CVPR 2026 Papers

Instruction tuning has been central to the success of recent vision-language models (VLMs), but it remains expensive-requiring large-scale datasets, high-quality annotations, and large compute budgets. We propose PRioritized cOncept learninG via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection (PROGRESS), a data- and compute-efficient framework that enables VLMs to dynamically select what to learn next based on their evolving needs during training. At each stage, the model tracks its learning progress across skills and selects the most informative samples-those it has not already mastered and that are not too difficult to learn at the current stage of training. This strategy effectively controls skill acquisition and the order in which skills are learned. Specifically, we sample from skills showing the highest learning progress, prioritizing those with the most rapid improvement. Unlike prior methods, PROGRESS requires no upfront answer annotations, queries answers only on a need basis, avoids reliance on additional supervision from auxiliary VLMs, and does not require compute-heavy gradient computations for data selection. Experiments across multiple instruction-tuning datasets of varying scales demonstrate that PROGRESS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with much less data and supervision. Additionally, we show strong cross-architecture generalization and transferability to larger models, validating PROGRESS as a scalable solution for efficient learning.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been shown to be vulnerable to malicious queries that can elicit unsafe responses. Recent work uses prompt engineering, response classification, or finetuning to improve MLLM safety. Nevertheless, such approaches are often ineffective against evolving malicious patterns, may require rerunning the query, or demand heavy computational resources. Steering the activations of a frozen model at inference time has recently emerged as a flexible and effective solution. However, existing steering methods for MLLMs typically handle only a narrow set of safety-related concepts or struggle to adjust specific concepts without affecting others. To address these challenges, we introduce Dictionary-Aligned Concept Control (DACO), a framework that utilizes a curated concept dictionary and a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) to provide granular control over MLLM activations. First, we curate a dictionary of 15,000 multimodal concepts by retrieving over 400,000 caption-image stimuli and summarizing their activations into concept directions. We name the dataset DACO-400K. Second, we show that the curated dictionary can be used to intervene activations via sparse coding. Third, we propose a new steering approach that uses our dictionary to initialize the training of an SAE and automatically annotate the semantics of the SAE atoms for safeguarding MLLMs. Experiments on multiple MLLMs (e.g., QwenVL, LLaVA, InternVL) across safety benchmarks (e.g., MM-SafetyBench, JailBreakV) show that DACO significantly improves MLLM safety while maintaining general-purpose capabilities.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) often degrade under distribution shifts because they rely on spurious correlations, such as background cues, rather than semantically meaningful features. Existing regularization methods, typically relying on simple foreground-background masks, which fail to capture the fine-grained semantic concepts that define an object (e.g., "long beak" and "wings" for a "bird"). As a result, these methods provide limited robustness to distribution shifts. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel finetuning framework that steers model reasoning toward concept-level semantics. Our approach optimizes the model's internal relevance maps to align with spatially grounded concept masks. These masks are generated automatically, without manual annotation: class-relevant concepts are first proposed using an LLM-based, label-free method, and then segmented using a VLM. The finetuning objective aligns relevance with these concept regions while simultaneously suppressing focus on spurious background areas. Notably, this process requires only a minimal set of images and uses half of the dataset classes. Extensive experiments on five out-of-distribution benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves robustness across multiple ViT-based models. Furthermore, we show that the resulting relevance maps exhibit stronger alignment with semantic object parts, offering a scalable path toward more robust and interpretable vision models. Finally, we confirm that concept-guided masks provide more effective supervision for model robustness than conventional segmentation maps, supporting our central hypothesis.

Personalized text-to-image (T2I) generation has emerged as a key application for creating user-specific concepts from a few reference images. The core challenge is concept disentanglement: separating the target concept from irrelevant residual information. Lacking such disentanglement, capturing high-fidelity features often incorporates undesired attributes that conflict with user prompts, compromising the trade-off between concept fidelity and text alignment. While existing methods rely on manual guidance, they often fail to represent intricate visual details and lack scalability. We introduce ConceptPrism, a framework that extracts shared features exclusively through cross-image comparison without external information. We jointly optimize a target token and image-wise residual tokens via reconstruction and exclusion losses. By suppressing shared information in residual tokens, the exclusion loss creates an information vacuum that forces the target token to capture the common concept. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ConceptPrism achieves accurate concept disentanglement and significantly improves overall performance across diverse and complex visual concepts.

Interpretable-by-design models are gaining traction in computer vision because they provide faithful explanations for their predictions. In image classification, these models typically recover human-interpretable concepts from an image and use them for classification. Sparse concept recovery methods leverage the latent space of vision-language models to represent image embeddings as sparse combinations of concept embeddings. However, by ignoring the hierarchical structure of semantic concepts, these methods may produce correct predictions with explanations that are inconsistent with the hierarchy. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Concept Embedding & Pursuit (HCEP), a framework that induces a hierarchy of concept embeddings in the latent space and performs hierarchical sparse coding to recover the concepts present in an image. Given a hierarchy of semantic concepts, we introduce a geometric construction for the corresponding hierarchy of embeddings. Under the assumption that the true concepts form a rooted path in the hierarchy, we derive sufficient conditions for their recovery in the embedding space. We further show that hierarchical sparse coding reliably recovers hierarchical concept embeddings, whereas standard sparse coding fails. Experiments on real-world datasets show that HCEP improves concept precision and recall compared to existing methods while maintaining competitive classification accuracy. Moreover, when the number of samples available for concept estimation and classifier training is limited, HCEP achieves superior classification accuracy and concept recovery. Our results demonstrate that incorporating hierarchical structure into sparse concept recovery leads to more faithful and interpretable image classification models.

Pruning-based unlearning has recently emerged as a fast, training-free, and data-independent approach to remove undesired concepts from diffusion models. It promises high efficiency and robustness, offering an attractive alternative to traditional fine-tuning or editing-based unlearning. However, in this paper we uncover a hidden danger behind this promising paradigm. We find that the locations of pruned weights, typically set to zero during unlearning, can act as side-channel signals that leak critical information about the erased concepts.To verify this vulnerability, we design a novel attack framework capable of reviving erased concepts from pruned diffusion models in a fully data-free and training-free manner. Our experiments confirm that pruning-based unlearning is not inherently secure, as erased concepts can be effectively revived without any additional data or retraining.Finally, we explore potential defense strategies and advocate safer pruning mechanisms that conceal pruning locations while preserving unlearning effectiveness, providing practical insights for designing more secure pruning-based unlearning frameworks.

Contrastive vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot recognition yet remain vulnerable to spurious correlations, particularly background over-reliance. We introduce Cluster-based Concept Importance (CCI), a novel interpretability method that uses CLIP's own patch embeddings to group spatial patches into semantically coherent clusters, masking them, and evaluating relative changes in model predictions. CCI sets a new state of the art on faithfulness benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by large margins; for example, it yields more than a twofold improvement on the deletion-AUC metric for MS COCO retrieval. We further propose that CCI when combined with GroundedSAM, automatically categorizes predictions as foreground or background-driven, providing a crucial diagnostic ability. Existing benchmarks such as CounterAnimals, however, rely solely on accuracy and implicitly attribute all performance degradation to background correlations. Our analysis shows this assumption to be incomplete, since many errors arise from viewpoint variation, scale shifts, and fine-grained object confusions. To disentangle these effects, we introduce COVAR, a benchmark that systematically varies object foregrounds and backgrounds. Leveraging CCI with COVAR, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of eighteen CLIP variants, providing both methodological advances and empirical evidence that chart a path toward more robust vision-language models.

Contrastive vision-language (V&L) models remain a popular choice for various applications. However, several limitations have emerged, most notably the limited ability of V&L models to learn compositional representations. Prior methods often addressed this limitation by generating custom training data to obtain hard-negative samples. Hard-negatives have been shown to improve performance on compositionality tasks, but are often specific to a single benchmark, do not generalize, and can cause substantial degradation of basic V&L capabilities such as zero-shot or retrieval performance, rendering them impractical. In this work we follow a different approach. We identify two root causes that limit compositionality performance of V&Ls: 1) Long training captions do not require a compositional representation; and 2) The final global pooling in the text and image encoders leads to a complete loss of the necessary information to learn binding in the first place. As a remedy, we propose two simple solutions: 1) We obtain short concept centric caption parts using standard NLP software and align those with the image; and 2) We introduce a parameter-free cross-modal attention-pooling to obtain concept centric visual embeddings from the image encoder. With these two changes and simple auxiliary contrastive losses, we obtain SOTA performance on standard compositionality benchmarks, while maintaining or improving strong zero-shot and retrieval capabilities. This is achieved without increasing inference cost. We release the code for this work at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/concept_centric_clip.

From content moderation to content curation, applications requiring vision classifiers for visual concepts are rapidly expanding. Existing human-in-the-loop approaches typically assume users begin with a clear, stable concept understanding to be able to provide high-quality supervision. In reality, users often start with a vague idea and must iteratively refine it through "concept deliberation", a practice we uncovered through structured interviews with content moderation experts. We operationalize the common strategies in deliberation used by real content moderators into a human-in-the-loop framework called Agile Deliberation that explicitly supports evolving and subjective concepts. The system supports users in defining the concept for themselves by exposing them to borderline cases. The system does this with two deliberation stages: (1) concept scoping, which decomposes the initial concept into a structured hierarchy of sub-concepts, and (2) concept iteration, which surfaces semantically borderline examples for user reflection and feedback to iteratively align an image classifier with the user's evolving intent. Since concept deliberation is inherently subjective and interactive, we painstakingly evaluate the framework through 18 user sessions, each 1.5h long, rather than standard benchmarking datasets. We find that Agile Deliberation achieves 7.5% higher F1 scores than automated decomposition baselines and more than 3% higher than manual deliberation, while participants reported clearer conceptual understanding and lower cognitive effort.

Generative AI models pose a significant challenge to intellectual property (IP), as they can replicate unique artistic styles and concepts without attribution. While watermarking offers a potential solution, existing methods often fail in complex scenarios where multiple concepts (e.g., an object and an artistic style) are composed within a single image. These methods struggle to disentangle and attribute each concept individually. In this work, we introduce TokenTrace, a novel proactive watermarking framework for robust, multi-concept attribution. Our method embeds secret signatures into the semantic domain by simultaneously perturbing the text prompt embedding and the initial latent noise that guide the diffusion model's generation process. For retrieval, we propose a query-based TokenTrace module that takes the generated image and a textual query specifying which concepts need to be retrieved (e.g., a specific object or style) as inputs. This query-based mechanism allows the module to disentangle and independently verify the presence of multiple concepts from a single generated image. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both single-concept (object and style) and multi-concept attribution tasks, significantly outperforming existing baselines while maintaining high visual quality and robustness to common transformations.

Unsupervised Concept Extraction aims to extract concepts from a single image, yet existing methods suffer from the inability to extract composable intrinsic concepts. To address this, this paper introduces a new task called Compositional and Interpretable Intrinsic Concept Extraction (CI-ICE). The CI-ICE task aims to leverage diffusion-based text-to-image models to extract composable object-level and attribute-level concepts from a single image, such that the original concept can be reconstructed through the combination of these concepts. To achieve this goal, we propose a method called HyperExpress, which addresses the CI-ICE task through two core aspects. Specifically, first, we propose a concept learning approach that leverages the inherent hierarchical modeling capability of hyperbolic space to achieve accurate concept disentanglement while preserving the hierarchical structure and relational dependencies among concepts; second, we introduce a concept-wise optimization method that maps the concept embedding space to maintain complex inter-concept relationships while ensuring concept composability. Our method demonstrates outstanding performance in extracting compositionally interpretable intrinsic concepts from a single image.

Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models deliver remarkable visual fidelity but pose safety risks due to their capacity to reproduce undesirable content, such as copyrighted ones. Concept erasure has emerged as a mitigation strategy, yet existing approaches struggle to balance scalability, precision, and robustness, which restricts their applicability to erasing only a few hundred concepts. To address these limitations, we present Erasing Thousands of Concepts (ETC), a scalable framework capable of erasing thousands of concepts while preserving generation quality. Our method first models low-rank concept distributions via a Student's t-distribution Mixture Model (tMM). It enables pin-point erasure of target concepts via affine optimal transport while preserving others by anchoring the boundaries of target concept distributions without pre-defined anchor concepts. We then train a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based module, termed MoEraser, which removes target embeddings while preserving the anchor embeddings. By injecting noise into the text embedding projector and fine-tuning MoEraser for recovery, our framework achieves robustness to white-box attack such as module removal. Extensive experiments on over 2,000 concepts across heterogeneous domains and diffusion models demonstrate state-of-the-art scalability and precision in large-scale concept erasure.