CVPR 2026 Papers

Recent diffusion models increasingly favor Transformer backbones, motivated by the remarkable scalability of fully attentional architectures. Yet the locality bias, parameter efficiency, and hardware friendliness--the attributes that established ConvNets as the efficient vision backbone--have seen limited exploration in modern generative modeling. Here we introduce the fully convolutional diffusion model (FCDM), a model having a backbone similar to ConvNeXt, but designed for conditional diffusion modeling. We find that using only 50% of the FLOPs of DiT-XL/2, FCDM-XL achieves competitive performance with 7x and 7.5x fewer training steps at 256x256 and 512x512 resolutions, respectively. Remarkably, FCDM-XL can be trained on a 4-GPU system, highlighting the exceptional training efficiency of our architecture. Our results demonstrate that modern convolutional designs provide a competitive and highly efficient alternative for scaling diffusion models, reviving ConvNeXt as a simple yet powerful building block for efficient generative modeling.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit powerful reasoning capabilities but suffer sophisticated jailbreak vulnerabilities. Fundamentally, aligning LVLMs is not just a safety challenge but a problem of economic efficiency. Current alignment methods struggle with the trade-off between safety, utility, and operational costs. Critically, a focus solely on final outputs (process-blindness) wastes significant computational budget on unsafe deliberation. This flaw allows harmful reasoning to be disguised with benign justifications, thereby circumventing simple additive safety scores.To address this, we propose EcoAlign, an inference-time framework that reframes alignment as an economically rational search by treating the LVLM as a boundedly rational agent. EcoAlign incrementally expands a thought graph and scores actions using a forward-looking function (analogous to net present value) that dynamically weighs expected safety, utility, and cost against the remaining budget. To prevent deception, path safety is enforced via the weakest-link principle. Extensive experiments across 3 closed-source and 2 open-source models on 6 datasets show that EcoAlign matches or surpasses state-of-the-art safety and utility at a lower computational cost, thereby offering a principled, economical pathway to robust LVLM alignment.

Continual Learning (CL) provides an effective paradigm for acquiring new knowledge, and the principle of learning without retaining past samples has led to exemplar-free CL that better matches practical conditions. However, a key challenge is the semantic shift, which requires reliable activation of past class representations to align with the current feature space. While drift compensation acts as the activator, it commonly assumes uniform semantic distributions and shifts, which is unrealistic for random data streams. For this, we propose the Dual-Estimator (Dual-E) to decouple global and local semantic shifts, addressing both issues of non-uniformity. Specifically, to address intra-task non-uniform semantic distributions that limit effective compensation for low-frequency semantics, Dual-E incorporates a mixture-of-experts estimator comprising multiple networks that model semantic shifts across diverse local representation spaces. For inter-task non-uniformity in semantic shifts, where uniform full-scale compensation potentially overlooks the varying degrees of semantic change across classes, Dual-E employs a low-rank estimator with an embedded low-rank network that prioritizes global semantic trends for classes exhibiting larger shifts. Dual-E leverages analytical solutions to update within a few epochs, enabling efficient plug-in integration with existing exemplar-free methods. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the advantages of Dual-E over state-of-the-art approaches.

The recent success of artificial intelligence motivates many non-professional users to train their own models. Those users often resort to cloud training services, seeking to obtain a sufficiently accurate model at a modest cost, for which properly setting up the learning rate and batch size is crucial. While various Hyper-parameter Optimization (HPO) methods have been proposed in that regard, they largely act based on heavy-weight validation signals, being inefficient in the overall cost. We find that the model training process can be viewed as a two-dimensional voting process---with gradients for different iterations and from different samples; moreover, to attain cost-efficient training is to ensure that the gradient redundancy is within a proper range which is similar across diverse models. Based on that insight, we further introduce GR-Gauge, a general method that gauges the gradient redundancy to instruct HPO decisions like configuration searching and trial termination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GR-Gauge can help attain near-optimal accuracy in much less time than existing methods.

To utilize pre-trained neural networks on edge and mobile devices, we often require efficient adaptation to user-specific runtime data distributions while operating under limited compute and memory resources. On-device retraining with a target dataset can facilitate such adaptations; however, it remains impractical due to the increasing depth of modern neural nets, as well as the computational overhead associated with gradient-based optimization across all layers. Current approaches reduce training cost by selecting a subset of layers for retraining; however, they rely on labeled data, at least one full-model backpropagation, or server-side meta-training, limiting their suitability for constrained devices. We introduce AdaBet, a gradient-free layer selection approach to rank important layers, followed by important channels of these layers, by analyzing topological features of their activation spaces through Betti Numbers and using forward passes alone. AdaBet allows selecting layers and channels with high learning capacity, which are important for retraining and adaptation, without requiring labels or gradients. Evaluating AdaBet on sixteen pairs of benchmark models and datasets shows AdaBet achieves an average gain of 2.5% more classification accuracy over gradient-based baselines while reducing average peak memory consumption by 40%. We open-source our code at https://github.com/Nokia-Bell-Labs/efficient_layer_selection

Image generative models have become indispensable tools to yield exquisite high-resolution (HR) images for everyone, ranging from general users to professional designers. However, a desired outcome often requires generating a large number of HR images with different prompts and seeds, resulting in high computational cost for both users and service providers. Generating low-resolution (LR) images first could alleviate computational burden, but it is not straightforward how to generate LR images that are perceptually consistent with their HR counterparts. Here, we consider the task of generating high-fidelity LR images, called Previews, that preserve perceptual similarity of their HR counterparts for an efficient workflow, allowing users to identify promising candidates before generating the final HR image. We propose the commutator-zero condition to ensure the LR-HR perceptual consistency for flow matching models, leading to the proposed training-free solution with downsampling matrix selection and commutator-zero guidance. Extensive experiments show that our method can generate LR images with up to 33% computation reduction while maintaining HR perceptual consistency. When combined with existing acceleration techniques, our method achieves up to 3xspeedup. Moreover, our formulation can be extended to image manipulations, such as warping and translation, demonstrating its generalizability.