CVPR 2026 Papers

Infrared video acquisition inherently suffers from low spatial resolution and limited frame rates due to the physical constraints of thermal imaging sensors. These limitations make infrared video enhancement uniquely challenging, as it requires restoring spatial details and temporal continuity from highly undersampled thermal signals. To address this challenge, we propose THERIS, a unified THERmal-physics inspired framework for Infrared spatial-temporal video Super-resolution. Grounded in the physical principles of thermal diffusion, THERIS leverages heat conduction dynamics that govern the spatiotemporal evolution of infrared pixel intensities. Specifically, the proposed Thermal Diffusion Interpolation Module (TDIM) treats temporal feature sequences as one-dimensional heat fields and performs frequency-domain diffusion to synthesize temporally coherent intermediate frames. Building on this foundation, the Thermo-Aware State Space Module (TSSM) refines spatiotemporal representations through learnable spectral filtering and selective state-space modeling, while maintaining consistency guided by the thermodynamic prior inherited from TDIM. Additionally, a Temperature Field Modeling Loss is introduced to enforce adherence to the heat conduction equation, promoting temporal coherence and spatial stability in the generated results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that THERIS achieves state-of-the-art performance while producing visually coherent results. To facilitate further research in the infrared video processing domain, we also introduce IRVAL, a high-resolution dataset comprising 108,512 video frames at 512x512 resolution.

Physically Plausible Video Generation (PPVG) has emerged as a promising avenue for modeling real-world physical phenomena. PPVG requires an understanding of commonsense knowledge, which remains a challenge for video diffusion models. Current approaches leverage commonsense reasoning capability of large language models to embed physical concepts into prompts. However, generation models often render physical phenomena as a single moment defined by prompts, due to the lack of conditioning mechanisms for modeling causal progression. In this paper, we view PPVG as generating a sequence of causally connected and dynamically evolving events. To realize this paradigm, we design two key modules: (1) Physics-driven Event Chain Reasoning. This module decomposes the physical phenomena described in prompts into multiple elementary event units, leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning. To mitigate causal ambiguity, we embed physical formulas as constraints to impose deterministic causal dependencies during reasoning. (2) Transition-aware Cross-modal Prompting (TCP). To maintain continuity between events, this module transforms causal event units into temporally aligned vision-language prompts. It summarizes discrete event descriptions to obtain causally consistent narratives, while progressively synthesizing visual keyframes of individual events by interactive editing. Comprehensive experiments on PhyGenBench and VideoPhy benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance in generating physically plausible videos across diverse physical domains. Code is available at https://github.com/ZixuanWang0525/CoECT.

Residual diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in image restoration tasks. In near-domain transformations such as image deraining, however, we observe that the residuals exhibit an inherent low-rank structure. Motivated by this property, we propose the Low-Rank Residual Diffusion Model (LRDM), which performs diffusion within a compact low-rank residual subspace for efficient and structure-preserving restoration. We formalize this observation as the Low-Rank Residual Assumption and show that the variational lower bound becomes tighter when residuals lie in a low-rank space. Building on this insight, we introduce an Asymmetric Residual Diffusion Process that constrains the forward process in the low-rank domain while maintaining full-rank flexibility in the reverse process. To accommodate the varying complexity of residuals across diffusion timesteps, we further introduce an Adaptive Rank Selection mechanism that dynamically adjusts the rank during the diffusion process. Experiments on deraining, deblurring, and deshading benchmarks show that LRDM surpasses full-rank diffusion baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the advantage of modeling diffusion in a low-rank residual space. Project Page: \urlstyle same \hypersetup allcolors=magenta https://github.com/JF-Tan/LRDM .

Understanding and predicting object motion from egocentric video is fundamental to embodied perception and interaction. However, generating physically consistent 6DoF trajectories remains challenging due to occlusions, fast motion, and the lack of explicit physical reasoning in existing generative models. We present EgoFlow, a flow-matching framework that synthesizes realistic and physically plausible trajectories conditioned on multimodal egocentric observations. EgoFlow employs a hybrid Mamba-Transformer-Perceiver architecture to jointly model temporal dynamics, scene geometry, and semantic intent, while a gradient-guided inference process enforces differentiable physical constraints such as collision avoidance and motion smoothness. This combination yields coherent and controllable motion generation without post-hoc filtering or additional supervision. Experiments on HD-EPIC, EgoExo4D, and HOT3D show that EgoFlow outperforms diffusion-based and transformer baselines in accuracy, generalization, and physical realism, reducing collision rates by up to 79%, and strong generalization to unseen scenes. Our results highlight the promise of flow-based generative modeling for scalable and physically grounded egocentric motion understanding. Project page: https://abhi-rf.github.io/egoflow/

Dual-hand action segmentation, densely predicting actions for both hands from untrimmed videos, is essential for understanding complex bimanual activities. However, it poses several unique challenges: complex inter-hand dependencies, visual asymmetry between hands, representation conflicts where the dominant hand monopolizes gradients, and semantic ambiguity in fine-grained actions. We propose Polyphony, a three-stage method to address these challenges through: (1) an Alternating Dual-Hand Vision Transformer that alternates training between left- and right-hand mini-batches to ensure balanced gradient contributions from both hands while sharing a spatio-temporal encoder; (2) Semantic Feature Conditioning that aligns visual features with structured, compositional action descriptions to enhance discrimination of semantically similar actions; and (3) Diffusion-Based Segmentation with cross-hand feature fusion for inter-hand coordination and adaptive loss weighting for balancing performance. Polyphony achieves state-of-the-art on both dual-hand datasets (HA-ViD, ATTACH) with improvements up to 16.8 points, and on the single-stream Breakfast dataset (82.5%), outperforming the prior best method that uses a 12x larger backbone. Notably, our unified model with a single shared backbone surpasses baselines requiring separate per-hand models. Code is at https://github.com/x-labs-xyz/Polyphony-Dual-hand-Action-Segmentation.

Concept erasure aims to remove harmful, inappropriate, or copyrighted content from text-to-image diffusion models while preserving non-target semantics. However, existing methods either rely on costly fine-tuning or apply coarse semantic separation, often degrading unrelated concepts and lacking adaptability to evolving concept sets. In this paper, we propose Graph-Guided Online Concept Erasure (GrOCE), a training-free framework that performs precise and context-aware online removal of target concepts. GrOCE constructs dynamic semantic graphs to identify clusters of target concepts and selectively suppress their influence within text prompts. It consists of three synergistic components: (1) dynamic semantic graph construction (Construct) incrementally builds a weighted graph over vocabulary concepts to capture semantic affinities; (2) adaptive cluster identification (Identify) extracts a target concept cluster through multi-hop traversal and diffusion-based scoring to quantify semantic influence; and (3) selective severing (Sever) removes semantic components associated with the target cluster from the text prompt while retaining non-target semantics and the global sentence structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GrOCE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Concept Similarity (CS) and Frechet Inception Distance (FID) metrics, offering efficient, accurate, and stable concept erasure.

Cinematic Audio Source Separation (CASS) aims to decompose mixed film audio into speech, music, and sound effects, enabling applications like dubbing and remastering. Existing CASS approaches are audio-only, overlooking the inherent audio-visual nature of films, where sounds often align with visual cues. We present the first framework for audio-visual CASS (AV-CASS), leveraging visual context to enhance separation quality. Our method formulates CASS as a conditional generative modeling problem using conditional flow matching, enabling multimodal audio source separation. To address the lack of cinematic datasets with isolated sound tracks, we introduce a training data synthesis pipeline that pairs in-the-wild audio and video streams (e.g., facial videos for speech, scene videos for effects) and design a dedicated visual encoder for this dual-stream setup. Trained entirely on synthetic data, our model generalizes effectively to real-world cinematic content and achieves strong performance on synthetic, real-world, and audio-only CASS benchmarks. Code and demo are available at https://cass-flowmatching.github.io.

Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos based on text queries that describe only partial events. Existing methods suffer from incomplete global contextual perception, struggling with query ambiguity and local noise induced by spurious responses. To address these issues, we propose DreamPRVR, which adopts a coarse-to-fine representation learning paradigm. The model first generates global contextual semantic registers as coarse-grained highlights spanning the entire video and then concentrates on fine-grained similarity optimization for precise cross-modal matching. Concretely, these registers are generated by initializing from the video-centric distribution produced by a probabilistic variational sampler and then iteratively refined via a text-supervised truncated diffusion model. During this process, textual semantic structure learning constructs a well-formed textual latent space, enhancing the reliability of global perception. The registers are then adaptively fused with video tokens through register-augmented Gaussian attention blocks, enabling context-aware feature learning. Extensive experiments show that DreamPRVR outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code is released at https://github.com/lijun2005/CVPR26-DreamPRVR.

Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated significant advancements in generating high-quality images, while raising potential safety concerns regarding harmful content generation. Safety-guidance-based methods have been proposed to mitigate harmful outputs by steering generation away from harmful zones, where the zones are averaged across multiple harmful categories based on predefined keywords. However, these approaches fail to capture the complex interplay among different harm categories, leading to "harmful conflicts" where mitigating one type of harm may inadvertently amplify another, thus increasing overall harmful rate. To address this issue, we propose Conflict-aware Adaptive Safety Guidance (CASG), a training-free framework that dynamically identifies and applies the category-aligned safety direction during generation. CASG is composed of two components: (i) Conflict-aware Category Identification (CaCI), which identifies the harmful category most aligned with the model's evolving generative state, and (ii) Conflict-resolving Guidance Application (CrGA), which applies safety steering solely along the identified category to avoid multi-category interference. CASG can be applied to both latent-space and text-space safeguards. Experiments on T2I safety benchmarks demonstrate CASG's state-of-the-art performance, reducing the harmful rate by up to 15.4% compared to existing methods.

Recently, synthetic palmprints have been increasingly used as substitutes for real data to train recognition models. To be effective, such synthetic data must reflect the diversity of real palmprints, including both style variation and geometric variation. However, existing palmprint generation methods mainly focus on style translation, while geometric variation is either ignored or approximated by simple handcrafted augmentations. In this work, we propose FlowPalm, an optical-flow-driven palmprint generation framework capable of simulating the complex non-rigid deformations observed in real palms. Specifically, FlowPalm estimates optical flows between real palmprint pairs to capture the statistical patterns of geometric deformations. Building on these priors, we design a progressive sampling process that gradually introduces the geometric deformations during diffusion while maintaining identity consistency. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that FlowPalm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art palmprint generation approaches in downstream recognition tasks. Project page: https://yuchenzou.github.io/FlowPalm/

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of generative tasks, yet training them from scratch is notoriously resource-intensive, typically requiring millions of training images and many GPU days. Motivated by a data-centric view of this bottleneck, we adopt a condensation-based perspective: given a large training set, the goal is to construct a much smaller condensed dataset that still supports training strong diffusion models under minimal data and compute budgets. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Diffusion Dataset Condensation (D2C), a two-phase framework comprising Select and Attach. In the Select phase, a diffusion difficulty score combined with interval sampling is used to identify a compact, informative training subset from the original data. Building on this subset, the Attach phase further strengthens the conditional signals by augmenting each selected image with rich semantic and visual representations. To our knowledge, D2C is the first framework that systematically investigates dataset condensation for diffusion models, whereas prior condensation methods have mainly targeted discriminative architectures. Extensive experiments across data budgets from 0.8% to 8% of ImageNet, model architectures, and image resolutions demonstrate that D2C dramatically accelerates diffusion model training while preserving high generative quality. On ImageNet 256x256 with SiT-XL/2, D2C attains a FID of 4.3 in just 40k steps using only 0.8% of the training images, corresponding to about 233x and 100x faster training than vanilla SiT-XL/2 and SiT-XL/2 + REPA, respectively. Code: https://github.com/xie-lab-ml/Diffusion-Dataset-Condensation.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human preferences, inspiring the development of reward-centric diffusion reinforcement learning (RDRL) to achieve similar alignment and controllability. While diffusion models can generate high-quality outputs, RDRL remains susceptible to reward hacking, where the reward score increases without corresponding improvements in perceptual quality. We demonstrate that this vulnerability arises from the non-robustness of reward model gradients, particularly when the reward landscape with respect to the input image is sharp. To mitigate this issue, we introduce methods that exploit gradients from a robustified reward model, without requiring its retraining. Specifically, we employ gradients from a flattened reward model, obtained through parameter perturbations of the diffusion model and perturbations of its generated samples. Empirically, each method independently alleviates reward hacking and improves robustness, while their joint use amplifies these benefits. Our resulting framework, RSA-FT (Reward Sharpness-Aware Fine-Tuning), is simple, broadly compatible, and consistently enhances the reliability of RDRL.

Diffusion models have recently motivated great success in many generation tasks like object removal. Nevertheless, existing image decomposition methods struggle to disentangle semi-transparent or transparent layer occlusions due to mask prior dependencies, static object assumptions, and the lack of datasets. In this paper, we delve into a novel task: Layer-Wise Decomposition of Alpha-Composited Images, aiming to recover constituent layers from single overlapped images under the condition of semi-transparent/transparent alpha layer non-linear occlusion. To address challenges in layer ambiguity, generalization, and data scarcity, we first introduce AlphaBlend, the first large-scale and high-quality dataset for transparent and semi-transparent layer decomposition, containing six subtasks with different characteristics (e.g., translucent flare removal, semi-transparent cell decomposition, glassware decomposition). Building on this dataset, we present DiffDecompose, a diffusion Transformer-based framework that learns the posterior over possible layer decompositions conditioned on the input image, semantic prompts, and blending type. Rather than regressing alpha mattes directly, DiffDecompose performs In-Context Decomposition, enabling the model to predict one or multiple layers without per-layer supervision, and introduces Layer Position Encoding Cloning to maintain pixel-level correspondence across layers. Extensive experiments on the proposed AlphaBlend dataset and public LOGO dataset verify the effectiveness of DiffDecompose. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Wangzt1121/DiffDecompose.

Innovative visual stylization is a cornerstone of artistic creation, yet generating novel and consistent visual styles remains a significant challenge. Existing generative approaches typically rely on lengthy textual prompts, reference images, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning to guide style-aware image generation, but often struggle with style consistency, limited creativity, and complex style representations. In this paper, we consider the code-to-style image generation task, which aims to produce images with novel and consistent visual styles specified by only a numerical code. To date, this field has only been primarily explored by the industry (e.g., Midjourney), with no open-source research from the academic community. To fill this gap, we propose CoTyle, the first open-source method for this task. Specifically, we first train a discrete style codebook from a collection of images to extract style embeddings. These embeddings serve as conditions for a text-to-image diffusion model (T2I-DM) to generate stylistic images. Subsequently, we train an autoregressive style generator on the discrete style embeddings to model their distribution, allowing the synthesis of novel style embeddings. During inference, a numerical style code is mapped to a unique style embedding by the style generator, and this embedding guides the T2I-DM to generate images in the corresponding style. Extensive experiments validate that CoTyle effectively converts a numerical code into a style controller, demonstrating a style is worth one code. Compared to existing methods, the stylized images generated by our method are more diverse and consistent, unlocking a vast space of reproducible styles from minimal input.

While language models have become impactful in many real-world applications, video generation remains largely confined to entertainment. Motivated by video's inherent capacity to demonstrate physical-world information that is difficult to convey through language alone (e.g., imagine teaching someone to tie a tie using only text), we identify an underutilized opportunity to extend video as a new answer modality for Next-Event Prediction (NEP), formalized as Video-Next-Event Prediction (VNEP). While the established NEP task takes a video with a procedural or predictive question as input to predict the next event in text, VNEP requires dynamic video responses. This shift from telling to showing unlocks more intuitive and customized answers for procedural learning and creative exploration. However, this task remains challenging for existing models, as it demands an understanding of multimodal input, instruction-conditioned reasoning, and the generation of video with visual and semantic consistency. To address this, we introduce VANS, a model that leverages reinforcement learning to align a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with a Video Diffusion Model (VDM) for VNEP. The core of VANS is our proposed Joint-GRPO that orchestrates the VLM and VDM to function as a unit. Driven by a shared reward on their respective output, it optimizes the VLM to produce captions that are both accurate and friendly to visualize, while guiding the VDM to generate videos that are faithful to these captions and the input visual context. To enable this learning, we craft VANS-Data-100K, a dedicated dataset for the VNEP task. Experiments on procedural and predictive benchmarks demonstrate that VANS achieves state-of-the-art performance in both video event prediction and visualization.

Achieving human-level dexterity in robots via imitation learning from heterogeneous datasets is hindered by the challenge of cross-embodiment skill transfer, particularly for high-DoF robotic hands. Existing methods, often relying on 2D observations and temporal-centric action representation, struggle to capture 3D spatial relations and fail to handle embodiment heterogeneity. This paper proposes the Structural Action Transformer (SAT), a new 3D dexterous manipulation policy that challenges this paradigm by introducing a structural-centric perspective. We reframe each action chunk not as a temporal sequence, but as a variable-length, unordered sequence of joint-wise trajectories. This structural formulation allows a Transformer to natively handle heterogeneous embodiments, treating the joint count as a variable sequence length. To encode structural priors and resolve ambiguity, we introduce an Embodied Joint Codebook that embeds each joint's functional role and kinematic properties. Our model learns to generate these trajectories from 3D point clouds via a continuous-time flow matching objective. We validate our approach by pre-training on large-scale heterogeneous datasets and fine-tuning on simulation and real-world dexterous manipulation tasks. Our method consistently outperforms all baselines, demonstrating superior sample efficiency and effective cross-embodiment skill transfer. This structural-centric representation offers a new path toward scaling policies for high-DoF, heterogeneous manipulators.

Video generation has recently emerged as a central task in the field of generative AI. However, the substantial computational cost inherent in video synthesis makes model distillation a critical technique for efficient deployment. Despite its significance, there is a scarcity of methods specifically designed for video diffusion models. Prevailing approaches often directly adapt image distillation techniques, which frequently lead to artifacts such as oversaturation, temporal inconsistency, and mode collapse. To address these challenges, we propose a novel distillation framework tailored specifically for video diffusion models. Its core innovations include: (1) an adaptive regression loss that dynamically adjusts spatial supervision weights to prevent artifacts arising from excessive distribution shifts; (2) a temporal regularization loss to counteract temporal collapse, promoting smooth and physically plausible sampling trajectories; and (3) an inference-time frame interpolation strategy that reduces sampling overhead while preserving perceptual quality. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the VBench and VBench2 benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves stable few-step video synthesis, significantly enhancing perceptual fidelity and motion realism. It consistently outperforms existing distillation baselines across multiple metrics.

Diffusion Probabilistic Models have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of generative tasks. However, we have observed that these models often suffer from a Signal-to-Noise Ratio-timestep (SNR-t) bias. This bias refers to the misalignment between the SNR of the denoising sample and its corresponding timestep during the inference phase. Specifically, during training, the SNR of a sample is strictly coupled with its timestep. However, this correspondence is disrupted during inference, leading to error accumulation and impairing the generation quality. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence and theoretical analysis to substantiate this phenomenon and propose a simple yet effective differential correction method to mitigate the SNR-t bias. Recognizing that diffusion models typically reconstruct low-frequency components before focusing on high-frequency details during the reverse denoising process, we decompose samples into various frequency components and apply differential correction to each component individually. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly improves the generation quality of various diffusion models (IDDPM, ADM, DDIM, A-DPM, EA-DPM, EDM, PFGM++, and FLUX) on datasets of various resolutions with negligible computational overhead.

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress, generating visually realistic and semantically coherent images from textual prompts. However, natural language alone lacks the precision required for design-centric applications that demand strict spatial and structural fidelity--particularly when representing complex concepts that integrate multi-level information, such as product or scene design. To address this limitation, controllable diffusion frameworks introduce auxiliary conditions (e.g., depth, edge, or reference images) to guide the generative process. Models like ControlNet and IP-Adapter effectively inject such priors, improving structural or appearance alignment. Yet, real-world design tasks rarely depend on a single type of condition. They often require simultaneous integration of multiple heterogeneous cues--for instance, preserving spatial layout from depth maps, structural outlines from edge maps, and stylistic attributes from reference images. Current approaches either handle only one condition or naively stack multiple ones, resulting in computational inefficiency and conflicting guidance that degrade generation quality. This multi-condition inconsistency forms a critical bottleneck for applying diffusion models to real-world design workflows, motivating our proposed framework. We propose a data-driven adaptive condition fusion mechanism for multi-conditional diffusion. Our method introduces a novel condition adaptation module that dynamically selects and fuses subsets of conditions based on the diffusion timestep, task characteristics, and feature injection position. This adaptive strategy harmonizes diverse structural and appearance priors, achieving controllable yet flexible generation in complex design scenarios. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements in fidelity, consistency, and controllability across multi-condition tasks, establishing a new direction for practical, detail-preserving diffusion-based design generation.