generative models makes it possible to generate high-quality 3D content. Recent text-to-3D large model have achieved remarkable breakthroughs in multi-view consistency. However, their effectiveness is often affected by inherent biases, resulting in sensitivity to design settings such as prompt format, leading to difficulty understanding complex prompts. To help text-to3D generative models understand more diverse prompts, we propose a framework to localize and mitigate the bias in the current text-to-3D large model. Specifically, we first use the existing model to generate 3D content and use the quality evaluation model to identify the cross-modality bias. Then, we use the predicted quality score to quantify the contribution of the prompt text to the bias. Finally, in order to reduce these biases, we construct diverse pairwise examples to help the current text-to-3D large model construct unbiased visual-text connections. The experiment shows that our method has achieved competitive results and can provide higher quality, more diverse 3D content compared to existing methods.

Poster
PP-Brep: Few-Shot B-rep Classification with Hybrid Graph Representation

Jiacheng Hao, Chunying Liu, Hao Guo, Ruohan Wang, Hongping Gan, Yilei Shi

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In industrial settings, classification of 3D CAD models are critical for efficient manufacturing. However, the limited availability of annotated CAD models presents an obstacle to achieving rapid adaptation in few-shot part classification scenarios. In this paper, we propose a hybrid graph representation and a pre-training and graph prompt framework for B-rep few-shot classification. Specifically, hybrid graph representation captures comprehensive and multi-level structural information of B-rep models by constructing local topology graph, global parallel graph and regional association hypergraph. A hierarchical graph network then fuses component-level structures with topological details in the hybrid graph. Reinforcement-augmented contrastive pre-training produces robust universal representations while in-place perturbation reduces training time. Structure-aware graph prompts finally produce node-specific cues, enabling few-shot B-rep part classification without heavy fine-tuning. Experiments on the TraceParts-11and FabWave-31 datasets show that our method outperforms existing general-purpose approaches. This work provides an efficient and state-of-the-art solution for few-shot B-rep part classification.

Poster
SEBA: Sample-Efficient Black-Box Attacks on Visual Reinforcement Learning

Tairan Huang, Yulin Jin, Junxu Liu, Qingqing Ye, Haibo Hu

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Visual reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable progress in visual control and robotics, but its vulnerability to adversarial perturbations remains underexplored. Most existing black-box attacks focus on vector-based or discrete-action RL, and their effectiveness on image-based continuous control is limited by the large action space and excessive environment queries. We propose SEBA, a sample-efficient framework for black-box adversarial attacks on visual RL agents. SEBA integrates a shadow Q model that estimates cumulative rewards under adversarial conditions, a generative adversarial network that produces visually imperceptible perturbations, and a world model that simulates environment dynamics to reduce real-world queries. Through a two-stage iterative training procedure that alternates between learning the shadow model and refining the generator, SEBA achieves strong attack performance while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari benchmarks show that SEBA significantly reduces cumulative rewards, preserves visual fidelity, and greatly decreases environment interactions compared to prior black-box and white-box methods. The code is available at https://github.com/tairanhuang/seba online.

Poster
Aligning Multi-Character Narrative Image Generation with Multi-Aspect Human Preferences

Ziyi Gao, Zhipeng Wei, Jingjing Chen, Zhiyu Tan, Hao Li, Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen

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Narrative image generation aims to create images featuring multiple distinct characters while capturing their interrelationships, posing significant challenges for current text-to-image diffusion models. As a result, general personalized methods often suffer from poor semantic alignment, identity blending, and aesthetic implausibility.These issues are inadequately captured by existing evaluation metrics such as CLIP, ArcFace, and conventional reward models, which fundamentally fail to align with human perceptual preferences. To align with human preferences, we first construct a fine-grained human preference dataset, NI-RLHF, by collecting both detailed human critiques and preference judgments across three core dimensions: prompt following, identity consistency, and visual quality.This comprehensive dataset facilitates the training of NIReward, a critique-based reward model capable of generating interpretable image evaluations.Building upon the interpretable reward signal from NIReward, we propose Adaptive Dominance-based Preference Optimization (ADPO) to balance learning across diverse preference dimensions while dynamically adapting to reward margins.Experimental results indicate that NIReward significantly outperforms existing evaluation models and reward models, and ADPO yields a significant improvement across the three key preference dimensions. By introducing NIReward and ADPO, our work paves the way for generating narrative images aligned with actual human preferences.

Poster
MDS-VQA: Model-Informed Data Selection for Video Quality Assessment

Jian Zou, Xiaoyu Xu, Zhihua Wang, Yilin Wang, Balu Adsumilli, Kede Ma

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Learning-based video quality assessment (VQA) has advanced rapidly, yet progress is increasingly constrained by a disconnect between model design and dataset curation. Model-centric approaches often iterate on fixed benchmarks, while data-centric efforts collect new human labels without systematically targeting the weaknesses of existing VQA models. Here, we describe MDS-VQA, a model-informed data selection mechanism for curating unlabeled videos that are both difficult for the base VQA model and diverse in content. Difficulty is estimated by a failure predictor trained with a ranking objective, and diversity is measured using deep semantic video features, with a greedy procedure balancing the two under a constrained labeling budget. Experiments across multiple VQA datasets and models demonstrate that MDS-VQA identifies diverse, challenging samples that are particularly informative for active fine-tuning. With only a 5% selected subset per target domain, the fine-tuned model improves mean SRCC from 0.651 to 0.722 and achieves the top gMAD rank, indicating strong adaptation and generalization.

Poster
Exploring Spatiotemporal Feature Propagation for Video-Level Compressive Spectral Reconstruction: Dataset, Model and Benchmark

Lijing Cai, Zhan Shi, Chenglong Huang, Jinyao Wu, Qiping Li, Zikang Huo, Linsen Chen, Chongde Zi, Xun Cao

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Recently, Spectral Compressive Imaging (SCI) has achieved remarkable success, unlocking significant potential for dynamic spectral vision. However, existing reconstruction methods, primarily image-based, suffer from two limitations: (i) Encoding process masks spatial-spectral features, leading to uncertainty in reconstructing missing information from single compressed measurements, and (ii) The frame-by-frame reconstruction paradigm fails to ensure temporal consistency, which is crucial in the video perception. To address these challenges, this paper seeks to advance spectral reconstruction from the image level to the video level, leveraging the complementary features and temporal continuity across adjacent frames in dynamic scenes. Initially, we construct the first high-quality dynamic hyperspectral image dataset (DynaSpec), comprising 30 sequences obtained through frame-scanning acquisition. Subsequently, we propose the Propagation-Guided Spectral Video Reconstruction Transformer (PG-SVRT), which employs a spatial-then-temporal attention to effectively reconstruct spectral features from abundant video information, while using a bridged token to reduce computational complexity. Finally, we conduct simulation experiments to assess the performance of four SCI systems, and construct a DD-CASSI prototype for real-world data collection and benchmarking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PG-SVRT achieves superior performance in reconstruction quality, spectral fidelity, and temporal consistency, while maintaining minimal FLOPs.

Poster
NexusFlow: Unifying Disparate Tasks under Partial Supervision via Invertible Flow Networks

Fangzhou Lin, Yuping Wang, Yuliang Guo, Zixun Huang, Xinyu Huang, Haichong Zhang, Kazunori Yamada, Zhengzhong Tu, Liu Ren, Ziming Zhang

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Partially Supervised Multi-Task Learning (PS-MTL) aims to leverage knowledge across tasks when annotations are incomplete. Existing approaches, however, have largely focused on the simpler setting of homogeneous, dense prediction tasks, leaving the more realistic challenge of learning from structurally diverse tasks unexplored. To this end, we introduce NexusFlow, a novel, lightweight, and plug-and-play framework effective in both settings. NexusFlow introduces a set of surrogate networks with invertible coupling layers to align the latent feature distributions of tasks, creating a unified representation that enables effective knowledge transfer. The coupling layers are bijective, preserving information while mapping features into a shared canonical space. This invertibility avoids representational collapse and enables alignment across structurally different tasks without reducing expressive capacity.We first evaluate NexusFlow on the core challenge of domain-partitioned autonomous driving, where dense map reconstruction and sparse multi-object tracking are supervised in different geographic regions, creating both structural disparity and a strong domain gap. NexusFlow sets a new state-of-the-art result on nuScenes, outperforming strong partially supervised baselines. To demonstrate generality, we further test NexusFlow on NYUv2 using three homogeneous dense prediction tasks, segmentation, depth, and surface normals, as a representative N-task PS-MTL scenario. NexusFlow yields consistent gains across all tasks, confirming its broad applicability.

Poster
From Rays to Projections: Better Inputs for Feed-Forward View Synthesis

Zirui Wu, Zeren Jiang, Martin R. Oswald, Jie Song

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Feed-forward view synthesis models predict a novel view in a single pass with minimal 3D inductive bias. Existing works encode cameras as Plucker ray maps, which tie predictions to the arbitrary world coordinate gauge and make them sensitive to small camera transformations, thereby undermining geometric consistency. In this paper, we ask what inputs best condition a model for robust and consistent view synthesis. We propose projective conditioning, which replaces raw camera parameters with a target-view projective cue that provides a stable 2D input. This reframes the task from a brittle geometric regression problem in ray space to a well-conditioned target-view image-to-image translation problem. Additionally, we introduce a masked autoencoding pretraining strategy tailored to this cue, enabling the use of large-scale uncalibrated data for pretraining. Our method shows improved fidelity and stronger cross-view consistency compared to ray-conditioned baselines on our view-consistency benchmark. It also achieves state-of-the-art quality on standard novel view synthesis benchmarks.

Poster
S2D: Sparse to Dense Lifting for 3D Reconstruction with Minimal Inputs

Yuzhou Ji, Qijian Tian, He Zhu, Xiaoqi Jiang, Guangzhi Cao, Lizhuang Ma, Yuan Xie, Xin Tan

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Explicit 3D representations have already become an essential medium for 3D simulation and understanding. However, the most commonly used point cloud and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) each suffer from non-photorealistic rendering and significant degradation under sparse inputs. In this paper, we introduce Sparse to Dense lifting (S2D), a novel pipeline that bridges the two representations and achieves high-quality 3DGS reconstruction with minimal inputs. Specifically, the S2D lifting is two-fold. We first present an efficient one-step diffusion model that lifts sparse point cloud for high-fidelity image artifact fixing. Meanwhile, to reconstruct 3D consistent scenes, we also design a corresponding reconstruction strategy with random sample drop and weighted gradient for robust model fitting from sparse input views to dense novel views. Extensive experiments show that S2D achieves the best consistency in generating novel view guidance and first-tier sparse view reconstruction quality under different input sparsity. By reconstructing stable scenes with the least possible captures among existing methods, S2D enables minimal input requirements for 3DGS applications.

Poster
MimicTalker: A Multimodal Interactive and Memory-Enhanced Framework for Real-Time Dyadic 3D Head Generation

Yinuo Wang, Yanbo Fan, Xuan Wang, Boyao Zhou, Yu Guo, Yujun Shen, Fei Wang

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Dyadic interactive head generation aims to synthesize realistic head motions that respond both verbally and non-verbally to an interlocutor in real-time conversation. The existing works often focus on offline scenarios, and struggle with a shallow understanding of the multimodal conversational context while also lacking long-term coherence. To address these limitations, we propose MimicTalker, a novel method for producing real-time, contextually-aware, and long-term consistent interactive head motions. To this end, we propose a Multimodal Interactive Context Extraction (MICE) module to capture both instantaneous and long-term multimodal interactive information from the interlocutor. To enhance in-depth conversational understanding, we propose a Semantic-enhanced Dynamic Interaction (SDI) module to integrate the intentions and topics of the conversation, which are automatically extracted through an LLM-based analyzer. Further, we propose a semantic-guided Motion Style Memory (MSM) mechanism, enabling the long-term motion consistency throughout the conversation. We conduct experiments on both short conversational segments (25 seconds) and extended dialogues (6 minutes), and the comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches.

Poster
Chain-of-Thought Guided Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification

Ya Gao, Shihao Li, Zhaojun Liu, AIHUA ZHENG, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang

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With the rise of visual-language models, multi-modal ReID retrieves specific targets by integrating different spectra and textual descriptions. Existing methods merely adopt descriptive representation learning for image-text, ignoring the relationships among the intrinsic logical hierarchies of semantic features. Since Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can provide textual logical context and enhance semantic perception in large-model reasoning, we propose CoT-ReID, a CoT-guided framework that injects the Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) reasoning into multi-modal ReID. Specifically, we simulate the joint visual-textual logical decision-making of human reasoning, leveraging CoT textual logical reasoning to guide visual feature learning at the early, late, and decision-making level: At the early level, we embed the semantic reversion of CoT hierarchical reasoning into visual features to calibrate bottom-level features and emphasize visual hierarchical reasoning. Next, we take CoT hierarchical reasoning text as an anchor condition to constrain the consistency of visual cross-modal semantics. Finally, through the hierarchical reasoning process of CoT, we embed logically reasoned text attribute features into multi-modal decision-making, providing logical support for selecting discriminative identity features. By constructing CoT textual benchmarks and our proposed modules, our framework generates more robust multi-modal features in complex scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on four datasets (RGBNT100, MSVR310, WMVeID863, RGBNT201) demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Poster
Immunizing Models Against Harmful Long-Horizon Fine-Tuning via Contractive Optimization Dynamics

Najibul Haque Sarker, Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim, Ali Asgarov, Chia-Wei Tang, Alvi Md Ishmam, Chris Thomas

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Fine-tuning has become the default way to adapt powerful foundation models, but this also enables low-cost repurposing for harmful objectives. Existing immunization methods try to optimize local geometry or simulate short attacker horizons, and penalize observed loss drops. However, in practice, downstream tuners run thousands of updates and overcome these short-horizon defenses.In this paper, we propose CLAMP (Contractive Long-horizon Attacker Mitigation via Progress-bounding), an immunization method that traps harmful fine-tuning by shaping the attacker's optimization dynamics rather than only the initial landscape. Our key idea is to make harmful training locally contractive, making each update smaller than the last. This yields a closed-form bound on the attacker's training beyond the attacker's simulated training steps. We also introduce a Hessian-free directional curvature penalty, to create adversarial landscapes along harmful descent directions. Our bi-level objective minimizes the attacker's predicted improvement from train step zero to infinity. Experiments show our method withstands long-horizon fine-tuning across classification, generative, and autoregressive settings, substantially reduces harmful task adaptation, while preserving benign utility and fine-tuneability.

Poster
EnergyAction: Unimanual to Bimanual Composition with Energy-Based Models

Mingchen Song, Xiang Deng, Jie Wei, Dongmei Jiang, Liqiang Nie, Weili Guan

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Recent advances in unimanual manipulation policies have achieved remarkable success across diverse robotic tasks through abundant training data and well-established model architectures. However, extending these capabilities to bimanual manipulation remains challenging due to the lack of bimanual demonstration data and the complexity of coordinating dual-arm actions. Existing approaches either rely on extensive bimanual datasets or fail to effectively leverage pre-trained unimanual policies. To address this limitation, we propose EnergyAction, a novel framework that compositionally transfers unimanual manipulation policies to bimanual tasks through the Energy-Based Models (EBMs). Specifically, our method incorporates three key innovations. First, we model individual unimanual policies as EBMs and leverage their compositional properties to compose left and right arm actions, enabling the fusion of unimanual policies into a bimanual policy. Second, we introduce an energy-based temporal-spatial coordination mechanism through energy constraints, ensuring the generated bimanual actions are both temporal coherence and spatial feasibility. Third, we propose two different energy-aware denoising strategies that dynamically adapt denoising steps based on action quality assessment. These strategies ensure the generation of high-quality actions while maintaining superior computational efficiency compared to fixed-step denoising approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that EnergyAction effectively transfers unimanual knowledge to bimanual tasks, achieving superior performance on both simulated and real-world tasks with minimal bimanual data.

Poster
OntoAug: Rethinking Generative Data Augmentation via Ontology Guidance

Shuo Wang, Zhichuan Wang, Jun Luo

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Generative data augmentation has created new opportunities for improving image recognition models. Despite these advances, most existing augmentation methods process images holistically, without accounting for the uneven distribution of discriminative information in classification tasks, where foreground subjects typically contain richer category-relevant signals than background context. Ignoring this imbalance can introduce unintended semantic shifts in generated samples, thereby weakening the model's ability to capture the intrinsic ontology of the target object. In fact, human perception operates in a similar manner: subject identity remains stable, while contextual variations are naturally tolerated as long as overall coherence is preserved. Inspired by this observation, we propose OntoAug, an ontology-oriented data augmentation framework that explicitly distinguishes between subject and environment. OntoAug separates foreground and background through structured layout control and guides diffusion models to generate samples with consistent subjects and diverse contextual variations. By explicitly introducing foreground masks and diverse background prompts during the generation process, the framework enhances both semantic fidelity and diversity in the synthesized data. Extensive experiments show that OntoAug achieves strong performance across multiple tasks, including image classification, few-shot learning, weakly supervised object localization (WSOL), and large vision-language model reasoning.

Poster
ZOO-Prune: Training-Free Token Pruning via Zeroth-Order Gradient Estimation in Vision-Language Models

Youngeun Kim, Youjia Zhang, Huiling Liu, Aecheon Jung, Sunwoo Lee, Sungeun Hong

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Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable strong multimodal reasoning but incur heavy inference costs from redundant visual tokens. Token pruning alleviates this issue, yet existing approaches face limitations. Attention-based methods rely on raw attention scores, which are often unstable across layers and heads and can lead to redundant selections. Diversity-based methods improve robustness by selecting tokens far apart in feature space, but risk dropping regions needed for accurate prediction. We propose ZOO-Prune, a training-free framework built on the intuition that highly sensitive tokens have a stronger influence on the model's output and capture complementary visual cues rather than redundant ones. To achieve this, we estimate token sensitivity using zeroth-order perturbations at the lightweight projection layer. This measures how small random perturbations affect the projected features and enables efficient approximation of each token's influence without backpropagation. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks show that ZOO-Prune consistently outperforms prior methods while pruning up to 94.4% of tokens without sacrificing accuracy. Our method also improves efficiency, reaching up to 2.30x faster end-to-end inference compared to the baseline. Code is available at https://aim-skku.github.io/ZOO-Prune.

Poster