CVPR 2026 Papers

Neural networks are often treated as monolithic black boxes that process all inputs uniformly through all layers. However, researchers intuitively wonder: do simple images require all 50 layers of ResNet-50, or is the prediction effectively decided much earlier? We investigate when pretrained models make up their minds during a forward pass by training linear probes at each layer of ResNet variants on ImageNet, without modifying the base model. Our findings reveal substantial computational heterogeneity across architectures. We discover pronounced bimodal patterns with distinct populations of early and late deciders: in deeper ResNets, 33--39% of samples stabilize within the first third of the network, while 39--42% are assigned to the final 30% of depth; across all three ResNets, the late fraction ranges from 39% to 54%. The decision layer is highly sensitive to stability criteria, with mean depths increasing from 2.6--4.1 (k=1) to 9.0--10.0 (k=4). Linear probe accuracy exhibits sharp jumps in final residual stages, reaching 73--75% for ResNet-50/101 and 65% for ResNet-18, indicating that semantic consolidation occurs late. These findings expose computational heterogeneity in standard inference and clarify both the promise and the limits of stability-based early exiting.

Video highlight detection aims to identify the most engaging segments in long-form videos, supporting content editing and recommendation, especially for movies and TV dramas. However, existing methods are ill-suited to cinematic content due to its narrative complexity, while the scarcity of annotated data and the high cost of manual labeling further hinder progress. To bridge this gap, we introduce **TVHighlights**, the first large-scale dataset tailored for video highlight detection in movies and TV dramas, with 1,721 carefully curated videos covering diverse genres. Built on community-driven behaviors, it provides realistic and diverse annotations without human labeling. Based on TVHighlights, we propose **LTV-HD**: a LLM-guided, human-free collaborative training framework for video highlight detection in cinematic content. LTV-HD operates in two stages: (1) weakly supervised pre-training of a lightweight model using video-level labels, followed by (2) iterative refinement through collaboration between large language models (LLMs) and the lightweight model. LLMs generate noisy clip-level pseudo-labels, which the lightweight model learns from under a noise-robust strategy, and its high-confidence predictions are then fed back to guide the LLM in distilling genre-specific highlight patterns through a self-improving loop. Experiments demonstrate that LTV-HD achieves state-of-the-art performance on TVHighlights, validating its effectiveness in real-world, annotation-free scenarios.

Visual-language models (VLMs) excel at data mappings, but real-world document heterogeneity and unstructuredness disrupt the consistency of cross-modal embeddings. Recent late-interaction methods enhance image-text alignment through multi-vector representations, yet traditional training with limited samples and static strategies cannot adapt to the model's dynamic evolution, causing cross-modal retrieval confusion. To overcome this, we introduce Evo-Retriever, a retrieval framework featuring an LLM-guided curriculum evolution built upon a novel Viewpoint-Pathway collaboration. First, we employ multi-view image alignment to enhance fine-grained matching via multi-scale and multi-directional perspectives. Then, a bidirectional contrastive learning strategy generates "hard queries" and establishes complementary learning paths for visual and textual disambiguation to rebalance supervision. Finally, the model-state summary from the above collaboration is fed into an LLM meta-controller, which adaptively adjusts the training curriculum using expert knowledge to promote the model's evolution. On ViDoRe V2 and MMEB (VisDoc), Evo-Retriever achieves state-of-the-art performance, with nDCG@5 scores of 65.2 % and 77.1 %.

Recovering global human and camera motion from monocular video is essential for world-coordinate human reconstruction but remains challenging due to entangled motions in image space. Traditional SLAM methods estimate monocular camera motion but fail in scenes dominated by foreground objects such as humans. A common workaround is to mask out dynamic objects, yet this approach becomes brittle when humans occupy most of the view or the background is too noisy, leading to unstable tracking and loss of constraints. This paper takes the opposite stance and reintegrates human motion as informative landmarks. We introduce HumanBA, a human-aware bundle adjustment framework that transforms dynamic humans into usable constraints via motion decoupling. HumanBA subtracts the human-induced component from observed joint trajectories, isolating a camera-induced (pseudo-static) component that can be safely incorporated into bundle adjustment alongside background features. To mitigate noise in global human estimates, HumanBA applies motion refinements and motion-aware reliability weighting. Across EMDB and SLOPER4D benchmarks, we show consistent improvements on camera pose estimation and reduce global human reconstruction error, demonstrating the benefits of treating humans as dynamic yet informative landmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/MartaYang/HumanBA.

Full-body motion estimation from sparse VR observations is an inherently under-constrained problem, with only three 6-DoF trackers (HMD and controllers) available to infer a full skeletal pose. To address this ambiguity, we introduce a probabilistic framework that models joint orientations as distributions on SO(3) using the Matrix Fisher distribution. Instead of predicting a single deterministic pose, our network outputs a distribution for each joint, whose mode and concentration directly quantify prediction uncertainty on the rotation manifold. This enables likelihood-based training and principled uncertainty propagation. At the core of our model is a causal Transformer encoder that fuses sparse observations with motion history. We further propose region-wise tokens for the torso, arms, and legs, obtained via attention pooling over local joint features and semantic VR anchors. These tokens guide compact, per-region Fisher regression. To ensure kinematic coherence efficiently, we employ a limb refinement module, where each child joint's Fisher parameters are conditioned on its parent's distribution and the regional context, propagating pose and uncertainty hierarchically. Extensive experiments on standard sparse-VR benchmarks show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, while providing well-calibrated joint-wise uncertainty.

We introduce Neural Riemannian Motion Fields (\name), a novel 3D generative human motion prior that enables robust, temporally consistent, and physically plausible 3D motion recovery. Unlike existing VAE or diffusion-based methods, our higher-order motion prior explicitly models the human motion in the zero level set of a collection of neural distance fields (NDFs) corresponding to pose, transition (velocity), and acceleration dynamics. Our framework is rigorous in the sense that our NDFs are constructed on the product space of joint rotations, their angular velocities, and angular accelerations, respecting the geometry of the underlying articulations. We further introduce: (i) a novel adaptive-step hybrid algorithm for projecting onto the set of plausible motions, and (ii) a novel geometric integrator to "roll out" realistic motion trajectories during test-time-optimization and generation. Our experiments show significant and consistent gains: trained on the AMASS dataset, \name remarkably generalizes across multiple input modalities and to diverse tasks ranging from denoising to motion in-betweening and fitting to partial 2D / 3D observations.

We present Sketch2Colab, which turns storyboard-style 2D sketches into coherent, object-aware 3D multi-human motion with fine-grained control over agents, joints, timing, and contacts. Diffusion-based motion generators offer strong realism but often rely on costly guidance for multi-entity control and degrade under strong conditioning. Sketch2Colab instead learns a sketch-conditioned diffusion prior and distills it into a rectified-flow student in latent space for fast, stable sampling. To make motion follow storyboards closely, we guide the student with differentiable objectives that enforce keyframes, paths, contacts, and physical consistency. Collaborative motion naturally involves discrete changes in interaction, such as converging, forming contact, cooperative transport, or disengaging, and a continuous flow alone struggles to sequence these shifts cleanly. We address this with a lightweight continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) planner that tracks the active interaction regime and modulates the flow to produce clearer, synchronized coordination in human-object-human motion. Experiments on CORE4D and InterHuman show that Sketch2Colab outperforms baselines in constraint adherence and perceptual quality while sampling substantially faster than diffusion-only alternatives.

Reconstructing 3D human-object interaction (HOI) from monocular images is highly challenging especially when human and object are mutually occluded. Existing methods primarily rely on single-view inputs, which fundamentally limit their ability to recover occluded regions and accurately estimate contact areas. To address these challenges, we for the first time, consider to introduce novel-view feature priors to enhance monocular 3D HOI reconstruction. We first design a cross-view generator that learns to infer novel-view image features from a single-view input, enriching spatial geometry at the feature level without requiring extra inputs during inference. Guided by both real and generated view features, a spatial cross-view feature fusion module adaptively aggregates complementary cues to enhance the initial reconstruction of human and object meshes. Built upon this reconstruction, we sample 3D vertex features from both views and introduce a bidirectional cross-view Transformer to integrate multi-view vertex representations for accurate contact estimation. Finally, the predicted contact maps are leveraged to refine human-object meshes, yielding geometrically consistent and physically plausible reconstructions.Experiments on BEHAVE and InterCap show that our proposed CrossHOI surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both reconstruction accuracy and contact prediction, especially under severe occlusions.

We introduce SAM 3D Body (3DB), a promptable model for single-image full-body 3D human mesh recovery (HMR) that demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with strong generalization and consistent accuracy in diverse in-the-wild conditions. 3DB estimates the human pose of the body, feet, and hands. It is the first model to use a new parametric mesh representation, Momentum Human Rig (MHR), which decouples skeletal pose and body shape. 3DB employs an encoder-decoder architecture and supports auxiliary prompts, including 2D keypoints and masks, enabling user-guided inference similar to the SAM family of models. We derive high-quality annotations from a multi-stage annotation pipeline that uses various combinations of manual keypoint annotation, differentiable optimization, multi-view geometry, and dense keypoint detection. Our data engine efficiently selects and processes data to ensure data diversity, collecting unusual poses and rare imaging conditions. We present a new evaluation dataset organized by pose and appearance categories, enabling nuanced analysis of model behavior. Our experiments demonstrate superior generalization and substantial improvements over prior methods in both qualitative user preference studies and traditional quantitative analysis. Both 3DB and MHR are open-source.

Text-to-image generative models have achieved impressive fidelity and diversity, but can inadvertently produce unsafe or undesirable content due to implicit biases embedded in large-scale training datasets.Existing concept erasure methods, whether text-only or image-assisted, face trade-offs: textual approaches often fail to fully suppress concepts, while naive image-guided methods risk over-erasing unrelated content. We propose TICoE, a Text-Image Collaborative Erasing framework that achieves precise and faithful concept removal through a continuous convex concept manifold and hierarchical visual representation learning. TICoE precisely removes target concepts while preserving unrelated semantic and visual content. To objectively assess the quality of erasure, we further introduce a fidelity-oriented evaluation strategy that measures post-erasure usability. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that TICoE surpasses prior methods in concept removal precision and content fidelity, enabling safer, more controllable text-to-image generation.

Methods using inertial measurement units (IMUs) provide a wearable alternative to camera-based motion capture. To mitigate drift from inertial signals, recent sparse inertial pose estimators integrate inter-sensor distances measured by ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging. So far, UWB distances have only been used as an additional input feature, ignoring the physical constraints they impose on sensor positions. However, these distances can also be used to reconstruct the underlying 3D sensor layout, which in turn provides more informative input for pose reconstruction. We propose Ultra Diffusion Poser, a diffusion model that explicitly models these geometric constraints. It includes a Spatial Layout Module that analytically reconstructs the 3D sensor positions from UWB measurements. These sensor positions are used alongside IMU signals and UWB distances as a conditioning signal during diffusion. Still, network predictions can violate inter-sensor distance measurements. To address this, we introduce UWB-Diffusion Guidance, which encourages alignment between predicted poses and measured distances during diffusion sampling. Together, these contributions enable our model to achieve state-of-the-art performance, reducing joint position error by up to 22% over prior work. Code can be found here https://github.com/eth-siplab/UltraDiffusionPoser.