CVPR 2026 Papers

Recent end-to-end autonomous driving approaches have leveraged Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance planning capabilities in complex driving scenarios. However, VLMs are inherently trained as generalist models, lacking specialized understanding of driving-specific reasoning in 3D space and time. When applied to autonomous driving, these models struggle to establish structured spatial-temporal representations that capture geometric relationships, scene context, and motion patterns critical for safe trajectory planning.To address these limitations, we propose SGDrive, a novel framework that explicitly structures the VLM's representation learning around driving-specific knowledge hierarchies. Built upon a pre-trained VLM backbone, SGDrive decomposes driving understanding into a scene-agent-goal hierarchy that mirrors human driving cognition: drivers first perceive the overall environment (scene context), then attend to safety-critical agents and their behaviors, and finally formulate short-term goals before executing actions. This hierarchical decomposition provides the structured spatial-temporal representation that generalist VLMs lack, integrating multi-level information into a compact yet comprehensive format for trajectory planning.Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that SGDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance among camera-only methods, validating the effectiveness of hierarchical knowledge structuring for adapting generalist VLMs to autonomous driving.

Discriminative and generative vision models excel in their respective domains but remain semantically misaligned, hindering progress toward unified visual learning. We introduce LEASE (LEArning from SEmantic Dictionaries), a self-supervised framework that bridges this gap using a paired generative-discriminative codebook design. LEASE operates entirely in a discrete token space produced through a one-time precomputation step, enabling efficient training without data augmentations, teacher models, or online tokenizers. LEASE integrates two complementary objectives: a masked token reconstruction loss that captures fine-grained generative detail, and a codebook contrast loss that aligns encoder features with discriminative semantics via adaptive centroid weighting. This dual supervision yields a unified latent space that supports both high-quality generation and strong representation learning.On ImageNet-1K, LEASE achieves state-of-the-art unified performance, outperforming prior VQGAN-based methods such as MAGE and Sorcen across linear probing, unconditional generation, few-shot learning, transfer, and robustness benchmarks. It also competes favorably with domain-specialized contrastive and generative models while surpassing previous MIM methods. The unsupervised LEASE model can also be extended to conditional generation by building upon its learned representations, proving competitive with specialized baselines.Overall, LEASE provides an efficient and effective step toward general-purpose vision models that jointly understand and generate visual content. Code will be released upon acceptance.

The approximation and convergence properties of implicit neural representations (INRs) are known to be highly sensitive to parameter initialization strategies. While several data-driven initialization methods demonstrate significant improvements over standard random sampling, the reasons for their success -- specifically, whether they encode classical statistical signal priors or more complex features -- remain poorly understood. In this study, we explore this phenomenon through a series of experimental analyses leveraging noise pretraining. We pretrain INRs on diverse noise classes (e.g., Gaussian, Dead Leaves, Spectral) and measure their ability to both fit unseen signals and encode priors for an inverse imaging task (denoising). Our analyses on image and video data reveal a surprising finding: simply pretraining on unstructured noise (Uniform, Gaussian) dramatically improves signal fitting capacity compared to all other baselines. However, unstructured noise also yields poor deep image priors for denoising. In contrast, we also find that noise with the classic 1/|f^\alpha| spectral structure of natural images achieves an excellent balance of signal fitting and inverse imaging capabilities, performing on par with the best data-driven initialization methods. This finding enables more efficient INR training in applications lacking sufficient prior domain-specific data.

Recent diffusion models increasingly favor Transformer backbones, motivated by the remarkable scalability of fully attentional architectures. Yet the locality bias, parameter efficiency, and hardware friendliness--the attributes that established ConvNets as the efficient vision backbone--have seen limited exploration in modern generative modeling. Here we introduce the fully convolutional diffusion model (FCDM), a model having a backbone similar to ConvNeXt, but designed for conditional diffusion modeling. We find that using only 50% of the FLOPs of DiT-XL/2, FCDM-XL achieves competitive performance with 7x and 7.5x fewer training steps at 256x256 and 512x512 resolutions, respectively. Remarkably, FCDM-XL can be trained on a 4-GPU system, highlighting the exceptional training efficiency of our architecture. Our results demonstrate that modern convolutional designs provide a competitive and highly efficient alternative for scaling diffusion models, reviving ConvNeXt as a simple yet powerful building block for efficient generative modeling.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit powerful reasoning capabilities but suffer sophisticated jailbreak vulnerabilities. Fundamentally, aligning LVLMs is not just a safety challenge but a problem of economic efficiency. Current alignment methods struggle with the trade-off between safety, utility, and operational costs. Critically, a focus solely on final outputs (process-blindness) wastes significant computational budget on unsafe deliberation. This flaw allows harmful reasoning to be disguised with benign justifications, thereby circumventing simple additive safety scores.To address this, we propose EcoAlign, an inference-time framework that reframes alignment as an economically rational search by treating the LVLM as a boundedly rational agent. EcoAlign incrementally expands a thought graph and scores actions using a forward-looking function (analogous to net present value) that dynamically weighs expected safety, utility, and cost against the remaining budget. To prevent deception, path safety is enforced via the weakest-link principle. Extensive experiments across 3 closed-source and 2 open-source models on 6 datasets show that EcoAlign matches or surpasses state-of-the-art safety and utility at a lower computational cost, thereby offering a principled, economical pathway to robust LVLM alignment.

Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models report impressive success rates exceeding 95% on robotic manipulation benchmarks, yet these results may mask fundamental weaknesses in robustness. Current simulation-based robustness evaluations suffer from narrow perturbation coverage, manual design constraints, and coarse-grained analysis that fails to reveal when and how models fail. To address this gap, we propose LIBERO-Plus, a comprehensive, automatic, and fine-grained evaluation framework with controlled perturbations across seven dimensions: object layouts, camera viewpoints, robot initial states, language instructions, lighting conditions, background textures, and sensor noise. Our systematic analysis of ten state-of-the-art models reveals consistent brittleness beneath apparent competence, with performance dropping from 95% to below 30% under modest perturbations. Our findings challenge the assumption that high benchmark scores equate to true competency and highlight the need for evaluation practices that assess reliability under realistic variation.

Existing monocular 3D detectors typically tame the pronounced nonlinear regression of 3D bounding box through decoupled prediction paradigm, which employs multiple branches to estimate geometric center, depth, dimensions, and rotation angle separately.Although this decoupling strategy simplifies the learning process, it inherently ignores the geometric collaborative constraints between different attributes, resulting in the lack of geometric consistency prior, thereby leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose novel Spatial-Projection Alignment (SPAN) with two pivotal components: (i). Spatial Point Alignment enforces an explicit global spatial constraint between the predicted and ground-truth 3D bounding boxes, thereby rectifying spatial drift caused by decoupled attribute regression. (ii). 3D-2D Projection Alignment ensures that the projected 3D box is aligned tightly within its corresponding 2D detection bounding box on the image plane, mitigating projection misalignment overlooked in previous works. To ensure training stability, we further introduce a Hierarchical Task Learning strategy that progressively incorporates spatial-projection alignment as 3D attribute predictions refine, preventing early stage error propagation across attributes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can be easily integrated into any established monocular 3D detector and delivers significant performance improvements.

With the growing accessibility of large-scale 3D point clouds from LiDAR and photogrammetric techniques, 3D change detection (3DCD) has become essential for understanding dynamic scenes. Existing methods typically formulate this as segmentation, treating each point independently for binary classification. This leads to isolated misclassified noise points inside regions. Meanwhile, feature similarity at boundaries causes boundary ambiguity. The more severe class imbalance inherent to change detection further exacerbates this issue. To address these challenges, we propose SRGCD, a Stability-Driven Region Growth Framework that redefines 3DCD as region growing rather than segmentation. Our key insight is that progressively expanding from highly confident seeds avoids pitfalls of point-wise classification while elegantly alleviating class imbalance. Specifically, we first apply strict constraints through Mutual Geometric Consistency Prior to identify minimal highly reliable unchanged seeds. From these seeds, Stability-Guided Controlled Attention modules progressively propagate stability from stable regions to neighboring uncertain points, enabling unchanged regions to grow layer-by-layer from interior cores toward boundaries. This coarse-to-fine growing process naturally forms coherent regions, avoiding isolated noise while achieving compact, well-defined boundaries through progressive expansion. Extensive experiments on the synthetic dataset Urb3DCD and the real-world dataset HKCD demonstrate that SRGCD achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly improving interior completeness and boundary compactness over existing methods.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a promising approach in novel view synthesis, combining photorealistic rendering with real-time efficiency. However, its success heavily relies on dense camera coverage; under sparse-view conditions, insufficient supervision leads to irregular Gaussian distributions--characterized by globally sparse coverage, blurred background, and distorted high-frequency areas.To address this, we propose HeroGS--Hierarchical Guidance for Robust 3D Gaussian Splatting--a unified framework that establishes hierarchical guidance across the image, feature, and parameter levels. At the image level, sparse supervision is converted into pseudo-dense guidance, globally regularizing the Gaussian distributions and forming a consistent foundation for subsequent optimization. Building upon this, Feature-Adaptive Densification and Pruning (FADP) at the feature level leverages low-level features to refine high-frequency details and adaptively densifies Gaussians in background regions.The optimized distributions then support Co-Pruned Geometry Consistency (CPG) at parameter level, which guides geometric consistency through parameter freezing and co-pruning, effectively removing inconsistent splats. The hierarchical guidance strategy effectively constrains and optimizes the overall Gaussian distributions, thereby enhancing both structural fidelity and rendering quality.Extensive experiments demonstrate that HeroGS achieves high-fidelity reconstructions and consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines under sparse-view conditions.

Depth map super-resolution with color guidance is a fundamental task in computer vision that aims to reconstruct high-resolution depth maps by leveraging structural correlations from corresponding guidance images. Recently, with the development of deep learning techniques, the performance of guided depth super-resolution (GDSR) models has been significantly improved. However, most existing approaches rely on black-box architectures that lack theoretical interpretability. Although graph optimization has been explored to integrate model-driven and data-driven frameworks, it remains computationally expensive and struggles to preserve the intrinsic structures of the depth maps. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel GDSR framework based on a dual graph Laplacian prior, termed LapNet, which efficiently unfolds graph optimization into a deep neural network. Specifically, we first formulate a dual graph Laplacian prior that separately models structural dependencies along the row and column dimensions of the depth maps. This formulation explicitly enforces piecewise smoothness while reducing computational complexity from O(H^3W^3) to O(H^3 + W^3) by avoiding the construction of global affinity graph. Furthermore, we develop a deep implicit prior to extract high-frequency structural cues from the guidance image, serving as a complementary component to the manually designed prior. Finally, we integrate these complementary priors into a unified variational optimization framework, which is efficiently solved through alternating minimization and subsequently unfolded into an interpretable multi-stage deep network. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that LapNet achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining low computational complexity.

In computer vision, machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific visual concepts or training images without retraining from scratch. Studies show that existing approaches often modify the classifier while leaving internal representations intact, resulting in incomplete forgetting.In this work, we extend the notion of unlearning to the representation level, deriving a three-term interplay between forgetting efficacy, retention fidelity, and class separation. Building on Neural Collapse theory, we show that the orthogonal projection of a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) remains an ETF in a lower-dimensional space, yielding a provably optimal forgetting operator.We further introduce the Representation Unlearning Score (RUS) to quantify representation-level forgetting and retention fidelity. Building on this, we introduce POUR (Provably Optimal Unlearning of Representations), a geometric projection method with closed-form (POUR-P) and feature-level unlearning variants under a distillation scheme (POUR-D).Experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and PathMNIST demonstrate that POUR achieves effective unlearning while preserving retained knowledge, outperforming state-of-the-art unlearning methods on both classification-level and representation-level metrics. Code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

Clear imaging under hazy conditions is a critical task. Prior-based and neural methods have improved results. However, they operate on RGB frames, which suffer from limited dynamic range. Therefore, dehazing remains ill- posed and can erase structure and illumination details. To address this, we use event cameras for dehazing for the first time. Event cameras offer much higher HDR (120dB vs. 60dB) and microsecond latency, therefore they suit hazy scenes. In practice, transferring HDR cues from events to frames is hard because real paired data are scarce. To tackle this, we propose an event-guided diffusion model that utilizes the strong generative priors of diffusion mod- els to reconstruct clear images from hazy inputs by effec- tively transferring HDR information from events. Specifi- cally, we design an event-guided module that maps sparse HDR event features, e.g., edges, corners, into the diffusion latent space. This clear conditioning provides precise struc- tural guidance during generation, improves visual realism, and reduces semantic drift. For real-world evaluation, we collect a drone dataset in heavy haze (AQI = 341) with synchronized RGB and event sensors. Experiments on two benchmarks and our dataset achieve state-of-the-art results.

Following the success of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in foundation LLMs, an increasing number of works have sought to adapt GRPO to Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs) for visual perception tasks (e.g., detection and segmentation). However, much of this line of research rests on a long-standing yet unexamined assumption: training paradigms developed for language reasoning can be transferred seamlessly to visual perception. Our experiments show that this assumption is not valid, revealing intrinsic differences between reasoning-oriented and perception-oriented settings. Using reasoning segmentation as a representative case, we surface two overlooked factors: (i) the need for a broader output space, and (ii) the importance of fine-grained, stable rewards. Building on these observations, we propose Dr.Seg, a simple, plug-and-play GRPO-based framework consisting of a Look-to-Confirm mechanism and a Distribution-Ranked Reward module, requiring no architectural modifications and integrating seamlessly with existing GRPO-based VLLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dr.Seg improves performance in complex visual scenarios while maintaining strong generalization. Code, data, and models will be publicly released upon acceptance.

Ill-posed inverse problems are fundamental in many domains, ranging from astrophysics to medical imaging. Emerging diffusion models provide a powerful prior for solving these problems. Existing maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) or posterior sampling approaches, however, rely on different computational approximations, leading to inaccurate or suboptimal samples. To address this issue, we introduce a new approach to solving MAP problems with diffusion model priors using a dual ascent optimization framework. Our framework achieves better image quality as measured by various metrics for image restoration problems, it is more robust to high levels of measurement noise, it is faster, and it estimates solutions that represent the observations more faithfully than the state of the art.

To utilize pre-trained neural networks on edge and mobile devices, we often require efficient adaptation to user-specific runtime data distributions while operating under limited compute and memory resources. On-device retraining with a target dataset can facilitate such adaptations; however, it remains impractical due to the increasing depth of modern neural nets, as well as the computational overhead associated with gradient-based optimization across all layers. Current approaches reduce training cost by selecting a subset of layers for retraining; however, they rely on labeled data, at least one full-model backpropagation, or server-side meta-training, limiting their suitability for constrained devices. We introduce AdaBet, a gradient-free layer selection approach to rank important layers, followed by important channels of these layers, by analyzing topological features of their activation spaces through Betti Numbers and using forward passes alone. AdaBet allows selecting layers and channels with high learning capacity, which are important for retraining and adaptation, without requiring labels or gradients. Evaluating AdaBet on sixteen pairs of benchmark models and datasets shows AdaBet achieves an average gain of 2.5% more classification accuracy over gradient-based baselines while reducing average peak memory consumption by 40%. We open-source our code at https://github.com/Nokia-Bell-Labs/efficient_layer_selection

Planning-oriented end-to-end driving models show great promise, yet they fundamentally learn statistical correlations instead of true causal relationships. This vulnerability leads to causal confusion, where models exploit dataset biases as shortcuts, critically harming their reliability and safety in complex scenarios. To address this, we introduce CausalVAD, a de-confounding training framework that leverages causal intervention. At its core, we design the sparse causal intervention scheme (SCIS), a lightweight, plug-and-play module to instantiate the backdoor adjustment theory in neural networks. SCIS constructs a dictionary of prototypes representing latent driving contexts. It then uses this dictionary to intervene on the model's sparse vectorized queries. This step actively eliminates spurious associations induced by confounders, thereby eliminating spurious factors from the representations for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmarks like nuScenes show CausalVAD achieves state-of-the-art planning accuracy and safety. Furthermore, our method demonstrates superior robustness against both data bias and noisy scenarios configured to induce causal confusion.

Predicting enzyme kinetic parameters quantifies how efficiently an enzyme catalyzes a specific substrate under defined biochemical conditions. Canonical parameters such as the turnover number (k_\text cat ), Michaelis constant (K_\text m ), and inhibition constant (K_\text i ) depend jointly on the enzyme sequence, the substrate chemistry, and the conformational adaptation of the active site during binding. Many learning pipelines simplify this process to a static compatibility problem between the enzyme and substrate, fusing their representations through shallow operations and regressing a single value. Such formulations overlook the staged nature of catalysis, which involves both substrate recognition and conformational adaptation. In this regard, we reformulate kinetic prediction as a staged multimodal conditional modeling problem and introduce the Enzyme-Reaction Bridging Adapter (ERBA), which injects cross-modal information via fine-tuning into Protein Language Models (PLMs) while preserving their biochemical priors. ERBA performs conditioning in two stages: Molecular Recognition Cross-Attention (MRCA) first injects substrate information into the enzyme representation to capture specificity; Geometry-aware Mixture-of-Experts (G-MoE) then integrates active-site structure and routes samples to pocket-specialized experts to reflect induced fit. To maintain semantic fidelity, Enzyme-Substrate Distribution Alignment (ESDA) enforces distributional consistency within the PLM manifold in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Experiments across three kinetic endpoints and multiple PLM backbones, ERBA delivers consistent gains and stronger out-of-distribution performance compared with sequence-only and shallow-fusion baselines, offering a biologically grounded route to scalable kinetic prediction and a foundation for adding cofactors, mutations, and time-resolved structural cues.

Realistic digital avatars require expressive and dynamic hair motion; however, most existing head avatar methods assume rigid hair movement. These methods often fail to disentangle hair from the head, representing it as a simple outer shell and failing to capture its natural volumetric behavior. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing PhysHead, a hybrid representation for animatable head avatars with realistic hair dynamics learned from multiview video. At the core is a 3D Gaussian-based layered representation of the head. Our approach combines a 3D parametric mesh for the head with strand-based hair, which can be directly simulated using physics engines. For the appearance model, we employ Gaussian primitives attached to both the head mesh and hair segments. This representation enables the creation of photorealistic head avatars with dynamic hair behavior, such as wind-blown motion, overcoming the constraints of rigid hair in existing methods. However, these animation capabilities also require new training schemes. In particular, we propose the use of VLM-based models to generate appearance of regions that are occluded in the dynamic training sequences. In quantitative and qualitative studies, we demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed model and compare it with existing baselines. We show that our method can synthesize physically plausible hair motion besides expression and camera control. For additional results and code, please refer to https://physhead.github.io

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have shown exceptional performance in image generation, yet their large parameter counts incur high computational costs, impeding deployment in resource-constrained settings. To address this, we propose Pluggable Pruning with Contiguous Layer Distillation (PPCL), a flexible structured pruning framework specifically designed for DiT architectures. First, we identify redundant layer intervals through a linear probing mechanism combined with the first-order differential trend analysis of similarity metrics. Subsequently, we propose a plug-and-play teacher-student alternating distillation scheme tailored to integrate depth-wise and width-wise pruning within a single training phase. This distillation framework enables flexible knowledge transfer across diverse pruning ratios, eliminating the need for per-configuration retraining. Extensive experiments on multiple Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer architecture models demonstrate that PPCL achieves a 50% reduction in parameter count compared to the full model, with less than 3% degradation in key objective metrics. Notably, our method maintains high-quality image generation capabilities while achieving higher compression ratios, rendering it well-suited for resource-constrained environments.