CVPR 2026 Papers

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Decision breakdown

4,042papers

Counted from the official paper list; may differ slightly from the number the conference announced.

  • Oral
    1383.4%
  • Poster
    3,90496.6%

Browse all papers

EmoTaG: Emotion-Aware Talking Head Synthesis on Gaussian Splatting with Few-Shot Personalization

Haolan Xu, Keli Cheng, Lei Wang, Ning Bi, Xiaoming Liu

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Audio-driven 3D talking head synthesis has advanced rapidly with Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). By leveraging rich pre-trained priors, few-shot methods enable instant personalization from just a few seconds of video. However, under expressive facial motion, existing few-shot approaches often suffer from geometric instability and audio-emotion mismatch, highlighting the need for more effective emotion-aware motion modeling. In this work, we present EmoTaG, a few-shot emotion-aware 3D talking head synthesis framework built on the Pretrain-and-Adapt paradigm. Our key insight is to reformulate motion prediction in a structured FLAME parameter space rather than directly deforming 3D Gaussians, thereby introducing explicit geometric priors that improve motion stability. Building upon this, we propose a Gated Residual Motion Network (GRMN), which captures emotional prosody from audio while supplementing head pose and upper-face cues absent from audio, enabling expressive and coherent motion generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EmoTaG achieves state-of-the-art performance in emotional expressiveness, lip synchronization, visual realism, and motion stability.

Poster
Phased DMD: Few-step Distribution Matching Distillation via Score Matching within Subintervals

Xiangyu Fan, Zesong Qiu, Zhuguanyu Wu, Fanzhou Wang, Zhiqian Lin, Tianxiang Ren, Dahua Lin, Ruihao Gong, Lei Yang

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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/.

Poster
FlexAvatar: Learning Complete 3D Head Avatars with Partial Supervision

Tobias Kirschstein, Simon Giebenhain, Matthias Nießner

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We introduce FlexAvatar, a method for creating high-quality and complete 3D head avatars from a single image. A core challenge lies in the limited availability of multi-view data and the tendency of monocular training to yield incomplete 3D head reconstructions. We identify the root cause of this issue as the entanglement between driving signal and target viewpoint when learning from monocular videos. To address this, we propose a transformer-based 3D portrait animation model with learnable data source tokens, so-called bias sinks, which enables unified training across monocular and multi-view datasets. This design leverages the strengths of both data sources during inference: strong generalization from monocular data and full 3D completeness from multi-view supervision. Furthermore, our training procedure yields a smooth latent avatar space that facilitates identity interpolation and flexible fitting to an arbitrary number of input observations. In extensive evaluations on single-view, few-shot, and monocular avatar creation tasks, we verify the efficacy of FlexAvatar. Many existing methods struggle with view extrapolation while FlexAvatar generates complete 3D head avatars with realistic facial animations.

Poster
Bridging the Modality Gap in Compositional Zero-Shot Learning via Sparse Alignment and Unimodal Memory Bank

Yang Zhang, Zhixiang Chi, Xudong Yan, Yang Wang, Songhe Feng

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Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen attribute-object compositions with learned primitives (attribute and object) knowledge from seen compositions. While previous approaches gain their notable performance through the powerful cross-modal alignment of CLIP, they often overlook the modality gap, an inherent constraint stemming from information-imbalanced training data. In this work, we propose SAM, a novel \underline \text S parse \underline \text A lignment and Unimoal \underline \text M emory Bank to effectively bridging modality gap for CZSL. Specifically, we conduct sparse alignment that links textual representations directly to their semantically pertinent visual patches. This direct linking serves to prune redundant visual data and counter the information imbalance in image-text pairs. Subsequently, with the sparsely aligned visual information as its guidance, the visual adaptive condensation module adaptively fuses these critical cues into a unified representation. Finally, we introduce a dynamically updated memory bank that stores samples from both seen and unseen compositions. This bank serves a dual purpose: it bypasses the modality gap through visual-only classification and concurrently strengthens generalization to unseen compositions. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that our method gains significant improvements over CLIP-based methods under closed-world and open-world settings.

Poster
Attribution-Guided Model Rectification of Unreliable Neural Network Behaviors

Peiyu Yang, Naveed Akhtar, Jiantong Jiang, Ajmal Mian

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The performance of neural network models deteriorates due to their unreliable behavior on non-robust features of corrupted samples. Owing to their opaque nature, rectifying models to address this problem often necessitates arduous data cleaning and model retraining, resulting in huge computational and manual overhead. In this work, we leverage rank-one model editing to establish an attribution-guided model rectification framework that effectively locates and corrects model unreliable behaviors. We first distinguish our rectification setting from existing model editing, yielding a formulation that corrects unreliable behavior while preserving model performance and reducing reliance on large budgets of cleansed samples. We further reveal a bottleneck of model rectifying arising from heterogeneous editability across layers. To target the primary source of misbehavior, we introduce an attribution-guided layer localization method that quantifies layer-wise editability and identifies the layer most responsible for unreliabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in correcting unreliabilities observed for neural Trojans, spurious correlations and feature leakage. Our method shows remarkable performance by achieving its editing objective with as few as a single cleansed sample, which makes it appealing for practice.

Poster
Graph Attention Prototypical Network for Robust Few-Shot Classification

Tingyun Liu, Licheng Liu, Qibin Zhang, Qiying Feng, C. L. Philip Chen

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Few-shot learning has attracted extensive attention, with metric-based approaches such as Prototypical Networks establishing strong baselines. These methods construct class prototypes from support samples and classify query samples via distance metrics, but their performance is highly sensitive to label noise. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel Graph Attention Prototypical Network (GAPNet) for robust few-shot classification. GAPNet first extracts local and global features via a classic CNN backbone and a group attention broad learning module, respectively. To mitigate the impact of label noise, the intra-class and inter-class relationships between support and query samples are explicitly modeled via a pseudo-label guided graph constructor, and then processed by an edge-aware graph attention module to capture topological correlations. Furthermore, an adaptive noise-robust prototype generator is introduced to dynamically suppress the contributions of noisy samples, substantially improving the reliability of class prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of GAPNet to label noise. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, GAPNet improves accuracy in the 5-way 5-shot setting by 3% ~ 8% on three general image benchmarks and one fine-grained classification dataset.

Poster
ProjFlow: Projection Sampling with Flow Matching for Zero-Shot Exact Spatial Motion Control

Akihisa Watanabe, Qing Yu, Edgar Simo-Serra, Kent Fujiwara

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Generating human motion with precise spatial control is a challenging problem. Existing approaches often require task-specific training or slow optimization, and enforcing hard constraints frequently disrupts motion naturalness. Building on the observation that many animation tasks can be formulated as a linear inverse problem, we introduce ProjFlow, a training-free sampler that achieves zero-shot, exact satisfaction of linear spatial constraints while preserving motion realism. Our key advance is a novel kinematics-aware metric that encodes skeletal topology. This metric allows the sampler to enforce hard constraints by distributing corrections coherently across the entire skeleton, avoiding the unnatural artifacts of naive projection. Furthermore, for sparse inputs, such as filling in long gaps between a few keyframes, we introduce a time-varying formulation using pseudo-observations that fade during sampling. Extensive experiments on representative applications, motion inpainting, and 2D-to-3D lifting, demonstrate that ProjFlow achieves exact constraint satisfaction and matches or improves realism over zero-shot baselines, while remaining competitive with training-based controllers.

Poster
Your Dissimilarities Define You: Complementary Learning Exploiting Class Diversities

Dimitrios Katsikas, Nikolaos Passalis, Anastasios Tefas

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In this work, we exploit class dissimilarities to provide complementary learning information beyond correct classification, that is not fully utilized in existing learning paradigms. To model these dissimilarities, we introduce the concept of an opposite-class, which consists of everything that is not part of a corresponding class, i.e., all samples from non-target classes or samples from unknown classes. By setting appropriately encoded target distributions over the non-target classes, we explicitly optimize the model's activation distributions across all non-target classes, which enhances class dissimilarity information and enables better control over the geometry of the representations. We analyze the convergence dynamics of our proposed approach, both theoretically and empirically, showing that it naturally pushes the representations towards neural collapse, leading to more discriminative and robust features. Our extensive evaluation across multiple classification settings demonstrates consistent improvements of our method on closed-set, open-set, few-shot classification, and domain generalization. Code: https://github.com/katdimitris/Complementary-Dissimilarity-Loss

Poster
VGGT-360: Geometry-Consistent Zero-Shot Panoramic Depth Estimation

Jiayi Yuan, Haobo Jiang, De Wen Soh, Na Zhao

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This paper presents VGGT-360, a novel training-free framework for zero-shot, geometry-consistent panoramic depth estimation. Unlike prior view-independent training-free approaches, VGGT-360 reformulates the task as panoramic reprojection over multi-view reconstructed 3D models by leveraging the intrinsic 3D consistency of VGGT-like foundation models, thereby unifying fragmented per-view reasoning into a coherent panoramic understanding. To achieve robust and accurate estimation, VGGT-360 integrates three plug-and-play modules that form a unified panorama-to-3D-to-depth framework: (i) Uncertainty-guided adaptive projection slices panoramas into perspective views to bridge the domain gap between panoramic inputs and VGGT's perspective prior. It estimates gradient-based uncertainty to allocate denser views to geometry-poor regions, yielding geometry-informative inputs for VGGT. (ii) Structure-saliency enhanced attention strengthens VGGT's robustness during 3D reconstruction by injecting structure-aware confidence into its attention layers, guiding focus toward geometrically reliable regions and enhancing cross-view coherence. (iii) Correlation-weighted 3D model correction refines the reconstructed 3D model by reweighting overlapping points using attention-inferred correlation scores, providing a consistent geometric basis for accurate panoramic reprojection. Extensive experiments show that VGGT-360 outperforms both trained and training-free state-of-the-art methods across multiple resolutions and diverse indoor and outdoor datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Yuanjiayii/VGGT-360.

Poster
Remedying Target-Domain Astigmatism for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection

Yongwei Jiang, Yixiong Zou, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li

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Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) aims to adapt pretrained detectors from a source domain to target domains with limited annotations, suffering from severe domain shifts and data scarcity problems. In this work, we find a previously overlooked phenomenon: models exhibit dispersed and unfocused attention in target domains, leading to imprecise localization and redundant predictions, just like a human cannot focus on visual objects. Therefore, we call it the target-domain Astigmatism problem. Analysis on attention distances across transformer layers reveals that regular fine-tuning inherently shows a trend to remedy this problem, but results are still far from satisfactory, which we aim to enhance in this paper. Biologically inspired by the human fovea-style visual system, we enhance the fine-tuning's inherent trend through a center-periphery attention refinement framework, which contains (1) a Positive Pattern Refinement module to reshape attention toward semantic objects using class-specific prototypes, simulating the visual center region; (2) a Negative Context Modulation module to enhance boundary discrimination by modeling background context, simulating the visual periphery region; and (3) a Textual Semantic Alignment module to strengthen center-periphery distinction through cross-modal cues. Our bio-inspired approach transforms astigmatic attention into focused patterns, substantially improving adaptation to target domains. Experiments on six challenging CD-FSOD benchmarks consistently demonstrate improved detection accuracy and establish new state-of-the-art results.

Poster
RefTon: Reference person shot assist virtual Try-on

Liuzhuozheng Li, Yue Gong, Shanyuan Liu, Zanyi Wang, Dengyang Jiang, Leibucha Wu, Bo Cheng, Yuhang Ma, Dawei Leng, Yuhui Yin

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We introduce RefTon, a flux-based person-to-person virtual try-on framework that enhances garment realism through unpaired visual references. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on complex auxiliary inputs such as body parsing and warped mask or require finely designed extract branches to process various input conditions, RefTon streamlines the process by directly generating try-on results from a source image and a target garment, without the need for structural guidance or auxiliary components to handle diverse inputs. Moreover, inspired by human clothing selection behavior, RefTon leverages additional reference images (the target garment worn on different individuals) to provide powerful guidance for refining texture alignment and maintaining the garment details. To enable this capability, we built a dataset containing unpaired reference images for training. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that RefTon achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining a simple and efficient person-to-person design. \thanks Code and dataset is available at: https://github.com/360CVGroup/RefTon.

Poster
Few-for-Many Personalized Federated Learning

Ping Guo, Tiantian Zhang, Xi Lin, Xiang Li, Zhi-Ri Tang, Qingfu Zhang

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Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) aims to train customized models for clients with highly heterogeneous data distributions while preserving data privacy. Existing approaches often rely on heuristics like clustering or model interpolation, which lack principled mechanisms for balancing heterogeneous client objectives. Serving M clients with distinct data distributions is inherently a multi-objective optimization problem, where achieving optimal personalization ideally requires M distinct models on the Pareto front. However, maintaining M separate models poses significant scalability challenges in federated settings with hundreds or thousands of clients. To address this challenge, we reformulate PFL as a few-for-many optimization problem that maintains only K shared server models (K << M) to collectively serve all M clients. We prove that this framework achieves near-optimal personalization: the approximation error diminishes as K increases and each client's model converges to each client's optimum as data grows. Building on this reformulation, we propose FedFew, a practical algorithm that jointly optimizes the K server models through efficient gradient-based updates. Unlike clustering-based approaches that require manual client partitioning or interpolation-based methods that demand careful hyperparameter tuning, FedFew automatically discovers the optimal model diversity through its optimization process. Experiments across vision, NLP, and real-world medical imaging datasets demonstrate that FedFew, with just 3 models, consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/pgg3/FedFew.

Poster
Enhancing Mixture-of-Experts Specialization via Cluster-Aware Upcycling

Sanghyeok Chu, Pyunghwan Ahn, Gwangmo Song, Seung Hwan Kim, Honglak Lee, Bohyung Han

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Sparse Upcycling provides an efficient way to initialize a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model from pretrained dense weights instead of training from scratch. However, since all experts start from identical weights and the router is randomly initialized, the model suffers from expert symmetry and limited early specialization. We propose Cluster- aware Upcycling, a strategy that incorporates semantic structure into MoE initialization. Our method first partitions the dense model's input activations into semantic clusters. Each expert is then initialized using the subspace representations of its corresponding cluster via truncated SVD, while setting the router's initial weights to the cluster centroids. This cluster-aware initialization breaks expert symmetry and encourages early specialization aligned with the data distribution. Furthermore, we introduce an expert-ensemble self-distillation loss that stabilizes training by providing reliable routing guidance using an ensemble teacher. When evaluated on CLIP ViT-B/32 and ViT-B/16, Cluster-aware Upcycling consistently outperforms existing methods across both zero-shot and few-shot benchmarks. The proposed method also produces more diverse and dis- entangled expert representations, reduces inter-expert similarity, and leads to more confident routing behavior.

Poster
Discover, Segment, and Select: A Progressive Mechanism for Zero-shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation

Yilong Yang, Jianxin Tian, Shengchuan Zhang, Liujuan Cao

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Current zero-shot camouflaged object segmentation methods typically employ a two-stage pipeline (discover-then-segment): using MLLMs to obtain visual prompts, followed by SAM segmentation. However, relying solely on MLLMs for camouflaged object discovery often leads to inaccurate localization, false positives, and missed detections. To address these issues, we propose the Discover-Segment-Select (DSS) mechanism, a three-stage framework that progressively refines the segmentation process. The proposed method contains a Feature-driven Object Discovery (FOD) module that leverages visual features to generate diverse object proposals, a segmentation module that refines these proposals through SAM segmentation, and a Semantic-driven Mask Selection (SMS) module that employs MLLMs to evaluate and select the optimal segmentation mask from multiple candidates. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with lower GPU memory consumption. Code will be released at https://github.com/ynulonger/DSS.git.

Poster
Hyperbolic Defect Feature Synthesis for Few-Shot Defect Classification

Huimin Li, Boxuan Hu, Yulin Zhang, Xiuzhuang Zhou, Junlin Hu

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Defect synthesis, as a core technology for addressing the problem of few-shot defect classification, has been widely adopted in industrial scenarios. It helps alleviate the problem of insufficient model generalization capability owing to data scarcity by establishing a data augmentation pipeline. Recently, remarkable progress has been achieved in both explicit defect image generation and implicit defect feature synthesis approaches. However, existing methods are always conducted in Euclidean space. Constrained by the flatness of Euclidean space, it is difficult to synthesize defect data containing complex structures. In this paper, we attempt to explore defect generation in hyperbolic space and propose a hyperbolic defect feature synthesis (HypDFS) method. By modeling the potential defect distribution via a small number of hyperbolic defect prototypes and further optimizing the synthetic defect features with the hierarchical defect contrastive loss in hyperbolic space, our HypDFS method can obtain a better generalized defect representation that is more conducive to downstream few-shot defect classification task. Extensive experiments on the MVTec-FS benchmark and standard MTD dataset under the few-shot settings demonstrate that the proposed HypDFS surpasses the Euclidean baseline by a large margin, showing promising prospects for defect synthesis in hyperbolic space.

Poster
CLIPoint3D: Language-Grounded Few-Shot Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Domain Adaptation

Mainak Singha, Sarthak Mehrotra, Paolo Casari, Subhasis Chaudhuri, Elisa Ricci, Biplab Banerjee

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Recent vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP demonstrate impressive cross-modal reasoning, extending beyond images to 3D perception. Yet, these models remain fragile under domain shifts, especially when adapting from synthetic to real-world point clouds. Conventional 3D domain adaptation approaches rely on heavy trainable encoders, yielding strong accuracy but at the cost of efficiency. We introduce CLIPoint3D, the first framework for few-shot unsupervised 3D point cloud domain adaptation built upon CLIP. Our approach projects 3D samples into multiple depth maps and exploits the frozen CLIP backbone, refined through a knowledge-driven prompt tuning scheme that integrates high-level language priors with geometric cues from a lightweight 3D encoder. To adapt task-specific features effectively, we apply parameter-efficient fine-tuning to CLIP's encoders and design an entropy-guided view sampling strategy for selecting confident projections. Furthermore, an optimal transport-based alignment loss and an uncertainty-aware prototype alignment loss collaboratively bridge source-target distribution gaps while maintaining class separability. Extensive experiments on PointDA-10 and GraspNetPC-10 benchmarks show that CLIPoint3D achieves consistent 3-16% accuracy gains over both CLIP-based and conventional encoder-based baselines. Project page: https://sarthakm320.github.io/CLIPoint3D.

Poster
Language Does Matter for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Visual Feature Enhancement

Fei Zhou, Xiwen Zhang, Qingqing Qiu, Lei Zhang, Wei Wei, Chen Ding, Yi Zhang, Liang Li, Xiangyu Yue, Yanning Zhang

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Cross-domain few-shot image interpretation (CD-FSII) has been significantly advanced by fine-tuning pre-trained visual feature models using limited labeled samples in target domains. However, profound cross-domain distribution discrepancies, along with inherent conflicts between extensive object visual appearance variations and limited annotations, trap those existing pure visual feature representations into some non-transferable short-cut patterns, thus degrading their cross-domain generalization capacity. To mitigate this problem, we present a simple yet effective cross-modal visual feature enhancement framework which primarily contributes in the following three aspects. 1) We make the first attempt to introduce linguistic descriptions of image attributes to regulate the pre-trained visual feature model for specific target image adaptation. Specifically, image-level attributes (e.g., object appearance in individual images) and domain-level attributes (e.g., overall style and background characteristics of the dataset) are extracted using a pre-trained image captioning model and a large language model (LLM), respectively, to construct comprehensive linguistic characterizations. 2) A lightweight residual cross-attention scheme is developed to seamlessly embed linguistic descriptions of image attributes into visual feature representations, thereby compensating for the limitations of purely visual cues in capturing cross-domain transferable high-level semantic characteristics. 3) The proposed framework is task-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with off-the-shelf pre-trained visual feature models. It demonstrates superior generalization performance compared to several state-of-the-art methods across multiple CD-FSII benchmarks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. We will release all code and data to facilitate further research.

Poster
Semantic-Guided Global-Local Collaborative Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

Yongxin Yan, Weisen Chen, Xingye Chen, Yuanjie Shao, Zhengrong Zuo, Wenming Tan, Wenqi Ren, Changxin Gao, Nong Sang

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Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) poses a critical challenge in machine learning, requiring models to continuously integrate novel classes with limited samples while preserving knowledge of previously seen classes. While existing FSCIL approaches have demonstrated promising results, they still suffer from catastrophic forgetting and few-shot overfitting due to the challenge of balancing old knowledge retention with new knowledge acquisition. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative Semantic-Guided Global-Local Collaborative Prompt Learning (SGLC) framework. Built upon powerful pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the framework first introduces a dual-alignment mechanism: globally aligning visual features with visual-textual prototypes and locally aligning multi-view visual features with local textual attribute features, which facilitates effective knowledge learning while preserving existing knowledge via frozen prototypes of previous classes. Furthermore, to alleviate overfitting, we incorporate Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate semantically rich textual descriptions, which simultaneously guide both global and local prompt learning through knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on the miniImageNet, CIFAR-100, and CUB200 datasets demonstrate that SGLC performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

Poster
Reevaluating the Intra-Modal Misalignment Hypothesis in CLIP

Jonas Herzog, Yue Wang

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Recent research suggested that the embeddings produced by CLIP-like contrastive language-image training are suboptimal for image-only tasks. The main theory is that the inter-modal (language-image) alignment loss ignores intra-modal (image-image) alignment, leading to poorly calibrated distances between images. In this study, we question this intra-modal misalignment hypothesis. We reexamine its foundational theoretical argument, the indicators used to support it, and the performance metrics affected. For the theoretical argument, we demonstrate that there are no such supposed degrees of freedom for image embedding distances. For the empirical measures, our findings reveal they yield similar results for language-image trained models (CLIP, SigLIP) and image-image trained models (DINO, SigLIP2). This indicates the observed phenomena do not stem from a misalignment specific to the former. Experiments on the commonly studied intra-modal tasks retrieval and few-shot classification confirm that addressing supposed misalignment is unnecessary for best performance.

Poster
FlowSteer: Guiding Few-Step Image Synthesis with Authentic Trajectories

Lei Ke, Hubery Yin, Gongye Liu, Zhengyao Lv, Jingcai Guo, Chen Li, Wenhan Luo, Yujiu Yang, Jing Lyu

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With the success of flow matching in visual generation, sampling efficiency remains a critical bottleneck for its practical application. Among flow models' accelerating methods, ReFlow has been somehow overlooked although it has theoretical consistency with flow matching. This is primarily due to its suboptimal performance in practical scenarios compared to consistency distillation and score distillation. In this work, we investigate this issue within the ReFlow framework and propose FlowSteer, a method unlocks the potential of ReFlow-based distillation by guiding the student along teacher's authentic generation trajectories. We first identify that Piecewised ReFlow's performance is hampered by a critical distribution mismatch during the training and propose Online Trajectory Alignment(OTA) to resolve it. Then, we introduce a adversarial distillation objective applied directly on the ODE trajectory, improving the student's adherence to the teacher's generation trajectory. Furthermore, we find and fix a previously undiscovered flaw in the widely-used \texttt FlowMatchEulerDiscreteScheduler that largely degrades few-step inference quality. Our experiment result on SD3 demonstrates our method's efficacy.

Poster