CVPR 2026 Papers

Image aesthetic assessment (IAA) has extensive applications in content creation, album management, and recommendation systems, etc. In such applications, it is commonly needed to pick out the most aesthetically pleasing image from a series of images with subtle aesthetic variations, a topic we refer to as fine-grained IAA. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art IAA models are typically designed for coarse-grained evaluation, where images with notable aesthetic differences are evaluated independently on an absolute scale. These models are inherently limited in discriminating fine-grained aesthetic differences. To address the dilemma, we contribute FGAesthetics, a fine-grained IAA database with 32,217 images organized into 10,028 series, which are sourced from diverse categories including Natural, AIGC, and Cropping. Annotations are collected via pairwise comparisons within each series. We also devise Series Refinement and Rank Calibration to ensure the reliability of data and labels. Based on FGAesthetics, we further propose FGAesQ, a novel IAA framework that learns discriminative aesthetic scores from relative ranks through Difference-preserved Tokenization (DiffToken), Comparative Text-assisted Alignment (CTAlign), and Rank-aware Regression (RankReg). FGAesQ enables accurate aesthetic assessment in fine-grained scenarios while still maintains competitive performance in coarse-grained evaluation. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Embodied navigation that adheres to social norms remains an open research challenge. Our SocialNav is a foundational model for socially-aware navigation with a hierarchical "brain-action" architecture, capable of understanding high-level social norms and generating low-level, socially compliant trajectories. To enable such dual capabilities, we construct the SocNav Dataset, a large-scale collection of 7 million samples, comprising (1) a Cognitive Activation Dataset providing social reasoning signals such as chain-of-thought explanations and social traversability prediction, and (2) an Expert Trajectories Pyramid aggregating diverse navigation demonstrations from internet videos, simulated environments, and real-world robots. A multi-stage training pipeline is proposed to gradually inject and refine navigation intelligence: we first inject general navigation skills and social norms understanding into the model via imitation learning, and then refine such skills through a deliberately designed Socially-Aware FlowExploration GRPO (SAFE-GRPO), the first flow-based reinforcement learning framework for embodied navigation that explicitly rewards socially compliant behaviors. SocialNav achieves +38% success rate and +46% social compliance rate compared to the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating strong gains in both navigation performance and social compliance. Data and code will be made publicly available.

While 3DGS has emerged as a high-fidelity scene representation, encoding rich, general-purpose features directly from its primitives remains under-explored. We address this gap by introducing Chorus, a multi-teacher pretraining framework that learns a holistic feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene encoder by distilling complementary signals from 2D foundation models. Chorus employs a shared 3D encoder and teacher-specific projectors to learn from language-aligned, generalist, and object-aware teachers, encouraging a shared embedding space that captures signals from high-level semantics to fine-grained structure. We evaluate Chorus on a wide range of tasks: open-vocabulary semantic and instance segmentation, linear and decoder probing, data-efficient supervision, as well as LLM-based Q&A. Besides 3DGS, we also test Chorus on several benchmarks that only support point clouds by pretraining a variant using only Gaussians' centers, colors, estimated normals. Interestingly, this encoder shows strong transfer and outperforms the point clouds baseline while using 39.9xfewer training scenes. Finally, we propose a render-and-distill adaptation that facilitates out-of-domain finetuning. Our code and model is released at this codebase.

Invisible watermarking has become a critical mechanism for authenticating AI-generated image content, with major platforms deploying watermarking schemes at scale. However, evaluating the vulnerability of these schemes against sophisticated removal attacks remains essential to assess their reliability and guide robust design. In this work, we expose a fundamental vulnerability in invisible watermarks by reformulating watermark removal as a view synthesis problem. Our key insight is that generating a perceptually consistent alternative view of the same semantic content, akin to re-observing a scene from a shifted perspective, naturally removes the embedded watermark while preserving visual fidelity. This reveals a critical gap: watermarks robust to pixel-space and frequency-domain attacks remain vulnerable to semantic-preserving viewpoint transformations. We introduce a zero-shot diffusion-based framework that applies controlled geometric transformations in latent space, augmented with view-guided correspondence attention to maintain structural consistency during reconstruction. Operating on frozen pre-trained models without detector access or watermark knowledge, our method achieves state-of-the-art watermark suppression across 15 watermarking methods--outperforming 14 baseline attacks while maintaining superior perceptual quality across multiple datasets.

The 3D characterization of microstructures is crucial for understanding and designing functional materials. However, the scanning electron microscope (SEM), widely used in scientific research, captures only 2D electron intensity distributions. Existing SEM 3D reconstruction methods struggle with textureless regions, shadowing artifacts, and calibration dependencies, whereas advanced learning-based approaches fail to generalize to microscopic SEM domains due to the lack of physical priors and domain-specific data. We introduce NFH-SEM, a neural field-based hybrid framework that reconstructs high-fidelity 3D surfaces from multi-view, multi-detector SEM images. NFH-SEM integrates coarse multi-view geometry with photometric stereo cues from detector signals through a continuous neural field, incorporating a learnable forward model that embeds SEM imaging physics for self-calibrated, shadow-robust reconstruction. NFH-SEM achieves precise recovery across diverse specimens, revealing 478 nm layered features in two-photon lithography samples, 782 nm surface textures on pollen grains, and 1.559 mm fracture steps on silicon carbide particles, demonstrating its accuracy and broad applicability. Our code and real-world dataset are available at https://github.com/zju3dv/NFH-SEM.

Temporal retiming, the ability to reconstruct and render dynamic scenes at arbitrary timestamps, is crucial for applications such as slow-motion playback, temporal editing, and post-production. However, most existing 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) methods overfit at discrete frame indices but struggle to represent continuous-time frames, leading to ghosting artifacts when interpolating between timestamps. We identify this limitation as a form of temporal aliasing and propose RetimeGS, a simple yet effective 4DGS representation that explicitly defines the temporal behavior of the 3D Gaussian and mitigates temporal aliasing. To achieve smooth and consistent interpolation, we incorporate optical flow-guided initialization and supervision, triple-rendering supervision, and other targeted strategies. Together, these components enable ghost-free, temporally coherent rendering even under large motions. Experiments on datasets featuring fast motion, non-rigid deformation, and severe occlusions demonstrate that RetimeGS achieves superior quality and coherence over state-of-the-art methods.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) objects is indispensable for safely deploying object detectors in the wild. Current approaches enable the unknown-aware ability by regularizing the instance-level feature space, such as outlier synthesis. Despite the general efficacy, it is challenging to truly learn the concept of 'unknown' under the absence of real unknown data. In this paper, we propose UNO-Adapter, a simple yet highly effective framework tailored for OOD object detection. Our key insight is that in object detection, where in-distribution (ID) and OOD objects may coexist within the same context, we need global abstraction and reasoning to help the detector learn their differences, i.e., unknown injection. UNO-Adapter consists of two key steps: unsupervised concept discovery and neural concept binder. The former introduces an object-centric learning paradigm to abstract and model the holistic image, including both ID and OOD, obtaining sparse and compressed slot-based representations with relational constraints. The latter dynamically combines slots with object candidates extracted by the detector, binding the concept of unknown to the de facto detector. During inference, we introduce an image-guided OOD object score to reinforce the distinction between ID and OOD. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. In particular, UNO-Adapter reduces the FPR95 by up to 11.96% compared to the previous best OOD object detection method.

Diffeomorphic image registration (DIR) seeks topology-preserving transformations and is fundamental in medical imaging. Existing DIR methods rely on integration schemes (e.g., scaling-and-squaring) and multiple regularizers to enforce invertibility. We introduce **SGDIR**, a continuous-time registration framework, parameterized by known time-embedded backbones, that models diffeomorphisms using only a single semigroup-based regularization, eliminating explicit integration and auxiliary constraints. We mathematically prove that this formulation directly learns the flow of an underlying ODE, inherently enforcing inverse and cycle consistencies. We evaluate on eight 2D and 3D MR and CT datasets. Under strict semigroup enforcement, our model achieves near-perfect diffeomorphism and significantly outperforms existing diffeomorphic methods, while remaining competitive with leading non-diffeomorphic deformable models. When the regularization is relaxed, the same architecture functions as a deformable method and substantially surpasses state-of-the-art non-diffeomorphic approaches in registration accuracy. These results demonstrate that continuous-time deformation modeling, guided solely by our semigroup-based regularization, yields a unified framework capable of both rigorously diffeomorphic mapping and state-of-the-art deformable registration.

Multi-view 3D reconstruction methods remain highly sensitive to photometric inconsistencies arising from camera optical characteristics and variations in image signal processing (ISP). Existing mitigation strategies such as per-frame latent variables or affine color corrections lack physical grounding and generalize poorly to novel views. We propose the Physically-Plausible ISP (PPISP) correction module, which disentangles camera-intrinsic and capture-dependent effects through physically based and interpretable transformations. A dedicated PPISP controller, trained on the input views, predicts ISP parameters for novel viewpoints, analogous to auto exposure and auto white balance in real cameras. This design enables realistic and fair evaluation on novel views without access to ground-truth images. PPISP achieves SotA performance on standard benchmarks, while providing intuitive control and supporting the integration of metadata when available. The source code is available at: https://github.com/nv-tlabs/ppisp

Physical AI aims to develop models that can perceive and predict real-world dynamics; yet, the extent to which current multi-modal large language models and video generative models support these abilities is insufficiently understood. We introduce Physical AI Bench (PAI-Bench), a unified and comprehensive benchmark that evaluates perception and prediction capabilities across video generation, conditional video generation, and video understanding, comprising 2,808 real-world cases with task-aligned metrics designed to capture physical plausibility and domain-specific reasoning. Our study provides a systematic assessment of recent models and shows that video generative models, despite strong visual fidelity, often struggle to maintain physically coherent dynamics, while multi-modal large language models exhibit limited performance in forecasting and causal interpretation. These observations suggest that current systems are still at an early stage in handling the perceptual and predictive demands of Physical AI. In summary, PAI-Bench establishes a realistic foundation for evaluating Physical AI and highlights key gaps that future systems must address.

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art video generation quality, but their inference remains expensive due to the large number of sequential denoising steps. This has motivated a growing line of research on accelerating diffusion inference. Among training-free acceleration methods, caching reduces computation by reusing previously computed model outputs across timesteps. Existing caching methods rely on heuristic criteria to choose cache/reuse timesteps and require extensive tuning. We address this limitation with a principled sensitivity-aware caching framework. Specifically, we formalize the caching error through an analysis of the model output sensitivity to perturbations in the denoising inputs, i.e., the noisy latent and the timestep, and show that this sensitivity is a key predictor of caching error. Based on this analysis, we propose Sensitivity-Aware Caching (SenCache), a dynamic caching policy that adaptively selects caching timesteps on a per-sample basis. Our framework provides a theoretical basis for adaptive caching, explains why prior empirical heuristics can be partially effective, and extends them to a dynamic, sample-specific approach. Experiments on Wan 2.1, CogVideoX, and LTX-Video show that SenCache achieves better visual quality than existing caching methods under similar computational budgets.

The introduction of negative labels (NLs) has proven effective in enhancing Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. However, existing methods often lack an understanding of OOD images, making it difficult to construct an accurate negative space. Furthermore, the absence of negative labels semantically similar to ID labels constrains their capability in near-OOD detection. To address these issues, we propose shaping an Adaptive Negative Textual Space (ANTS) by leveraging the understanding and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, we cache images likely to be OOD samples from the historical test images and prompt the MLLM to describe these images, generating expressive negative sentences that precisely characterize the OOD distribution and enhance far-OOD detection. For the near-OOD setting, where OOD samples resemble the in-distribution (ID) subset, we cache the subset of ID classes that are visually similar to historical test images and then leverage MLLM reasoning to generate visually similar negative labels tailored to this subset, effectively reducing false negatives and improving near-OOD detection. To balance these two types of negative textual spaces, we design an adaptive weighted score that enables the method to handle different OOD task settings (near-OOD and far-OOD), making it highly adaptable in open environments. On the ImageNet benchmark, our ANTS significantly reduces the FPR95 by 3.1%, establishing a new state-of-the-art. Furthermore, our method is training-free and zero-shot, enabling high scalability. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZhuWenjie98/ANTS.

YOLO detectors are known for their fast inference speed, yet training them remains unexpectedly time-consuming due to their exhaustive pipeline that processes every training image in every epoch, even when many images have already been sufficiently learned. This stands in clear contrast to the efficiency suggested by the "You Only Look Once" philosophy. This naturally raises an important question: Does YOLO really need to see every training image in every epoch? To explore this, we propose an Anti-Forgetting Sampling Strategy (AFSS) that dynamically determines which images should be used and which can be skipped during each epoch, allowing the detector to learn more effectively and efficiently. Specifically, AFSS measures the learning sufficiency of each training image as the minimum of its detection recall and precision, and dynamically categorizes training images into easy, medium, or hard levels accordingly. Easy training images are sparsely resampled during training in a continuous review manner, with priority given to those that have not been used for a long time to reduce redundancy and prevent forgetting. Moderate training images are partially selected, prioritizing recently unused ones and randomly choosing the rest from unselected images to ensure coverage and prevent forgetting. Hard training images are fully sampled in every epoch to ensure sufficient learning. The learning sufficiency of each training image is periodically updated, enabling detectors to adaptively shift its focus toward the informative training images over time while progressively discarding redundant ones. On widely used natural image detection benchmarks (MS COCO 2017 and PASCAL VOC 2007) and remote sensing detection datasets (DOTA-v1.0 and DIOR-R), AFSS achieves more than 1.43x training speedup for YOLO-series detectors while also improving accuracy.

Music-driven 3D dance generation offers significant creative potential, yet practical applications demand versatile and multimodal control. Given the highly dynamic and complex human motion covering various styles and genres, dance generation requires satisfying diverse conditions beyond just music (e.g., spatial trajectories, keyframe gestures, or style descriptions). However, the absence of a large-scale and richly annotated dataset severely hinders progress. In this paper, we build OpenDanceSet, an extensive human dance dataset comprising over 100 hours across 14 genres and 147 subjects. Each sample has rich annotations to facilitate robust cross-modal learning: 3D motion, paired music, 2D keypoints, trajectories, and expert-annotated text descriptions. Furthermore, we propose OpenDanceNet, a unified masked modeling framework for controllable dance generation, including a disentangled auto-encoder and a multimodal joint-prediction Transformer. OpenDanceNet supports generation conditioned on music and arbitrary combinations of text, keypoints, or trajectories. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our work achieves high-fidelity synthesis with strong diversity and realistic physical contacts, while also offering flexible control over spatial and stylistic conditions.

Infrared and visible video fusion is pivotal for robust perceptual systems, aiming to synthesize a comprehensive video stream that leverages both thermal resilience and textured details. However, prevailing methods, by treating videos as sequences of independent frames, inherently introduce temporal incoherence, such as flickering and ghosting artifacts. While diffusion models possess strong generative priors to remedy this, their iterative nature is prohibitively slow for video. To resolve this fundamental dilemma, we propose a streaming diffusion model for efficient infrared and visible video fusion, termed SDMFusion. Our key insight is to exploit the generative prior of a pre-trained diffusion model into a one-step sampling framework, while explicitly modeling temporal dynamics. We design a memory-augmented latent pipeline where a temporal aggregation adapter aligns and propagates cross-frame features to ensure coherence, supported by a dedicated temporal consistency loss. This approach effectively decouples the challenge of achieving high fidelity from maintaining temporal stability. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art, generating fused videos with exceptional spatio-temporal consistency at a speed suitable for real-time application. The code is available at https://github.com/DandanYoung/SDMFusion.

We introduce SAM 3D Body (3DB), a promptable model for single-image full-body 3D human mesh recovery (HMR) that demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with strong generalization and consistent accuracy in diverse in-the-wild conditions. 3DB estimates the human pose of the body, feet, and hands. It is the first model to use a new parametric mesh representation, Momentum Human Rig (MHR), which decouples skeletal pose and body shape. 3DB employs an encoder-decoder architecture and supports auxiliary prompts, including 2D keypoints and masks, enabling user-guided inference similar to the SAM family of models. We derive high-quality annotations from a multi-stage annotation pipeline that uses various combinations of manual keypoint annotation, differentiable optimization, multi-view geometry, and dense keypoint detection. Our data engine efficiently selects and processes data to ensure data diversity, collecting unusual poses and rare imaging conditions. We present a new evaluation dataset organized by pose and appearance categories, enabling nuanced analysis of model behavior. Our experiments demonstrate superior generalization and substantial improvements over prior methods in both qualitative user preference studies and traditional quantitative analysis. Both 3DB and MHR are open-source.

We present MAMMA, a markerless motion-capture pipeline that accurately recovers SMPL-X parameters from multi-view video. Traditional motion-capture systems rely on physical markers. Although they offer high accuracy, their requirements of specialized hardware, manual marker placement, and extensive post-processing make them costly and time-consuming. Recent learning-based methods attempt to overcome these limitations, but most are designed for single-person capture, rely on sparse keypoints, or struggle with occlusions and physical interactions. In this work, we introduce a method that predicts dense 2D contact-aware and visibility-aware surface landmarks conditioned on segmentation masks, enabling person-specific correspondence estimation even under heavy occlusion. We employ a novel architecture that exploits learnable queries for each landmark. We demonstrate that our approach can handle complex person--person interaction and offers greater accuracy than existing methods. To train our network, we construct a large, synthetic multi-view dataset combining human motions from diverse sources, including extreme poses, hand motions, and close interactions. Our dataset yields high-variability synthetic sequences with rich body contact and occlusion, and includes SMPL-X ground-truth annotations with dense 2D landmarks. The result is a system capable of accurately capturing human motion without the need for markers. Our approach offers competitive reconstruction quality compared to commercial marker-based motion-capture solutions, without the extensive manual cleanup. Finally, we address the absence of common benchmarks for dense-landmark prediction and markerless motion capture by introducing two evaluation settings built from real multi-view sequences. https://mamma.is.tue.mpg.de/