CVPR 2026 Papers

Foundational vision models have become the de facto standard for many vision tasks due to their strong performance. However, they are notoriously opaque and remain hard to interpret. We present ALOE (ALign Once to Explain), a one-time, label-free feature alignment based approach that efficiently converts foundational vision models into inherently interpretable B-cos variants. Once aligned, the B-cos backbone is used as a drop-in replacement across several downstream tasks--amortizing the cost of interpretability. ALOE is robust across pre-training paradigms (supervised, self-supervised, vision-language) and is 100-1000x more data-efficient than training from scratch. On classification, it outperforms fully-supervised B-cos models (e.g., +9.2 p.p. top-1 on ImageNet for ViT-B/16), retains strong linear probing, k-NN, and zero-shot transfer performance competitive with foundational backbones (DINOv3, SigLIP2) across diverse datasets. It also preserves spatially structured features useful for dense prediction, while yielding well-localized and highly human-interpretable explanations by design. Code link https://github.com/rmaser/aloe.

Context-dependent (CD) tasks demand the model to have advanced visual understanding ability, such as recognizing camouflaged objects and medical lesions. Current CD methods rely heavily on pixel-level annotated training sets, neglecting issues from redundant samples and the high annotation costs. In this paper, we address the pruning needs of CD datasets, focusing on selecting the most valuable samples for labeling and training using weak annotations. To achieve this, we decompose CD coreset selection into two steps: sample evaluation and coreset selection, proposing corresponding solutions: points-based optimal transport and a maximum distance entropy strategy. Specifically, we formulate sample evaluation as an optimal transport problem between foreground and background distributions, designing a foreground destruction-reconstruction process based on points to compute transport costs and score samples. For samples of varying importance, our selection strategy balances coreset coverage and diversity. We validate our method on six CD tasks, achieving 1% accuracy loss relative to full training under a 40% pruning rate.

Visual Autoregressive Modeling (VAR) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for image generation that surpasses diffusion models in efficiency and quality. However, accelerating attention computation in VAR is still challenging because attention patterns across scales exhibit strong and complex semantic biases that early coarse-scale tokens dominate global structure, while fine-scale tokens mainly refine local details. Existing acceleration methods rely on heuristic token pruning or fixed attention masks, lacking a principled way to balance acceleration and semantic fidelity. In this work, we propose a two-stage acceleration framework for VAR. First, we introduce a semantic-cost-aware masking strategy (SCA-Mask) that quantifies the importance of each attention tile and formulates mask shape design as a cost-constrained optimization problem. This enables adaptive pruning under a given compute budget while preserving essential semantic context. Second, we present Post-Acceleration Adaptation (PAA), a decoder-side fine-tuning scheme that employs internal knowledge distillation to restore image quality from pruned latents. PAA does not require external data and uses a lightweight LoRA-based adaptation, providing a highly efficient alternative to retraining the autoregressive transformer. Comprehensive experiments across multiple VAR tasks demonstrate that our method achieves decent speedup with negligible loss of visual fidelity, yielding a principled and effective pathway toward fast and high-quality visual autoregressive generation.

We contend that embodied learning is fundamentally a lifecycle problem rather than a single-stage optimization. Systems that optimize only one link (data collection, simulation, learning, or deployment) rarely sustain improvement or generalize beyond narrow settings. We introduce Arcadia, a closed-loop framework that operationalizes embodied lifelong learning by tightly coupling four stages: (1) Self-evolving exploration and grounding for autonomous data acquisition in physical environments, (2) Generative scene reconstruction and augmentation for realistic and extensible scene creation, (3) a Shared embodied representation architecture that unifies navigation and manipulation within a single multimodal backbone, and (4) Sim-from-real evaluation and evolution that closes the feedback loop through simulation-based adaptation. This coupling is non-decomposable: removing any stage breaks the improvement loop and reverts to one-shot training. Arcadia delivers consistent gains on navigation and manipulation benchmarks and transfers robustly to physical robots, indicating that a tightly coupled lifecycle: continuous real-world data acquisition, generative simulation update, and shared-representation learning, supports lifelong improvement and end-to-end generalization. We release standardized interfaces enabling reproducible evaluation and cross-model comparison in reusable environments, positioning Arcadia as a scalable foundation for general-purpose embodied agents.

Recent advances in diffusion-based language models (DLMs) have shown remarkable potential for de novo protein design. However, enabling controllable protein generation requires integrating diverse biological conditions, such as structure, functions, and chemical interactions, each represented in distinct modalities. Existing approaches often either support a single condition or treat multiple conditions through separate modality-specific encoders. This isolation limits cross-modal interaction, reduces generation quality, and complicates the incorporation of new conditions without retraining or redesigning the backbone. To address these limitations, we introduce MMCP-GEN, a DLM for Multi-Modal, Multi-Condition Protein sequence GENeration. MMCP-GEN establishes a new paradigm for controllable protein generation under complex multimodal constraints. Its core is a modality-composable and extensible conditioning mechanism that fuses heterogeneous biological conditions via learnable queries and modality-indicator heads, enabling disentangled, extensible, and cross-modal condition integration without retraining the backbone. A joint generation-and-scoring objective further aligns sequence recovery with structural fidelity. Empirically, MMCP-GEN achieves state-of-the-art performance across structure-, function-, and ligand-conditioned tasks, improving sequence recovery by up to 5% and outperforming attentive baselines in diverse functional annotation tasks. These results establish MMCP-GEN as a general and high-fidelity framework for controllable protein generation. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/WanyuGroup.

Story visualization aims to generate coherent image sequences that faithfully represent a narrative and match given character references. Despite progress in generative models, existing benchmarks remain narrow in scope, often limited to short prompts, lacking character references, or single-image cases, failing to reflect real-world narrative complexity and obscuring true model performance. We introduce ViStoryBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate story visualization models across varied narrative structures, visual styles, and character settings. It features richly annotated multi-shot scripts derived from curated stories spanning literature, film, and folklore. Large language models assist in story summarization and script generation, with all outputs verified by humans for coherence and fidelity. Character references are carefully curated to maintain consistency across different artistic styles. ViStoryBench proposes a suite of multi-dimensional automated metrics to evaluate character consistency, style similarity, prompt alignment, aesthetic quality, and artifacts like copy-paste behavior. These metrics are validated through human studies and used to assess a broad range of open-source and commercial models, enabling systematic analysis and encouraging advances in visual storytelling.

Recent advancements adopt online reinforcement learning (RL) from LLMs to text-to-image rectified flow diffusion models for reward alignment. The use of group-level rewards successfully aligns the model with the targeted reward. However, it faces challenges including low efficiency, dependency on stochastic samplers, and reward hacking. The problem is that rectified flow models are fundamentally different from LLMs: 1) For efficiency, online image sampling takes much more time and dominates the time of training. 2) For stochasticity, rectified flow is deterministic once the initial noise is fixed. Aiming at these problems and inspired by the effects of group-level rewards from LLMs, we design Group-level Direct Reward Optimization (GDRO). GDRO is a new post-training paradigm for group-level reward alignment that combines the characteristics of rectified flow models. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we point out that GDRO supports full offline training that saves the large time cost for image rollout sampling. Also, it is diffusion-sampler-independent, which eliminates the need for the ODE-to-SDE approximation to obtain stochasticity. We also empirically study the reward hacking trap that may mislead the evaluation, and involve this factor in the evaluation using a corrected score that not only considers the original evaluation reward but also the trend of reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GDRO effectively and efficiently improves the reward score of the diffusion model through group-wise offline optimization across the OCR and GenEval tasks, while demonstrating strong stability and robustness in mitigating reward hacking.

Recent advances in novel view synthesis have enabled differentiable rendering methods to reconstruct 3D scenes directly from images. Algorithms such as 3D Gaussian Splatting and RayGauss use local basis functions to represent radiance fields, enabling fast, high-quality rendering of real-world scenes. However, these methods lack an exact geometric representation of the scene. In this work, inspired by Hermite Radial Basis Function (HRBF) implicits, we introduce a global implicit function constructed from local RBFs and their derivatives to represent surfaces. The proposed formulation enables learning scene geometry through differentiable rendering of an implicit function. By leveraging local basis functions, it achieves both an efficient geometric representation and fast rendering, using a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) to accelerate intersections with the local basis functions. The implementation of our approach will be made publicly available upon the paper's publication.

High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HRTEM) enables atomic-scale observation of nucleation dynamics, which boosts the studies of advanced solid materials. Nonetheless, due to the millisecond-scale rapid change of nucleation, it requires short-exposure rapid imaging, leading to severe noise that obscures atomic positions. In this work, we propose a statistical characteristic-guided denoising network, which utilizes statistical characteristics to guide the denoising process in both spatial and frequency domains. In the spatial domain, we present spatial deviation-guided weighting to select appropriate convolution operations for each spatial position based on deviation characteristic. In the frequency domain, we present frequency band-guided weighting to enhance signals and suppress noise based on band characteristics. We also develop an HRTEM-specific noise calibration method and generate a dataset with disordered structures and realistic HRTEM image noises. It can ensure the denoising performance of models on real images for nucleation observation. Experiments on synthetic and real data show our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in HRTEM image denoising, with effectiveness in the localization downstream task. Code will be available at https://github.com/HeasonLee/SCGN.

Long-context video understanding and generation pose a significant computational challenge for Transformer-based video models due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. While existing sparse attention methods employ coarse-grained patterns to improve efficiency, they typically incur redundant computation and suboptimal performance. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose VecAttention, a novel vector-wise sparse attention framework that achieves superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs for video models. We observe that video attention maps exhibit a strong vertical-vector sparse pattern, and further demonstrate that this vertical-vector pattern offers consistently better accuracy-sparsity trade-offs compared with existing coarse-grained sparse patterns. Based on this observation, VecAttention dynamically selects and processes only informative vertical vectors through a lightweight important-vector selection that minimizes memory access overhead and an optimized vector sparse attention kernel. Comprehensive evaluations on video understanding (VideoMME, LongVideoBench, and VCRBench) and generation (VBench) tasks show that VecAttention delivers a 2.65xspeedup over full attention and a 1.83xspeedup over state-of-the-art sparse attention methods, with comparable accuracy to full attention.

Temporally consistent surface reconstruction of dynamic 3D objects from unstructured point cloud data remains challenging, especially for very long sequences. Existing methods either optimize deformations incrementally, risking drift and requiring long runtimes, or rely on complex learned models that demand category-specific training. We present Neu-PiG, a fast deformation optimization method based on a novel preconditioned latent-grid encoding that distributes spatial features parameterized on the position and normal direction of a keyframe surface. Our method encodes entire deformations across all time steps at various spatial scales into a multi-resolution latent grid, parameterized by the position and normal direction of a reference surface from a single keyframe. This latent representation is then augmented for time modulation and decoded into per-frame 6-DoF deformations via a lightweight multi-layer perceptron (MLP). To achieve high-fidelity, drift-free surface reconstructions in seconds, we employ Sobolev preconditioning during gradient-based training of the latent space, completely avoiding the need for any explicit correspondences or further priors. Experiments across diverse human and animal datasets demonstrate that Neu-PiG outperforms state-the-art approaches, offering both superior accuracy and scalability to long sequences while running at least 60x faster than existing training-free methods and achieving inference speeds on the same order as heavy pre-trained models.

Arbitrary-Scale SR (ASISR) remains fundamentally limited by cross-scale distribution shift: once the inference scale leaves the training range, noise, blur, and artifacts accumulate sharply. We revisit this challenge from a cross-scale distribution transition perspective and propose CASR, a simple yet highly efficient cyclic SR framework that reformulates ultra-magnification as a sequence of in-distribution scale transitions. This design ensures stable inference at arbitrary scales while requiring only a single model. CASR tackles two major bottlenecks: distribution drift across iterations and patch-wise diffusion inconsistencies. The proposed SSAM module aligns structural distributions via superpixel aggregation, preventing error accumulation, while SARM module restores high-frequency textures by enforcing correlation-guided consistency and preserving self-similarity structure through correlation alignment. Despite using only a single model, our approach significantly reduces distribution drift, preserves long-range texture consistency, and achieves superior generalization even at extreme magnification.

Domain generalization for semantic segmentation aims to mitigate the degradation in model performance caused by domain shifts. However, in many real-world scenarios, we are unable to access the model parameters and architectural details due to privacy concerns and security constraints. Traditional fine-tuning or adaptation is hindered, leading to the demand for input-level strategies that can enhance generalization without modifying model weights. To this end, we propose a Style-Adaptive GEneralization framework (SAGE), which improves the generalization of frozen models under privacy constraints. SAGE learns to synthesize visual prompts that implicitly align feature distributions across styles instead of directly fine-tuning the backbone. Specifically, we first utilize style transfer to construct a diverse style representation of the source domain, thereby learning a set of style characteristics that can cover a wide range of visual features. Then, the model adaptively fuses these style cues according to the visual context of each input, forming a dynamic prompt that harmonizes the image appearance without touching the interior of the model. Through this closed-loop design, SAGE effectively bridges the gap between frozen model invariance and the diversity of unseen domains. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAGE achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods under privacy constraints and outperforms full fine-tuning baselines in all settings.

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable potential in automating digital tasks, highlighting the need for high-quality trajectory data to support effective agent training. Yet existing trajectory synthesis pipelines often yield agents that fail to generalize beyond simple interactions. We identify this limitation as stemming from the neglect of semantic-ambiguous actions--interactions whose meanings are context-dependent, sequentially dependent, or visually ambiguous. Such actions are crucial for real-world robustness but are under-represented and poorly processed in current datasets, leading to semantic misalignment between task instructions and execution. To address these issues, we propose HATS, a Hardness-Aware Trajectory Synthesis framework designed to mitigate the impact of semantic ambiguity. We define hardness as the degree of semantic ambiguity associated with an action and develop two complementary modules: (1) a hardness-driven exploration that guides data collection toward ambiguous yet informative interactions, and (2) an alignment-guided refinement that iteratively validates and repairs instruction-execution consistency. The two modules operate in a closed-loop manner--exploration supplies refinement with challenging trajectories, while refinement feedback updates the hardness signal to guide future exploration. Extensive experiments show that agents trained with HATS consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines across benchmark GUI environments.

Both detection-then-match and detection-free methods have been extensively studied for image-to-point cloud registration, yet they still face significant challenges. The detection-then-match approach emphasizes high-quality correspondences but is limited by the availability of repeatable keypoints, making it susceptible to errors from incorrect matches. In contrast, detection-free methods aim for dense correspondences using a coarse-to-fine strategy to mitigate matching errors. However, non-overlapping regions and low-quality matches still introduce inaccuracies, and the differences between image texture and point cloud structure cause inconsistent region representations, increasing the likelihood of incorrect matches.To address these challenges, we propose two innovative modules: the High-Value Zone Reinforced Selection Module (HZRS) and the Zone Representation Consistency Alignment Module (ZRCA). HZRS employs reinforcement learning to resolve the non-differentiable issue of selecting high-value matching regions, while ZRCA improves region alignment through three stages: understand, coordinate, and accelerate.Extensive experiments and ablation studies on RGB-D Scenes v2 and 7-Scenes demonstrate the superiority of our network, establishing it as the state-of-the-art for image-to-point cloud registration.

We propose PatchScene, a novel diffusion-based framework for large-scale LiDAR scene completion. Unlike existing methods that rely on global latent representations or dense voxel grids, PatchScene adopts a patch-based voxel diffusion paradigm that explicitly generates fine-grained geometry within localized 3D regions. To ensure coherent reconstruction at both spatial and temporal scales, we introduce a confidence-guided spatio-temporal fusion mechanism that integrates overlapping patches and adjacent frames in a unified generative process. Furthermore, we design an Annular-Flow diffusion strategy that leverages the radial density pattern of LiDAR scans to progressively propagate high-fidelity information from near-range to far-range regions, enabling spatially unbounded scene completion. Extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI benchmark demonstrate that PatchScene achieves state-of-the-art performance across all standard metrics, surpassing previous approaches in both geometric accuracy and temporal consistency. Remarkably, the model trained on 20 m LiDAR ranges generalizes effectively to 50 m scenes without retraining, highlighting its strong scalability and generalization capability for real-world autonomous driving applications.

Whole Slide Images (WSIs) exhibit hierarchical structure, where diagnostic information emerges from cellular morphology, regional tissue organization, and global context. Existing Computational Pathology (CPath) Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically compress an entire WSI into a single embedding, which hinders fine-grained grounding and ignores how pathologists synthesize evidence across different scales. We introduce MLLM-HWSI, a Hierarchical WSI-level MLLM that aligns visual features with pathology language at four distinct scales, cell as word, patch as phrase, region as sentence, and WSI as paragraph to support interpretable evidence-grounded reasoning. MLLM-HWSI decomposes each WSI into multi-scale embeddings with scale-specific projectors and jointly enforces (i) a hierarchical contrastive objective and (ii) a cross-scale consistency loss, preserving semantic coherence from cells to the WSI. We compute diagnostically relevant patches and aggregate segmented cell embeddings into a compact cellular token per-patch using a lightweight Cell-Cell Attention Fusion (CCAF) transformer. The projected multi-scale tokens are fused with text tokens and fed to an instruction-tuned LLM for open-ended reasoning, VQA, report, and caption generation tasks. Trained in three stages, MLLM-HWSI achieves new SOTA results on 13 WSI-level benchmarks across six CPath tasks. By aligning language with multi-scale visual evidence, MLLM-HWSI provides accurate, interpretable outputs that mirror diagnostic workflows and advance holistic WSI understanding. Code is available at: \href https://github.com/BasitAlawode/HWSI-MLLM Github .

Balancing convergence efficiency and robustness under Differential Privacy (DP) is a central challenge in Federated Learning (FL). Although AdamW accelerates training and fine-tuning in large-scale models, we find that directly applying it to Differentially Private FL (DPFL) suffers from three major issues: (i) data heterogeneity and privacy noise jointly amplify the variance of the second-moment estimator, (ii) DP perturbations bias the second-moment estimator, and (iii) DP amplifies AdamW's sensitivity to local overfitting, worsening client drift. We propose DP-FedAdamW, the first AdamW-based optimizer for DPFL. It restores the effectiveness of AdamW under DP by stabilizing second-moment variance, removing DP-induced bias, and aligning local updates with the global descent direction to curb client drift. Theoretically, we establish an unbiased second-moment estimator and prove a linearly accelerated convergence rate without any heterogeneity assumption, while providing tighter (\varepsilon,\delta)-DP guarantees. Our empirical results demonstrate the strong performance of DP-FedAdamW across language and vision Transformers, as well as ResNet-18. On Tiny-ImageNet (Swin-Base, \varepsilon=1), DP-FedAdamW outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 5.83%. The code is available at https://github.com/junkangLiu0/DP-FedAdamW.

End-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD) systems, which learn to predict future trajectories directly from sensor data, are fundamentally challenged by the inherent spatio-temporal imbalance of trajectory data. This imbalance creates a significant optimization burden, causing models to learn spurious correlations instead of robust driving logic, while also prioritizing uncertain, distant predictions, thereby compromising immediate safety. To address these issues, we propose ResAD, a novel Normalized Residual Trajectory Modeling framework. Instead of predicting the future trajectory directly, our approach reframes the learning task by predicting the residual from a deterministic inertial reference. This inertial reference serves as a stable physical prior, encouraging the model to focus on necessary, context-driven deviations (e.g., traffic rules and obstacles) rather than simple pattern matching. To mitigate the optimization imbalance caused by uncertain, long-term horizons, ResAD further incorporates Point-wise Normalization of the predicted residual. This re-weights the objective to prevent large errors at distant, uncertain waypoints from dominating the learning signal. On the NAVSIM v1 and v2 benchmarks, ResAD achieves state-of-the-art results of 88.8 PDMS and 85.5 EPDMS with only two denoising steps, showing that it simplifies learning and improves planning performance.