CVPR 2026 Papers

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to transfer knowledge from known categories to automatically discover new, unseen ones while preserving recognition of the known classes. Despite recent progress, existing GCD approaches typically assume that all data are drawn from the same distribution, which is rarely valid in real-world scenarios. In practice, data often experience simultaneous domain shifts and novel category emergence, causing severe performance degradation of existing systems. To address this challenge, we propose CausalGCD, a causality-inspired framework designed to mitigate domain-shift bias in category discovery. Specifically, we first analyze the causal graph to uncover the relationships among key variables in cross-domain GCD. We then introduce the concept of causal dependency risk and propose a Causal Dependency Risk Estimator to capture causal semantics, further deriving a theoretically computable upper bound to optimize this risk under cross-domain GCD settings. Furthermore, we propose a Causal Geometric Manifold Constraint that enforces invariant manifold-level associations between known and unknown categories across domains, thereby facilitating robust discovery of novel classes. Extensive experiments on the SSB-C and DomainNet benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CausalGCD and highlight the significance of causal reasoning in open-world category discovery.

Understanding how transcriptomic programs shape tissue morphology remains a central challenge in computational pathology. Gene-to-WSI tile synthesis offers a principled generative framework to translate molecular profiles into histological images. However, most existing methods compress RNA-Seq into a single global embedding injected once at initialization, an oversimplified design that weakens transcriptomic signals and induces spurious, non-biological associations. We present GeneVAR, an Autoregressive Gene-to-WSI model that reformulates synthesis as an iterative, coarse-to-fine generative process. At its core is a novel Causal MeanFlow module, which leverages counterfactual interventions to suppress non-biological variations (e.g., staining or contrast artifacts) and enforce an artifact-invariant generation process. Concurrently, it reinforces transcriptome-informed guidance across multiple stages, preserving biological fidelity throughout the generative trajectory. Combined with a b-VAE for compact gene embeddings and a multi-scale vector quantizer for discrete morphology representation, GeneVAR generates H&E-stained WSI tiles that are both visually realistic and transcriptomically faithful. Extensive experiments across five TCGA cancer benchmarks demonstrate consistent state-of-the-art performance, surpassing prior methods in both generative fidelity and downstream classification accuracy.

While structure-based relocalizers have long strived for point correspondences when establishing or regressing query-map associations, in this paper, we pioneer the use of planar primitives and 3D planar maps for lightweight 6-DoF camera relocalization in structured environments. Planar primitives, beyond being fundamental entities in projective geometry, also serve as region-based representations that encapsulate both structural and semantic richness. This motivates us to introduce PlanaReLoc, a streamlined plane-centric paradigm where a deep matcher associates planar primitives across the query image and the map within a learned unified embedding space, after which the 6-DoF pose is solved and refined under a robust framework. Through comprehensive experiments on the ScanNet and 12Scenes datasets across hundreds of scenes, our method demonstrates the superiority of planar primitives in facilitating reliable cross-modal structural correspondences and achieving effective camera relocalization without requiring realistically textured/colored maps, pose priors, or per-scene training. The code and data are available at https://github.com/3dv-casia/PlanaReLoc.

Infrared small target detection is one highly special category of object detection, faced with tiny target imaging size and cluttered backgrounds. Currently, almost all existing methods are target-centered, directly learning the target features from backgrounds. However, due to weak target signals, they are often difficult in effectively capturing stable features. Sometimes, they cannot even distinguish real targets from background confounders. To overcome these problems, from an opposite perspective, we propose the first Causal-guided Hierarchical Anomaly-aware Learning (CHAL) framework. Breaking through target-centered paradigm, it focuses on background learning, while the targets are handled as the anomalies in backgrounds. In detail, to fulfill the goal, a spatio-temporal neural field is designed to model the background evolution patterns from generative perspective. Meanwhile, a hierarchical anomaly-aware learning is proposed to decompose anomaly discovery. Furthermore, to block the spurious correlations often caused by background confounders, and enhance true target causality, a causal-guiding mechanism is designed. The experiments on three infrared datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of our CHAL. Even in visible-light scenarios, it still possesses obvious adaptivity. Source code will be open.

In safety-critical industrial applications, accurately identifying causal relationships and quantifying uncertainty is essential for tasks such as root cause analysis, feature selection, and process optimization. Traditional causal discovery methods inadequately handle nonlinearities and complex uncertainties prevalent in industrial sensor data. To address this, we introduce a novel causal discovery framework that integrates Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) representations of stochastic noise into structural equations. This method effectively captures complex nonlinear couplings and arbitrary noise distributions characteristic of industrial data. We rigorously prove the identifiability of causal structures under mild sparsity conditions on the chaos coefficients, extending linear non-Gaussian acyclic model (LiNGAM) identifiability results. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior accuracy, robustness under non-Gaussian noise conditions, and practical uncertainty quantification. This framework presents a principled, interpretable, and computationally feasible approach to causal analysis in nonlinear uncertain industrial environments.

Machine unlearning (MU) addresses privacy risks in pretrained models. The main goal of MU is to remove the influence of designated data while preserving the utility of retained knowledge. Achieving this goal requires preserving semantic relations among retained instances, which existing studies often overlook. We observe that without such preservation, models suffer from progressive structural collapse, undermining both the deletion-retention balance. In this work, we propose a novel structure-faithful framework that introduces stakes, i.e., semantic anchors that serve as reference points to maintain the knowledge structure. By leveraging these anchors, our framework captures and stabilizes the semantic organization of knowledge. Specifically, we instantiate the anchors from language-driven attribute descriptions encoded by a semantic encoder (e.g., CLIP). We enforce preservation of the knowledge structure via structure-aware alignment and regularization: the former aligns the organization of retained knowledge before and after unlearning around anchors, while the latter regulates updates to structure-critical parameters. Results from image classification, retrieval, and face recognition show average gains of 32.9%, 22.5%, and 19.3% in performance, balancing the deletion-retention trade-off and enhancing generalization.