CVPR 2026 Papers

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) leverages labeled data to categorize unlabeled samples from known or unknown classes. Most previous methods jointly optimize supervised and unsupervised objectives and achieve promising results. However, inherent optimization interference still limits their ability to improve further. Through quantitative analysis, we identify a key issue, i.e., gradient entanglement, which 1) distorts supervised gradients and weakens discrimination among known classes, and 2) induces representation-subspace overlap between known and novel classes, reducing the separability of novel categories. To address this issue, we propose the Energy-Aware Gradient Coordinator (EAGC), a plug-and-play gradient-level module that explicitly regulates the optimization process. EAGC comprises two components: Anchor-based Gradient Alignment (AGA) and Energy-aware Elastic Projection (EEP). AGA introduces a reference model to anchor the gradient directions of labeled samples, preserving the discriminative structure of known classes against the interference of unlabeled gradients. EEP softly projects unlabeled gradients onto the complement of the known-class subspace and derives an energy-based coefficient to adaptively scale the projection for each unlabeled sample according to its degree of alignment with the known subspace, thereby reducing subspace overlap without suppressing unlabeled samples that likely belong to known classes. Experiments show that EAGC consistently boosts existing methods and establishes new state-of-the-art results. Code is available at https://haiyangzheng.github.io/EAGC.

Multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for brain tumor segmentation, with many methods leveraging its four key modalities to capture complementary information for effective sub-region analysis. However, the absence of several modalities is very common in practice, leading to severe performance degradation in existing full-modality segmentation methods. Limited by the structured data model, recent works often adopt a multi-stage training strategy for full-modality and missing-modality scenarios, which increases training costs and inadequately addresses the interference of miss. In this work, we propose a graph-based one-stage framework for robust brain tumor segmentation with missing modalities. Specifically, we introduce modality-specific virtual nodes that serve as supplementary information sources to compensate for missing modalities. To enhance model robustness against arbitrary modality combinations, we leverage the inherent flexibility of graph networks to devise a dynamic connection strategy. This mechanism dynamically adjusts the adjacency matrix based on modality availability, preserving beneficial information flow while mitigating interference effects caused by missing modalities. Furthermore, we enhance the graph network through heterogeneous weight matrices, enhancing its adaptability to multimodal scenarios. Extensive experiments on the BRATS-2018 and BRATS-2020 datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on almost all subsets of incomplete modalities.

Recent research on medical MLLMs has shifted its focus from image-level understanding to fine-grained, pixel-level comprehension. Although segmentation serves as the foundation for pixel-level understanding, existing approaches face two major challenges. First, they introduce implicit segmentation tokens and require joint fine-tuning of the MLLM and external pixel decoders, increasing the risk of catastrophic forgetting and limiting out-of-domain generalization. Second, most methods rely on single-pass reasoning and lack the ability to iteratively refine segmentation results. To overcome these limitations, we propose IBISAgent--a novel agentic MLLM that reformulates segmentation as a vision-centric, multi-step decision-making process. IBISAgent enables MLLMs to generate interleaved reasoning and text-based click actions, invoke segmentation tools, and produce high-quality masks without architectural modifications. We also design a two-stage training framework consisting of cold-start SFT and agentic RL with tailored, fine-grained rewards. Through iterative multi-turn visual reasoning, IBISAgent naturally facilitates mask refinement and enhances robustness in complex medical referring and reasoning segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IBISAgent consistently outperforms both closed-source and open-source SOTA methods.

Due to the inherent ambiguity of facial expressions and subjectivity in dataset labeling, learning with noisy labels remains a critical challenge in facial expression recognition (FER). The supervisory mechanism of teacher-student network offers a promising approach for noisy-labeled FER. However, this approach is prone to noise accumulation and gradual coupling between the teacher and student parameters during training. We propose an Optimal Teacher Pool-driven dynamic label Noise Suppression framework for facial expression recognition (OTP-NS). Specifically, we construct an optimal teacher pool architecture that dynamically maintains multiple best teacher models while fusing their predictions, thereby mitigating noise accumulation and coupling of teacher-student parameters via update mechanisms. Furthermore, we develop two sample-level noise suppression parts: (1) Similarity-Aware Label Smoothing (SALS), diverging from the static smoothing strength in traditional label smoothing, automatically modulates the smoothing strength for teacher model based on prediction-label similarity, achieving fine-grained noise suppression. (2) Confidence-Weighted Logits (CWL), adaptively adjusting the classification loss of student model based on sample-to-centroid confidence metrics, alleviates the detrimental effects of noisy samples on model training. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across various noise levels, validating the effectiveness of our proposed framework in learning robust representations from noisy data.

Annotating bounding boxes is costly and limits the scalability of object detection. This challenge is compounded by the need to preserve high accuracy while minimizing manual effort in real-world applications. Prior active learning methods often depend on model features or modify detector internals and training schedules, increasing integration overhead. Moreover, they rarely jointly exploit the benefits of image-level signals, class-imbalance cues, and instance-level uncertainty for comprehensive selection. We present Portable Active Learning (PAL), a detector-agnostic, easily portable framework that operates solely on inference outputs. PAL combines class-wise instance uncertainty with image-level diversity to guide data selection. At each round, PAL trains lightweight class-specific logistic classifiers to distinguish true from false positives, producing entropy-based uncertainty scores for proposals. Candidate images are then refined using global image entropy, class diversity, and image similarity, yielding batches that are both informative and diverse. PAL requires no changes to model internals or training pipelines, ensuring broad compatibility across detectors. Extensive experiments on COCO, PASCAL VOC, and BDD100K demonstrate that PAL consistently improves label efficiency and detection accuracy compared to existing active learning baselines, making it a practical solution for scalable and cost-effective deployment of object detection in real-world settings.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) naturally process visual inputs across multiple timesteps, offering rich temporal dynamics and energy-efficient computation. However, the temporally invariant supervision commonly used in training tends to reinforce the same dominant response patterns across timesteps, leading to redundant representations and limiting temporal discriminability. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Temporal Representation Enhancement(TRE), a novel learning-to-forget paradigm that encourages more diverse and complementary temporal representations. TRE identifies high-contribution semantic patterns through class-specific contribution estimation and temporal accumulation, and selectively suppresses them using a dynamic modulation strategy. By redirecting the model's attention toward alternative yet informative semantic cues, TRE promotes the learning of complementary features across timesteps. This approach not only strengthens the temporal discriminative capacity of SNNs but also enables more effective multi-timestep learning by leveraging richer semantic information. Extensive experiments on both static image datasets and dynamic neuromorphic datasets demonstrate that TRE consistently improves classification accuracy and feature diversity across different SNN backbones.

Accurately modeling agent behaviors is an important task in self-driving. It is also a task with many symmetries, such as equivariance to the order of agents and objects in the scene or equivariance to arbitrary roto-translations of the entire scene as a whole; i.e., SE(2)-equivariance. The transformer architecture is a ubiquitous tool for modeling these symmetries. While standard self-attention is inherently permutation equivariant, explicit pairwise relative positional encodings have been the standard for introducing SE(2)-equivariance. However, this approach introduces an additional cost that is quadratic in the number of agents, limiting its scalability to larger scenes and batch sizes. In this work, we propose DriveGATr, a novel transformer-based architecture for agent modeling that achieves SE(2)-equivariance without the computational cost of existing methods. Inspired by recent advances in geometric deep learning, DriveGATr encodes scene elements as multivectors in the 2D projective geometric algebra \mathbb R ^*_ 2,0,1 and processes them with a stack of equivariant transformer blocks. Crucially, DriveGATr models geometric relationships using standard attention between multivectors, eliminating the need for costly explicit pairwise relative positional encodings. Experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset demonstrate that DriveGATr is comparable to the state-of-the-art in traffic simulation and establishes a superior Pareto front for performance vs computational cost.

Face swapping aims to transfer the identity of a source face onto a target face while preserving target-specific attributes such as pose, expression, lighting, skin tone, and makeup. However, since real ground truth for face swapping is unavailable, achieving both accurate identity transfer and high-quality attribute preservation remains challenging. Recent diffusion-based approaches attempt to improve visual fidelity through conditional inpainting on masked target images, but the masked condition removes crucial appearance cues, resulting in plausible yet misaligned attributes. To address this limitation, we propose APPLE (Attribute-Preserving Pseudo-Labeling), a fully diffusion-based teacher-student framework for attribute-preserving face swapping. Our approach introduces a teacher design to produce pseudo-labels aligned with the target attributes through (1) a conditional deblurring formulation that improves the preservation of global attributes such as skin tone and illumination, and (2) an attribute-aware inversion scheme that further enhances fine-grained attribute preservation such as makeup. APPLE conditions the student on clean pseudo-labels rather than degraded masked inputs, enabling more faithful attribute preservation. As a result, APPLE achieves state-of-the-art performance in attribute preservation while maintaining competitive identity transferability.

The incorporation of online reinforcement learning (RL) into diffusion and flow-based generative models has recently gained attention as a powerful paradigm for aligning model behavior with human preferences. By leveraging stochastic sampling via Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) during the denoising phase, these models can explore a variety of denoising trajectories, enhancing the exploratory capacity of RL. However, despite their ability to discover potentially high-reward samples, current approaches often struggle to effectively align with preferences due to the sparsity and narrowness of reward feedback. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel framework called Granular-GRPO (G^2RPO), which enables fine-grained and comprehensive evaluation of sampling directions in the RL training of flow models. Specifically, we propose a Singular Stochastic Sampling mechanism that supports step-wise stochastic exploration while ensuring strong correlation between injected noise and reward signals, enabling more accurate credit assignment to each SDE perturbation. Additionally, to mitigate the bias introduced by fixed-granularity denoising, we design a Multi-Granularity Advantage Integration module that aggregates advantages computed across multiple diffusion scales, resulting in a more robust and holistic assessment of sampling trajectories. Extensive experiments on various reward models, including both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, demonstrate that our G^2RPO outperforms existing flow-based GRPO baselines, highlighting its effectiveness and generalization capability.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) set the state of the art in visual generation, yet their quadratic self-attention cost fundamentally limits scaling to long token sequences. Recent Top-K sparse attention approaches reduce the computation of DiTs by compressing tokens into block-wise representation and selecting a small set of relevant key blocks, but still suffer from (i) quadratic selection cost on compressed tokens and (ii) increasing K required to maintain model quality as sequences grow. We identify that their inefficiency is due to the single-level design, as a single coarse level is insufficient to represent the global structure.In this paper, we introduce Log-linear Sparse Attention (LLSA), a trainable sparse attention mechanism for extremely long token sequences that reduces both selection and attention costs from quadratic to log-linear complexity by utilizing a hierarchical structure. LLSA performs hierarchical Top-K selection, progressively adopting sparse Top-K selection with the indices found at the previous level,and introduces a Hierarchical KV Enrichment mechanism that preserves global context while using fewer tokens of different granularity during attention computation. To support efficient training, we develop a high-performance GPU implementation that uses only sparse indices for both the forward and backward passes, eliminating the need for dense attention masks.We evaluate LLSA on high-resolution pixel-space image generation without using patchification and VAE encoding. LLSA accelerates attention inference by 28.27 xand DiT training by 6.09 xon 256 x256 pixel token sequences, while maintaining generation quality. The results demonstrate that LLSA offers a promising direction for training long-sequence DiTs efficiently.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) objects is indispensable for safely deploying object detectors in the wild. Current approaches enable the unknown-aware ability by regularizing the instance-level feature space, such as outlier synthesis. Despite the general efficacy, it is challenging to truly learn the concept of 'unknown' under the absence of real unknown data. In this paper, we propose UNO-Adapter, a simple yet highly effective framework tailored for OOD object detection. Our key insight is that in object detection, where in-distribution (ID) and OOD objects may coexist within the same context, we need global abstraction and reasoning to help the detector learn their differences, i.e., unknown injection. UNO-Adapter consists of two key steps: unsupervised concept discovery and neural concept binder. The former introduces an object-centric learning paradigm to abstract and model the holistic image, including both ID and OOD, obtaining sparse and compressed slot-based representations with relational constraints. The latter dynamically combines slots with object candidates extracted by the detector, binding the concept of unknown to the de facto detector. During inference, we introduce an image-guided OOD object score to reinforce the distinction between ID and OOD. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. In particular, UNO-Adapter reduces the FPR95 by up to 11.96% compared to the previous best OOD object detection method.

Inspired by the general Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task, aerial VLN has attracted widespread attention, owing to its significant practical value in applications such as logistics delivery and urban inspection. However, existing methods face several challenges in complex urban environments, including insufficient generalization to unseen scenes, suboptimal performance in long-range path planning, and inadequate understanding of spatial continuity. To address these challenges, we propose HTNav, a new collaborative navigation framework that integrates Imitation Learning (IL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) within a hybrid IL-RL framework. This framework adopts a staged training mechanism to ensure the stability of the basic navigation strategy while enhancing its environmental exploration capability. By integrating a tiered decision-making mechanism, it achieves collaborative interaction between macro-level path planning and fine-grained action control. Furthermore, a map representation learning module is introduced to deepen its understanding of spatial continuity in open domains. On the CityNav benchmark, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all scene levels and task difficulties. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework significantly improves navigation precision and robustness in complex urban environments.

We present DrivoR, a simple transformer-based architecture for end-to-end autonomous driving. Our approach builds on pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) and introduces camera-aware register tokens that compress multi-camera features into a compact scene representation, significantly reducing downstream computation without sacrificing accuracy. These tokens drive two lightweight transformer decoders that generate and then score candidate trajectories. The scoring decoder learns to mimic an oracle and predicts interpretable sub-scores e.g., safety or efficiency, enabling behavior-conditioned driving at inference. Despite its minimal design, DrivoR outperforms or matches strong baselines across NAVSIM-v1/v2, and closed-loop HUGSIM benchmarks. Our results show that a pure-transformer architecture, combined with targeted token compression, is sufficient for accurate, efficient, and adaptive end-to-end driving. Code and checkpoints are available via the project page.

Reliable UAV object detection requires robustness to illumination changes, motion blur, and scene dynamics that suppress RGB cues. Thermal long-wave infrared (LWIR) sensing preserves contrast in low light, and event cameras retain microsecond-level temporal edges, but integrating all three modalities in a unified detector has not been systematically studied. We present a tri-modal framework that processes RGB, thermal, and event data with a dual-stream hierarchical vision transformer. At selected encoder depths, a Modality-Aware Gated Exchange (MAGE) applies inter-sensor channel and spatial gating, and a Bidirectional Token Exchange (BiTE) module performs bidirectional token-level attention with depthwise-pointwise refinement, producing resolution-preserving fused maps for a standard feature pyramid and two-stage detector. We introduce a 10,489-frame UAV dataset with synchronized and pre-aligned RGB-thermal-event streams and 24,223 annotated vehicles across day and night flights. Through 61 controlled ablations, we evaluate fusion placement, mechanism (baseline MAGE+BiTE, CSSA, GAFF), modality subsets, and backbone capacity. Tri-modal fusion improves over all dual-modal baselines, with fusion depth having a significant effect and a lightweight CSSA variant recovering most of the benefit at minimal cost. This work provides the first systematic benchmark and modular backbone for tri-modal UAV-based object detection.

The utilization of temporal information has always been an open topic in the tracking community. However, existing trackers tend to employ more and more inputs or parameters for temporal learning, hindering their deployment in resource-constrained unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). More importantly, this raises ambiguity whether the performance gains come from the temporal learning itself, or come from the increased inputs and parameters. In this study, we advocate designing temporal learning components from a more balanced perspective that jointly considers performance gains and computational costs. To achieve this goal, we introduce a new evaluation metric, i.e., precision per FLOP (PPF). The PPF is introduced to quantify the tracking precision gains achieved by temporal learning components per unit of FLOP, thus enabling fair and efficiency-aware comparisons among these components and driving them toward more efficient designs. Based on this metric, we propose a low-cost yet effective temporal learning (LETL) approach to model contextual relationships. This approach continuously propagates and merges representative appearance tokens in video streams, allowing the tracker to efficiently capture the changing patterns of targets with relatively low costs. We integrate the LETL approach into existing one-stream frameworks, thereby building a simple yet effective tracker, namely LETrack, for robust UAV tracking. Extensive experimental demonstrate the superiority of our LETrack, and show that the proposed LETL approach achieves higher PPF scores. The Code is available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/LETrack.

We introduce ProM3E, a probabilistic masked multimodal embedding model for any-to-any generation of multimodal representations for ecology. ProM3E is based on masked modality reconstruction in the embedding space, learning to infer missing modalities given a few context modalities. By design, our model supports modality inversion in the embedding space. The probabilistic nature of our model allows us to analyze the feasibility of fusing various modalities for given downstream tasks, essentially learning what to fuse. Using these features of our model, we propose a novel cross-modal retrieval approach that mixes inter-modal and intra-modal similarities to achieve superior performance across all retrieval tasks. We further leverage the hidden representation from our model to perform linear probing tasks and demonstrate the superior representation learning capability of our model. All our code, datasets and model will be released at https://vishu26.github.io/prom3e.

Current diffusion-based portrait animation models predominantly focus on enhancing visual quality and expression realism, while overlooking generation latency and real-time performance, which restricts their application range in the live streaming scenario. We propose PersonaLive, a novel diffusion-based framework towards streaming real-time portrait animation with multi-stage training recipes. Specifically, we first adopt hybrid implicit signals, namely implicit facial representations and 3D implicit keypoints, to achieve expressive image-level motion control. Then, a fewer-step appearance distillation strategy is proposed to eliminate appearance redundancy in the denoising process, greatly improving inference efficiency. Finally, we introduce an autoregressive micro-chunk streaming generation paradigm equipped with a sliding training strategy and a historical keyframe mechanism to enable low-latency and stable long-term video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PersonaLive achieves state-of-the-art performance with up to **7-22**xspeedup over prior diffusion-based portrait animation models. The code will be publicly available.

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) offer excellent scalability for high-fidelity generation, but their computational overhead poses a great challenge for practical deployment. Existing acceleration methods primarily exploit the temporal dimension, whereas spatial acceleration remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate spatial acceleration for DiTs via latent upsampling. We found that naive latent upsampling for spatial acceleration introduces artifacts, primarily due to aliasing in high-frequency edge regions and mismatching from noise-timestep discrepancies. Then, based on these findings and analyses, we propose a training-free spatial acceleration framework, dubbed Region-Adaptive Latent Upsampling (RALU), to mitigate those artifacts while achieving spatial acceleration of DiTs by our mixed-resolution latent upsampling. RALU achieves artifact-free, efficient acceleration with early upsampling only on artifact-prone edge regions and noise-timestep matching for different latent resolutions, leading to up to 7.0xspeedup on FLUX-1.dev and 3.0xon Stable Diffusion 3 with negligible quality degradation. Furthermore, our RALU is complementarily applicable to existing temporal acceleration methods and timestep-distilled models, leading to up to 15.9xspeedup.

Ray-tracing-based 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) enjoys the generality of supporting non-pinhole camera models and relightable formulations. However, they are usually lacking in performance, partially due to the need for depth-based sorting of all intersecting Gaussians along the traced rays.In this paper, we introduce a sorting-free differentiable stochastic formulation for ray-traced 3DGS, enabling efficient reconstruction and rendering of both standard and relightable 3DGS scenes.For standard 3DGS, our method offers performance comparable to rasterization-based 3DGS and outperforms sorting-based ray tracing.For relightable 3DGS, our technique provides higher-quality reconstructions and renderings thanks to the accurate shadow and shading computation provided by fully ray-traced shadow and light rays.