CVPR 2026 Papers

Normalizing flows (NFs) are end-to-end likelihood-based generative models for continuous data, and have recently regained attention with encouraging progress on image generation. Yet in the video generation domain, where spatiotemporal complexity and computational cost are substantially higher, state-of-the-art systems almost exclusively rely on diffusion-based models. In this work, we revisit this design space by presenting STARFlow-V, a normalizing flow-based video generator with substantial benefits such as end-to-end learning, robust causal prediction and native likelihood estimation. Building upon the recently proposed STARFlow, STARFlow-V operates in the spatiotemporal latent space with a global-local architecture which restricts causal dependencies to a global latent space while preserving rich local within-frame interactions. This eases error accumulation over time, a common pitfall of standard autoregressive diffusion model generation. Additionally, we propose flow-score matching, which equips the model with a light-weight causal denoiser to improve the video generation consistency in an autoregressive fashion. To improve the sampling efficiency, STARFlow-V employs a video-aware Jacobi iteration scheme that recasts inner updates as parallelizable iterations without breaking causality. Thanks to the invertible structure, the same model can natively support text-to-video, image-to-video as well as video-to-video generation tasks. Empirically, STARFlow-V achieves strong visual fidelity and temporal consistency with practical sampling throughput relative to diffusion-based baselines. These results present the first evidence, to our knowledge, that NFs are capable of high-quality autoregressive video generation, establishing them as a promising research direction for building world models.

As AI generative models evolve at unprecedented speed, image attribution has become a moving target. New diffusion, adversarial and autoregressive generators appear almost monthly, making existing watermark, classifier and inversion methods obsolete upon release. The core problem lies not in model recognition, but in the inability to adapt attribution itself.We introduce IncreFA, a framework that redefines attribution as a structured incremental learning problem, allowing the system to learn continuously as new generative models emerge. IncreFA departs from conventional incremental learning by exploiting the hierarchical relationships among generative architectures and coupling them with continual adaptation. It integrates two mutually reinforcing mechanisms: (1) Hierarchical Constraints, which encode architectural hierarchies through learnable orthogonal priors to disentangle family-level invariants from model-specific idiosyncrasies; and (2) a Latent Memory Bank, which replays compact latent exemplars and mixes them to generate pseudo-unseen samples, stabilising representation drift and enhancing open-set awareness.On the newly constructed Incremental Attribution Benchmark (IABench) covering 28 generative models released between 2022 and 2025, IncreFA achieves state-of-the-art attribution accuracy and 98.9% unseen detection under a temporally ordered open-set protocol.

Dataset distillation often prioritizes global semantic proximity when creating small surrogate datasets for original large-scale ones. However, object semantics are inherently hierarchical. For example, the position and appearance of a bird's eyes are constrained by the outline of its head. Global proximity alone fails to capture how object-relevant structures at different levels support recognition. In this work, we investigate the contributions of hierarchical semantics to effective distilled data. We leverage the vision autoregressive (VAR) model whose coarse-to-fine generation mirrors this hierarchy and propose HierAmp to amplify semantics at different levels. At each VAR scale, we inject class tokens that dynamically identify salient regions and use their induced maps to guide amplification at that scale. This adds only marginal inference cost while steering synthesis toward discriminative parts and structures. Empirically, we find that semantic amplification leads to more diverse token choices in constructing coarse-scale object layouts. Conversely, at fine scales, the amplification concentrates token usage, increasing focus on object-related details. Across popular dataset distillation benchmarks, HierAmp consistently improves validation performance without explicitly optimizing global proximity, demonstrating the importance of semantic amplification for effective dataset distillation.

Controllable, high-fidelity mesh editing remains a significant challenge in the domain of 3D content creation. Existing generative methods often struggle with complex geometries and fail to preserve fine-scale details. We propose CraftMesh, a novel framework for high-fidelity generative mesh manipulation based on Poisson Seamless Fusion. We decompose mesh editing into a pipeline that leverages the strengths of 2D image editing and 3D generation models: we first edit a 2D reference image, then generate a 3D mesh corresponding to the edited region, and fuse it seamlessly into the original mesh through a Geometry and Texture Fusion method. We introduce two core techniques: Poisson Geometric Fusion, which utilizes a hybrid SDF/Mesh representation with normal blending to achieve harmonious geometric integration, and Poisson Texture Harmonization for visually consistent texture blending. We demonstrate state-of-the-art structural consistency, geometric fidelity, and texture quality in challenging editing scenarios.

Generating high-fidelity, seamless textures directly on 3D surfaces, a process we term 3D-native texturing, is a fundamental open challenge, promising to overcome the limitations of traditional UV-based and multi-view projection methods. While promising, existing native approaches are bottlenecked by the lack of a powerful and versatile latent representation, severely limiting the fidelity of generated results. In this work, we identify this representation gap as the central roadblock to progress. We introduce Lafite, a framework that resolves this challenge by learning to generate textures as a 3D generative sparse latent color field. At its core, Lafite leverages a variational autoencoder (VAE) to encode complex surface appearance into a sparse, structured latent space and then decoded into a continuous color field. This novel representation achieves unprecedented fidelity, i.e., yielding a >10 dB PSNR improvement in reconstruction over state-of-the-art methods, by effectively disentangling texture from mesh topology and UV parameterizations. Building on this superior representation, a conditional rectified flow model synthesizes textures with state-of-the-art quality and coherence. Extensive experiments show that Lafite not only sets a new standard for native texturing but also enables flexible downstream applications like editing and material synthesis, paving the way for the next generation of 3D content creation workflows.

This paper addresses the problem of affordance grounding from RGBD images of an object, which aims to localize surface regions corresponding to a text query that describes an action on the object. While existing methods predict affordance regions only on visible surfaces, we propose Affostruction, a generative framework that reconstructs complete object geometry from partial RGBD observations and grounds affordances on the full shape including unobserved regions. Our approach introduces sparse voxel fusion of multi-view features for constant-complexity generative reconstruction, a flow-based formulation that captures the inherent ambiguity of affordance distributions, and an active view selection strategy guided by predicted affordances. Affostruction outperforms existing methods by large margins on challenging benchmarks, achieving 19.1 aIoU on affordance grounding and 32.67 IoU for 3D reconstruction.

Tractography is the process of inferring the trajectories of white-matter pathways in the brain from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI). Local tractography methods, which construct streamlines by following local fiber orientation estimates stepwise through an image, are prone to error accumulation and high false positive rates, particularly on noisy or low-resolution data. In contrast, global methods, which attempt to optimize a collection of streamlines to maximize compatibility with underlying fiber orientation estimates, are computationally expensive. To address these challenges, we introduce GenTract, the first generative model for global tractography. We frame tractography as a generative task, learning a direct mapping from dMRI to complete, anatomically plausible streamlines. We compare both diffusion-based and flow matching paradigms and evaluate GenTract's performance against state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, GenTract achieves precision 1.8x and 2.1x higher than the next-best methods, DDTracking and TractOracle, respectively. This advantage becomes even more pronounced in challenging low-resolution and noisy settings, where it outperforms the closest competitor by a factor of 3.5. By producing tractograms with high precision on research-grade data while also maintaining reliability on imperfect, lower-resolution data, GenTract represents a promising solution for global tractography.

Building intelligent agents capable of dexterous manipulation is essential for achieving human-like automation in both robotics and digital environments. However, existing GUI agents rely on discrete click predictions (x,y), which prohibits free-form, closed-loop trajectories (e.g. dragging a progress bar) that require continuous, on-the-fly perception and adjustment. In this work, we develop ShowUI-p, the first flow-based generative model as GUI dexterous hand, featuring the following designs:(i) Unified Discrete-Continuous Actions, integrating discrete clicks and continuous drags within a shared model, enabling flexible adaptation across diverse interaction modes;(ii) Flow-based Action Generation for drag modeling, which predicts incremental cursor adjustments from continuous visual observations via a lightweight action expert, ensuring smooth and stable trajectories;(iii) Drag Training data and Benchmark, where we manually collect and synthesize 20K drag trajectories across five domains (e.g. PowerPoint, Adobe Premiere Pro), and introduce ScreenDrag, a benchmark with comprehensive online and offline evaluation protocols for assessing GUI agents' drag capabilities.Our experiments show that proprietary GUI agents still struggle on ScreenDrag (e.g. Operator scores 13.27, and the best Gemini-2.5-CUA reaches 22.18). In contrast, ShowUI-p achieves 26.98 with only 450M parameters, underscoring both the difficulty of the task and the effectiveness of our approach. We hope this work advances GUI agents toward human-like dexterous control in digital world.

Color transfer aims to match the color distribution of a content image (source) to that of a style image (target) while preserving structure and perceptual realism. Yet modulation-based flow models such as ModFlows often produce trajectory misalignment and artifacts because they rely on strictly linear transport paths. We propose NCT, a nonlinear color transfer framework that replaces linear paths with Bezier trajectories, enabling smooth, nonlinear, and perceptually coherent color transfer. This parameterization lets the transport bend toward plausible intermediate color regimes, improving content-style alignment and reducing chromatic distortion. We further incorporate a Mixture of Experts (MoE) module in the encoder to select trajectory experts for different chromatic regimes, improving generalization to heterogeneous data with complex illumination and materials. Experiments show that NCT reduces artifacts and achieves more stable color transfer than prior flow-based methods, especially on 3D-rendered or highly textured images. The code is provided in supplementary materials.

Text-to-image diffusion models exhibit remarkable generative capabilities, yet their internal operations remain opaque, particularly when handling prompts that are not fully descriptive. In such scenarios, models must make implicit decisions to generate details not explicitly specified in the text. This work investigates the hypothesis that this decision-making process is not diffuse but is computationally localized within the model's architecture. While existing localization techniques focus on prompt-related interventions, we notice that such explicit conditioning may differ from implicit decisions. Therefore, we introduce a probing-based localization technique to identify the layers with the highest attribute separability for concepts. Our findings indicate that the resolution of ambiguous concepts is governed principally by self-attention layers, identifying them as the most effective point for intervention. Based on this discovery, we propose ICM (Implicit Choice-Modification) - a precise steering method that applies targeted interventions to a small subset of layers. Extensive experiments confirm that intervening on these specific self-attention layers yields superior debiasing performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, minimizing artifacts common to less precise approaches.

The unrealistic reliance on abundant prior information in traditional transferable attacks has spurred the Practical No-box Scenario (PNS), where attackers can access only limited unlabeled images. However, existing methods rely on iterative optimization to produce adversarial examples with inherently limited inference speed and transferability. Conversely, faster generative attacks fundamentally conflict with the PNS due to their critical dependence on abundant prior information that is explicitly absent in this scenario. To bridge this gap, we propose Prior-free Generative Attack (PGA), the first generative attack tailored for the PNS. Specifically, we introduce the Curriculum-Guided Micro-Robust Optimization that progressively incorporates more challenging discriminative tasks to mitigate the degenerate solutions common in self-supervised learning with limited data, yielding robust and transferable surrogates for downstream attacks. Furthermore, the Region-Aware Consistent Perturbation Learning guides the generator to produce fine-grained and spatially coherent perturbations, mitigating the common pitfall of generative attacks falling into local optima under insufficient supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PGA achieves remarkable transferability across various settings with high inference speed. This work provides a more practical benchmark for future research on transferable attacks, revealing the great potential of generative attacks under the PNS.

We present UniTEX, a novel two-stage 3D texture generation framework to create high-quality, consistent textures for 3D assets. Existing approaches predominantly rely on UV-based models in the second stage to refine textures after reprojecting the generated multi-view images onto the 3D shapes, which introduces challenges related to topological ambiguity. To address this, we bypass the limitations of UV mapping by introducing a Large Texturing Model (LTM) that directly regresses textures in a unified 3D functional space. Moreover, to enable more effective and complete supervision of LTM, we propose to extend surface-defined textures into a continuous volumetric field to serve as an advanced training objective, which we refer to as Texture Functions (TF). Finally, we develop an advanced LoRA-based strategy for efficiently adapting large-scale 2D Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for high-quality multi-view texture synthesis as our first stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniTEX achieves superior visual quality and texture integrity compared to existing approaches, offering a generalizable and scalable solution for automated 3D texture generation. Code is available in: https://github.com/HKUST-SAIL/UniTEX

MeanFlow (MF) has recently been established as a framework for one-step generative modeling. However, its "fastforward" nature introduces key challenges in both the training objective and the guidance mechanism. First, the original MF's training target depends not only on the underlying ground-truth fields but also on the network itself. To address this issue, we recast the objective as a loss on the instantaneous velocity v, re-parameterized by a network that predicts the average velocity u. Our reformulation yields a more standard regression problem and improves the training stability. Second, the original MF fixes the classifier-free guidance scale during training, which sacrifices flexibility. We tackle this issue by formulating guidance as explicit conditioning variables, thereby retaining flexibility at test time. The diverse conditions are processed through in-context conditioning, which reduces model size and benefits performance. Overall, our improved MeanFlow (iMF) method, trained entirely from scratch, achieves 1.72 FID with a single function evaluation (1-NFE) on ImageNet 256x256. iMF substantially outperforms prior methods of this kind and closes the gap with multi-step methods while using no distillation. We hope our work will further advance fastforward generative modeling as a stand-alone paradigm.

State-of-the-art crowd counting and localization are primarily modeled using two paradigms: density maps and point regression. Given the field's security ramifications, there is active interest in model robustness against adversarial attacks. Recent studies have demonstrated transferability across density-map-based approaches via adversarial patches, but cross-paradigm attacks (i.e., across both density map-based models and point regression-based models) remain unexplored. We introduce a novel adversarial framework that compromises both density map and point regression architectural paradigms through a comprehensive multi-task loss optimization. For point-regression models, we employ scene-density-specific high-confidence logit suppression; for density-map approaches, we use peak-targeted density map suppression. Both are combined with model-agnostic perceptual constraints to ensure that perturbations are effective and imperceptible to the human eye. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack, achieving on average a 7X increase in Mean Absolute Error compared to clean images while maintaining competitive visual quality, and successfully transferring across seven state-of-the-art crowd models with transfer ratios ranging from 0.55 to 1.69. Our approach strikes a balance between attack effectiveness and imperceptibility compared to state-of-the-art transferable attack strategies. The source code is available at https://github.com/simurgh7/CrowdGen

As powerful generative models, text-to-image diffusion models have recently been explored for discriminative tasks. A line of research focuses on adapting a pre-trained diffusion model to semantic segmentation without any further training, leading to training-free diffusion segmentors. These methods typically rely on cross-attention maps from the model's attention layers, which are assumed to capture semantic relationships between image pixels and text tokens. Ideally, such approaches should benefit from more powerful diffusion models, i.e., stronger generative capability should lead to better segmentation. However, we observe that existing methods often fail to scale accordingly. To understand this issue, we identify two underlying gaps: (i) Cross-attention is computed across multiple heads and layers, but there exists a discrepancy between these individual attention maps and a unified global representation. (ii) Even when a global map is available, it does not directly translate to accurate semantic correlation for segmentation, due to score imbalances among different text tokens. To bridge these gaps, we propose two techniques: auto aggregation and per-pixel rescaling, which together enable training-free segmentation to better leverage generative capability. We evaluate our approach on standard semantic segmentation benchmarks and further integrate it into a generative technique, demonstrating both improved performance and broad applicability. Codes are at https://github.com/Darkbblue/goca.

A fundamental dilemma in generative modeling persists: iterative diffusion models achieve outstanding fidelity, but at a significant computational cost, while efficient few-step alternatives are constrained by a hard quality ceiling. This conflict between generation steps and output quality arises from restrictive training objectives that focus exclusively on either infinitesimal dynamics (PF-ODEs) or direct endpoint prediction. We address this challenge by introducing an exact, continuous-time dynamics equation that analytically defines state transitions across any finite time interval (\Delta t). This leads to a novel generative paradigm, Transition Models (TiM), which adapt to arbitrary-step transitions, seamlessly traversing the generative trajectory from single leaps to fine-grained refinement with more steps.Despite having only 865M parameters, TiM achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing leading models such as SD3.5 (8B parameters) and FLUX.1 (12B parameters) across all evaluated step counts. Importantly, unlike previous few-step generators, TiM demonstrates monotonic quality improvement as the sampling budget increases. Additionally, when employing our native-resolution strategy, TiM delivers exceptional fidelity at resolutions up to (4096x4096).

Today's denoising diffusion models do not "denoise" in the classical sense, i.e., they do not directly predict clean images. Rather, the neural networks predict noise or a noised quantity. In this paper, we suggest that predicting clean data and predicting noised quantities are fundamentally different. According to the manifold assumption, natural data should lie on a low-dimensional manifold, whereas noised quantities do not. With this assumption, we advocate for models that directly predict clean data, which allows apparently under-capacity networks to operate effectively in very high-dimensional spaces. We show that simple, large-patch Transformers on pixels can be strong generative models: using no tokenizer, no pre-training, and no extra loss. Our approach is conceptually nothing more than "Just image Transformers", or JiT, as we call it. We report competitive results using JiT with large patch sizes of 16 and 32 on ImageNet at resolutions of 256 and 512, where predicting high-dimensional noised quantities can fail catastrophically. With our networks mapping back to the basics of the manifold, our research goes back to basics and pursues a self-contained paradigm for Transformer-based diffusion on raw natural data.

Human visual perception offers valuable insights for understanding computational principles of motion-based scene interpretation. Humans robustly detect and segment moving entities that constitute independently moveable chunks of matter, whether observing sparse moving dots, textured surfaces, or naturalistic scenes. In contrast, existing computer vision systems lack a unified approach that works across these diverse settings. Inspired by principles of human perception, we propose a generative model that hierarchically groups low-level motion and appearance features into particles (small Gaussians representing local matter), and groups particles into clusters capturing coherently and independently moveable physical entities. We develop a hardware-accelerated inference algorithm based on parallelized block Gibbs sampling to recover stable particle motion and groupings. Our model operates on different kinds of inputs (random dots, stylized textures, or naturalistic RGB video), enabling it to work across settings where biological vision succeeds but existing computer vision approaches do not. We validate this unified framework across three domains: on 2D random dot kinematograms, our approach captures human object perception including graded uncertainty across ambiguous conditions; on a Gestalt-inspired dataset of camouflaged rotating objects, our approach recovers correct 3D structure from motion and thereby accurate 2D object segmentation; and on naturalistic RGB videos, our model tracks the moving 3D matter that makes up deforming objects, enabling robust object-level scene understanding. This work thus establishes a general framework for motion-based perception grounded in principles of human vision.

We propose Bijective Universal Scene-Specific Anomalous Relationship Detection (BUSSARD), a normalizing flow-based model for detecting anomalous relations in scene graphs, generated from images. Our work follows a multimodal approach, embedding object and relationship tokens from scene graphs with a language model to leverage semantic knowledge from the real world. A normalizing flow model is used to learn bijective transformations that map object-relation-object triplets from scene graphs to a simple base distribution (typically Gaussian), allowing anomaly detection through likelihood estimation. We evaluate our approach on the SARD dataset containing office and dining room scenes. Our method achieves around 10% better AUROC results compared to the current state-of-the-art model, while simultaneously being five times faster. Through ablation studies, we demonstrate superior robustness and universality, particularly regarding the use of synonyms, with our model maintaining stable performance while the baseline shows 17.5% deviation. This work demonstrates the strong potential of learning-based methods for relationship anomaly detection in scene graphs. Our code is available at https://github.com/mschween/BUSSARD.