CVPR 2026 Papers

We present UIKA, a feed-forward animatable Gaussian head model from an arbitrary number of pose-free inputs, including a single image, multi-view captures, and smartphone-captured videos. Unlike the traditional avatar method, which requires a studio-level multi-view capture system and reconstructs a human-specific model through a long-time optimization process, we rethink the task through the lenses of model representation, network design, and data preparation. First, we introduce a UV-guided avatar modeling strategy, in which each input image is associated with a pixel-wise facial correspondence estimation. Such correspondence estimation allows us to reproject each valid pixel color from screen space to UV space, which is independent of camera pose and character expression. Furthermore, we design learnable UV tokens on which the attention mechanism can be applied at both the screen and UV levels. The learned UV tokens can be decoded into canonical Gaussian attributes using aggregated UV information from all input views. To train our large avatar model, we additionally prepare a large-scale, identity-rich synthetic training dataset. Our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in both monocular and multi-view settings. See more details in our project page: https://zijian-wu.github.io/uika-page/.

As 3D Gaussian Splatting becomes the de facto representation for interactive 3D assets, robust yet imperceptible watermarking is critical. We present a representation-native framework that separates where to write from how to preserve quality. A Trio-Experts module operates directly on Gaussian primitives to derive priors for carrier selection, while a Safety and Budget Aware Gate (SBAG) allocates Gaussians to watermark carriers--optimized for bit resilience under perturbation and bitrate budgets--and to visual compensators that are insulated from watermark loss. To maintain fidelity, we introduce a channel-wise group mask that controls gradient propagation for carriers and compensators, thereby limiting Gaussian parameter updates, repairing local artifacts, and preserving high-frequency details without increasing runtime. Our design yields view-consistent watermark persistence and strong robustness against common image distortions such as compression and noise, while achieving a favorable robustness-quality trade-off compared with prior methods. In addition, the decoupled finetuning provides per-Gaussian attributions that reveal where the message is carried and why those carriers are selected, enabling auditable explainability. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves a PSNR improvement of +0.83 dB and a bit-accuracy gain of +1.24%.

State-of-the-art point trackers typically rely on cost volumes to match features across frames, but this approach incurs quadratic complexity in spatial resolution, limiting scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose CoWTracker, a novel dense point tracker that eschews cost volumes in favor of warping. Inspired by recent advances in optical flow, our approach iteratively refines track estimates by warping features from the target frame to the query frame based on the current track estimate. Combined with a transformer that performs joint spatiotemporal reasoning across all tracks, our design establishes long-range correspondences without computing feature correlations. Our model is simple and achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard dense point tracking benchmarks, including TAP-Vid-DAVIS, TAP-Vid-Kinetics, and Robo-TAP. Remarkably, the model also excels at optical flow, sometimes outperforming specialized methods on the Sintel, KITTI, and Spring benchmarks. These results suggest that warping-based architectures can unify dense point tracking and optical flow estimation.

Controllable hand image generation aims to synthesize geometrically accurate images with consistent appearance. Recently, diffusion models have been widely applied for hand image synthesis. However, through input-level fusion or feature-level modulation, existing methods inject control signals with fixed strength across all timesteps, ignoring the progressive nature of the denoising process. In this paper, we reveal that the modulation of control signals depends on the denoising state and condition complexity. Due to distinct semantic distributions and information densities, achieving effective interaction among these heterogeneous representations remains challenging. To address this, we propose a Temporal and Content Co-Awareness Latent Diffusion method that introduces a dual-driven modulation strategy. Specifically, we design a query-based interaction mechanism to mitigate information redundancy and align semantic distributions. Leveraging cross-domain interaction, the model infers required control information to dynamically adjust pose and appearance injection strengths. Furthermore, we design a Pose-Invariant Appearance Encoder that captures both global appearance consistency and local texture details. Extensive experiments validate our superiority over state-of-the-art.

Reducing communication overhead in federated learning (FL) is challenging but crucial for large-scale distributed privacy-preserving machine learning. Unfortunately, directly compressing model updates often leads to sub-optimal convergence due to information loss, while increasing local computation can cause model divergence. Hence, this paper proposes a drastically different approach that adheres to the maxim that "a picture is worth a thousand words". We observe that the entire gradient information from local training can be effectively reconstructed from a compact, image-like representation. Based on this observation, we propose a novel approach, OS-Fed, which performs One-Shot Federated Learning by transmitting only a single, compact snapshot (comprising an image and a set of learnable labels) per round. To realize this approach, OS-Fed presents new snapshot synthesis techniques to (1) target the accumulated update of a trajectory segment to tackle gradient noise, (2) design a multi-grid snapshot that decouples conflicting gradient directions, and (3) incorporate error compensation to maintain training stability under extreme compression. Extensive experiments on CV and NLP benchmarks show that OS-Fed reduces communication costs by 1.5-16xcompared to state-of-the-art algorithms , resulting in 18-45% faster convergence.

We introduce a framework for converting 3D shapes into compact and editable assemblies of analytic primitives, directly addressing the persistent trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and parsimony. Our approach combines two key contributions: a novel primitive, termed SuperFrustum, and an iterative inference algorithm, Residual Primitive Fitting (ResFit). SuperFrustum is a analytical primitive that is simultaneously (1) expressive, being able to express various common solids such as cylinders, spheres, cones & their tapered and bent forms, (2) editable, being compactly parameterized with 8 parameters, and (3) optimizable, with a sign distance field differentiable w.r.t. its parameters almost everywhere. ResFit is an unsupervised procedure that interleaves global shape analysis with local optimization, iteratively fitting primitives to the unexplained residual of a shape to discover a parsimonious yet accurate decompositions for each input shape. On diverse 3D benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, improving IoU by over 9 points while using nearly half as many primitives as prior work. The resulting assemblies bridge the gap between dense 3D data and human-controllable design, producing high-fidelity and editable shape programs.

Recent advancements in the text-rendering capabilities of image generation models have made the end-to-end creation of graphic design content, such as posters, increasingly feasible. However, existing reward models fall short of accurately assessing design quality, as they primarily focus on global image aesthetics while overlooking the critical dimensions of typography and layout. Furthermore, the scarcity of domain-specific preference data remains a significant bottleneck, limiting the further development of graphic design evaluation and generation. To bridge this gap, we design an automated pipeline to construct a high-quality dataset of 70k poster preferences by leveraging the consensus of multiple Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to simulate human-like judgment. Based on this dataset, we propose PosterReward, a reward model specifically designed for high-precision poster assessment through a cascaded, multi-stage training strategy. We also provide multiple variants of the model to cater to different application scenarios. Finally, we introduce PosterRewardBench and PosterBench to evaluate the performance of existing reward models in poster assessment and the generation capabilities of current text-to-image models in poster creation, respectively.

Leveraging pre-trained Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for high-resolution (HR) image synthesis often leads to spatial layout collapse and degraded texture fidelity. Prior work mitigates these issues with complex pipelines that first perform a base-resolution (i.e., training-resolution) denoising process to guide HR generation. We instead explore the intrinsic generative mechanisms of DiTs and propose ResDiT, a training-free method that scales resolution efficiently. We identify the core factor governing spatial layout, position embeddings (PEs), and show that the original PEs encode incorrect positional information when extrapolated to HR, which triggers layout collapse. To address this, we introduce a PE scaling technique that rectifies positional encoding under resolution changes. To further remedy low-fidelity details, we develop a local-enhancement mechanism grounded in base-resolution local attention. We design a patch-level fusion module that aggregates global and local cues, together with a Gaussian-weighted splicing strategy that eliminates grid artifacts. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that ResDiT consistently delivers high-fidelity, high-resolution image synthesis and integrates seamlessly with downstream tasks, including spatially controlled generation.

Recent advances in unimanual manipulation policies have achieved remarkable success across diverse robotic tasks through abundant training data and well-established model architectures. However, extending these capabilities to bimanual manipulation remains challenging due to the lack of bimanual demonstration data and the complexity of coordinating dual-arm actions. Existing approaches either rely on extensive bimanual datasets or fail to effectively leverage pre-trained unimanual policies. To address this limitation, we propose EnergyAction, a novel framework that compositionally transfers unimanual manipulation policies to bimanual tasks through the Energy-Based Models (EBMs). Specifically, our method incorporates three key innovations. First, we model individual unimanual policies as EBMs and leverage their compositional properties to compose left and right arm actions, enabling the fusion of unimanual policies into a bimanual policy. Second, we introduce an energy-based temporal-spatial coordination mechanism through energy constraints, ensuring the generated bimanual actions are both temporal coherence and spatial feasibility. Third, we propose two different energy-aware denoising strategies that dynamically adapt denoising steps based on action quality assessment. These strategies ensure the generation of high-quality actions while maintaining superior computational efficiency compared to fixed-step denoising approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that EnergyAction effectively transfers unimanual knowledge to bimanual tasks, achieving superior performance on both simulated and real-world tasks with minimal bimanual data.

To achieve compactness or cost reduction for optical lens systems, designers typically rely on commercial software to design lens systems independently of post-processing algorithms, leading to excessive dependence on designers' expertise and often requiring significant time. Recently, joint optimization approaches utilizing differentiable ray tracing have emerged, demonstrating significant potential in lens design tasks. However, existing pipelines lack accurate and efficient diffraction modeling capabilities for miniature optical systems. In this work, we propose a novel lens component deletion pipeline for miniature optical systems, which automatically deletes the suitable lens component, and then optimizes both the lens system and the post-processing network to achieve joint aberration correction. Additionally, we introduce a novel metric for evaluating the contribution of each lens component within an optical system, aimed at identifying the lens component that has the least impact on the system. We also develop an efficient differentiable point spread function estimation method based on the Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction model, significantly reducing GPU memory consumption. Our proposed pipeline achieves lens component deletion while maintaining imaging quality comparable to the original lens system, thereby enabling the compactness or cost-effective optimization of miniature optical systems. Project page: https://github.com/WenguanZhang/HappyLens

Tracking targets with high-speed and nonlinear motion under occlusion remains challenging due to spatial appearance deprivation and temporal trajectory fragmentation caused by missing visual cues. Existing methods typically either dynamically update templates to maintain appearance similarity or employ autoregressive models to predict targets from historical trajectories. However, these methods are ineffective under severe occlusion owing to template contamination and limited frame rates for complex motion. In this work, we observe that occlusion inherently degrades the spatial matching mechanism, highlighting the importance of temporal cues. Meanwhile, event cameras with microsecond-level temporal resolution provide transient dynamic cues that facilitate modeling nonlinear motion. In light of this, we propose EvoTrack, an occlusion-robust tracking framework via event-derived transient evolution, which comprises event-based motion autoregression and target-aware appearance matching. Specifically, for motion autoregression, the fine-grained timestamps of events naturally encode the target's direction and speed, motivating a bidirectional motion consistency that constrains inter-frame displacement prediction under nonlinear motion. For appearance matching, we adopt a Gaussian masking strategy to simulate occlusion degradation, guiding the model to focus on target regions and learn invariant representations. Furthermore, we build a pixel-aligned Frame-Event tracking dataset with higher spatial resolution and explicit occlusion labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EvoTrack in challenging occlusion scenes.

Counting is one of the fundamental abilities of large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs). This paper examines how these foundation models represent and compute numerical information in counting tasks. We use controlled experiments with repeated textual and visual items and analyze counting in LLMs and LVLMs through a set of behavioral, observational, and causal mediation analyses. To this end, we design a specialized tool, CountScope, for the mechanistic interpretability of numerical content. Results show that individual tokens or visual features encode latent positional count information that can be extracted and transferred across contexts. Layerwise analyses reveal a progressive emergence of numerical representations, with lower layers encoding small counts and higher layers representing larger ones. We identify an internal counter mechanism that updates with each item, stored mainly in the final token or region. In LVLMs, numerical information also appears in visual embeddings, shifting between background and foreground regions depending on spatial composition. We further reveal that models rely on structural cues such as separators in text, which act as shortcuts for tracking item counts and strongly influence the accuracy of numerical predictions. Overall, counting emerges as a structured, layerwise process in LLMs and follows the same general pattern in LVLMs, shaped by the properties of the vision encoder.

Current visual grounding models are either based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that performs auto-regressive decoding, which is slow and risks hallucinations, or on re-aligning an LLM with vision features to learn new special or object tokens for grounding, which may undermine the LLM's pretrained reasoning ability. In contrast, we propose **VGent**, a modular encoder-decoder architecture that explicitly disentangles high-level reasoning and low-level bounding box prediction. Specifically, a frozen MLLM serves as the encoder to provide untouched powerful reasoning capabilities, while a decoder takes high-quality boxes proposed by detectors as queries and selects target box(es) via cross-attending on encoder's hidden states. This design fully leverages advances in both object detection and MLLM, avoids the pitfalls of auto-regressive decoding, and enables fast inference. Moreover, it supports modular upgrades of both the encoder and decoder to benefit the whole system: we introduce (i) **QuadThinker**, an RL-based training paradigm for enhancing multi-target reasoning ability of the encoder; (ii) **mask-aware label** for resolving detection-segmentation ambiguity; and (iii) **global target recognition** to improve the recognition of all the targets which benefits the selection among augmented proposals. Experiments on multi-target visual grounding benchmarks show that VGent achieves a new state-of-the-art with **+20.6%** F1 improvement over prior methods, and further boosts gIoU by **+8.2%** and cIoU by **+5.8%** under visual reference challenges, while maintaining constant, fast inference latency.

In this work, we propose a Multigrain-aware Semantic Prototype Scanning paradigm for pan-sharpening, built upon a high-order RWKV architecture and a tri-token prompting mechanism derived from semantic clustering. Specifically, our method contains three key components: 1) Multigrain-aware Semantic Prototype Scanning. Although RWKV offers an efficient linear-complexity alternative to Transformers, its conventional bidirectional raster scanning is still semantic-agnostic and prone to positional bias. To address this issue, we introduce a semantic-driven scanning strategy that leverages locality-sensitive hashing to group semantically related regions and construct multi-grain semantic prototypes, enabling context-aware token reordering and more coherent global interaction. 2) Tri-token Prompt Learning. We design a tri-token prompting mechanism consisting of a global token, cluster-derived prototype tokens, and a learnable register token. The global and prototype tokens provide complementary semantic priors for RWKV modeling, while the register token helps suppress noisy and artifact-prone intermediate representations. 3) Invertible Q-Shift. To counteract spatial details, we apply center difference convolution on the value pathway to inject high-frequency information, and introduce an invertible multi-scale Q-shift operation for efficient and lossless feature transformation without parameter-heavy receptive field expansion. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Imaging system design is a complex, time-consuming, and largely manual process; LiDAR design, ubiquitous in mobile devices, autonomous vehicles, and aerial imaging platforms, adds further complexity through unique spatial and temporal sampling requirements. In this work, we propose a framework for automated, task-driven LiDAR system design under arbitrary constraints. To achieve this, we represent LiDAR configurations in a continuous six-dimensional design space and learn task-specific implicit densities in this space via flow-based generative modeling. We then synthesize new LiDAR systems by modeling sensors as parametric distributions in 6D space and fitting these distributions to our learned implicit density using expectation-maximization, enabling efficient, constraint-aware LiDAR system design. We validate our method on diverse tasks in 3D vision, enabling automated LiDAR system design across real-world-inspired applications in face scanning, robotic tracking, and object detection.

Colored glass is widely used in everyday settings, yet its reflective and absorptive properties often introduce ghost shadows and color bias in captured images. However, existing methods typically neglect the absorption issue, making it difficult to address color bias caused by colored glass. To address this, we are the first to apply polarization imaging theory to model the light transmission process within glass. Specifically, we propose a novel imaging model, the Polarization State Tracing Model (PSTM), which traces polarized light along multiple propagation paths and accounts for wavelength-selective absorption, enabling joint reflection removal and color-consistent reconstruction. Guided by PSTM, we design a Channel Ring Attention (CRA) mechanism to efficiently capture inter-angle polarization dependencies and enhance feature interaction across polarization channels, ensuring physically consistent recovery. Besides, the recovered polarization information can be directly applied to advanced downstream tasks, such as Shape-from-Polarization (SfP). We construct a real-world dataset, GlassPol, containing a wide range of glass materials, enabling testing under diverse optical conditions. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 3dB improvement in PSNR, establishing a new benchmark for polarized reflection removal.

Diffusion transformers have demonstrated remarkable generation quality, albeit requiring longer training iterations and numerous inference steps. In each denoising step, diffusion transformers encode the noisy inputs to extract the lower-frequency semantic component and then decode the higher frequency with identical modules. This scheme creates an inherent optimization dilemma: encoding low-frequency semantics necessitates reducing high-frequency components, creating tension between semantic encoding and high-frequency decoding. To resolve this challenge, we propose a new \color ddtD ecoupled \color ddtD iffusion \color ddtT ransformer(\color ddtDDT ), with a decoupled design of a dedicated condition encoder for semantic extraction alongside a specialized velocity decoder. Our experiments reveal that a more substantial encoder yields performance improvements as model size increases. For ImageNet 256x256, Our DDT-XL/2 achieves a new state-of-the-art performance of 1.31 FID (nearly 4xfaster training convergence compared to previous diffusion transformers). For ImageNet 512x512, Our DDT-XL/2 achieves a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.28. Additionally, as a beneficial by-product, our decoupled architecture enhances inference speed by enabling the sharing self-condition between adjacent denoising steps. To minimize performance degradation, we propose a novel statistical dynamic programming approach to identify optimal sharing strategies.