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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Hierarchical Process Reward Models are Symbolic Vision Learners

Shan Zhang, Aotian Chen, Kai Zou, Jindong Gu, Yuan Xue, Anton van den Hengel

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Symbolic computer vision represents diagrams through explicit logical rules and structured representations, enabling interpretable understanding in machine vision. This requires fundamentally different learning paradigms from pixel-based visual models. Symbolic visual learners parse diagrams into geometric primitives--points, lines, and shapes--whereas pixel-based learners operate on textures and colors. We propose a novel self-supervised symbolic auto-encoder, where the encoder parses diagrams into structured primitives and their relations, and the decoder compiles them back into executable code that reproduces the original diagrams. Central to this architecture is SymHPR (Symbolic Hierarchical Process Reward Modeling), which applies hierarchical step-level rewards to enforce point-on-line, line-on-shape, and shape-on-relation consistency. Since reinforcement learning collapses under vanilla GRPO, our proposed stabilized strategies balance exploration and exploitation. Built upon the symbolic learner, we design two pipelines: one replaces the MLLM's visual encoder with the symbolic encoder; the other feeds interpretable symbolic parses directly to the LLM to guide reasoning. Evaluations across reconstruction, perception, and reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: achieving a 98.2% reduction in MSE for geometric diagram reconstruction, surpassing GPT-4o by 0.6% with a 7B model on chart reconstruction, and improving by +13% on the MathGlance perception benchmark, and by +3% on MathVerse and GeoQA reasoning benchmarks.

Poster
VL-Eraser: Vacuum Distillation for Machine Unlearning in Vision-Language Models

Yili Wang, Lu Dai, Tairan Huang, Yijie Xu, Hui Xiong

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Machine unlearning (MU) aims to remove sensitive or undesired content from pre-trained models. Existing MU methods are commonly characterized as gradually degrading model performance on undesired data to realize approximate forgetting. Despite their successes, the effectiveness in multimodal unlearning tasks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we first conduct an in-depth analysis and reveal that traditional MU methods tend to disrupt cross-modal alignment, leading to incomplete forgetting in multimodal scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose VL-Eraser, a novel unlearning paradigm for VLM unlearning. VL-Eraser reformulates unlearning in VLMs as a two-stage process: distillation and deletion. Specifically, VL-Eraser first introduces a vacuum distillation that disentangles undesired knowledge from the intricate parameters of VLMs and transfers it into low-rank adapters (LoRA). After distillation, unlearning is efficiently achieved by deleting the LoRA parameters from the original model. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that VL-Eraser achieves superior unlearning performance while preserving utility compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Poster
Beyond Multiple Choice: Verifiable OpenQA for Robust Vision-Language RFT

Yesheng Liu, Hao Li, Haiyu Xu, Baoqi Pei, Jiahao Wang, Mingxuan Zhao, Jing-Shu Zheng, Zheqi He, JG Yao, Xi Yang, Bowen Qin, Jiajun Zhang

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Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) has been a popular format for evaluating and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) of modern multimodal language models. Its constrained output format allows for simplified, deterministic automatic verification.However, we find that the options may leak exploitable signals, which makes the accuracy metrics unreliable for indicating real capabilities and encourages explicit or implicit answer guessing behaviors during RFT. We propose ReVeL (Rewrite and Verify by LLM), a framework that rewrites multiple-choice questions into open-form questions while keeping answers verifiable whenever possible. The framework categorizes questions according to different answer types, apply different rewriting and verification schemes, respectively. When applied for RFT, we converted 20k MCQA examples and use GRPO to finetune Qwen2.5-VL models. Models trained on ReVeL-OpenQA match MCQA accuracy on multiple-choice benchmarks and improve OpenQA accuracy by about six percentage points, indicating better data efficiency and more robust reward signals than MCQA-based training. When used for evaluation, ReVeL also reveals up to 20 percentage points of score inflation in MCQA benchmarks (relative to OpenQA), improves judging accuracy, and reduces both cost and latency. We will release code and data publicly.

Poster
Towards Calibrating Prompt Tuning of Vision- Language Models

Ashshak Sharifdeen, Fahad Shamshad, Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Abhishek Basu, Mohamed Ismithdeen, Jeyapriyan Jeyamohan, Chathurika Silva, Karthik Nandakumar, Muhammad Haris Khan

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Prompt tuning of large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP enables efficienttask adaptation without updating model weights. However, it often leads to poorconfidence calibration and unreliable predictive uncertainty. We address thisproblem by proposing a calibration framework that enhances predictive reliabilitywhile preserving the geometry of the pretrained CLIP embedding space, which isrequired for robust generalization. Our approach extends the standard cross-entropyloss with two complementary regularizers: (1) a mean-variance margin penalty thatstabilizes inter-class logit margins by maximizing their average while minimizingdispersion, mitigating underconfidence and overconfidence spikes; and (2) a textmoment-matching loss that aligns the first and second moments of tuned textembeddings with their frozen CLIP counterparts, preserving semantic dispersioncrucial for generalization. Through extensive experiments across 7 prompt-tuningmethods and 11 diverse datasets, we demonstrate that our approach significantlyreduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) compared to competitive calibrationtechniques on both base and novel classes.

Poster
Mantis: A Versatile Vision-Language-Action Model with Disentangled Visual Foresight

Yi Yang, Xueqi Li, Yiyang Chen, Jin Song, Yihan Wang, Zipeng Xiao, Jiadi Su, You Qiaoben, Pengfei Liu, Zhijie Deng

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Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate that visual signals can effectively complement sparse action supervisions. However, letting VLA directly predict high-dimensional visual states can distribute model capacity and incur prohibitive training cost, while compressing visual states into more compact supervisory signals inevitably incurs information bottlenecks. Moreover, existing methods often suffer from poor comprehension and reasoning capabilities due to the neglect of language supervision. This paper introduces Mantis, a novel framework featuring a Disentangled Visual Foresight (DVF) to tackle these issues. Specifically, Mantis decouples visual foresight prediction from the backbone with the combination of meta queries and a diffusion Transformer (DiT) head. With the current visual state provided to the DiT via a residual connection, a simple next-state prediction objective enables the meta queries to automatically capture the latent actions that delineate the visual trajectory, and hence boost the learning of explicit actions. The disentanglement reduces the burden of the VLA backbone, enabling it to maintain comprehension and reasoning capabilities through language supervision. Empirically, pretrained on human manipulation videos, robot demonstrations, and image-text pairs, Mantis achieves a 96.5% success rate on LIBERO benchmark after fine-tuning, surpassing powerful baselines while exhibiting high convergence speed. Real-world evaluations show that Mantis outperforms \pi_ 0.5 , a leading open-source VLA model, particularly in instruction-following capability, generalization to unseen instructions, and reasoning ability. We also introduce the adaptive temporal ensemble (ATE) strategy to balance computational efficiency and motion stability during inference, yielding the Mantis-ATE variant, which reduces inference counts by 45% while maintaining performance. We have released the code and model weights to the open-source community, which are available at https://github.com/SJTU-DENG-Lab/Mantis.

Poster
SIF: Semantically In-Distribution Fingerprints for Large Vision-Language Models

Yifei Zhao, Qian Lou, Mengxin Zheng

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The public accessibility of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) raises serious concerns about unauthorized model reuse and intellectual property infringement. Existing ownership verification approaches often rely on semantically abnormal queries or out-of-distribution responses as fingerprints, which are easily recognized and removed by adversaries. We first expose this vulnerability through the Semantic Divergence Attack (SDA), which detects and filters fingerprint checks by measuring semantic divergence between a stolen model and a reference model, showing that existing fingerprints are not semantic-preserving, easy to detect and bypass, and lacking robustness. To address these weaknesses, we propose SIF (Semantically In-Distribution Fingerprints), a non-intrusive ownership verification framework requiring no parameter modification. SIF introduces Semantic-Aligned Fingerprint Distillation (SAFD), which distills text-generation watermark signals--originally designed for text ownership protection rather than model protection--into the visual modality, enabling semantically coherent yet fingerprinted responses. Robust-Fingerprint Optimization (RFO) further simulates worst-case representation perturbations, ensuring resilience to model modifications such as fine-tuning and quantization. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen2.5-VL demonstrate that SIF achieves superior stealthiness and robustness, providing a practical solution for LVLM copyright protection.

Poster
QuantVLA: Scale-Calibrated Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Jingxuan Zhang, Yunta Hsieh, Zhongwei Wan, Haokun Lin, Xin Wang, Ziqi Wang, Yingtie Lei, Mi Zhang

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Vision-language-action (VLA) models unify perception, language, and control for embodied agents but face significant challenges in practical deployment due to rapidly increasing compute and memory demands, especially as models scale to longer horizons and larger backbones. To address these bottlenecks, we introduce QuantVLA, a training-free post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that, to our knowledge, is the first PTQ approach for VLA systems and the first to successfully quantize a diffusion transformer (DiT) action head. QuantVLA incorporates three scale-calibrated components: (1) a selective quantization layout that integerizes all linear layers in both the language backbone and the DiT while keeping attention projections in floating point to preserve the original operator schedule; (2) attention temperature matching, a lightweight per-head scaling mechanism that stabilizes attention logits and is folded into the dequantization scales at inference; and (3) output head balancing, a per-layer residual interface calibration that mitigates post-projection energy drift. The framework requires no additional training, uses only a small unlabeled calibration buffer, and supports integer kernels for low-bit weights and activations while leaving the architecture unchanged. Across representative VLA models on LIBERO, QuantVLA exceeds the task success rates of full-precision baselines, achieves about 70% relative memory savings on the quantized components, providing a practical pathway toward scalable low-bit embodied intelligence under strict compute, memory, and power constraints.

Poster
Boosting Vision-Language-Action Finetuning with Feasible Action Neighborhood Prior

Haochen Niu, Kanyu Zhang, Shuyu Yin, Qinghai Guo, Peilin Liu, Fei Wen

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In real-world robotic manipulation, states typically admit a neighborhood of near-equivalent actions. That is, for each state, there exist a feasible action neighborhood (FAN) rather than a single correct action, within which motions yield indistinguishable progress. However, prevalent VLA training methodologies are directly inherited from linguistic settings and do not exploit the FAN property, thus leading to poor generalization and low sample efficiency. To address this limitation, we introduce a FAN-guided regularizer that shapes the model's output distribution to align with the geometry of FAN. Concretely, we introduce a Gaussian prior that promotes locally smooth and unimodal predictions around the preferred direction and magnitude. In extensive experiments across both reinforced finetuning (RFT) and supervised finetuning (SFT), our method achieves significant improvement in sample efficiency, and success rate in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. By aligning with the intrinsic action tolerance of physical manipulation, FAN-guided regularization provides a principled and practical method for sample-efficient, and generalizable VLA adaptation. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Haochen-Niu/FAN-VLA.

Poster
SCoRe: Salience-Coverage Reduction for Vision Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models

Tong Xu, Hailong Shi, Xingyu Gao

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The heavy computational burden of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) stems primarily from the lengthy visual token sequences generated by their vision encoders. To mitigate this, recent work has shifted towards pruning tokens within the vision encoder. However, we observe that these methods predominantly rely on a suboptimal decoupled heuristic method. This strategy is conceptually flawed: it is prone to sampling collapse, fails to fundamentally eliminate token redundancy, and tends to systematically discard secondary yet important semantic clusters. Addressing this limitation, this paper proposes to formalize visual token pruning as a unified Representativeness Optimization Problem. We introduce SCoRe (Salience-Coverage Reduction), a unified optimization method theoretically grounded in the Weighted k-Center Problem. SCoRe constructs the final token set greedily: at each iteration, it selects the token that maximizes the unified representativeness score, thereby optimizing global representativeness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCoRe achieves State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance across multiple benchmarks. Notably, with negligible computational overhead, our method reduces tokens by 94.4% while retaining 95% of the full performance.

Poster
Language-guided Frequency Modulation for Large Vision-Language Models

Shuyi Ouyang, Gongfan Fang, Xinyin Ma, Yen-wei Chen, Lanfen Lin, Xinchao Wang

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Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual reasoning across diverse tasks. These tasks place different demands on visual representations: some prioritize high-level global context, while others emphasize fine-grained local details. However, most existing methods operate on visual representations primarily in the spatial domain, lacking an explicit mechanism for distinguishing between high-frequency local details and low-frequency global context. This limitation hinders fine-grained control of visual representations and complicates their hierarchical alignment with language. To address this issue, we introduce Language-guided Frequency Modulation (LFM), a plug-and-play approach that adaptively refines visual signals in the frequency domain under linguistic guidance. By selectively enhancing critical regions and details, LFM enables more structured and precise visual processing. Crucially, it adds no extra training parameters, relying solely on a lightweight learnable projector to refine visual tokens before integration into the LLM, thereby ensuring minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments across diverse vision-language benchmarks highlight LFM's scalability, effectiveness, and broad applicability to LVLMs.

Poster
RINO: Rotation-Invariant Non-Rigid Correspondences

Maolin Gao, Shao Jie Hu-Chen, Congyue Deng, Riccardo Marin, Leonidas Guibas, Daniel Cremers

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Dense 3D shape correspondence remains a central challenge in computer vision and graphics as many deep learning approaches still rely on intermediate geometric features or handcrafted descriptors, limiting their effectiveness under non-isometric deformations, partial data, and non-manifold inputs. To overcome these issues, we introduce RINO, an unsupervised, rotation-invariant dense correspondence framework that effectively unifies rigid and non-rigid shape matching. The core of our method is the novel RINONet, a feature extractor that integrates vector-based SO(3)-invariant learning with orientation-aware complex functional maps to extract robust features directly from raw geometry. This allows for a fully end-to-end, data-driven approach that bypasses the need for shape pre-alignment or handcrafted features. Extensive experiments show unprecedented performance of RINO across challenging non-rigid matching tasks, including arbitrary poses, non-isometry, partiality, non-manifoldness, and noise.

Poster
Towards Highly Transferable Vision-Language Attack via Semantic-Augmented Dynamic Contrastive Interaction

Yuanbo Li, Tianyang Xu, Cong Hu, Tao Zhou, Xiaojun Wu, Josef Kittler

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With the rapid advancement and widespread application of vision-language pre-training (VLP) models, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks has become a critical concern. In general, the adversarial examples can typically be designed to exhibit transferable power, attacking not only different models but also across diverse tasks. However, existing attacks on language-vision models mainly rely on static cross-modal interactions and focus solely on disrupting positive image-text pairs, resulting in limited cross-modal disruption and poor transferability. To address this issue, we propose a Semantic-Augmented Dynamic Contrastive Attack (SADCA) that enhances adversarial transferability through progressive and semantically guided perturbation. SADCA progressively disrupts cross-modal alignment through dynamic interactions between adversarial images and texts. This is accomplished by SADCA establishing a contrastive learning mechanism involving adversarial, positive and negative samples, to reinforce the semantic inconsistency of the obtained perturbations. Moreover, we empirically find that input transformations commonly used in traditional transfer-based attacks also benefit VLPs, which motivates a semantic augmentation module that increases the diversity and generalization of adversarial examples. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models demonstrate that SADCA significantly improves adversarial transferability and consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods. The code is released at https://github.com/LiYuanBoJNU/SADCA.

Poster
QuietPrune: Query-Guided Early Token Pruning for Vision-Language Models

Tianxiao Gao, Shanwei Zhao, Shuo Fang, Shiai Zhu, Chenguang Ma

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Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate powerful capabilities in multimodal tasks. However, the large number of visual tokens imposes a significant computational cost. In this paper, we propose QuietPrune, a QUery-guIded Early Token Pruning method to remove redundant visual tokens within VLMs, thereby enhancing computational efficiency. Unlike previous late pruning methods, we recognize that implementing early pruning within the vision transformer (ViT) can achieve benefits in both latency reduction and accuracy maintenance. To address the semantic loss problem in early pruning, we design a lightweight adapter by performing an inverse transformation of the projector in VLMs. The proposed adapter converts the contextual query into a visual domain [Q-CLS] (Query [CLS]) token, providing textual guidance for ViT pruning. During pruning, we further introduce a semi-structured pruning scheme based on visual-textual relevance. Specifically, we group spatially adjacent 2 x2 tokens to accommodate the visual token merging operation prevalent in mainstream VLMs. We use the mean attention scores between the [Q-CLS] token and the visual tokens as the relevance metric for each group, avoiding additional computation. Pruning is then applied at the group level based on the relevance score, preserving positional continuity. After pruning, we aggregate the redundant tokens into a single token to maintain context cues. Our method achieves up to 19.0% reduction in prefill latency while outperforming 4.2% in accuracy on the recent Qwen3-VL and InternVL3 series compared to existing late pruning methods.

Poster
Synthesizing Visual Concepts as Vision-Language Programs

Antonia Wüst, Wolfgang Stammer, Hikaru Shindo, Lukas Helff, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting

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Vision-Language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks but often fail at systematic visual reasoning, especially in inductive reasoning problems. Neuro-symbolic methods promise to address this by inducing interpretable logical programs from images, though they usually rely on rigid, domain-specific perception modules for this. We propose Vision-Language Programs (VLP), which combine the perceptual flexibility of VLMs with the systematic reasoning of symbolic program synthesis. Rather than embedding reasoning inside the VLM, VLP leverages the model to produce structured visual descriptions that are compiled into neuro-symbolic programs. The resulting programs execute directly on images, remain consistent with task constraints, and provide human-interpretable explanations that enable easy shortcut mitigation. Our experiments across synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that VLPs outperform both direct and structured prompting of VLMs, particularly on tasks that require complex logical reasoning.

Poster
Linear Fundamental Matrix Estimation from 7 or 5 Points

Taci Ata Kucukpinar, Juan Mogollon, Joshua Fraser, Timothy Duff, Kannappan Palaniappan

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We revisit the problem of estimating the fundamental matrix of a pair of perspective cameras, a cornerstone of geometric computer vision. As is well-known, linear solvers require at least 8 point correspondences, whereas nonlinear minimal solvers require just 7 in the uncalibrated case or 5 in the calibrated case. In this paper, we consider a special case of the 7-point problem where 5 of the points are configured to lie on two lines, which has previously been shown to have a unique solution. As a theoretical contribution, we offer a completely elementary analysis of how this uniqueness manifests in the standard 7-point algorithm. On a practical level, we provide the first linear solver for the minimal problem associated to this special configuration. Additionally, we evaluate a heuristic 5-point fundamental matrix solver based on the construction of virtual midpoints. When combined with early non-minimal fitting, the runtime and accuracy of our solver is competitive with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on multiple benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/CIVA-Lab/v-umlaut.

Oral
R4-CGQA: Retrieval-based Vision Language Models for Computer Graphics Image Quality Assessment

Zhuangzi Li, Jian Jin, Shilv Cai, Weisi Lin

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Immersive Computer Graphics (CGs) rendering has become ubiquitous in modern daily life. However, comprehensively evaluating CG quality remains challenging for two reasons: (1) existing CG datasets lack systematic descriptions of rendering quality; and (2) existing CG quality assessment methods cannot provide reasonable text-based explanations. To address these issues, we first identify six key perceptual dimensions of CG quality from the user perspective and construct a dataset of 3.5\mathrm K CG images with corresponding quality descriptions. Each description covers CG style, content, and perceived quality along the selected dimensions. Furthermore, we use a subset of the dataset to build several question-answer benchmarks based on the descriptions in order to evaluate the responses of existing Vision Language Models (VLMs). We find that current VLMs are not sufficiently accurate in judging fine-grained CG quality, but that descriptions of visually similar images can significantly improve a VLM's understanding of a given CG image. Motivated by this observation, we adopt retrieval-augmented generation and propose a two-stream retrieval framework that effectively enhances the CG quality assessment capabilities of VLMs. Experiments on several representative VLMs demonstrate that our method substantially improves their performance on CG quality assessment. The public dataset and code are at: https://github.com/lizhuangzi/R4-CGQA

Poster
VL-RouterBench: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Model Routing

Zhehao Huang, Baijiong Lin, Jingyuan Zhang, Jingying Wang, Yuhang Liu, Ning Lu, Tao Li, Xiaolin Huang

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Multi-model routing has evolved from an engineering technique into essential infrastructure, yet existing work lacks a systematic, reproducible benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs). We present VL-RouterBench to assess the overall capability of VLM routing systems systematically. The benchmark is grounded in raw inference and scoring logs from VLMs and constructs quality and cost matrices over sample-model pairs. In scale, VL-RouterBench covers 14 datasets across 3 task groups, totaling 30,540 samples, and includes 15 open-source models and 2 API models, yielding 519,180 sample-model pairs and a total input-output token volume of 34,494,977. The evaluation protocol jointly measures average accuracy, average cost, and throughput, and builds a ranking score from the harmonic mean of normalized cost and accuracy to enable comparison across router configurations and cost budgets. On this benchmark, we evaluate 10 routing methods and baselines and observe a significant routability gain, while the best current routers still show a clear gap to the ideal Oracle, indicating considerable room for improvement in router architecture through finer visual cues and modeling of textual structure. We open-source the complete data construction and evaluation toolchain to promote comparability, reproducibility, and practical deployment in multimodal routing research.

Poster
Towards Knowledge-augmented Bayesian Deep Learning For Computer Vision

Wang Ma, Hanjing Wang, Yufei Zhang, Darsha Udayanga, Qiang Ji

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Bayesian deep learning (BDL) integrates Bayesian inference with deep learning, improving predictive performance while enabling principled uncertainty quantification. However, existing BDLs often rely on non-informative random priors, limiting the benefits of Bayesian inference. In contrast, knowledge-augmented deep learning explicitly injects domain knowledge during training, yet lacks a probabilistic foundation. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-augmented BDL framework that integrates domain knowledge both as an informative prior and as an adaptive likelihood under a unified two-stage hybrid formulation. In the first stage, we learn a knowledge-informed prior p(\theta \mid \mathcal K ) by pre-training a model to satisfy domain-specific constraints. In the second stage, we perform Bayesian inference on task data with an adaptive knowledge likelihood p(\mathcal K \mid \theta, \mathcal D ), which dynamically enforces these constraints during optimization. This unified framework enables knowledge to guide both initialization and training, significantly improving prediction accuracy, robustness, adaptation and uncertainty estimation. Experiments on various computer vision tasks, including semi-synthetic and real-knowledge scenarios, demonstrate that our two-stage framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art Bayesian and knowledge-augmented baselines.

Poster
TIPSv2: Advancing Vision-Language Pretraining with Enhanced Patch-Text Alignment

Bingyi Cao, Koert Chen, Kevis-Kokitsi Maninis, Kaifeng Chen, Arjun Karpur, Ye Xia, Sahil Dua, Tanmaya Dabral, Guangxing Han, Bohyung Han, Joshua Ainslie, Alex Bewley, Mithun Jacob, René Wagner, Washington Ramos, Krzysztof Choromanski, Mojtaba Seyedhosseini, Howard Zhou, Andre Araujo

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Recent progress in vision-language pretraining has enabled significant improvements to many downstream computer vision applications, such as classification, retrieval, segmentation and depth prediction. However, a fundamental capability that these models still struggle with is aligning dense patch representations with text embeddings of corresponding concepts. In this work, we investigate this critical issue and propose novel techniques to enhance this capability in foundational vision-language models. First, we reveal that a patch-level distillation procedure significantly boosts dense patch-text alignment -- surprisingly, the patch-text alignment of the distilled student model strongly surpasses that of the teacher model. This observation inspires us to consider modifications to pretraining recipes, leading us to propose iBOT++, an upgrade to the commonly-used iBOT masked image objective, where unmasked tokens also contribute directly to the loss. This dramatically enhances patch-text alignment of pretrained models. Additionally, to improve vision-language pretraining efficiency and effectiveness, we modify the exponential moving average setup in the learning recipe, and introduce a caption sampling strategy to benefit from synthetic captions at different granularities. Combining these components, we develop TIPSv2, a new family of image-text encoder models suitable for a wide range of downstream applications. Through comprehensive experiments on 9 tasks and 20 datasets, we demonstrate strong performance, generally on par with or better than recent vision encoder models. Code and models are released via our project page at https://gdm-tipsv2.github.io/.

Poster
StructXLIP: Enhancing Vision-language Models with Multimodal Structural Cues

Zanxi Ruan, Songqun Gao, Qiuyu Kong, Yiming Wang, Marco Cristani

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Edge-based representations are fundamental cues for visual understanding, a principle rooted in early vision research and still central today. We extend this principle to vision-language alignment, showing that isolating and aligning structural cues across modalities can greatly benefit fine-tuning on long, detail-rich captions, with a specific focus on improving cross modal retrieval. We introduce StructXLIP, a fine-tuning alignment paradigm that extracts edge maps (e.g., Canny), treating them as proxies for the visual structure of an image, and filters the corresponding captions to emphasize structural cues, making them "structure-centric". Fine-tuning augments the standard alignment loss with three structure-centric losses: (i) aligning edge maps with structural text, (ii) matching local edge regions to textual chunks, and (iii) connecting edge maps to color images to prevent representation drift. From a theoretical standpoint, while standard CLIP maximizes the mutual information between visual and textual embeddings, StructXLIP additionally maximizes the mutual information between multimodal structural representations. This auxiliary optimization is intrinsically harder, guiding the model toward more robust and semantically stable minima, enhancing vision-language alignment. Beyond outperforming current competitors on cross-modal retrieval on both general and specialized domains, our method serves as a general boosting recipe that can be integrated into future approaches in a plug-and-play manner. Code and pretrained models are available at: https://github.com/intelligolabs/StructXLIP.

Poster