CVPR 2026 Papers

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) distills score-based generative models into efficient one-step generators, without requiring a one-to-one correspondence with the sampling trajectories of their teachers. Yet, the limited capacity of one-step distilled models compromises generative diversity and degrades performance in complex generative tasks, e.g., generating intricate object motions in text-to-video task. Directly extending DMD to multi-step distillation increases memory usage and computational depth, leading to instability and reduced efficiency. While prior works propose stochastic gradient truncation as a potential solution, we observe that it substantially reduces the generative diversity in text-to-image generation and slows motion dynamics in video generation, reducing performance to the level of one-step models. To address these limitations, we propose Phased DMD, a multi-step distillation framework that bridges the idea of phase-wise distillation with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), reducing learning difficulty while enhancing model capacity. Phased DMD incorporates two key ideas: progressive distribution matching and score matching within subintervals. First, our model divides the SNR range into subintervals, progressively refining the model to higher SNR levels, to better capture complex distributions. Next, to ensure accurate training within each subinterval, we derive rigorous mathematical formulations for the objective. We validate Phased DMD by distilling state-of-the-art image and video generation models, including Qwen-Image-20B and Wan2.2-28B. Experiments demonstrate that Phased DMD enhances motion dynamics, improves visual fidelity in video generation, and increases output diversity in image generation. Our code and models are available at https://x-niper.github.io/projects/Phased-DMD/.

Parameter Recombination (PR) methods aim to efficiently compose the weights of a neural network, and encompasses tasks like Parameter-Efficient FineTuning (PEFT) and Model Compression (MC), among others. Most methods typically focus on one application of PR, which can make composing them challenging. For example, when deploying a large model you may wish to compress the model and also quickly adapt to new settings. However, PEFT methods often can still contain millions of parameters. This may be small compared to the original model size, but can be problematic in resource constrained deployments like edge devices, where they take a larger portion of the compressed model's parameters. To address this, we present Coefficient-gated weight Recombination by Interpolated Shared basis Projections (\method ), a general approach that can address multiple PR tasks within the same framework, which can enable seamless integration. It accomplishes this by using a factorization process that decomposes pretrained weights into basis matrices and their component projections. Sharing these basis matrices across layers and adjusting its size enables us to perform MC, whereas the small size of the projection weights (fewer than 200 in some experiments) enables \method support PEFT. Experiments on ViT models show \method outperforms methods from prior work capable of dual-task applications by 4-5% while also outperforming the state-of-the-art in PEFT by 1.5% and PEFT+MC combinations by almost 1%.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) requires a balance between discriminative capability and computational efficiency for real-world deployment. However, even the Visual State Space Model (SSM), despite its linear complexity, suffers from redundant computation due to dense token processing. We propose SSM-aware Token-Efficient VMamba (TE-VMamba), which integrates adaptive patch pruning and merging modules to reduce redundant tokens while preserving identity-discriminative cues. The layer-adaptive pruning strategy removes low-importance tokens in shallow layers to enhance efficiency, whereas the depth-aware merging strategy consolidates semantically similar tokens in deeper layers to improve representation compactness. Learnable layer-wise thresholds dynamically balance accuracy and computational cost across the network. On the Market-1501 benchmark, TE-VMamba reduces FLOPs by over 60%, achieving significant computational savings while maintaining competitive accuracy. These results highlight the potential of structured token reduction in state-space models for efficient and powerful person re-identification.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in image and video generation, but their success comes at the cost of heavy computation. This inefficiency is largely due to the fixed tokenization process, which uses constant-sized patches throughout the entire denoising phase, regardless of the content's complexity. We propose dynamic tokenization, an efficient test-time strategy that varies patch sizes based on content complexity and the denoising timestep. Our key insight is that early timesteps usually require coarser patches to model global structure, while later iterations demand finer (smaller-sized) patches to refine local details. During inference, our method dynamically reallocates patch sizes across denoising steps for image and video generation and substantially reduces cost while preserving perceptual generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: it achieves up to 3.52xand 3.2xspeedup on FLUX-1.Dev and Wan 2.1, respectively, without compromising the generation quality and prompt adherence.

Attribution is essential for interpreting object-level foundation models. Recent methods based on submodular subset selection have achieved high faithfulness, but their efficiency limitations hinder practical deployment in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose PhaseWin, a novel phase-window search algorithm that enables faithful region attribution with near-linear complexity. PhaseWin replaces traditional quadratic-cost greedy selection with a phased coarse-to-fine search, combining adaptive pruning, windowed fine-grained selection, and dynamic supervision mechanisms to closely approximate greedy behavior while dramatically reducing model evaluations. Theoretically, PhaseWin retains near-greedy approximation guarantees under mild monotone submodular assumptions. Empirically, PhaseWin achieves over 95% of greedy attribution faithfulness using only 20% of the computational budget, and consistently outperforms other attribution baselines across object detection and visual grounding tasks with Grounding DINO and Florence-2. PhaseWin establishes a new state of the art in scalable, high-faithfulness attribution for object-level multimodal models. Code is available at https://github.com/Qihuai27/phasewin-search.

In stroke-based rendering, search methods often get trapped in local minima due to discrete stroke placement, while differentiable optimizers lack structural awareness and produce unstructured layouts. To bridge this gap, we propose a dual representation that couples discrete polylines with continuous Bezier control points via a bidirectional mapping mechanism. This enables collaborative optimization: local gradients refine global stroke structures, while content-aware stroke proposals help escape poor local optima. Our representation further supports Gaussian-splatting-inspired initialization, enabling highly parallel stroke optimization across the image. Experiments show that our approach reduces the number of strokes by 30-50%, achieves more structurally coherent layouts, and improves reconstruction quality, while cutting optimization time by 30-40% compared to existing differentiable vectorization methods.

Hyperbolic spaces provide a natural geometry for representing hierarchical and tree-structured data due to their exponential volume growth. To leverage these benefits, neural networks require intrinsic and efficient components that operate directly in hyperbolic space. In this work, we lift two core components of neural networks, Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) and Fully Connected (FC) layers, into hyperbolic space via Busemann functions, resulting in Busemann MLR (BMLR) and Busemann FC (BFC) layers with a unified mathematical interpretation. BMLR provides compact parameters, a point-to-horosphere distance interpretation, batch-efficient computation, and a Euclidean limit, while BFC generalizes FC and activation layers with comparable complexity. Experiments on image classification, genome sequence learning, node classification, and link prediction demonstrate improvements in effectiveness and efficiency over prior hyperbolic layers. The code is available at https://github.com/GitZH-Chen/HBNN.

Interpreting individual neurons or directions in activation space is an important topic in mechanistic interpretability. Numerous automated interpretability methods have been proposed to generate such explanations, but it remains unclear how reliable these explanations are, and which methods produce the most accurate descriptions. While crowd-sourced evaluations are commonly used, existing pipelines are noisy, costly, and typically assess only the highest-activating inputs, leading to unreliable results. In this paper, we introduce two techniques to enable cost-effective and accurate crowdsourced evaluation of automated interpretability methods beyond top activating inputs. First, we propose Model-Guided Importance Sampling (MG-IS) to select the most informative inputs to show human raters. In our experiments, we show this reduces the number of inputs needed to reach the same evaluation accuracy by 13x. Second, we address label noise in crowd-sourced ratings through Bayesian Rating Aggregation (BRAgg), which allows us to reduce the number of ratings per input required to overcome noise by 3x. Together, these techniques reduce the evaluation cost by 40x, making large-scale evaluation feasible. Finally, we use our methods to conduct a large scale crowd-sourced study comparing recent automated interpretability methods for vision networks.

Diffusion Transformers achieve impressive generative quality but remain computationally expensive due to iterative sampling. Recently, dynamic resolution sampling has emerged as a promising acceleration technique by reducing the resolution of early sampling steps. However, existing methods rely on heuristic re-noising at every resolution transition, injecting noise that breaks cross-stage consistency and forces the model to relearn global structure. In addition, these methods indiscriminately upsample the entire latent space at once without checking which regions have actually converged, causing accumulated errors, and visible artifacts. Therefore, we propose Fresco, a dynamic resolution framework that unifies re-noise and global structure across stages with progressive upsampling, preserving both the efficiency of low-resolution drafting and the fidelity of high-resolution refinement, with all stages aligned toward the same final target. Fresco achieves near-lossless acceleration across diverse domains and models, including 10 times speedup on FLUX, and 5 times on HunyuanVideo, while remaining orthogonal to distillation, quantization and feature caching, reaching 22 times speedup when combined with distilled models.

We introduce RAVEN, a deep learning architecture for processing frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar data that is designed for high computational efficiency. RAVEN reduces computation by using a learnable antenna mixer module on independent receiver state space encoders (SSM) to compress the virtual MIMO array into a compact set of learned features and by performing per-chirp inference with a calibrated early-exit rule, so the model reaches a decision using only a subset of chirps in a radar frame. These design choices yield up to 170x lower computation and 4x lower end-to-end latency than conventional frame-based radar backbones, while achieving state-of-the-art detection and BEV free-space segmentation performance on automotive radar datasets.

Traditional image compression prioritizes pixel fidelity but often preserves details irrelevant to downstream vision tasks. Compressing task-specific representations instead better aligns with task semantics, yet redundant information persists across correlated tasks. Existing multi-task compression methods typically rely on static dependency structures, leading to redundant bit allocation across correlated tasks and suboptimal rate-distortion performance. We present Adaptive Task Dependency Compression (ATDC), a framework that models per-image task relationships and encodes representations following an adaptive directed acyclic graph (DAG). ATDC infers pairwise task predictability via a learned correlation matrix, constructs a dynamic DAG to determine the optimal compression order, and encodes each task conditionally on its predecessors, achieving predictive redundancy removal and asymmetric information sharing across tasks. Experiments on the Taskonomy dataset demonstrate consistent gains in rate-distortion efficiency and task accuracy over both human-oriented codecs and state-of-the-art multi-task compression methods.The learned DAGs reveal interpretable, content-dependent task hierarchies, establishing adaptive dependency modeling as a principled paradigm for multi-task representation compression.

Egocentric perception on smart glasses could transform how we learn new skills in the physical world, but automatic skill assessment remains a fundamental technical challenge. We introduce SkillSight for power-efficient skill assessment from first-person data. Central to our approach is the hypothesis that skill level is evident not only in how a person performs an activity (video), but also in how they directtheir attention when doing so (gaze). Our two-stage framework first learns to jointly model gaze and egocentric video when predicting skill level, then distills a gaze-only student model. At inference, the student model requires only gaze input, drastically reducing power consumption by eliminating continuous video processing. Experiments on three datasets spanning cooking, music, and sports establish, for the first time, the valuable role of gaze in skill understanding across diverse real-world settings. Our SkillSight teacher model achieves state-of-the-art performance, while our gaze-only student variant maintains high accuracy using 73x less power than competing methods. These results pave the way for in-the-wild AI-supported skill learning.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to enhance the cross-domain performance of pre-trained models by adapting to unlabeled test data.While most existing TTA methods rely on backpropagation (BP) for finetuning, BP-free methods such as zeroth-order (ZO) methods are more desired in practical on-device scenarios. ZO methods rely only on forward computation, which can largely reduce the complexity and memory overhead of on-device deployment.However, ZO methods suffer from much higher variance compared with first-order methods in estimating the gradient.To address this, we propose an improved ZO method to substantially boost the performance of ZO optimization based TTA.First, we provide an observation to reveal the persistent low-rank Hessian structure of the loss during the adaptation process. Based on this insight, we then propose a loss-landscape curvature-aware zeroth-order (CAZO) method, which leverages a sliding-average estimation of the diagonal Hessian to construct a covariance matrix for anisotropic perturbation sampling. CAZO operates by freezing pretrained weights and optimizing minimal adapter parameters via forward-only passes based gradient estimation, which can substantially reduce the memory overhead compared to BP-based methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAZO significantly outperforms existing TTA methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while maintaining an excellent balance between accuracy and memory efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Hollyming/CAZO.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) in multimodal tracking reveals a concerning trend where recent performance gains are often achieved at the cost of inflated parameter budgets, which fundamentally erodes PEFT's efficiency promise. In this work, we introduce SEATrack, a Simple, Efficient, and Adaptive two-stream multimodal tracker that tackles this performance-efficiency dilemma from two complementary perspectives. We first prioritize cross-modal alignment of matching responses, an underexplored yet pivotal factor that we argue is essential for breaking the trade-off. Specifically, we observe that modality-specific biases in existing two-stream methods generate conflicting matching attention maps, thereby hindering effective joint representation learning. To mitigate this, we propose AMG-LoRA, which seamlessly integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for domain adaptation with Adaptive Mutual Guidance (AMG) to dynamically refine and align attention maps across modalities. We then depart from conventional local fusion approaches by introducing a Hierarchical Mixture of Experts (HMoE) that enables efficient global relation modeling, effectively balancing expressiveness and computational efficiency in cross-modal fusion. Equipped with these innovations, SEATrack advances notable progress over state-of-the-art methods in balancing performance with efficiency across RGB-T, RGB-D, and RGB-E tracking tasks. Code is available.

Flow-based Transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art image generation performance, but often suffer from high inference latency and computational cost due to their large parameter sizes. To improve inference efficiency without compromising quality, we propose Bridged Progressive Rectified Flow Transformers (NAMI), which decompose the generation process across temporal, spatial, and architectural demensions. We divide the rectified flow into different stages according to resolution, and use a BridgeFlow module to connect them. Fewer Transformer layers are used at low-resolution stages to generate image layouts and concept contours, and more layers are progressively added as the resolution increases. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves fast convergence and reduces inference time while ensuring generation quality. The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows: (1) We introduce Bridged Progressive Rectified Flow Transformers that enable multi-resolution training, accelerating model convergence; (2) NAMI leverages piecewise flow and spatial cascading of Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to rapidly generate images, reducing inference time by 64% for generating 1024x1024 resolution images; (3) We propose a BridgeFlow module to align flows between different stages; (4) We propose the NAMI-1K benchmark to evaluate human preference performance, aiming to mitigate distributional bias and comprehensively assess model effectiveness. The results show that our model is competitive with state-of-the-art models.

Recognizing visual and textual patterns is essential in many real-world applications of modern AI. However, tackling long-tail pattern recognition tasks remains challenging for current pre-trained foundation models such as LLMs and VLMs. While finetuning pre-trained models can improve accuracy in recognizing such implicit patterns, it is usually infeasible due to a lack of training data and high computational overhead. In this paper, we propose ADAMAB, an efficient embedding calibration framework for few-shot pattern recognition. To maximally reduce the computational costs, ADAMAB trains embedder-agnostic light-weight calibrators on top of fixed embedding models without accessing their parameters. To mitigate the need for large-scale training data, we introduce an adaptive data augmentation strategy based on the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) mechanism. With a modified upper confidence bound algorithm, ADAMAB diminishes the gradient shifting and offers theoretically guaranteed convergence in few-shot training. Our multi-modal experiments justify the superior performance of ADAMAB, with up to 40% accuracy improvement when training with less than 5 initial data samples of each class.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient vision, but applying them to RGB visual tracking remains difficult: Existing SNN tracking frameworks either do not fully align with spike-driven computation or do not fully leverage neurons' spatiotemporal dynamics, leading to a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. To address this, we introduce SpikeTrack, a spike-driven framework for energy-efficient RGB object tracking. SpikeTrack employs a novel asymmetric design that uses asymmetric timestep expansion and unidirectional information flow, harnessing spatiotemporal dynamics while cutting computation. To ensure effective unidirectional information transfer between branches, we design a memory-retrieval module inspired by neural inference mechanisms. This module recurrently queries a compact memory initialized by the template to retrieve target cues and sharpen target perception over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpikeTrack achieves the state-of-the-art among SNN-based trackers and remains competitive with advanced ANN trackers. Notably, it surpasses TransT on LaSOT dataset while consuming only 1/26 of its energy. To our knowledge, SpikeTrack is the first spike-driven framework to make RGB tracking both accurate and energy efficient.

Multimodal unsupervised anomaly detection has garnered increasing attention for robust defect localization.Recent approaches rely on establishing cross-modal matching relationships under normal conditions without explicit guidance.However, in practice, a single modality may have multiple distinct representations corresponding to another modality, and such unconditional mappings struggle to adaptively capture these variations, resulting in mapping ambiguity and the misclassification of diverse yet normal variations as anomalies.Moreover, existing methods suffer from slow inference speed and high memory overhead, hindering their deployment in real-world production lines.To address these issues, we propose an efficient and effective Complementary Prototype Mapping (CPMAD) framework, which dynamically extracts consensus and supplementary prototypes to serve as complementary priors, thereby guiding and disambiguating cross-modal mappings.The framework comprises three key components:(1) Consensus Extraction Module (CEM) learns a dynamic anchor, transforming multimodal features into anomaly-free consensus prototypes to improve cross-modal consistency and suppress latent anomalies;(2) Supplementary Query Module (SQM) employs a Complementary Residual Attention mechanism to capture the discrepancy between the consensus and modality-specific spaces, thereby exploring the most representative and discriminative cues as supplementary prototypes; and(3) Complementary Mapping Module adaptively integrates both prototypes to perform feature mapping.Extensive experiments demonstrate that CPMAD not only achieves superior performance in both full-data and few-shot settings across diverse industrial and medical scenarios but also maintains faster inference speeds and lower memory consumption compared to existing methods. Code: https://github.com/yuanzhao-CVLAB/CPMAD.

The task of multi-view inpainting necessitates 3D consistency in the inpainted images. Most prior methods first employ single-view 2D inpainting and then enforce multi-view consistency in a post-hoc 3D optimization stage, which leads to undesirable artifacts and lengthy optimization times. The existing single-stage method, MVInpainter, uses video priors and is pose-free, making it less suitable for inputs beyond video sequences. In this paper, we propose a framework that trains an inpainting model to condition on the explicit and reliable multi-view correspondences from a 3D foundation model. Central to our framework is a cross-view conditioning architecture, LaRP, carefully designed to utilize both the generative prior of a pretrained diffusion inpainting model and the reprojected cross-view appearance latents. We additionally propose a scalable data pipeline for stable training of LaRP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaRP outperforms prior methods in 3D consistency and novel view synthesis quality competitive with the state-of-the-art, while being 50x faster.