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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Seeing Through Touch: Tactile-Driven Visual Localization of Material Regions

Seongyu Kim, Seungwoo Lee, Hyeonggon Ryu, Joon Son Chung, Arda Senocak

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We address the problem of tactile localization, where the goal is to identify image regions that share the same material properties as a tactile input. Existing visuo-tactile methods rely on global alignment and thus fail to capture the fine-grained local correspondences required for this task. The challenge is amplified by existing datasets, which predominantly contain close-up, low-diversity images. We propose a model that learns local visuo-tactile alignment via dense cross-modal feature interactions, producing tactile saliency maps for touch-conditioned material segmentation. To overcome dataset constraints, we introduce: (i) in-the-wild multi-material scene images that expand visual diversity, and (ii) a material-diversity pairing strategy that aligns each tactile sample with visually varied yet tactilely consistent images, improving contextual localization and robustness to weak signals. We also construct two new tactile-grounded material segmentation datasets for quantitative evaluation. Experiments on both new and existing benchmarks show that our approach substantially outperforms prior visuo-tactile methods in tactile localization.

Poster
PhenoYieldNet: Learning Crop-Aware Phenological Responses for Multi-Crop Yield Prediction

Yu Luo, Xiaogang Zhu, Shan Zeng, Wei Xiang, Thomas Francis Bishop, Zhiyong Wang, Kun Hu

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Accurate crop yield prediction is crucial for sustainable agriculture and global food security. While existing methods are predominantly developed for single-crop prediction, they often struggle to generalize across diverse crop types, without addressing the unique crop phenological responses that are dynamically modulated by complex weather patterns. In this paper, we propose PhenoYieldNet, a multi-crop yield prediction framework that learns crop-specific phenology by explicitly modeling their responses with temporal drivers. Specifically, we develop a crop-aware temporal decoder consisting of a Crop Phenology Bank (CPB) and a Crop Phenology Attention (CPA) module. The CPB integrates a set of learnable embeddings, which leverage a query to guide the CPA module to learn the most relevant phenology patterns for the specific crop. And the CPA module explicitly captures multi-scale trend and variation components to construct temporal contexts, enabling the model to dynamically adjust the attention across different phenological stages. To learn robust and generalizable features for multi-crop prediction, the encoder is initialized with a pre-trained foundation model, and further adapted via a self-supervised Temporal Contrastive Adaptation strategy to align with agricultural temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments conducted on multi-crop datasets indicate that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across different regions and crops.

Poster
Through the Frequency Lens: Cross-Domain Generalisable Gaze Estimation with Adaptive Modulation

Yang Xu, Yiwei Bao, Feng Lu

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Deep learning-based gaze estimation methods often exhibit significant performance degradation on unseen target domains. Through systematic frequency-domain analysis, we reveal that face images contain frequency components with distinct contributions: some facilitate cross-domain generalization while others introduce domain-specific interference that impedes it, with both components varying across datasets and constituting a key source of domain gap. Based on these observations, we propose the Frequency-Guided Adaptive Learning framework (FGAL), a novel framework enhancing domain generalization without accessing target domain data. The FGAL consists of two complementary modules: the Adaptive Interference Suppression Module (AISM) and the Spectrum Diversification Module (SDM). AISM adaptively suppresses sample-specific interfering frequency components through learnable modulation maps, while SDM diversifies frequency distribution patterns to enhance robustness against cross-domain variations. Experiments demonstrate that FGAL achieves substantial improvements, outperforming baselines by up to 28.2% and state-of-the-art methods by up to 19.5% across multiple cross-domain settings, demonstrating our framework's potential for broader domain generalization tasks.

Poster
Detect Anything via Next Point Prediction

Qing Jiang, Junan Huo, Xingyu Chen, Yuda Xiong, Zhaoyang Zeng, Yihao Chen, Tianhe Ren, Junzhi Yu, Lei Zhang

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Object detection has long been dominated by traditional coordinate regression-based models, such as YOLO, DETR, and Grounding DINO. Although recent efforts have attempted to leverage MLLMs to tackle this task, they face challenges like low recall rate, duplicate predictions, coordinate misalignment, etc. In this work, we bridge this gap and propose Rex-Omni, a 3B-scale MLLM that achieves state-of-the-art object perception performance. On benchmarks like COCO and LVIS, Rex-Omni attains performance comparable to or exceeding regression-based models (e.g., DINO, Grounding DINO) in a zero-shot setting. This is enabled by three key designs: 1) Task Formulation: we use special tokens to represent quantized coordinates from 0 to 999, reducing the model's learning difficulty and improving token efficiency for coordinate prediction; 2) Data Engines: we construct multiple data engines to generate high-quality grounding, referring, and pointing data, providing semantically rich supervision for training; 3) Training Pipelines: we employ a two-stage training process, combining supervised fine-tuning on 22 million data with GRPO-based reinforcement post-training. This RL post-training leverages geometry-aware rewards to effectively bridge the discrete-to-continuous coordinate prediction gap, improve box accuracy, and mitigate undesirable behaviors like duplicate predictions that stem from the teacher-guided nature of the initial SFT stage. Beyond conventional detection, Rex-Omni's inherent language understanding enables versatile capabilities such as object referring, pointing, visual prompting, GUI grounding, spatial referring, OCR and key-pointing, all systematically evaluated on dedicated benchmarks. We believe that Rex-Omni paves the way for more versatile and language-aware visual perception systems.

Poster
W2W: Language-Model-Based Trajectory Prediction with Reinforcement Learning

Zirui Xu, Biao Yang, Rongrong Ni, Zhongkai Zhou, Shaobo Shen

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Pedestrian trajectory prediction is crucial for applications such as autonomous driving and social robots. Recently, language model (LM)-based trajectory prediction has offered both prediction accuracy and interpretability. However, the L2 loss commonly used in trajectory prediction cannot be directly applied to LM optimization, resulting in degraded prediction performance. Moreover, current LM-based trajectory prediction methods lack explicit expressions of social interactions, and their scene descriptions are overly simplistic, making it challenging to impose practical scene constraints. To address these issues, we propose Write-to-Walk (W2W). First, we convert observed trajectories and interaction cues (companion/following/obstacle) into parsable textual prompts, so that interaction semantics are expressed more explicitly in the model input. Afterward, a T5-Small backbone is trained in a two-stage manner: (1) Full-parameter supervised fine-tuning with cross-entropy loss for language learning, enabling formatted question answering; (2) Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize W2W, where a reward function combining ADE error and off-road penalties strengthens scene constraints, producing future trajectories consistent with the scene context and further improving prediction accuracy. Experiments on benchmark datasets (ETH/UCY and SDD) demonstrate that W2W remains competitive with recent LM-based prediction methods and strong trajectory prediction baselines on ADE/FDE. The interpretability of LMs further supports W2W's deployment in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving.

Poster
Video-CoE: Reinforcing Video Event Prediction via Chain of Events

Qile Su, Jing Tang, Rui Chen, Lei Sun, Xiangxiang Chu

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Despite advances in the application of MLLMs for various video tasks, video event prediction (VEP) remains relatively underexplored. VEP requires the model to perform fine-grained temporal modeling of videos and establish logical relationships between videos and future events, which current MLLMs still struggle with. In this work, we first present a comprehensive evaluation of current leading MLLMs on the VEP task, revealing the reasons behind their inaccurate predictions, including lack of logical reasoning ability for future events prediction and insufficient utilization of visual information. To address these challenges, we propose **C**hain **o**f **E**vents (**CoE**) paradigm, which constructs temporal event chains to implicitly enforce MLLM focusing on the visual content and the logical connections between videos and future events, incentivizing model's reasoning capability with multiple training protocols. Experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms both leading open-source and commercial MLLMs, establishing a new state-of-the-art on the VEP task.

Poster
STRNet: Visual Navigation with Spatio-Temporal Representation through Dynamic Graph Aggregation

Hao Ren, Zetong Bi, Yiming Zeng, Zhaoliang Wan, Lu Qi, Hui Cheng

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Visual navigation requires the robot to reach a specified goal such as an image, based on a sequence of first-person visual observations. While recent learning-based approaches have made significant progress, they often focus on improving policy heads or decision strategies while relying on simplistic feature encoders and temporal pooling to represent visual input. This leads to the loss of fine-grained spatial and temporal structure, ultimately limiting accurate action prediction and progress estimation. In this paper, we propose a unified spatio-temporal representation framework that enhances visual encoding for robotic navigation. Our approach extracts features from both image sequences and goal observations, and fuses them using the designed spatio-temporal fusion module. This module performs spatial graph reasoning within each frame and models temporal dynamics using a hybrid temporal shift module combined with multi-resolution difference-aware convolution. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently improves navigation performance and offers a generalizable visual backbone for goal-conditioned control. Code is available at https://github.com/hren20/STRNet.

Poster
Gaussian-Mixture Latent Flow for Stochastic 3D Human Motion Prediction

Yue Ma, Frederick W. B. Li, Xiaohui Liang

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Stochastic human motion prediction aims to forecast future motion distributions. Although recent studies have achieved strong performance in terms of accuracy and diversity, they often overlook plausibility (e.g., resulting in physically unrealistic predictions) and uncertainty quantification, which is essential for real-world applications and downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose a latent flow-based model equipped with a data-driven Gaussian mixture prior that more effectively disentangles diverse human behaviors than conventional single-modal priors. This prior is derived from patterns in the training data without requiring additional annotations. Furthermore, the fully invertible nature of our model enables natural uncertainty quantification through tractable likelihood computation. Experiments on the Human3.6M and AMASS datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and plausibility, while also providing reliable uncertainty estimates.

Poster
MEMO: Human-like Crisp Edge Detection Using Masked Edge Prediction

Jiaxin Cheng, Yue Wu, Yicong Zhou

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Learning-based edge detection models trained with cross-entropy loss often suffer from thick edge predictions, which deviate from the crisp, single-pixel annotations typically provided by humans. While previous approaches to achieving crisp edges have focused on designing specialized loss functions or modifying network architectures, we show that a carefully designed training and inference strategy alone is sufficient to achieve human-like edge quality. In this work, we introduce the Masked Edge Prediction MOdel (MEMO), which produces both accurate and crisp edges using only cross-entropy loss. We first construct a large-scale synthetic edge dataset to pre-train MEMO, enhancing its generalization ability. Subsequent fine-tuning on downstream datasets requires only a lightweight module comprising 1.2% additional parameters. During training, MEMO learns to predict edges under varying ratios of input masking. A key insight guiding our inference is that thick edge predictions typically exhibit a confidence gradient: high in the center and lower toward the boundaries. Leveraging this, we propose a novel progressive prediction strategy that sequentially finalizes edge predictions in order of prediction confidence, resulting in thinner and more precise contours. Our method achieves visually appealing, post-processing-free, human-like edge maps and outperforms prior methods on crispness-aware evaluations. \href https://github.com/cplusx/MEMO_Edge_Detection https://github.com/cplusx/MEMO_Edge_Detection

Poster
ProOOD: Prototype-Guided Out-of-Distribution 3D Occupancy Prediction

Yuheng Zhang, Mengfei Duan, Kunyu Peng, Yuhang Wang, Di Wen, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Kailun Yang

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3D semantic occupancy prediction is central to autonomous driving, yet current methods are vulnerable to long-tailed class bias and out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, often overconfidently assigning anomalies to rare classes. We present ProOOD, a lightweight, plug-and-play method that couples prototype-guided refinement with training-free OOD scoring. ProOOD comprises (i) prototype-guided semantic imputation that fills occluded regions with class-consistent features, (ii) prototype-guided tail mining that strengthens rare-class representations to curb OOD absorption, and (iii) EchoOOD, which fuses local logit coherence with local and global prototype matching to produce reliable voxel-level OOD scores. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that ProOOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution 3D occupancy prediction and OOD detection. On SemanticKITTI, it surpasses baselines by +3.57% mIoU overall and +24.80% tail-class mIoU; on VAA-KITTI, it improves AuPRC_r by +19.34 points, with consistent gains across benchmarks. These improvements yield more calibrated occupancy estimates and more reliable OOD detection in safety-critical urban driving. The source code will be made publicly available.

Poster
MVP: Multiple View Prediction Improves GUI Grounding

Yunzhu Zhang, Zeyu Pan, Zhengwen Zeng, Shuheng Shen, Changhua Meng, Linchao Zhu

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GUI grounding, which translates natural language instructions into precise pixel coordinates, is essential for developing practical GUI agents. However, we observe that existing grounding models exhibit significant coordinate prediction instability--minor visual perturbations (e.g., cropping a few pixels) can drastically alter predictions, flipping results between correct and incorrect. This instability severely undermines model performance, especially for samples with high-resolution and small UI elements. To address this issue, we propose Multi-View Prediction (MVP), a training-free framework that enhances grounding performance through multi-view inference. Our key insight is that while single-view predictions may be unstable, aggregating predictions from multiple carefully cropped views can effectively distinguish correct coordinates from outliers. MVP comprises two components: (1) Attention-Guided View Proposal, which derives diverse views guided by instruction-to-image attention scores, and (2) Multi-Coordinates Clustering, which ensembles predictions by selecting the centroid of the densest spatial cluster. Extensive experiments demonstrate MVP's effectiveness across various models and benchmarks. Notably, on ScreenSpot-Pro, MVP boosts UI-TARS-1.5-7B to 56.1%, GTA1-7B to 61.7%, Qwen3VL-8B-Instruct to 65.3%, and Qwen3VL-32B-Instruct to 74.0%.

Poster
CamPI: Physical Adversarial Examples through Camera Power Signal Injection

Yanze Ren, Mingyuan Lv, Qinhong Jiang, Yan Jiang, Chen Yan, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu

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Physical adversarial examples pose a concrete threat to real-world computer vision systems. Existing works mainly generate physical adversarial examples by affixing patches or projecting light onto targets, which are usually visible and can expose the malicious intention. In this work, we reveal a new attack surface that generates invisible adversarial samples by injecting signals into the camera's power supply. We analyze the mechanism of injecting structural stripe patterns into cameras and demonstrate the feasibility of controllable fine-grained injection with signal modulation. We develop a simulation model to emulate the physically injected perturbation, and propose end-to-end optimization methodologies in both white-box and black-box settings to generate the injection signal parameters. We perform a simulated evaluation across seven classification models and carry out physical signal injection experiments with optimized signals. The results show that physical adversarial examples generated through camera power signal injection can disrupt computer vision performance. Our work introduces a new methodology for physical adversarial examples, emphasizing the need for securing computer vision systems in the physical world.

Poster
Semi-Supervised Conformal Prediction With Unlabeled Nonconformity Score

Xuanning Zhou, Zihao Shi, Hao Zeng, Xiaobo Xia, Bingyi Jing, Hongxin Wei

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Conformal prediction (CP) is a powerful framework for uncertainty quantification, generating prediction sets with coverage guarantees. Split conformal prediction relies on labeled data in the calibration procedure. However, the labeled data is often limited in real-world scenarios, leading to unstable coverage performance in different runs. To address this issue, we extend CP to the semi-supervised setting and propose SemiCP, a new paradigm that leverages both labeled and unlabeled data for calibration. To achieve this, we introduce an unlabeled nonconformity score, Nearest Neighbor Matching (NNM) score. Specifically, NNM estimates the nonconformity scores of unlabeled samples using their most similar pseudo-labeled counterparts during calibration, while maintaining the original scores for labeled data. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the average coverage gap (i.e., the absolute difference between the empirical marginal coverage and the target coverage) of SemiCP can decrease significantly at a rate O(N-1t2) and converge to an error term, where N is the number of unlabeled data. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of SemiCP under limited labeled data, reducing the average coverage gap by up to 77% on common benchmarks with 4000 unlabeled examples, when there are only 20 labeled examples. Code is available at https://github.com/Shinning-Zhou/SemiCP.

Poster
SurgCoT: Advancing Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Surgical Videos through a Chain-of-Thought Benchmark

Gui Wang, YongSong Zhou, Kaijun Deng, Wooi Ping Cheah, Rong Qu, Jianfeng Ren, Linlin Shen

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Fine-grained spatiotemporal reasoning on surgical videos is critical, yet the capabilities of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in this domain remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SurgCoT, a unified benchmark for evaluating chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in MLLMs across 7 surgical specialties and 35 diverse procedures. SurgCoT assesses five core reasoning dimensions: Causal Action Ordering, Cue-Action Alignment, Affordance Mapping, Micro-Transition Localization, and Anomaly Onset Tracking, through a structured CoT framework with an intensive annotation protocol (Question-Option-Knowledge-Clue-Answer), where the Knowledge field provides essential background context and Clue provides definitive spatiotemporal evidence. Evaluation of 10 leading MLLMs shows: 1) commercial models outperform open-source and medical-specialized variants; 2) significant gaps exist in surgical CoT reasoning; 3) SurgCoT enables effective evaluation and enhances progressive spatiotemporal reasoning. SurgCoT provides a reproducible testbed to narrow the gap between MLLM capabilities and clinical reasoning demands. Code and data: https://github.com/CVI-SZU/SurgCoT.

Poster
Learning to See Through a Baby's Eyes: Early Visual Diets Enable Robust Visual Intelligence in Humans and Machines

Yusen Cai, Qing Lin, Bhargava Satya Nunna, Mengmi Zhang

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Newborns perceive the world with low-acuity, color-degraded, and temporally continuous vision, which gradually sharpens as infants develop. To explore the ecological advantages of such staged "visual diets", we train self-supervised learning (SSL) models on object-centric videos under constraints that simulate infant vision: grayscale-to-color (C), blur-to-sharp (A), and preserved temporal continuity (T)--collectively termed CATDiet. For evaluation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark across ten datasets, covering clean and corrupted image recognition, texture-shape cue conflict tests, silhouette recognition, depth-order classification, and the visual cliff paradigm.All CATDiet variants demonstrate enhanced robustness in object recognition, despite being trained solely on object-centric videos. Remarkably, models also exhibit biologically aligned developmental patterns, including neural plasticity changes mirroring synaptic density in macaque V1 and behaviors resembling infants' visual cliff responses. Building on these insights, CombDiet initializes SSL with CATDiet before standard training while preserving temporal continuity. Trained on object-centric or head-mounted infant videos, CombDiet outperforms standard SSL on both in-domain and out-of-domain object recognition and depth perception. Together, these results suggest that the developmental progression of early infant visual experience offers a powerful reverse-engineering framework for understanding the emergence of robust visual intelligence in machines. All code, data, and models are available at Github.

Poster
FVAR: Next-Focus Prediction for Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Xiaofan Li, Chenming Wu, Yanpeng Sun, Jiaming Zhou, Delin Qu, Yansong Qu, Weihao Bo, Haibao Yu, Dingkang Liang

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Visual autoregressive models achieve remarkable generation quality through next-scale predictions across multi-scale token pyramids. However, the conventional method uses uniform scale downsampling to build these pyramids, leading to aliasing artifacts that compromise fine details and introduce unwanted jaggies and moire patterns. To tackle this issue, we present FVAR, which reframes the paradigm from next-scale prediction to next-focus prediction, mimicking the natural process of camera focusing from blur to clarity. Our approach introduces three key innovations: 1) Next-Focus Prediction Paradigm that transforms multi-scale autoregression by progressively reducing blur rather than simply downsampling; 2) Progressive Refocusing Pyramid Construction that uses physics-consistent defocus kernels to build clean, alias-free multi-scale representations; and 3) High-Frequency Residual Learning that employs a specialized residual teacher network to effectively incorporate alias information during training while maintaining deployment simplicity. Specifically, we construct optical low-pass views using defocus point spread function (PSF) kernels with decreasing radius, creating smooth blur-to-clarity transitions that eliminate aliasing at its source. To further enhance detail generation, we introduce a High-Frequency Residual Teacher that learns from both clean structure and alias residuals, distilling this knowledge to a vanilla VAR deployment network for seamless inference. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that FVAR substantially reduces aliasing artifacts, improves fine detail preservation, and enhances text readability, achieving superior performance with perfect compatibility to existing VAR frameworks.

Poster
A Geometric Algebra-Informed 3DGS Framework for Wireless Channel Prediction

Jingzhou Shen, Tianya Zhao, Xuyu Wang

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In this paper, we introduce Geometric Algebra-Informed 3D Gaussian Splatting (GAI-GS), a framework for wireless modeling that couples 3D Gaussian splatting with a geometric algebra-based attention mechanism to explicitly model ray-object interactions in complex propagation environments. GAI-GS encodes joint spatial-electromagnetic (EM) relations into token representations, enabling scene-level aggregation within a unified, end-to-end neural architecture. This design grounds wireless ray propagation in electromagnetic principles, allowing token interactions to model key effects such as multipath, attenuation, and reflection/diffraction. Through extensive evaluations on multiple real-world indoor datasets, GAI-GS consistently surpasses current baselines across various wireless tasks.

Poster
Bridging Domains through Subspace-Aware Model Merging

Levy Chaves, Chao Zhou, Rebekka Burkholz, Eduardo Valle, Sandra Avila

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Model merging integrates multiple task-specific models into a single consolidated one. Recent research has made progress in improving merging performance for in-distribution or multi-task scenarios, but domain generalization in model merging remains underexplored. We investigate how merging models fine-tuned on distinct domains affects generalization to unseen domains. Through an analysis of parameter competition in the task matrix using singular value decomposition, we show that merging models trained under different distribution shifts induces stronger conflicts between their subspaces compared to traditional multi-task settings. To mitigate this issue, we propose SCORE (Subspace COnflict-Resolving mErging), a method designed to alleviate such singular subspace conflicts. SCORE finds a shared orthogonal basis by computing the principal components of the concatenated leading singular vectors of all models. It then projects each task matrix into the shared basis, pruning off-diagonal components to remove conflicting singular directions. SCORE consistently outperforms, on average, existing model merging approaches in domain generalization settings across a variety of architectures and model scales, demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability.

Poster
OneOcc: Semantic Occupancy Prediction for Legged Robots with a Single Panoramic Camera

Hao Shi, Ze Wang, Shangwei Guo, Mengfei Duan, Song Wang, Teng Chen, Kailun Yang, Lin Wang, kaiwei wang

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Robust 3D semantic occupancy is essential for legged and humanoid robots, yet most Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) systems are built for wheeled platforms with forward-facing sensors. We present OneOcc, a vision-only panoramic SSC framework tailored to severe body jitter and 360deg continuity. OneOcc integrates four complementary modules: (i) Dual-Projection fusion (DP-ER), which jointly exploits the raw annular panorama and its equirectangular unfolding to preserve true 360deg continuity while enabling grid-aligned feature extraction and seam-aware context; (ii) Bi-Grid Voxelization (BGV), which reasons in Cartesian and polar/cylindrical voxel spaces to reduce discretization bias and better align with panoramic geometry, yielding sharper free/occupied boundaries; (iii) a lightweight decoder with Hierarchical AMoE-3D fusion that dynamically routes multi-scale 3D features to specialized experts, improving long-range context and occlusion handling; and (iv) a plug-and-play Gait Displacement Compensation (GDC) module that learns feature-level motion correction from gait, stabilizing representations without extra sensors. We also release two panoramic occupancy benchmarks: QuadOcc (real quadruped, first-person 360deg) and Human360Occ (H3O) (CARLA human-ego 360deg with RGB/Depth/semantic-occupancy and standardized within-/cross-city splits). OneOcc sets new SOTA: on QuadOcc it exceeds strong vision baselines and even popular LiDAR methods, and on H3O it improves within-city by +3.83 mIoU and cross-city by +8.08. The modules are lightweight, enabling deployable full-surround semantic perception for legged and humanoid robots.

Poster
Rethinking Model Selection in VLM Through the Lens of Gromov-Wasserstein Distance

Muyang Li, Yucheng Liu, Jianbo Ma, Elliot Osborne, Bo Han, Tongliang Liu

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Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enhanced traditional LLMs with visual capabilities through the integration of vision encoders. While recent works have explored various combinations of vision encoders and LLMs, there still lacks a principled understanding of what makes a vision encoder suitable for VLM alignment. In this paper, we systematically investigate this question via comprehensive experiments on a curated collection of 19 pre-trained vision encoders from diverse sources. We first demonstrate that common practices, such as choosing encoders with the largest size or highest zero-shot accuracy, consistently fail to identify optimal models. In fact, these metrics show only weak to moderate correlation with VLM performance. This intriguing finding begs a fundamental question: What factors of vision-encoders matter in VLM? Through comprehensive analysis, we identify that the structural similarity across modalities plays a crucial but previously overlooked role in vision-encoder selection, which we measure using the Gromov-Wasserstein distance as a proxy. From a theoretical perspective, we show that the learnability of cross-modality mapping can be provably associated with the Gromov-Wasserstein distance. Empirical verification on 60+ full VLM training runs shows that our proposed inference-only metric performs significantly better than alternative model selection strategies and exhibits a much stronger correlation with final VLM performance, thereby enabling efficient and effective prediction of VLM performance before full training.

Poster