CVPR 2026 Papers

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Decision breakdown

4,042papers

Counted from the official paper list; may differ slightly from the number the conference announced.

  • Oral
    1383.4%
  • Poster
    3,90496.6%

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Bayesian Decomposition and Semantic Completion for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation

Guangchen Shi, Yirui Wu, Wei Zhu, Tao Wang, Hao Zhang, Bo Li, Tong Lu

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Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) aims to segment objects of novel categories given only a handful of labeled examples. However, existing methods often rely on complex category-specific modeling, resulting in high computational cost and limited generalization under low-data regimes. To address these challenges, we propose a Bayesian Probabilistic Network (BPNet) that reformulates FSS as a composition of three interpretable components: a prior, a likelihood, and a class-consistency term. Specifically, an efficient Segment Anything Model (SAM) is employed to generate fragmented prior regions for the query image, while both the likelihood and the consistency terms are estimated by a lightweight Class-Agnostic Localization Model (CALM). CALM simultaneously predicts the class consistency between support-query pairs through a binary classification head and estimates the likelihood by localizing the target region in the support image. By evaluating SAM-generated regions in parallel, CALM can efficiently identify the core region, thereby transforming the segmentation problem into a simple binary classification task. Furthermore, to mitigate the semantic incompleteness of SAM proposals, we introduce an attention-based Semantic Completion Module (SCM), which leverages local and global context cues to integrate fragmented regions into semantically complete masks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high efficiency.

Poster
Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Animatable 3D Avatars with Cloth Dynamics from a Single Image

Joohyun Kwon, Geonhee Sim, Gyeongsik Moon

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Existing single-image 3D human avatar methods primarily rely on rigid joint transformations, limiting their ability to model realistic cloth dynamics. We present DynaAvatar, a zero-shot framework that reconstructs animatable 3D human avatars with motion-dependent cloth dynamics from a single image. Trained on large-scale multi-person motion datasets, DynaAvatar employs a Transformer-based feed-forward architecture that directly predicts dynamic 3D Gaussian deformations without subject-specific optimization. To overcome the scarcity of dynamic captures, we introduce a static-to-dynamic knowledge transfer strategy: a Transformer pretrained on large-scale static captures provides strong geometric and appearance priors, which are efficiently adapted to motion-dependent deformations through lightweight LoRA fine-tuning on dynamic captures. We further propose the DynaFlow loss, an optical flow-guided objective that provides reliable motion-direction geometric cues for cloth dynamics in rendered space. Finally, we reannotate the missing or noisy SMPL-X fittings in existing dynamic capture datasets, as most public dynamic capture datasets contain incomplete or unreliable fittings that are unsuitable for training high-quality 3D avatar reconstruction models. Experiments demonstrate that DynaAvatar produces visually rich and generalizable animations, outperforming prior methods. Code, pretrained models, and reannotations will be released.

Poster
SubspaceAD: Training-Free Few-Shot Anomaly Detection via Subspace Modeling

Camile Lendering, Erkut Akdag, Egor Bondarau

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Detecting visual anomalies in industrial inspection often requires training with only a few normal images per category. Recent few-shot methods achieve strong results employing foundation-model features, but typically rely on memory banks, auxiliary datasets, or multi-modal tuning of vision-language models. We therefore question whether such complexity is necessary given the feature representations of vision foundation models. To answer this question, we introduce SubspaceAD, a training-free method, that operates in two simple stages. First, patch-level features are extracted from a small set of normal images by a frozen DINOv2 backbone. Second, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) model is fit to these features to estimate the low-dimensional subspace of normal variations. At inference, anomalies are detected via the reconstruction residual with respect to this subspace, producing interpretable and statistically grounded anomaly scores. Despite its simplicity, SubspaceAD achieves state-of-the-art performance across one-shot and few-shot settings without training, prompt tuning, or memory banks. In the one-shot anomaly detection setting, SubspaceAD achieves image-level and pixel-level AUROC of 98.0% and 97.6% on the MVTec-AD dataset, and 93.3% and 98.3% on the VisA dataset, respectively, surpassing prior state-of-the-art results.

Poster
Pointing at Parts: Training-Free Few-Shot Grounding in Multimodal LLMs

Shiang-Feng Tsai, Yuan-Hong Liao, Jin-Cheng Jhang*, Nan Qiao, Min Sun

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Part-level pointing is important for fine-grained interaction and reasoning, yet existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain limited to instance-level pointing. Part-level pointing presents unique challenges: annotation is costly, parts are long-tail distributed, and many are difficult to specify precisely in language. We introduce POinting at Parts (POP), a training-free, plug-and-play approach that addresses these challenges under a few-shot setup. POP fuses textual and visual attention maps with self-supervised visual correspondences from query image and few-shot examples. On average across the three evaluated datasets, POP achieves accuracy gains of up to 8.9 points in the one-shot setting and 16.4 points in the three-shot setting for the pointing-capable MLLMs--Qwen2.5-VL, Ovis2.5, and Molmo. Notably, even MLLMs without pointing capability benefit significantly from the proposed approach. These results establish a simple yet effective path toward fine-grained spatial grounding in MLLMs.

Poster
SD-FSMIS: Adapting Stable Diffusion for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

Meihua Li, Yang Zhang, Weizhao He, Hu Qu, Yisong Li

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Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation (FSMIS) aims to segment novel object classes in medical images using only minimal annotated examples, addressing the critical challenges of data scarcity and domain shifts prevalent in medical imaging. While Diffusion Models (DM) excel in visual tasks, their potential for FSMIS remains largely unexplored. We propose that the rich visual priors learned by large-scale DMs offer a powerful foundation for a more robust and data-efficient segmentation approach. In this paper, we introduce SD-FSMIS, a novel framework designed to effectively adapt the powerful pre-trained Stable Diffusion (SD) model for the FSMIS task. Our approach repurposes its conditional generative architecture by introducing two key components: a Support-Query Interaction (SQI) and a Visual-to-Textual Condition Translator (VTCT). Specifically, SQI provides a straightforward yet powerful means of adapting SD to the FSMIS paradigm. The VTCT module translates visual cues from the support set into an implicit textual embedding that guides the diffusion model, enabling precise conditioning of the generation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SD-FSMIS achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods in standard settings. Surprisingly, it also demonstrated excellent generalization ability in more challenging cross-domain scenarios. These findings highlight the immense potential of adapting large-scale generative models to advance data-efficient and robust medical image segmentation.

Poster
Focus on Background: Exploring SAM's Potential in Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation with Background-centric Prompting

Yuntian Bo, Yazhou Zhu, Piotr Koniusz, Haofeng Zhang

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Conventional few-shot medical image segmentation (FSMIS) approaches face performance bottlenecks that hinder broader clinical applicability. Although the Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits strong category-agnostic segmentation capabilities, its direct application to medical images often leads to over-segmentation due to ambiguous anatomical boundaries. In this paper, we reformulate SAM-based FSMIS as a prompt localization task and propose FoB (Focus on Background), a background-centric prompt generator that provides accurate background prompts to constrain SAM's over-segmentation. Specifically, FoB bridges the gap between segmentation and prompt localization by category-agnostic generation of support background prompts and localizing them directly in the query image. To address the challenge of prompt localization for novel categories, FoB models rich contextual information to capture foreground-background spatial dependencies. Moreover, inspired by the inherent structural patterns of background prompts in medical images, FoB models this structure as a constraint to progressively refine background prompt predictions. Experiments on three diverse medical image datasets demonstrate that FoB outperforms other baselines by large margins, achieving state-of-the-art performance on FSMIS, and exhibiting strong cross-domain generalization.

Poster
Unlocking Pre-trained Weights: Parameter Inheritance for Zero-Shot Initialization

Jiaze Xu, Shiyu Xia, Jiaqi Lv, Xin Geng

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Appropriate parameter initialization is crucial for reducing the training cost of deep neural networks. Graph HyperNetworks (GHN) have emerged as a promising approach for initializing diverse architectures, with recent methods such as Task-Aware Learngene (TAL) further attempting to leverage pre-trained model knowledge via soft label supervision. However, such indirect supervision fails to fully exploit the rich information encoded in pre-trained weights. We propose **P**arameter **I**nheri**T**ance **H**yperNetwork (**PITH**), which introduces a novel parameter projection mechanism to directly inherit parameters from pre-trained models for initializing target networks of varying configurations. Our method enables initialized networks to directly achieve competitive performance on downstream tasks without any further training, which we term zero-shot initialization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of PITH: ViT-Base initialized by PITH achieves 53.35% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet-1K, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 6.54%, with consistent improvements across multiple downstream tasks.

Poster
Few-Shot Hybrid Incremental Learning:Continually Learning under Data Scarcity and Task Uncertainty

Yan Li, Yuzhu Shi, Kan Zhou, Shu Zhang, Diqi He, Dingwen Zhang, Junwei Han

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The increasing complexity of real-world deployment requires intelligent agents to effectively adapt to non-stationary data streams with stochastic increments under data scarcity. We formally define this challenge as the Few-Shot Hybrid Incremental Learning (FSHIL) paradigm, which reveals a critical stability-plasticity dilemma. Existing strategies struggle to address this dilemma: representation freezing in few-shot incremental learning can mitigate overfitting under data scarcity but leads to insufficient representation plasticity, while architecture expansion in hybrid incremental learning provides plasticity for adaptation but results in overfitting under few-shot conditions. To address this, we propose the Conditional Meta-Expanding Mixture-of-Experts (CME-MoE), which balances feature-level stability-plasticity trade-off through conditional expert reuse and meta-expansion mechanism. Furthermore, recognizing the multi-domain manifestation in the latent space, we introduce the Self-Expanding Prototype Classifier (SEPC), which on-demand expands classification to model complex domain-shifted decision boundaries. The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in three few-shot incremental learning settings across five mainstream datasets, effectively addressing data scarcity and task uncertainty, and providing a robust solution for real-world continual learning.

Poster
Zero-shot Detection of AI-Generated Image via RAW-RGB Alignment

Haiwei Wu, Fengpeng Li, Zhilin Tu, Yuanman Li, Xiong Li, Jiantao Zhou

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Advances in generative AI (GenAI) have increasingly complicated the identification of synthetic images, prompting the proposal of numerous zero-/few-shot detection methods to counter unknown GenAI better. However, we observe that existing detectors often misclassify synthetic images with physical transformations (e.g., print+scan) as real. The essence of this observation lies in: should images remapped from the physical world to digital space still be categorized as "Synthetic"? Furthermore, the definition of what constitutes real and synthetic images urgently needs to be clarified. We first boldly propose that the authenticity of an image depends on whether it originates from the physical world, i.e., it is necessary to verify the original correlation between the digital image and the physical world. To this end, we first analyze the physical-to-digital mapping process: illumination signals are captured by camera sensors as RAW data, which is then converted into RGB data via camera internal parameters. This process embodies unique physical cues inherent to real scenes. Based on this, we propose a novel forensic feature termed alignment trace, which is constructed by modeling a shared RAW-RGB feature space. This trace captures the inherent parameter correlations of real images in the physical-to-digital conversion process, thereby indirectly verifying the physical origin of the image. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot detection using only real RAW-RGB data pairs. When additional prior knowledge is provided, the method can be easily fine-tuned to achieve better cross-domain detection performance. We hope this work provides a new baseline for zero-shot synthetic detection and, more significantly, inspires the forensics community to explore the essential distinctions between real and synthetic images.

Poster
Neural Mixture Density Processes

Yi Ding, Qi Tao, Xingxing Liang, Longfei Zhang, Yiqin Lv, Weitao Song, Fangjie Yang, Cheems Wang, Guangquan Cheng

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The neural process (NP) is a probabilistic meta learning model that learns distributions over functions via a global latent variable.It enables fast adaptation in few-shot scenarios by leveraging past experience. However, the design of latent variable structures and conditioning mechanisms in NPs remains underexplored, despite their importance in capturing diverse functional distributions.This paper proposes a new variant of NPs via mixture density modeling, referred to as the neural mixture density process (NMDP).The NMDP decomposes model parameters into task-agnostic and task-specific components to represent function distributions more flexibly. We train the model via the Expectation-Maximization algorithm to construct expressive functional priors.Compared with existing work, our method maintains several advantages: (i) less overfitting by updating a small part of the network parameters, (ii) compact task representation via distributions in the simplex,(iii) an improvement guarantee of generative likelihoods over iteration. Experimental results show that our method can achieve competitive performance with adequate explainability.

Poster
Defect Cue-Preserved Structural Feature Refinement for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Le Jiang, Yan Huang, Zhen Xu, Yong Xu, Hau San Wong, Si Wu

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Modern industrial quality control heavily relies on automated anomaly detection. While few-shot anomaly detection addresses the challenge of limited labeled data, real-world inspection faces a vast diversity of anomaly types, sizes, and shapes. We identify the primary cause for the anomaly detection difficulty as the progressive loss of detect cues as they pass through deep feature extraction pipelines. To counteract the defect cue fading, we propose a Defect Cue-Preserved Structural Feature Refinement model, referred to as DCP-SFR. Recognizing that early-stage cues are paramount, we design a conditional anomaly cue amplification module to produce an initial anomaly score map, which is then enhanced to increase the contrast between anomalous and normal regions. The amplified cues is subsequently used for reconstruction-based anomaly localization, by anchoring attention on true anomaly regions to preserve spatial integrity and prevent drift. Further, we incorporate a structure-aware segmentation refinement stage to improve anomaly segmentation in terms of edge alignment, thereby significantly improve boundary accuracy. On the MVTec AD and VisA benchmarks, DCP-SFR achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an image-level AUROC of 97.3% and a pixel-level AUROC of 98.2%, demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization performance.

Poster
SkeletonContext: Skeleton-side Context Prompt Learning for Zero-Shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Ning Wang, Tieyue Wu, Naeha Sharif, Farid Boussaid, Guangming Zhu, Lin Mei, Mohammed Bennamoun, Liang Zhang

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Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition aims to recognize unseen actions by transferring knowledge from seen categories through semantic descriptions. Most existing methods typically align skeleton features with textual embeddings within a shared latent space. However, the absence of contextual cues, such as objects involved in the action, introduces an inherent gap between skeleton and semantic representations, making it difficult to distinguish visually similar actions. To address this, we propose SkeletonContext, a prompt-based framework that enriches skeletal motion representations with language-driven contextual semantics. Specifically, we introduce a Cross-Modal Context Prompt Module, which leverages a pretrained language model to reconstruct masked contextual prompts under guidance derived from LLMs. This design effectively transfers linguistic context to the skeleton encoder for instance-level semantic grounding and improved cross-modal alignment. In addition, a Key-Part Decoupling Module is incorporated to decouple motion-relevant joint features, ensuring robust action understanding even in the absence of explicit object interactions. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SkeletonContext achieves state-of-the-art performance under both conventional and generalized zero-shot settings, validating its effectiveness in reasoning about context and distinguishing fine-grained, visually similar actions. Our project is available at:https://github.com/NingWang2049/skeletoncontext.

Poster
Interpretable Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning with Rectified Target-Domain Local Alignment

Yaze Zhao, Yixiong Zou, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li

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Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) adapts models trained with large-scale general data (source domain) to downstream target domains with only scarce training data, where the research on vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) is still in the early stages. Typical downstream domains, such as medical diagnosis, require fine-grained visual cues for interpretable recognition, but we find that current fine-tuned CLIP models can hardly focus on these cues, albeit they can roughly focus on important regions in source domains. Although current works have demonstrated CLIP's shortcomings in capturing local subtle patterns, in this paper, we find that **the domain gap and scarce training data further exacerbate such shortcomings, much more than that of holistic patterns**, which we call the local misalignment problem in CLIP-based CDFSL. To address this problem, due to the lack of supervision in aligning local visual features and text semantics, we turn to self-supervision information. Inspired by the translation task, we propose the CC-CDFSL method with cycle consistency, which translates local visual features into text features and then translates them back into visual features (and vice versa), and constrains the original features close to the translated back features.To reduce the noise imported by richer information in the visual modality, we further propose a Semantic Anchor mechanism, which first augments visual features to provide a larger corpus for the text-to-image mapping, and then shrinks the image features to filter out irrelevant image-to-text mapping. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks, backbones, and fine-tuning methods show we can (1) effectively improve the local vision-language alignment, (2) enhance the interpretability of learned patterns and model decisions by visualizing patches, and (3) achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our codes will be released.

Poster
Beyond Patches: Global-aware Autoregressive Model for Multimodal Few-Shot Font Generation

Haonan Cai, Yuxuan Luo, Zhouhui Lian

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Manual font design is an intricate process that transforms a stylistic visual concept into a coherent glyph set. This challenge persists in automated Few-shot Font Generation (FFG), where models struggle to preserve both structural integrity and stylistic fidelity from limited references. While autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated impressive generative capabilities, their application to FFG is constrained by conventional patch-level tokenization, which neglects global dependencies crucial for coherent font synthesis. Moreover, existing FFG methods remain within the image-to-image paradigm, relying solely on visual references and overlooking the role of language in conveying stylistic intent during font design. To address these limitations, we propose GAR-Font, a novel AR framework for multimodal few-shot font generation. GAR-Font introduces a global-aware tokenizer that effectively captures both local structures and global stylistic patterns, a multimodal style encoder offering flexible style control through a lightweight language-style adapter without requiring intensive multimodal pretraining, and a post-refinement pipeline that further enhances structural fidelity and style coherence. Extensive experiments show that GAR-Font outperforms existing FFG methods, excelling in maintaining global style faithfulness and achieving higher-quality results with textual stylistic guidance. Project Page: https://xtryer-s.github.io/projects_pages/GAR_Font.

Poster
Training-Only Heterogeneous Image-Patch-Text Graph Supervision for Advancing Few-Shot Learning Adapters

Mohammed Rahman Sherif Khan Mohammad, Ardhendu Behera, Sandip Pradhan, Swagat Kumar, Amr Ahmed

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Recent adapter-based CLIP tuning (e.g., Tip-Adapter) is a strong few-shot learner, achieving efficiency by caching support features for fast prototype matching. However, these methods rely on global uni-modal feature vectors, overlooking fine-grained patch relations and their structural alignment with class text. To bridge this gap without incurring inference costs, we introduce a novel asymmetric training-only framework. Instead of altering the lightweight adapter, we construct a high-capacity auxiliary Heterogeneous Graph Teacher that operates solely during training. This teacher (i) integrates multi-scale visual patches and text prompts into a unified graph, (ii) performs deep cross-modal reasoning via a Modality-aware Graph Transformer (MGT), and (iii) applies discriminative node filtering to extract high-fidelity class features. Crucially, we employ a cache-aware dual-objective strategy to supervise this relational knowledge directly into the Tip-Adapter's key-value cache, effectively upgrading the prototypes while the graph teacher is discarded at test time. Thus, inference remains identical to Tip-Adapter with zero extra latency or memory. Across standard 1-16-shot benchmarks, our method consistently establishes a new state-of-the-art. Ablations confirm that the auxiliary graph supervision, text-guided reasoning, and node filtering are the essential ingredients for robust few-shot adaptation.

Poster
InverFill: One-Step Inversion for Enhanced Few-Step Diffusion Inpainting

Duc Vu, Kien Nguyen, Trong-Tung Nguyen, Ngan Nguyen, Phong Nguyen, Khoi Nguyen, Cuong Pham, Anh Tran

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Recent diffusion-based models achieve photorealism in image inpainting but require many sampling steps, limiting practical use. Few-step text-to-image models offer faster generation, but naively applying them to inpainting yields poor harmonization and artifacts between the background and inpainted region. We trace this cause to random Gaussian noise initialization, which under low function evaluations causes semantic misalignment and reduced fidelity. To overcome this, we propose InverFill, a one-step inversion method tailored for inpainting that injects semantic information from the input masked image into the initial noise, enabling high-fidelity few-step inpainting. Instead of training inpainting models, InverFill leverages few-step text-to-image models in a blended sampling pipeline with semantically aligned noise as input, significantly improving vanilla blended sampling and even matching specialized inpainting models at low NFEs. Moreover, InverFill does not require real-image supervision and only adds minimal inference overhead. Extensive experiments show that InverFill consistently boosts baseline few-step models, improving image quality and text coherence without costly retraining or heavy iterative optimization.

Poster
LaS-Comp: Zero-shot 3D Completion with Latent-Spatial Consistency

Weilong Yan, Haipeng Li, Hao Xu, Nianjin Ye, Yihao Ai*, Shuaicheng Liu, Jingyu Hu

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This paper introduces LaS-Comp, a zero-shot and category-agnostic approach that leverages the rich geometric priors of 3D foundation models to enable 3D shape completion across diverse types of partial observations. Our contributions are threefold: First, LaS-Comp harnesses these powerful generative priors for completion through a complementary two-stage design: (i) an explicit replacement stage that preserves the partial observation geometry to ensure faithful completion; and (ii) an implicit refinement stage ensures seamless boundaries between the observed and synthesized regions. Second, our framework is training-free and compatible with different 3D foundation models. Third, we introduce Omni-Comp, a comprehensive benchmark combining real-world and synthetic data with diverse and challenging partial patterns, enabling a more thorough and realistic evaluation. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.

Poster
DDSF: Robust Few-Shot Learning via Disentangled Subspaces with Determinantal Point Process

Xulun Ye, Yifan Mei, Kun Zhou, Zelei Wu, Jieyu Zhao

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The performance of mean-based prototypical methods in few-shot learning is frequently compromised by noise and hard positives, where entangled feature representations cause prototype instability. We present a novel "Filter-Repair-Expand" framework grounded in Determinantal Point Process (DPP) theory. The method leverages DPP as its core logic, employing it to estimate sample confidence to filter anomalous samples from the initial set, guide a diffusion process via volume-maximization to enhance the sample representation, and subsequently maximize the volume of synergistic disentangled subspaces, constructing robust and diverse prototype subspaces. Experimental results establish new state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating significant gains in few-shot learning robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/24sleeping90/DDSF.

Poster
Few-Shot Incremental 3D Object Detection in Dynamic Indoor Environments

Yun Zhu, Jianjun Qian, Jian Yang, Jin Xie, Na Zhao

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Incremental 3D object perception is a critical step toward embodied intelligence in dynamic indoor environments. However, existing incremental 3D detection methods rely on extensive annotations of novel classes for satisfactory performance. To address this limitation, we propose FI3Det, a Few-shot Incremental 3D Detection framework that enables efficient 3D perception with only a few novel samples by leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) to learn knowledge of unseen categories. FI3Det introduces a VLM-guided unknown object learning module in the base stage to enhance perception of unseen categories. Specifically, it employs VLMs to mine unknown objects and extract comprehensive representations, including 2D semantic features and class-agnostic 3D bounding boxes. To mitigate noise in these representations, a weighting mechanism is further designed to re-weight the contributions of point- and box-level features based on their spatial locations and feature consistency within each box. Moreover, FI3Det proposes a gated multimodal prototype imprinting module, where category prototypes are constructed from aligned 2D semantic and 3D geometric features to compute classification scores, which are then fused via a multimodal gating mechanism for novel object detection. As the first framework for few-shot incremental 3D object detection, we establish both batch and sequential evaluation settings on two datasets, ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D, where FI3Det achieves strong and consistent improvements over baseline methods.

Poster
Mind the Discriminability Trap in Source-Free Cross-domain Few-shot Learning

Zhenyu Zhang, Yixiong Zou, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li, Guangyao Chen

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Source-Free Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (SF-CDFSL) focuses on fine-tuning with limited training data from target domains (e.g., medical or satellite images), where Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP and SigLIP have shown promising results. Current works in traditional visual models suggest that improving visual discriminability enhances performance. However, in VLM-based SF-CDFSL tasks, we find that strengthening visual-modal discriminability actually suppresses VLMs' performance. In this paper, we aim to delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation and a solution.By both theoretical and experimental proofs, our study reveals that fine-tuning with the typical cross-entropy loss (L_ vlm ) inherently includes a visual learning part and a cross-modal learning part, where the cross-modal part is crucial for rectifying the heavily disrupted modality misalignment in SF-CDFSL.However, we find that the visual learning essentially acts as a shortcut that encourages the model to reduce L_ vlm without considering the cross-modal part, therefore hindering the cross-modal alignment and harming the performance.Based on this interpretation, we further propose an approach to address this problem: first, we perturb the visual learning to guide the model to focus on the cross-modal alignment. Then, we use the visual-text semantic relationships to gradually align the visual and textual modalities during the fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on various settings, backbones (CLIP, SigLip, PE-Core), and tasks (4 CDFSL datasets and 11 FSL datasets) show that we consistently set new state-of-the-art results. We will release the code.

Poster