CVPR 2026 Papers

Inference-time optimization of diffusion latents enables powerful control but often degrades the statistical structure of true Gaussian noise, causing artifacts and reward hacking. To address this, we propose a Gaussianity regularizer that aligns a sample's local statistics with a typical Gaussian realization, rather than relying on pointwise likelihood. We formalize this by computing the KL divergence between the sample distribution and the Gaussian prior. To make the divergence computation tractable from a single sample, we lift each candidate latent into an empirical distribution induced by its statistics and model it as a pairwise Markov Random Field. This yields a Bethe-Kikuchi-style regularizer with 1D marginal, 2D spatial, and multi-scale terms. Our results show improved latent optimization stability and generation quality over prior approaches.

On-the-fly category discovery (OCD) aims to recognize known categories while simultaneously discovering novel ones from an unlabeled online stream, using a model trained only on labeled data. Existing approaches freeze the feature extractor trained offline and employ a hash-based framework that quantizes features into binary codes as class prototypes. However, discovering novel categories with a fixed knowledge base is counterintuitive, as the learning potential of incoming data is entirely neglected. In addition, feature quantization introduces information loss, diminishes representational expressiveness, and amplifies intra-class variance. It often results in category explosion, where a single class is fragmented into multiple pseudo-classes. To overcome these limitations, we propose a test-time adaptation framework that enables learning through discovery. It incorporates two complementary strategies: a semantic-aware prototype update and a stable test-time encoder update. The former dynamically refines class prototypes to enhance classification, whereas the latter integrates new information directly into the parameter space. Together, these components allow the model to continuously expand its knowledge base with newly encountered samples. Furthermore, we introduce a margin-aware logit calibration in the offline stage to enlarge inter-class margins and improve intra-class compactness, thereby reserving embedding space for future class discovery. Experiments on standard OCD benchmarks demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing hash-based state-of-the-art approaches, yielding notable improvements in novel-class accuracy and effectively mitigating category explosion. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ynanwu/TALON.