CVPR 2026 Papers

It is essential for understanding neural network decisions to interpret the functionality (also known as concepts) of neurons. Existing approaches describe neuron concepts by generating natural language descriptions, thereby advancing the understanding of the neural network's decision-making mechanism. However, these approaches assume that each neuron has well-defined functions and provides discriminative features for neural network decision-making. In fact, some neurons may be redundant or may offer misleading concepts. Thus, the descriptions for such neurons may cause misinterpretations of the factors driving the neural network's decisions. To address the issue, we introduce a verification of neuron functions, which checks whether the generated concept highly activates the corresponding neuron. Furthermore, we propose a Select-Hypothesize-Verify framework for interpreting neuron functionality. This framework consists of: 1) selecting activation samples that best capture a neuron's well-defined functional behavior through activation-distribution analysis; 2) forming hypotheses about concepts for the selected neurons; and 3) verifying whether the generated concepts accurately reflect the functionality of the neuron. Extensive experiments show that our method produces more accurate neuron concepts. Our generated concepts activate the corresponding neurons with a probability approximately 1.5 times that of the current state-of-the-art method.

Current AI weather forecasting models predict conventional atmospheric variables but cannot distinguish between cloud microphysical species critical for aviation safety. We introduce AviaSafe, a hierarchical, physics-informed neural forecaster that produces global, six-hourly predictions of these four hydrometeor species for lead times up to 7 days. Our approach addresses the unique challenges of cloud prediction: extreme sparsity, discontinuous distributions, and complex microphysical interactions between species. We integrate the Icing Condition (IC) index from aviation meteorology as a physics-based constraint that identifies regions where supercooled water fuels explosive ice crystal growth. The model employs a hierarchical architecture that first predicts cloud spatial distribution through masked attention, then quantifies species concentrations within identified regions. Training on ERA5 reanalysis data, our model achieves lower RMSE for cloud species compared to baseline and outperforms operational numerical models on certain key variables at 7-day lead times.The ability to forecast individual cloud species enables new applications in aviation route optimization where distinguishing between ice and liquid water determines engine icing risk.

Multi-stage generative models have shown great promise in 3D content creation due to focused generation of structure or texture in different stages, but their outputs often fail to align with human preferences. The key bottleneck to apply alignment methods is the presence of non-differentiable operations between generative stages.This disconnection stops preference signals applied to the final output from being backpropagated to the crucial, early stages of generation, while simple separated stage-wise alignment leads to texture-geometry inconsistency.To address this challenge, we introduce Circular-DPO, which builds a preference feedback loop to align multi-stage 3D generation models to human preference.Our method first applies Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to refine the final 3D asset.We then construct new preference pairs by sampling and decoding the assets generated by the optimized model.These newly-formed pairs are used to train the preceding generative stage, effectively creating a feedback loop that bridges the non-differentiable gap. Furthermore, to enhance robustness against noisy data, we introduce a quality-aware weighting mechanism that prioritizes reliable preference pairs during training. Experiments demonstrate that our approach improves the alignment of generated 3D content with human preferences by enabling holistic, multi-stage optimization.

Merging multiple Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules is promising for constructing general-purpose systems, yet challenging because LoRA update directions span different subspaces and contribute unevenly. When merged naively, such mismatches can weaken the directions most critical to certain task losses while overemphasizing relatively less important ones, ultimately reducing the model's ability to represent all tasks faithfully. We revisit this problem through two perspectives: subspace coverage, which captures how broadly LoRA directions cover diverse representational directions, and anisotropy, which reflects the imbalance of influence across those directions. We propose TARA-Merging (Task-Rank Anisotropy Alignment), which aligns merging weights using a preference-weighted cross-entropy pseudo-loss while preserving task-relevant LoRA subspaces. This ensures broad subspace coverage and mitigates anisotropy via direction-wise reweighting. Across eight vision and six NLI benchmarks, TARA-Merging consistently outperforms vanilla and LoRA-aware baselines, demonstrating strong robustness and generalization, and highlighting the importance of addressing both subspace coverage and anisotropy in LoRA merging.

Understanding social interaction in video requires reasoning over a dynamic interplay of verbal and non-verbal cues: who is speaking, to whom, and with what gaze or gestures.While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are natural candidates, simply adding visual inputs yields surprisingly inconsistent gains on social tasks. Our quantitative analysis of cross-modal attention inside state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals a core failure mode: in multi-speaker scenes, visual and textual tokens lack speaker-consistent alignment, exhibiting substantially weaker cross-modal attention than in object-centric images.To address this, we propose a multimodal multi-speaker attention alignment method that can be integrated into existing MLLMs. First, we introduce dynamic cross-modal head selection to identify attention heads most responsible for grounding. Then, an adaptive social-aware attention bias, computed from existing attention patterns and speaker locations, is injected into the attention mechanism. This bias reinforces alignment between a speaker's visual representation and their utterances without introducing trainable parameters or architectural changes.We integrate our method into three distinct MLLMs (LLaVA-NeXT-Video, Qwen2.5-VL, and InternVL3) and evaluate on three benchmarks (TVQA+, MMSI, OnlineMMSI). Across four social tasks, results demonstrate that our approach improves the ability of MLLMs and achieves state-of-the-art results.Attention visualizations confirm our method successfully focuses the model on speaker-relevant regions, enabling more robust multi-party social reasoning.

As publicly available data dwindles, synthetic data generation (SDG) has become a practical solution for privacy-preserving data sharing. By training generative models on private data, SDG creates samples that retain task-relevant features while obfuscating sensitive content. However, recent work shows that synthetic data can still leak private information via membership inference and reconstruction attacks. Existing defenses often degrade downstream utility. To address the privacy-utility trade-off, we formulate SDG as a bi-objective optimization problem. Yet, intractable gradients and expensive subset evaluation pose major challenges. We address this via alternate optimization over the generative model and data selection parameter, and further recast the selection step as a discrete-time optimal control problem, solved using Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. We propose PrivSynth, a framework that quantifies multiple privacy risks and integrates it into the control objective. Theoretical analysis guarantees convergence, and experiments on benchmark and medical datasets show that PrivSynth achieves better utility and stronger privacy protection than state-of-the-art methods.

Task arithmetic provides an efficient, training-free way to edit pre-trained models, yet lacks a fundamental theoretical explanation for its success. The existing concept of "weight disentanglement" describes the ideal outcome of non-interfering task composition but does not reveal its underlying cause. Crucially, what intrinsic properties of the pre-trained model (\theta_0) or the task vectors (\tau_t) enable this disentanglement remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce Task-Feature Specialization (TFS), a model's ability to allocate distinct internal features to different tasks, as the fundamental principle. We first prove that TFS is a sufficient condition for weight disentanglement. More importantly, we find that TFS also gives rise to an observable geometric consequence: weight vector orthogonality. This positions TFS as the common cause for both the desired functional outcome (disentanglement) and a measurable geometric property (orthogonality). This relationship provides the key insight for our method: since the abstract TFS property is intractable to enforce directly, we can instead promote weight disentanglement by shaping its concrete geometric consequence, orthogonality. Therefore, we propose OrthoReg, a simple and effective regularization method that actively enforces an internal orthogonal structure on weight updates (\Delta W) that constitute \tau_t during fine-tuning. And we theoretically prove that OrthoReg promotes disentanglement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OrthoReg consistently and significantly enhances the performance of various task arithmetic methods.

Machine unlearning (MU) addresses privacy risks in pretrained models. The main goal of MU is to remove the influence of designated data while preserving the utility of retained knowledge. Achieving this goal requires preserving semantic relations among retained instances, which existing studies often overlook. We observe that without such preservation, models suffer from progressive structural collapse, undermining both the deletion-retention balance. In this work, we propose a novel structure-faithful framework that introduces stakes, i.e., semantic anchors that serve as reference points to maintain the knowledge structure. By leveraging these anchors, our framework captures and stabilizes the semantic organization of knowledge. Specifically, we instantiate the anchors from language-driven attribute descriptions encoded by a semantic encoder (e.g., CLIP). We enforce preservation of the knowledge structure via structure-aware alignment and regularization: the former aligns the organization of retained knowledge before and after unlearning around anchors, while the latter regulates updates to structure-critical parameters. Results from image classification, retrieval, and face recognition show average gains of 32.9%, 22.5%, and 19.3% in performance, balancing the deletion-retention trade-off and enhancing generalization.

The core challenge in Text-based Person Retrieval (TPR) lies in establishing fine-grained, many-to-many semantic alignment between textual words and visual regions. Existing methods predominantly rely on pointwise similarity or attention mechanisms, implicitly assuming matches are independent and balanced. Consequently, under conditions of attribute overlap and substantial background noise, these methods often misallocate matching weights to non-discriminative regions or words, resulting in ambiguous matching outcomes. To address this, we propose QC-Align, a quota-calibrated fine-grained alignment framework guided by context-aware marginals. Specifically, we propose a Context-Aware Marginal Estimator (CAME) that dynamically assigns "matching quotas" to each word and visual region, and subsequently employs a Quota-Calibrated Transport (QCT) objective to explicitly constrain the matching quality each word and region can carry, thereby jointly optimizing the many-to-many correspondence between text and vision under these constraints. Notably, QC-Align is a parameter-free, plug-and-play training regularizer that requires no fine-grained annotations and incurs no inference overhead. Experiments on multiple mainstream person retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that QC-Align consistently improves baseline model performance, with greater gains and better interpretability in few-shot and cross-domain scenarios.

Recent person re-identification (ReID) leverages heterogeneous sensing with multiple modalities and viewpoints to improve robustness across diverse conditions. However, most approaches target predefined scenario pairs (e.g., visible-infrared or aerial-ground) and train separate task-specific models. In contrast, real-world systems often query against galleries that cover all scenarios, making such designs inefficient and complex to deploy. To bridge this gap, we introduce Any-Scenario ReID (AS-ReID): given a query from any (modality, viewpoint) scenario, a single model retrieves the same identity from a heterogeneous gallery spanning all scenarios. Progress toward AS-ReID is limited by two factors: (i) the lack of a real-world-aligned benchmark with broad scenario coverage, and (ii) the challenge of learning representations with strong intra-identity cohesion and inter-identity discrimination under diverse scenarios. To this end, we construct WHU-MARS, a multispectral aerial-ground benchmark with 2,337 identities and 434,620 images captured by RGB, near-infrared, and thermal infrared cameras on both ground and UAV platforms. WHU-MARS spans day-night, multiple seasons, and diverse weather, enabling AS-ReID as well as conventional ReID tasks. We further propose the Unified Alignment and Discrimination (UAD) framework. Progressive Center Alignment (ProCA) aggregates multi-view features into modality centers and then aligns them toward identity centers to reduce scenario bias. Global Prototype Discrimination (GPD) contrasts samples against global identity prototypes to enforce large-margin discrimination. Extensive experiments highlight the challenges of WHU-MARS and demonstrate the effectiveness of UAD on AS-ReID.

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized approach where multiple clients collaboratively train a shared global model without sharing their raw data. Despite its effectiveness, conventional FL faces scalability challenges due to excessive computational and communication demands placed on a single central server as the number of participating devices grows. Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) addresses these issues by distributing model aggregation tasks across intermediate nodes (stations), thereby enhancing system scalability and robustness against single points of failure. However, HFL still suffers from a critical yet often overlooked limitation: domain shift, where data distributions vary significantly across different clients and stations, reducing model performance on unseen target domains. While Federated Domain Generalization (FedDG) methods have emerged to improve robustness to domain shifts, their integration into HFL frameworks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we formally introduce Hierarchical Federated Domain Generalization (HFedDG), a novel scenario designed to investigate domain shift within hierarchical architectures. Specifically, we propose HFedATM, a hierarchical aggregation method that first aligns the convolutional filters of models from different stations through Filter-wise Optimal Transport Alignment and subsequently merges aligned models using a Shrinkage-aware Regularized Mean Aggregation. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that HFedATM significantly boosts the performance of existing FedDG baselines across multiple datasets and maintains computational and communication efficiency. Moreover, theoretical analyses indicate that HFedATM achieves tighter generalization error bounds compared to standard hierarchical averaging, resulting in faster convergence and stable training behavior.

Understanding animal species from multimodal data poses an emerging challenge at the intersection of computer vision and ecology.While recent biological models, such as BioCLIP, have demonstrated strong alignment between images and textual taxonomic information for species identification, the integration of the audio modality remains an open problem. We propose BioVITA, a novel visual-textual-acoustic alignment framework for biological applications. BioVITA involves (i) a training dataset, (ii) a representation model, and (iii) a retrieval benchmark. First, we construct a large-scale training dataset comprising 1.3 million audio clips and 2.3 million images, covering 14,133 species annotated with 34 ecological trait labels. Second, building upon BioCLIP2, we introduce a two-stage training framework to effectively align audio representations with visual and textual representations. Third, we develop a cross-modal retrieval benchmark that covers all possible directional retrieval across the three modalities (i.e., image-to-audio, audio-to-text, text-to-image, and their reverse directions), with three taxonomic levels: Family, Genus, and Species. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model learns a unified representation space that captures species-level semantics beyond taxonomy, advancing multimodal biodiversity understanding. The project page is available at: https://dahlian00.github.io/BioVITA_Page/

The inherent semantic ambiguity of "many-to-many", where one video matches multiple texts and vice versa, aggravates the difficulty in text-video retrieval. The dominant deterministic embeddings only struggle to capture the mean semantics, while existing probabilistic methods fail to distinguish hard negatives for their imposing rigid uncertainty priors or ignoring the interaction between similarity and uncertainty. To this end, we propose a novel physics-inspired framework (GraviAlign) that decomposes the alignment of cross-modal semantic distributions into two orthogonal factors inspired by the Gravitational Force: (1) Semantic Attraction measuring gravitational alignment between distribution centers via uncertainty-derived "semantic mass" and "semantic distance"; (2) Geometric Overlap quantifying distribution intersection. Each factor has independent veto power to reject those matches with misalignment or poor overlap. Additionally, GraviAlign offers an efficient (O(D)), theoretically grounded alternative to intractable joint integrals. Extensive experiments on DiDeMo, MSR-VTT, and ActivityNet demonstrate our effectiveness and superiority, and solid ablation studies confirm the indispensability of two novel components.

Image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from multiple source images to produce a more informative and visually consistent representation, benefiting both human perception and downstream vision tasks. Despite recent progress, most existing fusion methods are designed for specific tasks (i.e., multi-modal, multi-exposure, or multi-focus fusion) and struggle to effectively preserve source information during the fusion process. This limitation primarily arises from task-specific architectures and the degradation of source information caused by deep-layer propagation. To overcome these issues, we propose UniFusion, a unified image fusion framework designed to achieve cross-task generalization. First, leveraging DINOv3 for modality-consistent feature extraction, UniFusion establishes a shared semantic space for diverse inputs. Second, to preserve the understanding of each source image, we introduce a reconstruction-alignment loss to maintain consistency between fused outputs and inputs. Finally, we employ a bilevel optimization strategy to decouple and jointly optimize reconstruction and fusion objectives, effectively balancing their coupling relationship and ensuring smooth convergence. Extensive experiments across multiple fusion tasks demonstrate UniFusion's superior visual quality, generalization ability, and adaptability to real-world scenarios.

Inspired by the success of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) in image generation, recent work has adapted reward-based learning to image super-resolution (ISR) by using Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models as rewards. However, existing IQA models typically output only a single global score and are insensitive to local, fine-grained distortions, allowing perceptually undesirable artifacts to obtain spuriously high rewards and leading to reward hacking. To address this issue, we propose FinPercep-RM, a fine-grained perceptual reward model built on an encoder-decoder architecture that predicts both a global quality score and a Perceptual Degradation Map for spatially localizing and quantifying local defects. We further introduce FGR-30k, a dataset containing diverse and subtle distortions produced by real-world super-resolution models, to train the reward model. While FinPercep-RM provides stronger supervision, its increased complexity also makes generator policy learning unstable. We therefore develop a Co-evolutionary Curriculum Learning (CCL) strategy, in which the reward model and the ISR model evolve synchronously: the reward signal progressively increases in complexity, while the ISR model starts with simple global supervision for fast convergence and gradually transitions to fine-grained rewards. This easy-to-hard design stabilizes training and suppresses reward hacking. Extensive experiments across multiple ISR models demonstrate improvements in both global quality and local realism. Code will be available at https://github.com/lyd-2022/FinPercep-RM.

Aerial-ground visual localization is a challenging task due to the significant differences in scene scale and view point captured between two views. In this work, we explore the practical benefit of jointly learning camera calibration and bird's-eye-view (BEV) projection for estimating full 6 Degrees-of-freedom relative camera pose between uncalibrated aerial and ground views. We present Visual Geometry Alignment (VGA), a unified framework that jointly learns a global gravity-alignment prior inferred from dense monocular perspective fields, and a planar alignment prior complementing the unobserved azimuth angle through Procrustes alignment in a shared BEV plane. At inference, we jointly refine the relative camera pose by integrating the predicted per-camera gravity alignment and relative planar azimuth angle, yielding improved orientation and translation alignment from visual input with extreme wide base-lines and limited overlap. We evaluate our method on challenging MatrixCity, ACC-NVS1 and ULTRRA ground-aerial pairs, demonstrating that optimizing with learned geometric priors can further improve the camera pose estimation across diverse altitudes and environment.

Machine Unlearning (MU) focuses on removing the influence of training samples from pre-trained models without retraining the model entirely. Existing MU methods have made several efforts to enable complete forgetting while preserving the model's performance on remaining data. However, they typically apply equal weights across different data, overlooking the ambiguous decision boundaries between similar samples or approximate classes. This leads to unnecessary consumption of shallowly memorized samples and significant performance degradation for approximate retention classes. Additionally, the inherent inconsistency between forgetting and retention objectives results in gradient conflict and domination problems during training, hindering model convergence and degrading overall performance. To address these, we introduce a novel adaptive gradient reweighting that assigns importance weights to individual forget samples or vulnerable retention classes, thereby enabling more efficient unlearning and preserving the performance of approximate classes. Subsequently, we propose a multi-stage objective optimization strategy, which comprises three optimization stages: Direction Rectification, Temporal Stabilization, and Adaptive Objective Combination. This strategy rectifies the direction of conflicting gradients and prevents one task (forgetting or retention) from dominating the model update. Comprehensive analyses and extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves considerable performance improvements in various tasks and scenarios.

We introduce Clothe and Pose, an image generation and editing task that enables users to try on garments while simultaneously adopting any desired pose. Our method takes a single user image, a set of garment images, and a reference pose as input, and outputs the user wearing the target garment in the specified pose. We also propose an evaluation framework for clothing and re-posing tasks. Our study encompasses a wide variety of garments--including athletic wear, bottoms, dresses, innerwear, and swimwear--across diverse poses. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of Clothe and Pose for human-centric editing on both real-world captures and synthetic imagery.

Multi-modal learning approaches that integrate pathological images with genomic profiles have significantly enhanced the accuracy of survival prediction tasks. However, previous methods often struggle to effectively process long-range gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) and sparse genomic profiles due to the limitations of conventional scanning strategies to serialize data and the complex and heterogeneous nature of the modalities. Inspired by recent advancements in Mamba and mixture of experts (MoE), we propose a novel multi-directional composite scanning strategy with mixture of attention and Mamba experts (MDCS-MoAME) for cancer survival prediction. Specifically, we introduce a multi-directional composite scanning (MDCS) strategy to both WSIs and genomic profiles, and use the Mamba encoder to process intra-modal representations at the region, patch, and gene level, ensuring sufficient utilization of the intrinsic information within each modality. To further capture heterogeneous inter-modal representations, we introduce mixture of attention and Mamba experts (MoAME), which dynamically selects tailored experts to model complex inter-modal correlations, flexibly focusing on the interactions between modalities. Finally, we introduce alignment constraints to recalibrate inter-modal interactions and reduce intra- and inter-modal representation redundancy, enhancing its discriminative power for comprehensive survival analysis. Experimental results on five publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance.