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

Topic: Datasets and Benchmarks · 454 papers · Reset filters

Guiding Diffusion Models with Fine-Grained Conditions and Semantics-Preserving Sampling for One-Shot Federated Learning

Xiaojun Deng, Tianchi Liao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chuan Chen, Zibin Zheng

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One-shot Federated Learning (OSFL) has emerged as a promising paradigm to mitigate the high communication overhead of traditional federated learning. However, its effectiveness is often hindered by data heterogeneity across clients. While recent methods leverage pre-trained diffusion models to generate data for OSFL, they often struggle with some practical limitations, including a lack of semantic fidelity in capturing the fine-grained characteristics of local data, and insufficient diversity in the generated data, which collectively degrade the performance of the global model. To address these challenges, we propose Espresso, a novel framework that enhances both the fidelity and diversity of synthetic data in OSFL. Espresso consists of two main components: (1) Fine-Grained Condition Learning, which learns fine-grained conditional embeddings to improve semantic fidelity and diversity by modeling intra-category patterns, and (2) Semantics-Preserving Sampling, which diversifies the generated data by modeling the distribution of latent noises and applying a self-reflection sampling strategy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that Espresso can improve the semantic fidelity and diversity of the synthetic data, leading to an enhancement in the performance of the global model compared to state-of-the-art OSFL methods under data heterogeneity.

Poster
Den-TP: A Density-Balanced Data Curation and Evaluation Framework for Trajectory Prediction

Ruining Yang, Yi Xu, Yun Fu, Lili Su

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Trajectory prediction in autonomous driving has traditionally been studied from a model-centric perspective. However, existing datasets exhibit a strong long-tail distribution in scenario density, where common low-density cases dominate and safety-critical high-density cases are severely underrepresented. This imbalance limits model robustness and hides failure modes when standard evaluations average errors across all scenarios. We revisit trajectory prediction from a data-centric perspective and present Den-TP, a framework for density-aware dataset curation and evaluation. Den-TP first partitions data into density-conditioned regions using agent count as a dataset-agnostic proxy for interaction complexity. It then applies a gradient-based submodular selection objective to choose representative samples within each region while explicitly rebalancing across densities. The resulting subset reduces the dataset size by 50% yet preserves overall performance and significantly improves robustness in high-density scenarios. We further introduce density-conditioned evaluation protocols that reveal long-tail failure modes overlooked by conventional metrics. Experiments on Argoverse 1 and 2 with state-of-the-art models show that robust trajectory prediction depends not only on data scale, but also on balancing scenario density.

Poster
SoliReward: Mitigating Susceptibility to Reward Hacking and Annotation Noise in Video Generation Reward Models

Jiesong Lian, Ruizhe Zhong, Zixiang Zhou, Xiaoyue Mi, Long Hu, Yuan Zhou, Qinglin Lu, Yixue Hao, Junchi Yan

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Post-training alignment of video generation models with human preferences is a critical goal. Developing effective Reward Models (RMs) for this process faces significant methodological hurdles. Current data collection paradigms, reliant on in-prompt pairwise annotations, suffer from labeling noise. Concurrently, the architectural design of VLM-based RMs, particularly their output mechanisms, remains underexplored. Furthermore, RM is susceptible to reward hacking in post-training. To mitigate these limitations, we propose SoliReward, a systematic framework for video RM training. Our framework first sources high-quality, cost-efficient data via single-item binary annotations, then constructs preference pairs using a cross-prompt pairing strategy. Architecturally, we employ a Hierarchical Progressive Query Attention mechanism to enhance feature aggregation. Finally, we introduce a modified BT loss that explicitly accommodates win-tie scenarios. This approach regularizes the RM's score distribution for positive samples, providing more nuanced preference signals to alleviate over-focus on a small number of top-scoring samples. Our approach is validated on benchmarks evaluating physical plausibility, subject deformity, and semantic alignment, demonstrating improvements in direct RM evaluation metrics and in the efficacy of post-training on video generation models. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/lian700/SoliReward.

Poster
MERLIN: Building Low-SNR Robust Multimodal LLMs for Electromagnetic Signals

Junyu Shen, Zhendong She, Chenghanyu Zhang, Yuchuang Sun, Luqing Luo, Dingwei Tan, Zonghao Guo, Bo Guo, Zehua Han, Wupeng Xie, Yaxin Mu, Peng Zhang, Peipei Li, Fengxiang Wang, Yangang Sun, Maosong Sun

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The paradigm of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offers a promising blueprint for advancing the electromagnetic (EM) domain. However, prevailing approaches often deviate from the native MLLM paradigm, instead using task-specific or pipelined architectures that lead to fundamental limitations in model performance and generalization. Fully realizing the MLLM potential in EM domain requires overcoming three main challenges: (1) Data. The scarcity of high-quality datasets with paired EM signals and descriptive text annotations used for MLLMs pre-training; (2) Benchmark. The absence of comprehensive benchmarks to systematically evaluate and compare the performance of models on EM signal-to-text tasks; (3) Model. A critical fragility in low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) environments, where critical signal features can be obscured, leading to significant performance degradation. To address these challenges, we introduce a tripartite contribution to establish a foundation for MLLMs in the EM domain. First, to overcome data scarcity, we construct and release EM-100k, a large-scale dataset comprising over 100,000 EM signal-text pairs. Second, to enable rigorous and standardized evaluation, we propose EM-Bench, the most comprehensive benchmark featuring diverse downstream tasks spanning from perception to reasoning. Finally, to tackle the core modeling challenge, we present MERLIN, a novel training framework designed not only to align low-level signal representations with high-level semantic text, but also to explicitly enhance model robustness and performance in challenging low-SNR environments. Comprehensive experiments validate our method, showing that MERLIN is state-of-the-art in the EM-Bench and exhibits remarkable robustness in low-SNR settings.

Poster
REL-SF4PASS: Panoramic Semantic Segmentation with REL Depth Representation and Spherical Fusion

Xuewei Li, Xinghan Bao, Zhimin Chen, Xi Li

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As an important and challenging problem in computer vision, Panoramic Semantic Segmentation (PASS) aims to provide complete scene perception based on an ultra-wide angle of view. Most PASS methods often focus on spherical geometry with RGB input or use the depth information in original or HHA format, which does not make full use of panoramic image geometry. To address these shortcomings, we propose REL-SF4PASS with our REL depth representation based on cylindrical coordinate and Spherical-dynamic Multi-Modal Fusion (SMMF). REL is made up of Rectified Depth, Elevation-Gained Vertical Inclination Angle, and Lateral Orientation Angle, which fully represent 3D space in cylindrical coordinate style and the surface normal direction. SMMF aims to ensure the diversity of fusion for different panoramic image regions and reduce the breakage of cylinder side surface expansion in ERP projection, using different fusion strategies to match different regions. Experimental results show that REL-SF4PASS considerably improves performance and robustness on popular benchmarks (e.g., Stanford2D3D Panoramic datasets). It gains 2.35% average mIoU improvement on all 3 folds and reduces the performance variance by approximately 70% when facing 3D disturbance.

Poster
Evidential Deep Partial Label Learning to Quantify Disambiguation Uncertainty

Jinfu Fan, Jiangnan Li, Xiaohui Zhong, Kangrui Ren, Zhencun Jiang, Min Gan, Tianhao Gu, Linqing Huang

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Partial label learning (PLL) is a weakly supervised learning, where each instance is assigned a set of candidate labels and only one is true. However, due to potentially inaccurate annotations, existing PLL algorithms disambiguate labeling by minimizing the prediction loss, which leaves the model unaware of its prediction credibility. To address this issue, this paper proposes the evidential deep partial label learning (ED-PLL) to quantify disambiguation uncertainty, aiming to achieve candidate label disambiguation and reliability prediction. Firstly, we extend the evidence modeling mechanism to PLL, treating the candidate label set as the source of evidence for the label hypothesis, and using belief and credibility to model classification uncertainty, thereby guiding a more reliable disambiguation process. Meanwhile, we propose the expectation calculation under the Dirichlet distribution of non-candidate labels, which suppresses the output of non-candidate labels by using consistency regularization to further improve the accuracy of disambiguation. Furthermore, a conflict-aware regularization is proposed to evaluate the degree of conflict, which measures the consistency between instances within the class by combining the differences in the distribution of prediction results and model uncertainty, and thus improves the robustness of the model. In addition, this paper theoretically analyzes our method from the perspective of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, and the ED-PLL is compatible with any deep network or stochastic optimizer. Experiments on benchmark and real datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Poster
Neu-PiG: Neural Preconditioned Grids for Fast Dynamic Surface Reconstruction on Long Sequences

Julian Kaltheuner, Hannah Dröge, Markus Plack, Patrick Stotko, Reinhard Klein

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Temporally consistent surface reconstruction of dynamic 3D objects from unstructured point cloud data remains challenging, especially for very long sequences. Existing methods either optimize deformations incrementally, risking drift and requiring long runtimes, or rely on complex learned models that demand category-specific training. We present Neu-PiG, a fast deformation optimization method based on a novel preconditioned latent-grid encoding that distributes spatial features parameterized on the position and normal direction of a keyframe surface. Our method encodes entire deformations across all time steps at various spatial scales into a multi-resolution latent grid, parameterized by the position and normal direction of a reference surface from a single keyframe. This latent representation is then augmented for time modulation and decoded into per-frame 6-DoF deformations via a lightweight multi-layer perceptron (MLP). To achieve high-fidelity, drift-free surface reconstructions in seconds, we employ Sobolev preconditioning during gradient-based training of the latent space, completely avoiding the need for any explicit correspondences or further priors. Experiments across diverse human and animal datasets demonstrate that Neu-PiG outperforms state-the-art approaches, offering both superior accuracy and scalability to long sequences while running at least 60x faster than existing training-free methods and achieving inference speeds on the same order as heavy pre-trained models.

Poster
Bootstrap Your Own AV-Proxies: Adaptive Contrastive and Prototype Learning for Audio-Visual Segmentation

Junbo Zhang, Hang Su, Zhaofan Li, Hang Dong, Chao Sun

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Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to accurately segment sounding objects in video frames by leveraging audio-visual correspondence cues. However, it remains challenging due to the intrinsic semantic incompleteness within a single modality and the semantic gap between audio and visual representations. Traditional feature-fusion decoding approaches struggle to suppress fusion noise effectively, while recent methods that incorporate data-dependent priors often increase the complexity of modeling audio-visual correlations, leading to poor cross-domain generalization. To address these issues, we propose a novel adaptive contrastive and prototype learning framework, BYOAVP, for AVS. Specifically, we design a Self-Supervised Audio Enhancement (SSAE) module that introduces contrastive learning to adaptively align audio representations with gradient-blocked visual embeddings, thus narrowing the semantic gap between modalities. Furthermore, a Dynamic Prototype Constraint (DPC) module is developed to refine pixel-wise category perception via momentum-based prototype updating, while enhancing localization of sounding regions through cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance across two AVS benchmarks and six sub-tasks, exhibiting strong robustness and generalization ability.

Poster
LIFT and PLACE: A Simple, Stable, and Effective Knowledge Distillation Framework for Lightweight Diffusion Models

Hyunsoo Han, Sangyeop Yeo, Jaejun Yoo

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We demonstrate that in knowledge distillation for diffusion models, the teacher network's highly complex denoising process--stemming from its substantially larger capacity--poses a significant challenge for the student model to faithfully mimic. To address this problem, we propose a coarse-to-fine distillation framework with LInear FiTting-based distillation (LIFT) and Piecewise Local Adaptive Coefficient Estimation (PLACE). First, LIFT decomposes the objective into a "coarse" alignment and a "fine" refinement. The student is then trained on coarse alignment before proceeding to hard refinement. Second, PLACE extends LIFT to address spatially non-uniform errors by partitioning outputs into error-based groups, providing locally adaptive guidance. Our experiments show that LIFT and PLACE is effective across diffusion spaces (image/latent), backbones (U-Net/DiT), tasks (unconditional/conditional), datasets, and even extends to flow-based models such as MMDiT (SD3). Furthermore, under extreme compression with a 1.3M-parameter student (only 1.6% of the teacher), conventional KD fails to provide sufficient guidance for stable training, with FID scores often degrading to 50-200+, but our method remains stably convergent and achieves an FID of 15.73.

Poster
Rethinking Dataset Distillation: Hard Truths about Soft Labels

Priyam Dey, Aditya Sahdev, Sunny Bhati, Konda Reddy Mopuri, Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan

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Despite the perceived success of large-scale dataset distillation (DD) methods, recent evidence [??] finds that simple random image baselines perform on-par with state-of-the-art DD methods like SRe2L [??] due to the use of soft labels during downstream model training. This is in contrast with the findings in coreset literature, where high-quality coresets consistently outperform random subsets in the hard-label (HL) setting. To understand this discrepancy, we perform a detailed scalability analysis to examine the role of data quality under different label regimes, ranging from abundant soft labels (termed as SL+KD regime) to fixed soft labels (SL) and hard labels (HL). Our analysis reveals that high-quality coresets fail to convincingly outperform the random baseline in both SL and SL+KD regimes. In the SL+KD setting, performance further approaches near-optimal levels relative to the full dataset, regardless of subset size or quality, for a given compute budget. This performance saturation calls into question the widespread practice of using soft labels for model evaluation, where unlike the HL setting, subset quality has negligible influence. A subsequent systematic evaluation of five large-scale and four small-scale DD methods in the HL setting reveals that only RDED [??] reliably outperforms random baselines on ImageNet-1K, but can still lag behind strong coreset methods due to its over-reliance on easy sample patches. Based on this, we introduce CAD-Prune, a compute-aware pruning metric that efficiently identifies samples of optimal difficulty for a given compute budget, and use it to develop CA2D, a compute-aligned DD method, outperforming current DD methods on ImageNet-1K at various IPC settings. Together, our findings uncover many insights into current DD research and establish useful tools to advance data-efficient learning for both coresets and DD.

Oral
AMB3R: Accurate Feed-forward Metric-scale 3D Reconstruction with Backend

Hengyi Wang, Lourdes Agapito

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We present AMB3R, a multi-view feed-forward model for metric-scale dense 3D reconstruction that addresses diverse 3D vision tasks. The key idea is to employ a sparse, yet compact, volumetric scene representation as our backend, enabling geometric reasoning with spatial compactness. We further introduce AMB3R-VO and AMB3R-SfM, two training-free, model-agnostic pipelines that extend multi-view networks to uncalibrated visual odometry (online) or structure from motion for any number of images without test-time optimization. Compared to prior 3D foundation models, AMB3R achieves state-of-the-art performance in camera pose, depth, metric-scale estimation, and 3D reconstruction, while AMB3R-VO and AMB3R-SfM even surpass optimization-based SLAM and SfM systems with dense reconstruction priors on common benchmarks.

Poster
RDFace: A Benchmark Dataset for Rare Disease Facial Image Analysis under Extreme Data Scarcity and Phenotype-Aware Synthetic Generation

Ganlin Feng, Yuxi Long, Hafsa Ali, Erin Lou, Fahad Butt, Qian Liu, Yang Wang, Pingzhao Hu

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Rare diseases often manifest with distinctive facial phenotypes in children, offering valuable diagnostic cues for clinicians and AI-assisted screening systems. However, progress in this field is severely limited by the scarcity of curated, ethically sourced facial data and the high similarity among phenotypes across different conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce RDFace, a curated benchmark dataset comprising 456 pediatric facial images spanning 103 rare genetic conditions (average 4.4 samples per condition). Each ethically verified image is paired with standardized metadata. RDFace enables the development and evaluation of data-efficient AI models for rare disease diagnosis under real-world low-data constraints. We benchmark multiple pretrained vision backbones using cross-validation and explore synthetic augmentation with DreamBooth and FastGAN. Generated images are filtered via facial landmark similarity to maintain phenotype fidelity and merged with real data, improving diagnostic accuracy by up to 13.7% in ultra-low-data regimes. To assess semantic validity, phenotype descriptions generated by a vision-language model from real and synthetic images achieve a report similarity score of 0.84. RDFace establishes a transparent, benchmark-ready dataset for equitable rare disease AI research and presents a scalable framework for evaluating both diagnostic performance and the integrity of synthetic medical imagery.

Poster
Hi-Lo Prune: Look at What You'll Lose before Pruning with Hierarchical Token Selection

Zixun Sun, Yubo Dong, Hehe Fan, Yi Yang

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Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language understanding, yet processing long visual token sequences remains computationally expensive. Existing approaches mitigate this cost by reducing image tokens, either by discarding them after the visual encoder or by pruning them in the early Transformer layers of the LLM. While these strategies improve efficiency, they inevitably discard informative visual content and risk degrading downstream reasoning performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Hi-Lo Prune, a training-free pruning strategy that is built on a simple principle: look at what you will lose before you remove it. Instead of directly dropping tokens, Hi-Lo Prune first identifies which tokens are safe to prune through a coarse-to-fine selection process, and then encourages the model to absorb their information before pruning occurs. Specifically, the framework consists of three stages: (1) Hierarchical Pruning Token Selection. After visual encoding, we apply a coarse-to-fine process that identifies tokens to retain and selects a critical set of pruning candidates from redundant ones. (2) Attention-Guided Candidate Token Merge. Before removing selected tokens, an attention mechanism is applied to the early LLM layers, which explicitly transfers information from these candidates to the retained tokens. (3) Low-informative Candidate Token Removal. At a designated Transformer layer, the pruned tokens are removed, reducing computation for all subsequent layers. This design enables aggressive early-layer pruning while preserving critical visual cues. Experiments on Qwen2-VL, Qwen2.5-VL, and Qwen3-VL demonstrate that Hi-Lo Prune consistently outperforms existing pruning methods across multiple benchmarks, achieving strong performance even under high pruning ratios without any fine-tuning.

Poster
F^2HDR: Two-Stage HDR Video Reconstruction via Flow Adapter and Physical Motion Modeling

Huanjing Yue, Dawei Li, Shaoxiong Tu, Jingyu Yang

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Reconstructing High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos from sequences of alternating-exposure Low Dynamic Range (LDR) frames remains highly challenging, especially under dynamic scenes where cross-exposure inconsistencies and complex motion make inter-frame alignment difficult, leading to ghosting and detail loss. Existing methods often suffer from inaccurate alignment, suboptimal feature aggregation, and degraded reconstruction quality in motion-dominated regions. To address these challenges, we propose F^2HDR, a two-stage HDR video reconstruction framework that robustly perceives inter-frame motion and restores fine details in complex dynamic scenarios. The proposed framework integrates a flow adapter that adapts generic optical flow for robust cross-exposure alignment, a physical motion modeling to identify salient motion regions, and a motion-aware refinement network that aggregates complementary information while removing ghosting and noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that F^2HDR achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world HDR video benchmarks, producing ghost-free and high-fidelity results under large motion and exposure variations. Our code is available at https://github.com/wei1895/F2HDR.

Poster
GEM: Generating LiDAR World Model via Deformable Mamba

Yang Wu, Zhaojiang Liu, Qiang Meng, Youquan Liu, Renliang Weng, Jianjun Qian, Jian Yang, Jin Xie

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World models, which simulate environmental dynamics and generate sensor observations, are gaining increasing attention in autonomous driving. However, progress in LiDAR-based world models has lagged behind those built on camera videos or occupancy data, primarily due to two core challenges: the inherent disorder of LiDAR point clouds and the difficulty of distinguishing dynamic objects from static structures. To address these issues, we propose GEM: a Generative LiDAR world model that leverages dEformable Mamba architecture, significantly improving fidelity and imaginative capability. Specifically, leveraging the structural similarity between sequential laser scanning and Mamba's processing mechanism, we first tokenize LiDAR sweeps into compact representations via a custom LiDAR scene tokenizer. After unsupervised disentanglement of tokenized features via a dynamic-static separator, a tri-path deformable Mamba is introduced to perform selective scanning and adaptive gating fusion over the disentangled features, leading to enhanced spatial-temporal understanding of the world evolution. Optionally, a planner and a BEV layout controller can be integrated to explore the model's capability for autonomous rollout and its potential to generate "what-if" scenarios. Extensive experiments show that GEM achieves state-of-the-art performances across diverse benchmarks and evaluation settings, demonstrating its superiority and effectiveness. Project page: https://github.com/wuyang98/GEM .

Poster
HalluGen: Synthesizing Realistic and Controllable Hallucinations for Evaluating Image Restoration

Seunghoi Kim*, Henry F. J. Tregidgo, Chen Jin, Matteo Figini, Daniel C. Alexander

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Generative models are prone to hallucinations: plausible but incorrect structures absent in the ground truth. This issue is problematic in image restoration for safety-critical domains such as medical imaging, industrial inspection, and remote sensing, where such errors undermine reliability and trust. For example, in low-field MRI, widely used in resource-limited settings, restoration models are essential for enhancing low-quality scans, yet hallucinations can lead to serious diagnostic errors.Progress has been hindered by a circular dependency: evaluating hallucinations requires labeled data, yet such labels are costly and subjective.We introduce HalluGen, a diffusion-based framework that synthesizes realistic hallucinations with controllable type, location, and severity, producing perceptually realistic but semantically incorrect outputs (segmentation IoU drops from 0.86 to 0.36).Using HalluGen, we construct the first large-scale hallucination dataset comprising 4,350 annotated images derived from 1,450 brain MR images for low-field enhancement, enabling systematic evaluation of hallucination detection and mitigation.We demonstrate its utility in two applications: (1) benchmarking image quality metrics and developing Semantic Hallucination Assessment via Feature Evaluation (SHAFE), a feature-based metric with soft-attention pooling that improves hallucination sensitivity over traditional metrics; and (2) training reference-free hallucination detectors that generalize to real restoration failures.Together, HalluGen and its open dataset establish the first scalable foundation for evaluating hallucinations in safety-critical image restoration.

Poster
The SA-FARI Dataset: Segment Anything in Footage of Animals for Recognition and Identification

Dante Wasmuht, Otto Brookes, Maximilian Schall, Pablo Palencia, Christopher Beirne, Tilo Burghardt, Majid Mirmehdi, Hjalmar Kühl, Mimi Arandjelovic, Sam Pottie, Peter Bermant, Brandon Asheim, Yi Jin Toh, Adam Elzinga, Jason Allan Holmberg, Andrew Whitworth, Eleanor Flatt, Laura Gustafson, Chaitanya Ryali, Yuan-Ting Hu, Baishan Guo, Andrew Westbury, Kate Saenko, Didac Suris

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Automated video analysis is critical for wildlife conservation. A foundational task in this domain is multi-animal tracking (MAT), which underpins applications such as individual re-identification and behavior recognition. However, existing datasets are limited in scale, constrained to a few species, or lack sufficient temporal and geographical diversity - leaving no suitable benchmark for training general-purpose MAT models applicable to wild animals. To address this, we introduce SA-FARI, the largest open-source MAT dataset for wild animals. It comprises 11,609 camera trap videos collected over 10 years (2014-2024) from 741 locations across 4 continents, spanning 99 species categories. Each video is exhaustively annotated culminating in 46 hours of densely annotated footage containing 16,224 masklet identities and 942,702 individual bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and species labels. Alongside the task-specific annotations, we publish anonymized camera trap locations for each video. Finally, we present comprehensive benchmarks on SA-FARI using state-of-the-art vision-language models for detection and tracking, including SAM 3, evaluated with both species-specific and generic animal prompts. We also compare against vision only methods developed specifically for wildlife analysis. SA-FARI is the first large-scale dataset to combine high species diversity, multi-region coverage, and high-quality spatio-temporal annotations, offering a new foundation for advancing multi-animal tracking in the wild. The dataset is available at conservationxlabs.com/SA-FARI.

Oral
Learning from Oblivion: Predicting Knowledge-Overflowed Weights via Retrodiction of Forgetting

Jinhyeok Jang, Jaehong Kim, Jung Uk Kim

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Pre-trained weights have become a cornerstone of modern deep learning, enabling efficient knowledge transfer and improving downstream task performance, especially in data-scarce scenarios. However, a fundamental question remains: how can we obtain better pre-trained weights that encapsulate more knowledge beyond the given dataset? In this work, we introduce KNowledge-Overflowed Weights (KNOW) prediction, a novel strategy that leverages structured forgetting and its inversion to synthesize knowledge-enriched weights. Our key insight is that sequential fine-tuning on progressively downsized datasets induces a structured forgetting process, which can be modeled and reversed to recover knowledge as if trained on a larger dataset. We construct a dataset of weight transitions governed by this controlled forgetting and employ meta-learning to model weight prediction effectively. Specifically, our KNowledge-Overflowed Weights Nowcaster (KNOWN) acts as a hyper-model that learns the general evolution of weights and predicts enhanced weights with improved generalization. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and architectures demonstrate that KNOW prediction consistently outperforms Naive fine-tuning and simple weight prediction, leading to superior downstream performance. Our work provides a new perspective on reinterpreting forgetting dynamics to push the limits of knowledge transfer. The code and pre-trained model are available at https://github.com/jjh6297/KNOW

Poster
Smoothing the Score Function to Enhance Generalization in Diffusion Models

Xinyu Zhou, Jiawei Zhang, Stephen J Wright

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Diffusion models achieve remarkable generation quality, yet face a fundamental challenge known as memorization, where generated samples can replicate training samples exactly. We develop a theoretical framework to explain this phenomenon by showing that the empirical score function (the score function corresponding to the empirical distribution) is a weighted sum of the score functions of Gaussian distributions, in which the weights are sharp softmax functions. This structure causes individual training samples to dominate the score function, resulting in sampling collapse. In practice, approximating the empirical score function with a neural network can partially alleviate this issue and improve generalization. Our theoretical framework explains why: In training, the neural network learns a smoother approximation of the weighted sum, allowing the sampling process to be influenced by local manifolds rather than single points. Leveraging this insight, we propose two novel methods to further enhance generalization: (1) Noise Unconditioning enables each training sample to adaptively determine its score function weight to increase the effect of more training samples, thereby preventing single-point dominance and mitigating collapse. (2) Temperature Smoothing introduces an explicit parameter to control the smoothness. By increasing the temperature in the softmax weights, we naturally reduce the dominance of any single training sample and mitigate memorization. Experiments across multiple datasets validate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in improving generalization while maintaining high generation quality.

Poster
PromptStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching via Structure and Motion Prompts

Xianqi Wang, Hao Yang, Hangtian Wang, Junda Cheng, Gangwei Xu, Min Lin, Xin Yang

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Modern stereo matching methods have leveraged monocular depth foundation models to achieve superior zero-shot generalization performance. However, most existing methods primarily focus on extracting robust features for cost volume construction or disparity initialization. At the same time, the iterative refinement stage, which is also crucial for zero-shot generalization, remains underexplored. Some methods treat monocular depth priors as guidance for iteration, but conventional GRU-based architectures struggle to exploit them due to the limited representation capacity. In this paper, we propose Prompt Recurrent Unit (PRU), a novel iterative refinement module based on the decoder of monocular depth foundation models. By integrating monocular structure and stereo motion cues as prompts into the decoder, PRU enriches the latent representations of monocular depth foundation models with absolute stereo-scale information while preserving their inherent monocular depth priors. Experiments demonstrate that our PromptStereo achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization performance across multiple datasets, while maintaining comparable or faster inference speed. Our findings highlight prompt-guided iterative refinement as a promising direction for zero-shot stereo matching.

Poster