CVPR 2026 Papers

The rise of AI-generated images (AIGIs) poses growing challenges for digital authenticity, prompting the need for efficient, generalizable image forgery detection systems. Existing methods, whether non-LLM-based or LLM-based, exhibit distinct advantages and limitations. While non-LLM-based models offer efficient low-level artifact detection, they often lack semantic understanding. Conversely, LLM-based methods provide strong semantic reasoning and explainability but are computationally intensive and less sensitive to subtle visual artifacts. Moreover, the true contribution of explanatory reasoning texts to forgery detection performance remains unclear. In this work, we investigate the intrinsic value and potential of LLM-generated reasoning texts, considering it a source of generalization and semantic-error sensitivity. Based on these findings, we propose ReAlign, a novel framework that distills high-quality reasoning texts generated by a GRPO-optimized LLM into a lightweight AIGI detector via contrastive learning. ReAlign effectively inherits the generalization ability and semantic sensitivity capability of reasoning textual representations, while remaining efficient and lightweight for deployment. Moreover, ReAlign adopts a tailored joint optimization strategy that integrates contrastive loss for image-text alignment and classification loss for accurate forgery discrimination. Experimental results on AIGCDetectBenchmark, AIGI-Holmes, and our newly constructed UltraSynth-10k demonstrate that ReAlign consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art detectors in both accuracy and generalization, particularly when facing complex, high-fidelity forgeries from modern generative models.

The development of affective multimodal language models (MLMs) has long been constrained by a gap between low-level perception and high-level interaction, leading to fragmented affective capabilities and limited generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose a cognitively inspired three-level hierarchy that organizes affective tasks according to their cognitive depth--perception, understanding, and interaction--and provides a unified conceptual foundation for advancing affective modeling. Guided by this hierarchy, we introduce Nano-EmoX, a small-scale multitask MLM, and P2E (Perception-to-Empathy), a curriculum-based training framework. Nano-EmoX integrates a suite of omni-modal encoders, including an enhanced facial encoder and a fusion encoder, to capture key multimodal affective cues and improve cross-task transferability. The outputs are projected into a unified language space via heterogeneous adapters, empowering a lightweight language model to tackle diverse affective tasks. Concurrently, P2E progressively cultivates emotional intelligence by aligning rapid perception with chain-of-thought-driven empathy. To the best of our knowledge, Nano-EmoX is the first compact MLM (2.2B) to unify six core affective tasks across all three hierarchy levels, achieving state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating excellent efficiency and generalization.

Multimodal misinformation poses an escalating challenge that often evades traditional detectors, which are opaque black boxes and fragile against new manipulation tactics. We present Probabilistic Concept Graph Reasoning (PCGR), an interpretable, modular, and evolvable framework that reframes multimodal misinformation detection (MMD) as structured, concept-based reasoning. PCGR follows a build-then-infer paradigm, which first constructs a graph of human-understandable concept nodes, including novel high-level concepts automatically discovered and validated by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and then applies hierarchical attention over this concept graph to infer claim veracity. This design produces interpretable reasoning chains linking evidence to conclusions. Experiments demonstrate that PCGR achieves state-of-the-art MMD accuracy and robustness to emerging manipulation types, outperforming prior methods in both coarse detection and fine-grained manipulation recognition.

This work tackles a key challenge in test-time energy adaptation: prohibitive time overhead arising from recent state-of-the-art test-time adaptation (TTA) methods, which are built on energy models relying on iterative Monte Carlo or Langevin dynamics sampling with multiple stochastic updates per test instance to approximate energy gradients. We tackle the problem from an innovative control system perspective by i) describing the energy as a complex-valued wave, where the amplitude encodes energy uncertainty and the phase characterizes its evolution, and ii) maintaining a time-dependent wave equation that interprets TTA as a control system evolution process. By enforcing the control system law of probability current conservation, our method directs probability current away from high-energy (error-prone) regions toward low-energy (accurate) ones, achieving adaptive energy redistribution without additional stochastic sampling while preserving the overall normalization of the energy landscape. Experimentally, the proposed method significantly outperforms baseline methods across several public benchmark datasets, with adaptive time being only 1/3 1/7 of that required by the compared Top-1 to Top-3 baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/wongzbb/APT.

Many audio-visual learning methods have focused on aligning audio and visual information, either through semantic or temporal correspondence. However, most of these works have utilized monaural audio, which does not contain information about the spatial location of the sound source. In contrast, humans and other animals utilize binaural hearing to perceive this spatial information. Combining spatial sound and visual perception enables powerful high-level reasoning: for example, a person looking for their phone may hear the ringing sound coming from a backpack sitting on a table, and quickly infer that the missing phone is inside the backpack. In this paper, we investigate the problem of Audio-Visual Spatial Reasoning. We design a spatial audio-visual question answering dataset to cover scenarios where semantic correspondence between audio and visual signals is absent but spatial alignment exists, as well as cases with multiple audio-visual semantic correspondences that require spatial reasoning to disambiguate. We propose a model that learns spatial comprehension across the audio and vision modalities by connecting them with a large language model and experimentally demonstrate that spatial sound perception is an essential part of our task.

Recent advances in video reward models and post-training strategies have improved text-to-video (T2V) generation. While these models typically assess visual quality, motion quality, and text alignment, they often overlook key structural distortions, such as abnormal object appearances and interactions, which can degrade the overall quality of the generative video.To address this gap, we introduce REACT, a frame-level reward model designed specifically for structural distortions evaluation in generative videos. REACT assigns point-wise scores and attribution labels by reasoning over video frames, focusing on recognizing distortions. To support this, we construct a large-scale human preference dataset, annotated based on our proposed taxonomy of structural distortions, and generate additional data using a efficient Chain-of-Thought (CoT) synthesis pipeline. REACT is trained with a two-stage framework: (1) supervised fine-tuning with masked loss for domain knowledge injection, followed by (2) reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and pairwise rewards to enhance reasoning capability and align output scores with human preferences. During inference, a dynamic sampling mechanism is introduced to focus on frames most likely to exhibit distortion.We also present REACT-Bench, a benchmark for generative video distortion evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that REACT complements existing reward models in assessing structural distortion, achieving both accurate quantitative evaluations and interpretable attribution analysis.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated remarkable potential in enhancing the reasoning capability of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, RLVR often drives the policy toward over-determinism, resulting in ineffective exploration and premature policy convergence. While promoting token-level diversity has shown promise in mitigating entropy collapse, we argue that the latent dynamics underlying token generation encode a far richer computational structure for steering policy optimization toward a more effective exploration-exploitation tradeoff. To enable tractable analysis and intervention of the latent dynamics of LRMs, we leverage Koopman operator theory to obtain a linearized representation of their hidden state dynamics. This enables us to introduce Dynamic Spectral Dispersion (DSD), a new metric to quantify the heterogeneity of the model's latent dynamics, serving as a direct indicator of policy exploration. Building upon these foundations, we propose Reasoning with Latent eXploration (ReLaX), a framework that explicitly incorporates latent dynamics to regulate exploration and exploitation during policy optimization. Comprehensive experiments across a wide range of multimodal and text-only reasoning benchmarks show that ReLaX consistently incentivizes reasoning capability and outperforms existing token-level methods. Our project is available at https://github.com/ZhangShimin1/ReLaX.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) tasks require reasoning over complex visual scenes and executing adaptive actions in dynamic environments. While recent studies on reasoning VLAs show that explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) can improve generalization, they suffer from high inference latency due to lengthy reasoning traces. We propose Fast-ThinkAct, an efficient reasoning framework that achieves compact yet performant planning through verbalizable latent reasoning. Fast-ThinkAct learns to reason efficiently with latent CoTs by distilling from a teacher, driven by a preference-guided objective to align manipulation trajectories that transfers both linguistic and visual planning capabilities for embodied control. This enables reasoning-enhanced policy learning that effectively connects compact reasoning to action execution. Extensive experiments across diverse embodied manipulation and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Fast-ThinkAct achieves strong performance with up to 89.3% reduced inference latency over state-of-the-art reasoning VLAs, while maintaining effective long-horizon planning, few-shot adaptation, and failure recovery.

Recent advances in 3D scene-language understanding have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) for 3D reasoning by transferring their general reasoning ability to 3D multi-modal contexts. However, existing methods typically adopt standard decoders from language modeling, which rely on a causal attention mask. This design introduces two fundamental conflicts in 3D scene understanding: sequential bias among order-agnostic 3D objects and restricted object-instruction attention, hindering task-specific reasoning. To overcome these limitations, we propose 3D Spatial Language Instruction Mask (3D-SLIM), an effective masking strategy that replaces the causal mask with an adaptive attention mask tailored to the spatial structure of 3D scenes. Our 3D-SLIM introduces two key components: a Geometry-adaptive Mask that constrains attention based on spatial density rather than token order, and an Instruction-aware Mask that enables object tokens to directly access instruction context. This design allows the model to process objects based on their spatial relationships while being guided by the user's task. 3D-SLIM is simple, requires no architectural modifications, and adds no extra parameters, yet it yields substantial performance improvements across diverse 3D scene-language tasks. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and LLM baselines validate its effectiveness and underscore the critical role of decoder design in 3D multi-modal reasoning.

Despite significant progress in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their clinical reasoning capacity for multi-modal diagnosis remains largely unexamined. Current benchmarks, mostly single-modality data, can't evaluate progressive reasoning and cross-modal integration essential for clinical practice. We introduce the Cross-Modality Progressive Clinical Reasoning (X-PCR) benchmark, the first comprehensive evaluation of MLLMs through a complete ophthalmology diagnostic workflow, with two reasoning tasks: 1) a six-stage progressive reasoning chain spanning image quality assessment to clinical decision-making, and 2) a cross-modality reasoning task integrating six imaging modalities. The benchmark comprises 26,415 images and 177,868 expert-verified VQA pairs curated from 51 public datasets, covering 52 ophthalmic diseases. Evaluation of 21 MLLMs reveals critical gaps in progressive reasoning and cross-modal integration. Dataset and code: https://github.com/CVI-SZU/X-PCR.

Open-Vocabulary Temporal Action Detection (OV-TAD) aims to classify and localize action segments in untrimmed videos for unseen categories. Previous methods rely solely on global alignment between label-level semantics and visual features, which is insufficient to transfer temporal consistent visual knowledge from seen to unseen classes. To address this, we propose a Phase-wise Decomposition and Alignment (PDA) framework, which enables fine-grained action pattern learning for effective prior knowledge transfer. Specifically, we first introduce the CoT-Prompting Semantic Decomposition (CSD) module, which leverages the chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning ability of large language models to automatically decompose action labels into coherent phase-level descriptions, emulating human cognitive processes. Then, Text-infused Foreground Filtering (TIF) module is introduced to adaptively filter action-relevant segments for each phase leveraging phase-wise semantic cues, producing semantically aligned visual representations. Furthermore, we propose the Adaptive Phase-wise Alignment (APA) module to perform phase-level visual-textual matching, and adaptively aggregates alignment results across phases for final prediction. This adaptive phase-wise alignment facilitates the capture of transferable action patterns and significantly enhances generalization to unseen actions. Extensive experiments on two OV-TAD benchmarks demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method.

Vision-Language Models (VLM) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, showing promise for end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Chain-of-Thought (CoT), as VLM's widely used reasoning strategy, is facing critical challenges. Existing textual CoT has a large gap between text semantic space and trajectory physical space. Although the recent approach utilizes future image to replace text as CoT process, it lacks clear planning-oriented objective guidance to generate images with accurate scene evolution. To address these, we innovatively propose MindDriver, a progressive multimodal reasoning framework that enables VLM to imitate human-like progressive thinking for autonomous driving.MindDriver presents semantic understanding, semantic-to-physical space imagination, and physical-space trajectory planning.To achieve aligned reasoning processes in MindDriver, we develop a feedback-guided automatic data annotation pipeline to generate aligned multimodal reasoning training data. Furthermore, we develop a progressive reinforcement fine-tuningmethod to optimize the alignment through progressive high-level reward-based learning.MindDriver demonstrates superior performance in both nuScences open-loop and Bench2Drive closed-loop evaluation. Codes: https://github.com/hotdogcheesewhite/MindDriver.

Agentic vision-language models are increasingly trained to "think with images" by calling image operations. However, we show that high final-answer accuracy often hides unfaithful visual reasoning: models may invoke tools on irrelevant regions or ignore tool outputs entirely, yet still guess the correct answer. In this work, we first propose a faithfulness evaluation protocol that measures whether intermediate visual tool outputs (e.g., crops) actually contain the queried evidence. This reveals that recent visual agents achieve high final-answer accuracy but exhibit low rates of faithful tool-use on visual search benchmarks. We then introduce CodeV, a code-based visual agent trained with Tool-Aware Policy Optimization (TAPO). TAPO is a process-level RL framework that augments GRPO with dense rewards defined directly on visual tool inputs and outputs, rather than on chain-of-thought tokens, making supervision easier to verify and less susceptible to reward hacking. CodeV represents visual tools as executable Python code, and TAPO assigns step-wise rewards based solely on the question and tool output, encouraging both necessary and evidence-consistent tool use. In a two-stage SFT+RL pipeline, CodeV achieves competitive or superior accuracy while substantially increasing faithful tool-use rates on related visual search benchmarks. Beyond visual search, CodeV attains strong performance on a range of multimodal reasoning and math benchmarks, suggesting that explicitly supervising intermediate tool behavior is crucial for building trustworthy, agentic visual reasoning systems.

The video reasoning ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is crucial for downstream tasks like video question answering and temporal grounding. While recent approaches have explored text-based chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning for MLLMs, these methods often suffer from limited cross-modal interaction and increased hallucination, especially with longer videos or reasoning chains. To address these challenges, we propose Video Intelligence via Tool-Augmented Learning (VITAL), a novel end-to-end agentic video reasoning framework. With a visual toolbox, the model can densely sample new video frames on demand and generate multimodal CoT for precise long video reasoning. We observe that temporal grounding and question answering are mutually beneficial for video understanding tasks. Therefore, we construct two high-quality multi-task video reasoning datasets MTVR-CoT-72k for supervised fine-tuning and MTVR-RL-110k for reinforcement learning. Moreover, we propose a Difficulty-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization algorithm (DGRPO) to mitigate difficulty imbalance in multi-task reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments on eleven challenging video understanding benchmarks demonstrate the advanced reasoning ability of VITAL, outperforming existing methods in video question answering and temporal grounding tasks, especially in long video scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/zhang9302002/ThinkingWithVideos.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images by integrating a reference image with a corresponding modification text. CIR requires jointly considering the explicit semantics specified in the query and the implicit semantics embedded within its bi-modal composition. Recent training-free Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR) methods leverage Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to generate detailed target descriptions, converting the implicit information into explicit textual expressions. However, these methods rely heavily on the textual modality and fail to capture the fuzzy retrieval nature that requires considering diverse combinations of candidates. This leads to reduced diversity and accuracy in retrieval results. To address this limitation, we propose a novel training-free method, Geodesic Mixup-based Implicit semantic eXpansion and Explicit semantic Re-ranking for ZS-CIR (G-MIXER). G-MIXER constructs composed query features that reflect the implicit semantics of reference image-text pairs through geodesic mixup over a range of mixup ratios, and builds a diverse candidate set. The generated candidates are then re-ranked using explicit semantics derived from MLLMs, improving both retrieval diversity and accuracy. Our proposed G-MIXER achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple ZS-CIR benchmarks, effectively handling both implicit and explicit semantics without additional training. Our code will be available at https://github.com/maya0395/gmixer.

Cross-subject EEG-to-image retrieval for visual decoding is challenged by subject shift and hubness in the embedding space, which distort similarity geometry and destabilize top-k rankings, making small-k shortlists unreliable. We introduce SATTC (Structure-Aware Test-Time Calibration), a label-free calibration head that operates directly on the similarity matrix of frozen EEG and image encoders. SATTC combines a geometric expert-subject-adaptive whitening of EEG embeddings with an adaptive variant of Cross-domain Similarity Local Scaling (CSLS)--and a structural expert built from mutual nearest neighbors, bidirectional top-k ranks, and class popularity, fused via a simple Product-of-Experts rule. On THINGS-EEG under a strict leave-one-subject-out protocol, standardized inference with cosine similarities, l2-normalized embeddings, and candidate whitening already yields a strong cross-subject baseline over the original ATM retrieval setup. Building on this baseline, SATTC further improves Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy, reduces hubness and per-class imbalance, and produces more reliable small-k shortlists. These gains transfer across multiple EEG encoders, supporting SATTC as an encoder-agnostic, label-free test-time calibration layer for cross-subject neural decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/QunjieHuang/SATTC-CVPR2026

Clinical video diagnosis, in which physicians assess dynamic tissue responses across procedural stages, is critical for detecting diseases such as cervical and colorectal cancers. Recent spatiotemporal models map visual progressions directly to diagnostic outputs, yet overlook two hallmarks of expert reasoning: clinically grounded diagnostic principles and hypothesis-driven counterfactual thinking. This gap leads existing methods to conflate causal pathological cues with non-pathological variations, thereby limiting their reliability in data-scarce settings. Here we show that explicitly modeling counterfactual tissue evolution, guided by clinical rules that encode expert diagnostic principles, substantially improves diagnostic robustness-emulating the hypothesis-driven reasoning clinicians employ in practice. We introduce MEDVCR, comprising a Counterfactual Generator (CG) that synthesizes hypothetical tissue transitions via diffusion modeling, a Counterfactual Representation Learning (CRL) module that enforces temporal consistency, pathological separability, and counterfactual alignment, and a Dual Diagnostic Prediction (DDP) strategy that combines video-level context with frame-level counterfactual contrast. On two representative tasks, MEDVCR achieves 93.0% Recall@1 on colposcopy (+10.2%) and 94.8% Average Precision (AP) on colonoscopy (+2.6%), outperforming all state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. We anticipate that this counterfactual reasoning paradigm will open new avenues for vision-based clinical diagnostic tasks toward more transparent and interpretable decision support.

Multimodal Summarization (MMS) aims to generate concise textual summaries by understanding and integrating information across videos, transcripts, and images. However, existing approaches still suffer from three main challenges: (1) reliance on domain-specific supervision, (2) implicit fusion with weak cross-modal grounding, and (3) flat temporal modeling without event transitions. To address these issues, we introduce **CoE**, a training-free MMS framework that performs structured reasoning through a **Chain-of-Events** guided by a Hierarchical Event Graph (HEG). The HEG encodes textual semantics into an explicit event hierarchy that scaffolds cross-modal grounding and temporal reasoning. Guided by this structure, **CoE** localizes key visual cues, models event evolution and causal transitions, and refines outputs via lightweight style adaptation for domain alignment. Extensive experiments on eight diverse datasets demonstrate that **CoE** consistently outperforms state-of-the-art video CoT baselines, achieving average gains of **+3.04 ROUGE**, **+9.51 CIDEr**, and **+1.88 BERTScore**, highlighting its robustness, interpretability, and cross-domain generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/youxiaoxing/CoE.

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG), the task of localizing video segments from text queries, struggles in open-world settings due to limited dataset scale and semantic diversity, causing performance gaps between common and rare concepts. To overcome these limitations, we introduce OmniVTG, a new large-scale dataset for open-world VTG, coupled with a Self-Correction Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training paradigm designed to enhance the grounding capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Our OmniVTG is constructed via a novel Semantic Coverage Iterative Expansion pipeline, which first identifies gaps in the vocabulary of existing datasets and collects videos that are highly likely to contain these target concepts. For high-quality annotation, we leverage the insight that modern MLLMs excel at dense captioning more than direct grounding and design a caption-centric data engine to prompt MLLMs to generate dense, timestamped descriptions. Beyond the dataset, we observe that simple supervised finetuning (SFT) is insufficient, as a performance gap between rare and common concepts still persists. We find that MLLMs' video understanding ability significantly surpasses their direct grounding ability. Based on this, we propose a Self-Correction Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training paradigm. We train the MLLM to first predict, then use its understanding capabilities to reflect on and refine its own predictions. This capability is instilled via a three-stage pipeline of SFT, CoT finetuning, and reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments show our approach not only excels at open-world grounding in our OmniVTG dataset but also achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on four existing VTG benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/OmniVTG.