CVPR 2026 Papers

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, yet their expanded modality space introduces new compositional safety risks that emerge from complex text-image interactions.Such cross-modal couplings can produce unsafe semantics even when individual inputs are benign, exposing the fragile safety awareness of current MLLMs.While recent works enhance safety by guiding models to reason about potential risks, unregulated reasoning traces may compromise alignment; although Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) offers self-rewarded refinement without human supervision, it lacks verifiable signals for reasoning safety.To address this, we propose **SafeGRPO** a self-rewarded multimodal safety alignment framework that integrates rule-governed reward construction into GRPO, enabling interpretable and verifiable optimization of reasoning safety. Built upon the constructed **SafeTag-VL-3K** dataset with explicit visual, textual, and combined safety tags, SafeGRPO performs **step-guided safety thinking** to enforce structured reasoning and behavior alignment, substantially improving multimodal safety awareness, compositional robustness, and reasoning stability across diverse benchmarks without sacrificing general capabilities.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, their ability in low-level visual perception, particularly in detecting fine-grained visual discrepancies, remains underexplored and lacks systematic analysis.In this work, we introduce OddGridBench, a controllable benchmark for evaluating the visual discrepancy sensitivity of MLLMs. OddGridBench comprises over 1,400 grid-based images, where a single element differs from all others by one or multiple visual attributes such as color, size, rotation, or position.Experiments reveal that all evaluated MLLMs, including open-source families such as Qwen3-VL and InternVL3.5, and proprietary systems like Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-5, perform far below human levels in visual discrepancy detection. We further propose OddGrid-GRPO, a reinforcement learning framework that integrates curriculum learning and distance-aware reward. By progressively controlling the difficulty of training samples and incorporating spatial proximity constraints into the reward design, OddGrid-GRPO significantly enhances the model's fine-grained visual discrimination ability.We hope OddGridBench and OddGrid-GRPO will lay the groundwork for advancing perceptual grounding and visual discrepancy sensitivity in multimodal intelligence.All resources will be publicly released upon acceptance.

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) is a critical component for robust ego-motion estimation, enabling foundational capabilities such as autonomous navigation in robotics and real-time 6-DoF tracking for augmented reality.Existing methods face a well-known trade-off: filter-based approaches are efficient but prone to drift, while optimization-based methods, though accurate, rely on computationally prohibitive Visual-Inertial Bundle Adjustment (VIBA) that is difficult to run on resource-constrained platforms.Rather than removing VIBA altogether, we aim to reduce how often and how heavily it must be invoked. To this end, we cast two key design choices in modern VIO, when to run the visual frontend and how strongly to trust its output, as sequential decision problems, and solve them with lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Our framework introduces a lightweight, dual-pronged RL policy that serves as our core contribution: (1) a Select Agent intelligently gates the entire VO pipeline based only on high-frequency IMU data; and (2) a composite Fusion Agent that first estimates a robust velocity state via a supervised network , before an RL policy adaptively fuses the full (p, v, q) state.Experiments on the EuRoC MAV and TUM-VI datasets show that, in our unified evaluation, the proposed method achieves a more favorable accuracy-efficiency-memory trade-off than prior GPU-based VO/VIO systems: it attains the best average ATE while running up to 1.77xfaster and using less GPU memory. Compared to classical optimization-based VIO systems, our approach maintains competitive trajectory accuracy while substantially reducing computational load.

Pixel-wise capabilities are essential for building interactive intelligent systems. However, pixel-wise multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remain difficult to scale due to complex region-level encoders, specialized segmentation decoders, and incompatible training objectives. To address these challenges, we present SAMTok, a discrete mask tokenizer that converts any region mask into two special tokens and reconstructs the mask from these tokens with high fidelity. By treating masks as a new language, SAMTok enables base MLLMs (such as the QwenVL series) to learn pixel-wise capabilities through standard next-token prediction and simple reinforcement learning, without architectural modifications and specialized loss design. SAMTok builds on SAM2 and is trained on 209M diverse masks using a mask encoder and residual vector quantizer to produce discrete, compact, and information-rich tokens. With 5M SAMTok-formatted mask understanding and generation data samples, QwenVL-SAMTok attains state-of-the-art or comparable results on region captioning, region VQA, grounded conversation, referring segmentation, scene graph parsing, and multi-round interactive segmentation. We further introduce a textual answer-matching reward that enables efficient reinforcement learning for mask generation, delivering substantial improvements on GRES and GCG benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a scalable and straightforward paradigm for equipping MLLMs with strong pixel-wise capabilities.

Image-to-Video (I2V) generation represents a frontier in content creation, where models synthesize dynamic visual sequences by jointly reasoning from both image and text prompts. This multimodal grounding enables diverse controllability over video attributes. However, it is precisely this capability that introduces a critical security blind spot: by exploiting the interplay between visual and textual cues, attackers can launch multimodal jailbreak attacks that severely compromise output security. Despite the increasing implementation of security mechanisms in real-world I2V systems, such cross-modal threats remain unexplored. Existing attack methods remain confined to single-modal settings, relying solely on isolated text or image perturbations, which severely limits their effectiveness. To bridge this gap, we propose Runaway Evil, the first multimodal jailbreaking framework for I2V models with dynamic evolutionary capability. Built on a Strategy-Tactic-Action paradigm, our framework exhibits self-amplifying attack through three core components: (1) a strategy-aware command unit that enables the attack to self-evolve its strategies through reinforcement learning-driven strategy customization and large language model (LLM)-based strategy exploration; (2) a multimodal tactical planning unit that generates synergistic text jailbreak instructions and image tampering guidelines based on the selected strategies; and (3) an tactical action Unit executes and evaluates the coordinated attacks. This self-evolving architecture allows the framework to continuously adapt and intensify its attack strategies without human intervention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Runaway Evil achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates on commercial I2V models, such as Open-Sora 2.0 and CogVideoX. This work provides a critical tool for probing and mitigating multimodal vulnerabilities, laying a foundation for building more robust video generation systems. The code is available at: https://github.com/DeepSota/RunawayEvil.

Radiology report generation (RRG) aims to automatically produce clinically faithful reports from chest X-ray images. Prevailing work typically follows a scale-driven paradigm, by multi-stage training over large paired corpora and oversized backbones, making pipelines highly data- and compute-intensive. In this paper, we propose Oracle-educated GRPO (OraPO) with a FactScore-based reward (FactS) to tackle the RRG task under constrained budgets. OraPO enables single-stage, RL-only training by converting failed GRPO explorations on rare or difficult studies into direct preference supervision via a lightweight oracle step. FactS grounds learning in diagnostic evidence by extracting atomic clinical facts and checking entailment against ground-truth labels, yielding dense, interpretable sentence-level rewards. Together, OraPO and FactS create a compact and powerful framework that significantly improves learning efficiency on clinically challenging cases, setting the new SOTA performance on the CheXpert Plus dataset (0.341 in F1) with 2-3 orders of magnitude less training data using a small base VLM on modest hardware.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are advancing autonomous driving by replacing modular pipelines with unified end-to-end architectures. Current VLAs face two challenges: (1) they require extensive datasets annotated with reasoning traces, and (2) these traces greatly increase token counts, inflating training and inference costs. We propose NoRD (No Reasoning for Driving), a data- and inference-efficient VLA that addresses both. Compared to existing VLAs, NoRD achieves competitive performance while being fine-tuned on atleast <60% of the data and no reasoning annotations, resulting in 3x fewer tokens. Our approach applies Reinforcement Learning (RL) to fine-tune a Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) policy trained on a small, reasoning-free dataset. However, we observe that the standard RL algorithm, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), fails to yield significant improvements over this data-efficient SFT policy. We find that this limitation stems from difficulty bias, which disproportionately penalizes reward signals from scenarios that produce high-variance rollouts within GRPO. NoRD overcomes this limitation by incorporating Dr.GRPO, a recent algorithm designed to mitigate difficulty bias in LLMs. As a result, NoRD achieves competitive performance on Waymo and NAVSIM without large datasets, reasoning or additional inputs, enabling scalable, data-efficient training, and fast inference.

Panoramic dental radiographs require fine-grained spatial reasoning, bilateral symmetry understanding, and multi-step diagnostic verification, yet existing vision-language models operate under a static single-pass paradigm that limits their clinical reliability. In this paper, we introduce OralGPT-Plus, an agentic vision-language model designed to perform iterative and symmetry-aware diagnostic reasoning for panoramic dental radiograph analysis. To support this paradigm, we construct DentalProbe, a five-thousand-image dataset with expert-curated diagnostic trajectories that provide structured supervision for localized inspection and contralateral comparison. We further develop a Reinspection-driven reinforcement learning framework that encourages clinically meaningful re-examination and stabilizes long-horizon reasoning with rubric-based reward and conditioned diagnostic-driven reward. In parallel, we present MMOral-X, the first benchmark for holistic panoramic diagnosis, containing 300 open-ended questions and region-level annotations across multiple difficulty levels. OralGPT-Plus demonstrates consistent and reliable improvements over strong baselines on MMOral-X and established panoramic benchmarks, indicating the effectiveness of interactive and symmetry-informed reasoning. Our work highlights the value of agentic modeling for dental imaging and provides a foundation for future research in clinically aligned panoramic radiograph analysis.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved great success in dexterous grasping, significantly improving grasp performance and generalization from simulation to the real world. However, fine-grained functional grasping, which is essential for downstream manipulation tasks, remains underexplored and faces several challenges: the complexity of specifying goals and reward functions for functional grasps across diverse objects, the difficulty of multi-task RL exploration, and the challenge of sim-to-real transfer. In this work, we propose DemoFunGrasp for universal dexterous functional grasping. We factorize functional grasping conditions into two complementary components -- grasping style and affordance -- and integrate them into an RL framework that can learn to grasp any object with any functional grasping condition. To address the multi-task optimization challenge, we leverage a single grasping demonstration and reformulate the RL problem as one-step demonstration editing, substantially enhancing sample efficiency and performance.Experimental results in both simulation and the real world show that DemoFunGrasp generalizes to unseen combinations of objects, affordances, and grasping styles, outperforming baselines in both success rate and functional grasping accuracy. In addition to strong sim-to-real capability, by incorporating a vision-language model (VLM) for planning, our system achieves autonomous instruction-following grasp execution.

Recent advances in remote sensing have led to an increase in the number of available foundation models; each trained on different modalities, datasets, and objectives, yet capturing only part of the vast geospatial knowledge landscape. While these models show strong results within their respective domains, their capabilities remain complementary rather than unified. Therefore, instead of choosing one model over another, we aim to combine their strengths into a single shared representation.We introduce GeoSANE, a geospatial model foundry that learns a unified neural representation from the weights of existing foundation models and task-specific models, able to generate novel neural networks weights on-demand. Given a target architecture, GeoSANE generates weights ready for finetuning for classification, segmentation, and detection tasks across multiple modalities.Models generated by GeoSANE consistently outperform their counterparts trained from scratch, match or surpass state-of-the-art remote sensing foundation models, and outperform models obtained through pruning or knowledge distillation when generating lightweight networks. Evaluations across ten diverse datasets and on GEO-Bench confirm its strong generalization capabilities.By shifting from pre-training to weight generation, GeoSANE introduces a new framework for unifying and transferring geospatial knowledge across models and tasks. Code is available at \href https://hsg-aiml.github.io/GeoSANE/ hsg-aiml.github.io/GeoSANE/ .

We introduce VisualToolAgent (VisTA), a new reinforcement learning framework that empowers visual agents to dynamically explore, select, and compose tools from a diverse library based on empirical performance. Existing methods for tool-augmented visual reasoning either rely on training-free prompting or large-scale supervised fine-tuning; both lack active tool exploration and typically assume limited tool diversity, and fine-tuning methods additionally demand extensive human supervision. In contrast, VisTA leverages end-to-end reinforcement learning to iteratively refine sophisticated, query-specific tool selection strategies, guided solely by task outcomes. Leveraging reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), our framework enables an agent to autonomously discover effective tool-selection pathways without requiring explicit reasoning supervision. Experiments on the ChartQA, Geometry3K, MathVerse, and BlindTest benchmarks demonstrate that VisTA achieves significant performance gains over training-free and fine-tuning baselines, especially on out-of-distribution examples. These results highlight VisTA's ability to enhance generalization, adaptively utilize diverse tools, and pave the way for flexible, experience-driven visual reasoning systems.

Recently, unified multimodal models (UMMs) have made remarkable progress in integrating visual understanding and generation, demonstrating strong potential for complex text-to-image (T2I) tasks. Despite their theoretical promise, a persistent capability gap exists: UMMs typically exhibit superior visual understanding but comparatively weaker generative capabilities. This discrepancy arises largely from the intrinsic decoupling between the understanding and generation processes. While a UMM can accurately interpret fine-grained visual details, it often struggles to produce semantically coherent images from complex textual prompts. To address this challenge, we explore UMMs' internal understanding capability to enhance generation quality. We propose a token-level intrinsic text-image alignment reward mechanism, GvU, enabling the UMM to act simultaneously as teacher and student: it evaluates its own outputs using the understanding branch to guide the generations accordingly. Building upon this, we design a self-supervised reinforcement learning framework, allowing UMMs to iteratively improve their generation quality through understanding-based intrinsic reward signals--without reliance on external supervision. Experimental results show that our method substantially boosts UMMs' generation, which in turn strengthens their fine-grained visual understanding, narrowing the capability gap between UMMs' visual understanding and generation. The project page is https://matrix0721.github.io/gvu.github.io/.

Humans rarely plan whole-body interactions with objects at the level of explicit whole-body movements. High-level intentions, such as affordance, define the goal, while coordinated balance, contact, and manipulation can emerge naturally from underlying physical and motor priors. Scaling such priors is key to enabling humanoids to compose and generalize loco-manipulation skills across diverse contexts while maintaining physically coherent whole-body coordination. To this end, we introduce InterPrior, a scalable framework that learns a unified generative controller through large-scale imitation pretraining and post-training by reinforcement learning. InterPrior first distills a full-reference imitation expert into a versatile, goal-conditioned variational policy that reconstructs motion from multimodal observations and high-level intent. While the distilled policy reconstructs training behaviors, it does not generalize reliably due to the vast configuration space of large-scale human-object interactions. To address this, we apply data augmentation with physical perturbations, and then perform reinforcement learning finetuning to improve competence on unseen goals and initializations. Together, these steps consolidate the reconstructed latent skills into a valid manifold, yielding a motion prior that generalizes beyond the training data, e.g., it can incorporate new behaviors such as interactions with unseen objects. We further demonstrate its effectiveness for user-interactive control and its potential for real robot deployment.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently achieved remarkable success in eliciting visual reasoning within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing approaches typically train separate models for different tasks and treat image and video reasoning as disjoint domains. This results in limited scalability toward a multimodal reasoning generalist, which restricts practical versatility and hinders potential knowledge sharing across tasks and modalities.To this end, we propose OneThinker, an all-in-one reasoning model that unifies image and video understanding across diverse fundamental visual tasks, including question answering, captioning, spatial and temporal grounding, tracking, and segmentation. To achieve this, we construct the OneThinker-600k training corpus covering all these tasks and employ commercial models for CoT annotation, resulting in OneThinker-SFT-340k for SFT cold start.Moreover, we propose EMA-GRPO to handle reward heterogeneity in multi-task RL by tracking task-wise moving averages of reward standard deviations for balanced optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse visual benchmarks show that OneThinker delivers strong performance on 31 benchmarks, across 10 fundamental visual understanding tasks.Moreover, it exhibits effective knowledge transfer between certain tasks and preliminary zero-shot generalization ability, marking a step toward a unified multimodal reasoning generalist. All code, model, and data are released.

The primary obstacle for applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world robotics is the design of effective reward functions. While recently learning-based Process Reward Models (PRMs) are a promising direction, they are often hindered by two fundamental limitations: their reward models lack step-aware understanding and rely on single-view perception, leading to unreliable assessments of fine-grained manipulation progress; and their reward shaping procedures are theoretically unsound, often inducing a semantic trap that misguides policy optimization. To address these, we introduce Dopamine-Reward, a novel reward modeling method for learning a general-purpose, step-aware process reward model from multi-view inputs. At its core is our General Reward Model (GRM), trained on a vast 3,400+ hour dataset, which leverages Step-wise Reward Discretization for structural understanding and Multi-Perspective Reward Fusion to overcome perceptual limitations. Building upon Dopamine-Reward, we propose Dopamine-RL, a robust policy learning framework that employs a theoretically-sound Policy-Invariant Reward Shaping method, which enables the agent to leverage dense rewards for efficient self-improvement without altering the optimal policy, thereby fundamentally avoiding the semantic trap. Extensive experiments across diverse simulated and real-world tasks validate our approach. GRM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in reward assessment, and Dopamine-RL built on GRM significantly improves policy learning efficiency. For instance, after GRM is adapted to a new task in a one-shot manner from a single expert trajectory, the resulting reward model enables Dopamine-RL to improve the policy from near-zero to 95% success with only 150 online rollouts (approximately 1 hour of real robot interaction), while retaining strong generalization across tasks.

We propose Coded-E2LF (coded event to light field), a computational imaging method for acquiring a 4-D light field using a coded aperture and a stationary event-only camera. In a previous work, an imaging system similar to ours was adopted, but both events and intensity images were captured and used for light field reconstruction. In contrast, our method is purely event-based, which relaxes restrictions for hardware implementation. We also introduce several advancements from the previous work that enable us to theoretically support and practically improve light field reconstruction from events alone. In particular, we clarify the key role of a black pattern in aperture coding patterns. We finally implemented our method on real imaging hardware to demonstrate its effectiveness in capturing real 3-D scenes. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that a 4-D light field with pixel-level accuracy can be reconstructed from events alone. Our software and supplementary video are available from our project website: https://www.fujii.nuee.nagoya-u.ac.jp/Research/EventLF/.

Aligning Diffusion models has achieved remarkable breakthroughs in generating high-quality, human preference-aligned images. Existing techniques, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and DPO-style preference optimization, have become principled tools for fine-tuning diffusion models. However, SFT relies on high-quality images that are costly to obtain, while DPO-style methods depend on large-scale preference datasets, which are often inconsistent in quality. Beyond data dependency, these methods are further constrained by computational inefficiency. To address these two challenges, we propose Composite Reward Assisted Fine-Tuning (CRAFT), a lightweight yet powerful fine-tuning paradigm that requires significantly reduced training data while maintaining computational efficiency. It first leverages a Composite Reward Filtering (CRF) technique to construct a high-quality and consistent training dataset and then perform an enhanced variant of SFT. We also theoretically prove that CRAFT actually optimizes the lower bound of group-based reinforcement learning, establishing a principled connection between SFT with selected data and reinforcement learning. Our extensive empirical results demonstrate that CRAFT with only 100 samples can easily outperform recent SOTA preference optimization methods with thousands of preference-paired samples. Moreover, CRAFT can even achieve 11-220xfaster convergences than the baseline preference optimization methods, highlighting its extremely high efficiency.

Deploying embodied agents that can answer questions about their surroundings in realistic real-world settings remains difficult, partly due to the scarcity of benchmarks for episodic memory Embodied Question Answering (EQA). Inspired by the challenges of infrastructure inspections, we propose Inspection EQA as a compelling problem class for advancing episodic memory EQA, as it demands multi-scale reasoning and long-range spatial understanding, while offering standardized evaluation, professional inspection reports as grounding, and egocentric imagery. We introduce BridgeEQA, a benchmark of 2,200 open-vocabulary question-answer pairs (in the style of OpenEQA) grounded in professional inspection reports across 200 real-world bridge scenes with 47.93 images on average per scene. We further propose a new EQA metric Image Citation Relevance to evaluate the ability of a model to cite relevant images. Evaluations of state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal substantial performance gaps. To address this, we propose Embodied Memory Visual Reasoning (EMVR), which formulates the inspection EQA task as a Markov decision process. EMVR shows strong performance over the baselines. Code and dataset available at: https://drags99.github.io/bridge-eqa/

Spatial understanding remains a weakness of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and recent reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) pipelines depend on costly supervision, specialized tools, or constrained environments that limit scale. We introduce Spatial-SSRL, a self-supervised RL paradigm that derives verifiable signals directly from ordinary RGB or RGB-D images. Spatial-SSRL automatically formulates five pretext tasks that capture 2D and 3D spatial structure: shuffled patch reordering, flipped patch recognition, cropped patch inpainting, regional depth ordering, and relative 3D position prediction. These tasks provide ground-truth answers that are easy to verify and require no human or LVLM annotation. Training on our tasks substantially improves spatial reasoning while preserving general visual capabilities. On seven spatial understanding benchmarks in both image and video settings, Spatial-SSRL delivers average accuracy gains of 4.63% (3B) and 3.89% (7B) over the Qwen2.5-VL baselines. Our results show that simple, intrinsic supervision enables RLVR at scale and provides a practical route to stronger spatial intelligence in LVLMs.