CVPR 2026 Papers

Visual query localization (VQL) aims to predict a spatial-temporal response of the most recent occurrence from a sequence given a query. Currently, most research focuses on visual query localization from 2D videos, while its counterpart in 3D space has received little attention. In this paper, we make the first attempt to visual query localization in the 3D world by introducing a novel benchmark, dubbed 3DVQL. Specifically, 3DVQL contains 2,002 sequences with around 170,000 frames and 6.4K response track segments from 38 object categories. Each sequence in 3DVQL is provided with multiple modalities including point clouds (PC), RGB and depth images to support flexible research. To ensure high-quality annotation, each sequence is manually annotated with multiple rounds of verification and refinement. To our best knowledge, 3DVQL is the first benchmark towards 3D multimodal visual query localization. To facilitate comparison for subsequent research, we implement a series of representative 3D multimodal VQL baselines using PC and RGB. The experimental results show that existing methods exhibit significant performance variations across different fusion modules. To encourage future research, we propose a lift and attention fusion algorithm named LaF, which significantly outperforms existing baseline models. Our benchmark and model will be publicly released at our webpage https://github.com/wuhengliangliang/3DVQL.

Audio-visual navigation enables embodied agents to navigate toward sound-emitting targets by leveraging both auditory and visual cues. However, most existing approaches rely on precomputed room impulse responses (RIRs) for binaural audio rendering, restricting agents to discrete grid positions and leading to spatially discontinuous observations. To establish a more realistic setting, we introduce Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments (SAVN-CE), where agents can move freely in 3D spaces and perceive temporally and spatially coherent audio-visual streams. In this setting, targets may intermittently become silent or stop emitting sound entirely, causing agents to lose goal information. To tackle this challenge, we propose MAGNet, a multimodal transformer-based model that jointly encodes spatial and semantic goal representations and integrates historical context with self-motion cues to enable memory-augmented goal reasoning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MAGNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 12.1% absolute improvement in success rate. These results also highlight its robustness to short-duration sounds and long-distance navigation scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/yichenzeng24/SAVN-CE.

Visual Text Rendering (VTR) remains a critical challenge in text-to-image generation, where even advanced models frequently produce text with structural anomalies such as distortion, blurriness, and misalignment. However, we find that leading MLLMs and specialist OCR models largely fail to perceive these structural anomalies, creating a critical bottleneck for both VTR evaluation and RL-based optimization. As a result, even state-of-the-art generators (e.g., SeedDream4.0, Qwen-Image) still struggle to render structurally faithful text. To address this, we propose TextPecker, a plug-and-play structural anomaly perceptive RL strategy that mitigates noisy reward signals and works with any text-to-image generator. To enable this capability, we construct a recognition dataset with character-level structural-anomaly annotations and develop a stroke-editing synthesis engine to expand structural-error coverage. Experiments show that TextPecker consistently improves diverse text-to-image models; even on the well-optimized Qwen-Image, it significantly yields average gains of 4% in structural fidelity and 8.7% in semantic alignment for Chinese text rendering, establishing a new state-of-the-art in high-fidelity VTR. Our work fills a gap in VTR optimization, providing a foundational step towards reliable and structural faithful visual text generation.

Sparse Autoencoders uncover thousands of features in vision models, yet explaining these features without requiring human intervention remains an open challenge. While previous work has proposed generating correlation-based explanations based on top activating input examples, we present a fundamentally different alternative based on causal interventions. We leverage the structure of Vision-Language Models and steer individual SAE features in the vision encoder after providing an empty image. Then, we prompt the language model to explain what it "sees", effectively eliciting the visual concept represented by each feature. Results show that Steering offers an scalable alternative that complements traditional approaches based on input examples, serving as a new axis for automated interpretability in vision models. Moreover, the quality of explanations improves consistently with the scale of the language model, highlighting our method as a promising direction for future research. Finally, we propose Steering-informed Top-k, a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of causal interventions and input-based approaches to achieve state-of-the-art explanation quality without additional computational cost.

The synthesis of synchronized audio-visual content is a key challenge in generative AI, with open-source models facing challenges in robust audio-video alignment. Our analysis reveals that this issue is rooted in three fundamental challenges of the joint diffusion process: (1) Correspondence Drift, where concurrently evolving noisy latents impede stable learning of alignment; (2) inefficient global attention mechanisms that fail to capture fine-grained temporal cues; and (3) the intra-modal bias of conventional Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), which enhances conditionality but not cross-modal synchronization.To overcome these challenges, we introduce Harmony, a novel framework that mechanistically enforces audio-visual synchronization. We first propose a Cross-Task Synergy training paradigm to mitigate drift by leveraging strong supervisory signals from audio-driven video and video-driven audio generation tasks. Then, we design a Global-Local Decoupled Interaction Module for efficient and precise temporal-style alignment. Finally, we present a novel Synchronization-Enhanced CFG (SyncCFG) that explicitly isolates and amplifies the alignment signal during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Harmony establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing methods in both generation fidelity and, critically, in achieving fine-grained audio-visual synchronization.

In this paper we show that visual diffusion models can serve as effective geometric solvers: they can directly reason about geometric problems by working in pixel space. We first demonstrate this on the Inscribed Square Problem, a long-standing problem in geometry that asks whether every Jordan curve contains four points forming a square. We then extend the approach to two other well-known hard geometric problems: the Steiner Tree Problem and the Maximum Area Polygon Problem. Our method treats each problem instance as an image and trains a standard visual diffusion model that transforms Gaussian noise into an image representing a valid approximate solution that closely matches the exact one. The model learns to transform noisy geometric structures into correct configurations, effectively recasting geometric reasoning as image generation. Unlike prior work that necessitates specialized architectures and domain-specific adaptations when applying diffusion to parametric geometric representations, we employ a standard visual diffusion model that operates on the visual representation of the problem. This simplicity highlights a surprising bridge between generative modeling and geometric problem solving. Beyond the specific problems studied here, our results point toward a broader paradigm: operating in image space provides a general and practical framework for approximating notoriously hard problems, and opens the door to tackling a far wider class of challenging geometric tasks.

In recent years, face-based authentication methods are gradually replacing traditional methods across various applications, offering enhanced security and user convenience. However, these methods are threatened by the continuously evolving DeepFake techniques. In this paper, a novel Visual Speaker Authentication (VSA) approach based on dynamic lip-prints is proposed to improve system security against diverse attacks. The lip-prints are discriminative viseme segments that capture user's localized speaking habits. By leveraging these dynamic lip-prints, this approach can expand the prompt set without requiring additional user-recordings or model retraining, thereby strengthening resilience to replay attacks. Moreover, a Multi-Layer Dynamic-Enhanced Encoder is introduced to model fine-grained lip dynamics, addressing data scarcity challenges and ensuring robust feature extraction even in scenarios with short temporal spans and limited enrollment data. We have carried out extensive experiments on several datasets and the results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in both security enhancement and prompt set scalability.

Advances in large reasoning models have shown strong performance on complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute through extended inference-time thinking. However, recent studies observe that in vision-dependent tasks, extended textual reasoning at inference time can often degrade performance as models progressively lose attention to visual tokens, increasingly relying on textual priors alone. To address this, prior works used reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning to route visual tokens or employ refocusing mechanisms during reasoning. While effective, these methods are computationally expensive, requiring large-scale data generation and policy optimization. To leverage the benefits of inference-time compute without additional RL fine-tuning, we propose VisRef, a visually grounded test-time scaling framework. Our key idea is to actively guide the reasoning process through re-injecting a coreset of visual tokens that are semantically relevant to the reasoning context yet diverse and globally representative of the image for more grounded multi-modal reasoning. Experiments on three visual reasoning benchmarks with state-of-the-art multi-modal large reasoning models demonstrate that under fixed inference-time compute budgets, VisRef consistently outperforms existing test-time scaling approaches by up to 6.4%.