CVPR 2026 Papers

Visual counterfactual explanations aim to reveal the minimal semantic modifications that can alter a model's prediction, providing causal and interpretable insights into deep neural networks. However, existing diffusion-based counterfactual generation methods are often computationally expensive, slow to sample, and imprecise in localizing the modified regions. To address these limitations, we propose MaskDiME, a simple, fast, yet effective diffusion framework that unifies semantic consistency and spatial precision through localized sampling. Our approach adaptively focuses on decision-relevant regions to achieve localized and semantically consistent counterfactual generation while preserving high image fidelity. Our training-free framework, MaskDiME, performs inference over 30x faster than the baseline and achieves comparable or state-of-the-art performance across five benchmark datasets spanning diverse visual domains, establishing a practical and generalizable solution for efficient counterfactual explanation. Our code is available at https://github.com/clguo/MaskDiME.

Image-to-poster generation is a high-demand task requiring not only local adjustments but also high-level design understanding. Models must generate text, layout, style, and visual elements while preserving semantic fidelity and aesthetic coherence. The process spans two regimes: local editing, where ID-driven generation, rescaling, filling, and extending must preserve concrete visual entities; and global creation, where layout- and style-driven tasks rely on understanding abstract design concepts. These intertwined demands make image-to-poster a multi-dimensional process coupling entity-preserving editing with concept-driven creation under image-prompt control. To address these challenges, we propose PosterOmni, a generalized artistic poster creation framework that unlocks the potential of a base edit model for multi-task image-to-poster generation. PosterOmni integrates the two regimes, namely local editing and global creation, within a single system through an efficient data-distillation-reward pipeline: (i) constructing multi-scenario image-to-poster datasets covering six task types across entity-based and concept-based creation; (ii) distilling knowledge between local and global experts for supervised fine-tuning; and (iii) applying unified PosterOmni Reward Feedback to jointly align visual entity-preserving and aesthetic preference across all tasks. Additionally, we establish PosterOmni-Bench, a unified benchmark for evaluating both local editing and global creation. Extensive experiments show that PosterOmni significantly enhances reference adherence, global composition quality, and aesthetic harmony, outperforming all open-source baselines and even surpassing several proprietary systems.

Context-dependent (CD) tasks demand the model to have advanced visual understanding ability, such as recognizing camouflaged objects and medical lesions. Current CD methods rely heavily on pixel-level annotated training sets, neglecting issues from redundant samples and the high annotation costs. In this paper, we address the pruning needs of CD datasets, focusing on selecting the most valuable samples for labeling and training using weak annotations. To achieve this, we decompose CD coreset selection into two steps: sample evaluation and coreset selection, proposing corresponding solutions: points-based optimal transport and a maximum distance entropy strategy. Specifically, we formulate sample evaluation as an optimal transport problem between foreground and background distributions, designing a foreground destruction-reconstruction process based on points to compute transport costs and score samples. For samples of varying importance, our selection strategy balances coreset coverage and diversity. We validate our method on six CD tasks, achieving 1% accuracy loss relative to full training under a 40% pruning rate.

Non-transferable learning (NTL) aims to enforce usage restrictions by limiting a model's generalization on target-domain data while maintaining its utility on the source domain. Current approaches face three major challenges: (1) low training efficiency due to retraining of the backbone network, (2) low inference efficiency, and (3) a rigid reliance on a shared, non-adaptive backbone network spanning both source and target domains. This shared setup, which aims to maximize source-domain performance and minimize target-domain performance, often introduces optimization conflicts due to overlapping class categories across source and target domains. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient NTL approach using a dynamic Early-Exit Network, named ENL-DEE, which leverages Bayesian theory and dynamic neural networks to address these limitations. Our custom loss function guides source-domain data to exit at later stages of the network, maximizing model utility, while target-domain data exits earlier with non-semantic features, ensuring limited transferability. ENL-DEE offers three key advantages: (1) it enhances training efficiency by optimizing only the parameters of dynamic exit classifiers, bypassing the need to retrain the backbone; (2) it improves inference efficiency as data exits at various exit classifiers in the network; and (3) it resolves optimization conflicts by using distinct parameter sets for source and target domains, achieving higher performance on the source domain and lower performance on the target domain, thereby strengthening NTL. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and model architectures validate the scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness of our approach.

Recent advances in stereo matching have focused on accuracy, often at the cost of significantly increased model size. Traditionally, the community has regarded efficient models as incapable of zero-shot ability due to their limited capacity. In this paper, we introduce Lite Any Stereo, a stereo depth estimation framework that achieves strong zero-shot generalization while remaining highly efficient. To this end, we design a compact yet expressive backbone to ensure scalability, along with a carefully crafted hybrid cost aggregation module. We further propose a three-stage training strategy on million-scale data to effectively bridge the sim-to-real gap. Together, these components demonstrate that an ultra-light model can deliver strong generalization, ranking 1st across four widely used real-world benchmarks. Remarkably, our model attains accuracy comparable to or exceeding state-of-the-art non-prior-based accurate methods while requiring less than 1% computational cost, setting a new standard for efficient stereo matching.

Despite the perceived success of large-scale dataset distillation (DD) methods, recent evidence [??] finds that simple random image baselines perform on-par with state-of-the-art DD methods like SRe2L [??] due to the use of soft labels during downstream model training. This is in contrast with the findings in coreset literature, where high-quality coresets consistently outperform random subsets in the hard-label (HL) setting. To understand this discrepancy, we perform a detailed scalability analysis to examine the role of data quality under different label regimes, ranging from abundant soft labels (termed as SL+KD regime) to fixed soft labels (SL) and hard labels (HL). Our analysis reveals that high-quality coresets fail to convincingly outperform the random baseline in both SL and SL+KD regimes. In the SL+KD setting, performance further approaches near-optimal levels relative to the full dataset, regardless of subset size or quality, for a given compute budget. This performance saturation calls into question the widespread practice of using soft labels for model evaluation, where unlike the HL setting, subset quality has negligible influence. A subsequent systematic evaluation of five large-scale and four small-scale DD methods in the HL setting reveals that only RDED [??] reliably outperforms random baselines on ImageNet-1K, but can still lag behind strong coreset methods due to its over-reliance on easy sample patches. Based on this, we introduce CAD-Prune, a compute-aware pruning metric that efficiently identifies samples of optimal difficulty for a given compute budget, and use it to develop CA2D, a compute-aligned DD method, outperforming current DD methods on ImageNet-1K at various IPC settings. Together, our findings uncover many insights into current DD research and establish useful tools to advance data-efficient learning for both coresets and DD.

Balancing convergence efficiency and robustness under Differential Privacy (DP) is a central challenge in Federated Learning (FL). Although AdamW accelerates training and fine-tuning in large-scale models, we find that directly applying it to Differentially Private FL (DPFL) suffers from three major issues: (i) data heterogeneity and privacy noise jointly amplify the variance of the second-moment estimator, (ii) DP perturbations bias the second-moment estimator, and (iii) DP amplifies AdamW's sensitivity to local overfitting, worsening client drift. We propose DP-FedAdamW, the first AdamW-based optimizer for DPFL. It restores the effectiveness of AdamW under DP by stabilizing second-moment variance, removing DP-induced bias, and aligning local updates with the global descent direction to curb client drift. Theoretically, we establish an unbiased second-moment estimator and prove a linearly accelerated convergence rate without any heterogeneity assumption, while providing tighter (\varepsilon,\delta)-DP guarantees. Our empirical results demonstrate the strong performance of DP-FedAdamW across language and vision Transformers, as well as ResNet-18. On Tiny-ImageNet (Swin-Base, \varepsilon=1), DP-FedAdamW outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 5.83%. The code is available at https://github.com/junkangLiu0/DP-FedAdamW.

Recent optical flow estimation methods often employ local cost sampling from a dense all-pairs correlation volume. This results in quadratic computational and memory complexity in the number of pixels. Although an alternative memory-efficient implementation with on-demand cost computation exists, this is significantly slower in practice and therefore many prior methods process images at downsampled resolutions, missing fine-grained details. To address this, we propose an algorithm for both memory and compute-efficient implementation of the all-pairs correlation volume sampling, still matching the exact mathematical operator as defined by RAFT. Our approach outperforms on-demand sampling by up to 92% while maintaining equally low memory usage, and performs at least on par with the default implementation with up to 99% lower memory usage. As cost sampling makes up a significant portion of the overall runtime, this can translate to up to 63% savings for the total end-to-end model inference on high-resolution inputs. Our evaluation of existing methods includes an 8K ultra-high-resolution dataset and an inference-time extension of the SEA-RAFT method. With this, we achieve state-of-the-art results at high resolutions both in accuracy and runtime.

Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) face a fundamental performance bottleneck: the token explosion intrinsic to video inputs. The resulting O(N^2) prefill cost makes conventional Transformer inference prohibitively expensive at scale. Existing attempts fall into a hard accuracy-latency dilemma: naive sparsification risks losing essential temporal-spatial context, whereas naive parallelization introduces substantial communication and memory overhead. To overcome this impasse, we propose SegMo, a unified framework based on algorithm-system co-design that jointly optimizes what to compute (sparsification) and how to compute it (parallelism). Driven by the empirical discovery of Local Cohesion in VideoLLM attention, SegMo integrates two key components: (1) Content-Aware Sparsification (CAS): A lightweight, hierarchical algorithm that first employs Query Relevance for scene-level assessment, and then uses Temporal Redundancy for intra-scene static redundancy pruning, to generate a precise, non-uniform computation load, ensuring accuracy. (2) Locally-Cohesive Segment Parallelism (LSP): A novel paradigm that leverages attention locality to partition the video at scene boundaries, using a lightweight Global Context Injection mechanism to replace the massive communication and memory overheads of global attention. SegMo was validated across LVBench, LongVideoBench, and Video-MME. Our CAS module improved accuracy by up to 12.00%. When integrated with LSP, the full system (CAS + LSP) achieved a peak prefill acceleration of 3.55x, while still maintaining a significant accuracy gain of up to 8.31%.

Spatiotemporal predictive learning (STPL) aims to forecast future frames from past observations and is essential across a wide range of applications. Compared with recurrent or hybrid architectures, pure convolutional models offer superior efficiency and full parallelism, yet their fixed receptive fields limit their ability to adaptively capture spatially varying motion patterns. Inspired by biological center-surround organization and frequency-selective signal processing, we propose PFGNet, a fully convolutional framework that dynamically modulates receptive fields through pixel-wise frequency-guided gating. The core Peripheral Frequency Gating (PFG) block extracts localized spectral cues and adaptively fuses multi-scale large-kernel peripheral responses with learnable center suppression, effectively forming spatially adaptive band-pass filters. To maintain efficiency, all large kernels are decomposed into separable 1D convolutions (1xk followed by kx1), reducing per-channel computational cost from O(k2) to O(2k). PFGNet enables structure-aware spatiotemporal modeling without recurrence or attention. Experiments on Moving MNIST, TaxiBJ, Human3.6M, and KTH show that PFGNet delivers SOTA or near-SOTA forecasting performance with substantially fewer parameters and FLOPs. Our code is available at https://github.com/fhjdqaq/PFGNet.

Video Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (VUDA) poses a significant challenge in action recognition, requiring the adaptation of a model from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Despite recent advances, existing VUDA methods often fall short of fully supervised performance, a key reason being the prevalence of static and uninformative backgrounds that exacerbate domain shifts. Additionally, prior approaches largely overlook computational efficiency, limiting real-world adoption. To address these issues, we propose Learnable Motion-Focused Tokenization (LMFT) for VUDA. LMFT tokenizes video frames into patch tokens and learns to discard low-motion, redundant tokens, primarily corresponding to background regions, while retaining motion-rich, action-relevant tokens for adaptation. Extensive experiments on three standard VUDA benchmarks across 21 domain adaptation settings show that our VUDA framework with LMFT achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. LMFT thus enables VUDA that is both effective and computationally efficient.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have recently gained popularity for applying deep neural networks on small datasets as they reduce overfitting, simplify deployment, and enable fast training. We demonstrate that for dense image prediction tasks, a well-designed and lightweight dense readout on top of a frozen large backbone can surpass state-of-the-art PEFT methods in both efficiency and accuracy. Our parameter-efficient readout module combines interpolation and attention for fine-grained dense prediction. It integrates seamlessly with a wide range of pretrained vision backbones such as DINOv3 and can be combined with low-rank adaptation (LoRA). We achieve competitive or superior performance in semantic segmentation, object detection, pose estimation and semantic contour prediction, offering an efficient alternative to current PEFT techniques.

Tensor-based methods have attracted growing interest due to their ability to reduce trainable parameters and offer advantages over matrix-based approaches in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA and PiSSA), particularly in capturing inter-layer correlations. However, directly applying tensor methods requires repeated reconstruction of model weights during training, introducing substantial overhead and becoming a key bottleneck for deployment. To address this limitation, we propose Reconstruction-Free Tensor-Based Adaptation (ReFTA), which offers four advantages: (1) eliminating weight tensor reconstruction via tensor algebraic properties; (2) reducing initialization quantization error by fine-tuning only the principal tensor components; (3) providing a rigorous generalization guarantee rooted in tensor product algebra; and (4) enabling a unified design controlled by a single tensor rank configuration. Extensive experiments on both image classification (IC) and natural language understanding (NLU) tasks demonstrate that ReFTA achieves the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off among all evaluated methods. Across most cases, ReFTA attains the highest average accuracy with the fewest trainable parameters. On IC tasks with the ViT-Large model, ReFTA surpasses LoRA by 5.6% in average accuracy, while reducing the number of trainable parameters by up to 96% compared to LoRA. On NLU tasks with RoBERTa-Large, ReFTA improves the average accuracy by approximately 5% over most existing methods while using only 86.4% fewer parameters than LoRA (r=1) and 97.5% fewer than PiSSA. The code is available at https://github.com/jzheng20/ReFTA.

Weakly-supervised Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is essential for scalable scene understanding, as it learns interactions from only image-level annotations. Due to the lack of localization signals, prior works typically rely on an external object detector to generate candidate pairs and then infer their interactions through pairwise reasoning. However, this framework often struggles to scale due to the substantial computational cost incurred by enumerating numerous instance pairs. In addition, it suffers from false positives arising from non-interactive combinations, which hinder accurate instance-level HOI reasoning. To address these issues, we introduce Relational Grounding Transformer (RegFormer), a versatile interaction recognition module for efficient and accurate HOI reasoning. Under image-level supervision, RegFormer leverages spatially grounded signals as guidance for the reasoning process and promotes locality-aware interaction learning. By learning localized interaction cues, our module distinguishes humans, objects, and their interactions, enabling direct transfer from image-level interaction reasoning to precise and efficient instance-level reasoning without additional training. Our extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that RegFormer effectively learns spatial cues for instance-level interaction reasoning, operates with high efficiency, and even achieves performance comparable to fully supervised models. Our code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/RegFormer.

Table structure recognition in document AI faces significant challenges due to layout inconsistencies, merged cells, and complex nested structures, which is further exacerbated by the scarcity of large, diverse annotated datasets. In this paper, we present PIX-TAB (Efficient PIXel-Precise TABle Structure Recognition Approach) that provides exact, pixel-level structure using a small, lightweight model that can run on-device. The approach is language-agnostic, as it allows adding support for a new languages simply by replacing the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model without modifying to the core structure recognition model. Key innovations include: position-aware pixel-precise tokens for deterministic cell reconstruction; speculative decoding for faster sequence generation, and training-only box supervision to stabilize spatial grounding; region-based image segmentation. To mitigate data scarcity we propose a pipeline for generating a large synthetic table dataset. Experimental results validate each component. To address the limitations of existing evaluation methods we introduce TEDS_ struct100 and TEDS_ 100 metrics. Speculative decoding approach significantly improves recognition speed while maintaining accuracy. Finally, the combined techniques enable a mobile-optimized model that is more than three times faster than the full-size version.

Avoiding catastrophic forgetting for previous tasks and maintaining model plasticity to support new tasks are two critical objectives of continual learning. However, existing methods usually neglect one of the two aspects and fail to support long task sequences with satisfactory performance, especially in resource-constrained scenarios in which the size of the model is limited. This work proposes GRAPA, a parameter-efficient continual learning method that well balances stability and plasticity of the model to handle long task sequences with diverse complexities. GRAPA enhances model plasticity without sacrificing stability with two novel designs. First, a gradient-guided parameter reuse strategy is proposed to make full use of frozen parameters while ensuring that no task interference is introduced. Second, a reinforcement-learning-based parameter allocation is designed to enable the model to adapt to the current task on top of reused parameters while preserving maximal model capacity for future tasks. Experiments on multiple task sequences composed of various datasets demonstrate that GRAPA lifts mean task accuracy by up to 7.67%, with up to 14.92% gains on subsequent complex tasks, reflecting GRAPA's superior plasticity.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy, but its practical deployment is hampered by system and statistical heterogeneity. While federated network pruning offers a path to mitigate these issues, existing methods face a critical dilemma: server-side pruning lacks personalization, whereas client-side pruning is computationally prohibitive for resource-constrained devices. Furthermore, the pruning process itself induces significant parametric divergence among heterogeneous submodels, destabilizing training and hindering global convergence. To address these challenges, we propose SubFLOT, a novel framework for server-side personalized federated pruning. SubFLOT introduces an Optimal Transport-enhanced Pruning (OTP) module that treats historical client models as proxies for local data distributions, formulating the pruning task as a Wasserstein distance minimization problem to generate customized submodels without accessing raw data. Concurrently, to counteract parametric divergence, our Scaling-based Adaptive Regularization (SAR) module adaptively penalizes a submodel's deviation from the global model, with the penalty's strength scaled by the client's pruning rate. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SubFLOT consistently and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, underscoring its potential for deploying efficient and personalized models on resource-constrained edge devices.

While existing equivariant methods enhance data efficiency, they suffer from high computational intensity, reliance on single-modality inputs, and instability when combined with fast-sampling methods. In this work, we propose E3Flow, a novel framework that addresses the critical limitations of equivariant diffusion policies. E3Flow overcomes these challenges, successfully unifying efficient rectified flow with stable, multi-modal equivariant learning for the first time. Our framework is built upon spherical harmonic representations to ensure rigorous SO(3) equivariance. We introduce a novel invariant Feature Enhancement Module (FEM) that dynamically fuses hybrid visual modalities (point clouds and images), injecting rich visual cues into the spherical harmonic features. We evaluate E3Flow on 8 manipulation tasks from the MimicGen and further conduct 4 real-world experiments to validate its effectiveness in physical environments. Simulation results show that E3Flow achieves a 3.12% improvement in average success rate over the state-of-the-art Spherical Diffusion Policy (SDP) while simultaneously delivering a 7x inference speedup. E3Flow thus demonstrates a new and highly effective trade-off between performance, efficiency, and data efficiency for robotic policy learning. Code: https://github.com/zql-kk/E3Flow.

Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) demonstrate strong video understanding but suffer from inefficiency due to redundant visual tokens. Existing pruning primary targets intra-frame spatial redundancy or prunes inside the LLM with shallow-layer overhead, yielding suboptimal spatiotemporal reduction and underutilizing long-context compressibility. All of them often discard subtle yet informative context from merged or pruned tokens. In this paper, we propose a new perspective that elaborates token Anchors within intra-frame and inter-frame to comprehensively aggregate the informative contexts via local-global Optimal Transport (AOT). Specifically, we first establish local- and global-aware token anchors within each frame under the attention guidance, which then optimal transport aggregates the informative contexts from pruned tokens, constructing intra-frame token anchors. Then, building on the temporal frame clips, the first frame within each clip will be considered as the keyframe anchors to ensemble similar information from consecutive frames through optimal transport, while keeping distinct tokens to represent temporal dynamics, leading to efficient token reduction in a training-free manner. Extensive evaluations show that our proposed AOT obtains competitive performances across various short- and long-video benchmarks on leading video LLMs, obtaining substantial computational efficiency while preserving temporal and visual fidelity.