CVPR 2026 Papers

Large vision-language models (VLMs) excel on general benchmarks but often lack robustness in medical imaging, where heterogeneous supervision induces cross-dataset interference and sensitivity to data regime (i.e., how the supervisory signals are mixed). In realistic clinical workflows, data and tasks arrive sequentially, so naive continual training further leads to catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we propose MedQwen, a parameter-efficient medical VLM that couples a spectrally routed Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with a theoretically grounded scaling rule that aligns low-rank updates with a full-rank, fully fine-tuned MoE, without changing the base architecture. Concretely, we initialize each expert from non-overlapping singular value decomposition (SVD) segments of the pretrained weight and introduce a residual compensation and scaling scheme to enable stable expert specialization and consistent routing under distribution shift.Across 23 medical datasets covering visual question answering, report generation, radiology classification, and hallucination mitigation, MedQwen achieves strong, reliable performance: it approaches full fine-tuning on zero-shot classification with 339xfewer trainable parameters, and reduces sequential forgetting to ~5% where strong baselines degrade by >20-50%.

Cognitive science suggests that spatial ability develops progressively--from perception to reasoning and interaction. Yet in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), this hierarchy remains poorly understood, as most studies focus on a narrow set of tasks. We introduce SpatialTree, a cognitive-science-inspired hierarchy that organizes spatial abilities into four levels: low-level perception (L1), mental mapping (L2), simulation (L3), and agentic competence (L4). Based on this taxonomy, we construct the first capability-centric hierarchical benchmark, thoroughly evaluating mainstream MLLMs across 27 sub-abilities. The evaluation results reveal a clear structure: L1 skills are largely orthogonal, whereas higher-level skills are strongly correlated, indicating increasing interdependency. Through targeted supervised fine-tuning, we uncover a surprising transfer dynamic--negative transfer within L1, but strong cross-level transfer from low- to high-level abilities with notable synergy. Finally, we explore how to improve the entire hierarchy. We find that naive RL that encourages extensive "thinking" is unreliable: it helps complex reasoning but hurts intuitive perception. We propose a simple auto-think strategy that suppresses unnecessary deliberation, enabling RL to consistently improve performance across all levels. By building SpatialTree, we provide a proof-of-concept framework for understanding and systematically scaling spatial abilities in MLLMs.

Monocular 3D object detection from a single RGB image remains challenging due to two fundamental challenges: the ill-posed nature of 3D localization, where multiple plausible configurations can correspond to the same 2D observation, and unreliable confidence estimation that fails to reflect true localization accuracy. Existing methods predict deterministic 3D boxes that often collapse to implausible mean estimates and rely on absolute confidence scores that are highly sensitive to localization errors. This paper introduces RARE, a unified framework that addresses both challenges through learning to rank and retrieve. RARE formulates confidence estimation as a ranking problem, learning to order detections by their relative quality rather than regressing absolute values. It provides more robust and stable confidence estimates that are less sensitive to localization uncertainty. Building on this improved confidence estimator, RARE learns to construct a query set for each object that predicts multiple diverse and plausible 3D configurations, and retrieves the top-ranked prediction. It explicitly models the multimodal nature of monocular 3D perception and produces more plausible localizations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RARE. The code is available at https://github.com/HyeonjeongPark37/RARE.

Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning (EFCIL) aims to enable models to learn new classes sequentially without retaining samples from previous tasks. While recent approaches leverage pre-trained models with parameter-efficient tuning to mitigate forgetting, they often overlook a crucial cause of forgetting: the collapse of the class-discriminative structure. This structure comprises two interdependent components: intra-class structure, which characterizes the shape of individual classes, and inter-class structure, which characterizes the global geometric relationships among class prototypes. We reveal that catastrophic forgetting stems from the simultaneous deterioration of both intra-class and inter-class structures. To address this, we propose a unified framework that preserves the class-discriminative structure. It preserves the intra-class structure by reshaping class means and covariances to preserve each class's shape during migration, and maintains inter-class structure by stabilizing angular relationships between samples and old prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing leading methods on multiple EFCIL benchmarks, validating that preserving the class-discriminative structure is crucial for mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

The research frontier in human pose prediction (HPP) is advancing toward continual test-time adaptation (TTA), where models must self-adapt to dynamic test distributions. To date, the homeostatic continual TTA remains the sole viable solution, which isolates the model parameters and update domain-sensitive ones. Despite mitigating full-body domain gaps, human anatomical heterogeneity (domain shifts often localize to specific regions) is ignored. This anatomical-agnostic approach forces uniform parameter adaptation across kinematically distinct segments, causing: over-adaptation of stable regions and under-adaptation of shift-prone articulations. To address it, we introduce TT-HA, a novel Test-Time Heterogeneous Adaptation that implicitly estimates domain changes for anatomical segments, and adapt the corresponding parameters. Building on human anatomy, TT-HA partitions parameters into five anatomical subsets using fisher information matrix-based parameters uncertainty analysis. During testing, TT-HA uses the instance normalization statistics and Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) to quantify segment-wise domain changes, dynamically determining which segment-specific parameters to adapt and to what extent. When substantial domain shifts are detected, TT-HA restores only affected segments to source-trained values, ensuring robust adaptation without full parameter resetting; minor shifts trigger the fine-tuning of corresponding parameters while preserving remaining ones. Experiments show TT-HA's superior full-body accuracy with greater limb error decrease than prior methods, proving its anatomically-targeted efficacy.

The emergence of large generative models has substantially advanced learning-based scene recovery in the synthetic domain. However, these models generalize poorly to real scenarios stemming from the significant distribution gap, alongside poor adaptation to complex and unforeseen degradations. Consequently, it is imperative to develop a real scene adaptation strategy that yields faithful restorations with reliable generalizability. To this end, we propose Bilevel Prompt LoRA, a novel learning paradigm designed to effectively adapt pre-trained generative models for real scene recovery. First, we introduce a self-supervised distribution-fidelity learning scheme to calibrate the autoencoding pathway under task-irrelevant real distributions to improve texture fidelity. Subsequently, a bilevel joint modeling via hyperparameter optimization is further established, empowering robust synthetic-to-real adaptation for both seen and unseen scenes by exploiting the complementary advantages between LoRA and Prompts to foster mutual promotion. Extensive evaluations on diverse real adverse scenarios demonstrate our superiority, with comprehensive algorithm analyses proving our effectiveness.

Adapting Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to few-shot action recognition (FSAR) often trades accuracy for stability: task-specific gains can trigger catastrophic forgetting of domain-general knowledge and reduce inter-class margins. In few-shot episodes, each query is contrasted with only one positive class and a few negatives, so the text encoder sees limited prompt diversity and rarely observes hard counter-examples near decision boundaries. We propose Protect-to-Adapt (P2A), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method with two complementary modules. Orthogonal Subspace Control (OSC) estimates a principal semantic subspace of the pre-trained backbone and constrains low-rank updates to its orthogonal complement, preserving domain-general semantics while allowing task-specific adaptation. Ranked Negative-prompt Curriculum (RNC) uses a large language model to generate verifier-filtered negative prompts with increasing difficulty. These class-specific hard counter-examples enlarge margins and sharpen decision boundaries under few-shot conditions. With only 2% of backbone parameters trainable, P2A achieves state-of-the-art performance on five FSAR benchmarks and substantially reduces catastrophic forgetting in a cross-dataset continual-learning setting where the model is adapted sequentially to multiple video datasets without replay.

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have benefited from Reinforcement Learning (RL) for enhanced reasoning. However, existing methods still face critical limitations, including the lack of low-level visual information and effective visual feedback. To address these problems, this paper proposes a unified multimodal interleaved reasoning framework ForeSight, which enables VLMs to See Further with low-level visual cues and Think Deeper with effective visual feedback. First, it introduces a set of low-level visual tools to integrate essential visual information into the reasoning chain, mitigating the neglect of fine-grained visual features. Second, a mask-based visual feedback mechanism is elaborated to incorporate visual reflection into the thinking process, enabling the model to dynamically re-examine and update its answers. Driven by RL, ForeSight learns to autonomously decide on tool invocation and answer verification, with the final answer accuracy as the reward signal. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, we construct a new dataset, Character and Grounding SalBench (CG-SalBench), based on the SalBench dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the ForeSight-7B model significantly outperforms other models with the same parameter scale, and even surpasses the current SOTA closed-source models on certain metrics.

Residual diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in image restoration tasks. In near-domain transformations such as image deraining, however, we observe that the residuals exhibit an inherent low-rank structure. Motivated by this property, we propose the Low-Rank Residual Diffusion Model (LRDM), which performs diffusion within a compact low-rank residual subspace for efficient and structure-preserving restoration. We formalize this observation as the Low-Rank Residual Assumption and show that the variational lower bound becomes tighter when residuals lie in a low-rank space. Building on this insight, we introduce an Asymmetric Residual Diffusion Process that constrains the forward process in the low-rank domain while maintaining full-rank flexibility in the reverse process. To accommodate the varying complexity of residuals across diffusion timesteps, we further introduce an Adaptive Rank Selection mechanism that dynamically adjusts the rank during the diffusion process. Experiments on deraining, deblurring, and deshading benchmarks show that LRDM surpasses full-rank diffusion baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the advantage of modeling diffusion in a low-rank residual space. Project Page: \urlstyle same \hypersetup allcolors=magenta https://github.com/JF-Tan/LRDM .

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been widely adopted in vision tasks due to their strong transferability. In Federated Learning (FL), where full fine-tuning is communication-heavy, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) provides an efficient and communication-friendly way to adapt ViTs. However, existing LoRA-based federated tuning methods overlook latent client structures in real-world settings, limiting shared representation learning and hindering effective adaptation to unseen clients. To address this, we propose HiLoRA, a hierarchical LoRA framework that places adapters at three levels: root, cluster, and leaf, each designed to capture global, subgroup, and client-specific knowledge, respectively. Through cross-tier orthogonality and cascaded optimization, HiLoRA separates update subspaces and aligns each tier with its residual personalized objective. In particular, we develop a LoRA-Subspace Adaptive Clustering mechanism that infers latent client groups via subspace similarity analysis, thereby facilitating knowledge sharing across structurally aligned clients. Theoretically, we establish a tier-wise generalization analysis that supports HiLoRA's design. Experiments on ViT backbones with CIFAR-100 and DomainNet demonstrate consistent improvements in both personalization and generalization.

Person search, which aims to detect and re-identify individuals in unconstrained scenes, faces an inherent conflict in one-stage models: pedestrian detection focuses on shared human features, while person re-identification requires identity-specific representations. Existing approaches, such as feature decoupling and loss re-weighting, primarily address this issue in later network stages but fail to resolve early-stage feature entanglement. To overcome this limitation, we propose FSLoRA, a Freq-Spatial Low-Rank Adapter that progressively decouples task-specific features at the backbone level. FSLoRA consists of a Spatial-Level Module (SLM), which employs LoRA and a mixture-of-experts to dynamically activate task-relevant spatial features, and a Frequency-Level Module (FLM), which transforms features into the frequency domain to selectively enhance task-relevant frequency components while suppressing task-irrelevant noise. By integrating both spatial and frequency-based adaptations, FSLoRA reduces feature interference, enabling more effective joint optimization. Extensive experiments on CUHK-SYSU, PRW, and Posetrack21 demonstrate that FSLoRA not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also serves as a plug-and-play module adaptable to various person search frameworks, offering a unified and generalizable solution for one-stage person search.

Existing Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), focusing on designing efficient adaptation parameters (eg. prompts or residual prototypes), predominantly rely on high-confidence samples obtained via entropy-based filtering. However, this prevailing paradigm implicitly inherits the VLM's class-wise prediction biases and leads to insufficient coverage of the test distribution, rendering the adaptation process biased and insufficiently exploratory.To overcome these limitations, we propose Dynamic Logits Adjustment and Exploration (DLAE), a novel framework that integrates Dynamic Logit Adjustment (DLA) with a Consistency-Guided Exploratory Cache (CGEC). DLA dynamically recalibrates model logits based on test prediction statistics, thereby mitigating class-wise prediction inconsistencies. Different from traditional cache mechanisms, our CGEC actively identifies additional samples near decision boundaries whose predicted labels are sensitive to the logit adjustment, thereby exploring beyond only high-confidence samples. By enforcing semantic and temporal consistency, the cache preserves the reliability of selected samples while enabling cautious yet effective exploration of low-confidence regions, ultimately yielding stable and reliable adaptation.Extensive experiments across multiple vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses state-of-the-art TTA methods, showing superior stability, adaptability, and generalization.

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) enables real-time adaptation to domain shifts without offline retraining. Recent TTA methods have predominantly explored additive approaches that introduce lightweight modules for feature refinement. Recently, a subtractive approach that removes domain-sensitive channels has emerged as an alternative direction. We observe that these paradigms exhibit complementary effectiveness patterns: subtractive methods excel under severe shifts by removing corrupted features, while additive methods are effective under moderate shifts requiring refinement. However, each paradigm operates effectively only within limited shift severity ranges, failing to generalize across diverse corruption levels. This leads to the following question: can we adaptively balance both strategies based on measured feature-level domain shift? We propose CD-Buffer, a novel complementary dual-buffer framework where subtractive and additive mechanisms operate in opposite yet coordinated directions, driven by a unified discrepancy metric. Our key innovation lies in discrepancy-driven coupling, which unifies removal and refinement through a shared metric and automatically balances both strategies based on feature-level shift severity. This establishes channel-wise adaptive balancing that enables differentiated treatment for heterogeneous shift magnitudes without manual tuning. Extensive experiments on KITTI, Cityscapes, and ACDC datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, consistently achieving superior results across diverse weather conditions and severity levels.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable multimodal understanding and reasoning capabilities, yet remain computationally expensive due to dense visual tokenization. Existing efficiency approaches either merge redundant visual tokens or drop them progressively in language backbone, often trading accuracy for speed. In this work, we propose DUET-VLM, a versatile plug-and-play dual compression framework that consists of (a) vision-only redundancy aware compression of vision encoder's output into information-preserving tokens, followed by (b) layer-wise, salient text-guided dropping of visual tokens within the language backbone to progressively prune less informative tokens. This coordinated token management enables aggressive compression while retaining critical semantics. On LLaVA-1.5-7B, our approach maintains over 99% of baseline accuracy with 67% fewer tokens, and still retains >97% even at 89% reduction. With this dual-stage compression during training, it achieves 99.7% accuracy at 67% and 97.6% at 89%, surpassing prior SoTA visual token reduction methods across multiple benchmarks. When integrated into Video-LLaVA-7B, it even surpasses the baseline--achieving >100% accuracy with a substantial 53.1% token reduction and retaining 97.6% accuracy under an extreme 93.4% setting. These results highlight end-to-end training with DUET-VLM, enabling robust adaptation to reduced visual (image/video) input without sacrificing accuracy, producing compact yet semantically rich representations within the same computational budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/AMD-AGI/DUET-VLM.

Given the real-time demands of UAV tracking, many methods simplify the backbone to reduce computation, but this often weakens feature representation and degrades performance in complex scenarios. To alleviate this issue, we propose EATrack, an efficient and asymmetric UAV tracking framework centered around a teacher-guided dual-branch distillation strategy that enhances the feature expressiveness of the lightweight student model. Specifically, EATrack investigates two complementary perspectives of knowledge transfer: a spatially focused feature-level distillation that compensates for weakened representations by guiding the student to learn strong target representations, and a prediction-level distillation that enhances spatial localization by learning the teacher's capability of accurate target localization. Furthermore, to enhance robustness against appearance variations, we introduce a fine-grained target-aware distillation strategy that selectively transfers the teacher's target modeling capacity to the student. A temporal adaptation module is incorporated at inference to enhance robustness over time. Experiments on five UAV benchmarks demonstrate that EATrack achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and speed, with EATrack-DeiT improving average success rate by 1.2% over the previous SOTA while running at 241.9 FPS on GPU.

Perception under low illumination remains a major challenge for computer vision systems, as RGB sensors often fail to capture sufficient structural and color information in extremely dark environments. Event cameras, with their high dynamic range and temporal resolution, provide complementary cues that are well suited for such conditions. In this work, we present eRetinexGS, a novel framework that jointly leverages event streams and low-light frames through 3D Gaussian Splatting for scene-level enhancement and reconstruction. Unlike previous approaches that operate on individual frames, eRetinexGS enforces geometric and photometric consistency across multiple views, bridging the gap between degraded images and noisy event signals. By introducing an event-assisted Retinex decomposition and a reflectance-illumination representation within the 3DGS pipeline, our method reconstructs normal-light radiance fields with fine-grained details and accurate color. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that eRetinexGS achieves state-of-the-art performance in low-light scene enhancement while maintaining real-time rendering capability.

Human Action Recognition (HAR) is a fundamental computer vision task with diverse real-world applications. Practical deployments often involve low-light environments and unconstrained 6-DoF camera motion, conditions that degrade visual quality, disrupt temporal coherence, and compromise reliability of existing methods. Event cameras, with high low-light sensitivity and microsecond-level temporal resolution, paired with an inertial measurement unit (IMU), present a promising solution. However, current research faces two key challenges: absence of a benchmark integrating low-light conditions, 6-DoF motion, and synchronized IMU data; and lack of effective motion compensation techniques. To address these, we propose Event-IMU Stabilized HAR (EIS-HAR), with two modules. The first is an EIS module that reduces motion blur via a non-linear warping function to reconstruct a motion-compensated input. The second is a HAR module with a four-stage hybrid architecture to efficiently extract spatiotemporal features for accurate action recognition. To alleviate data scarcity, we introduce DarkShake-DVS, the first large-scale event-based HAR benchmark that includes 18,041 real-world clips captured in low light and intense 6-DoF motion, supplemented by synchronized IMU data. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate consistent superiority of EIS-HAR over state-of-the-art methods.

Diffusion models often exhibit inconsistent sample quality due to stochastic variations inherent in their sampling trajectories. Although training-based fine-tuning and inference-time alignment techniques aim to improve sample fidelity, they typically necessitate full denoising processes and external reward signals. This incurs substantial computational costs, hindering their broader applicability. In this work, we unveil an intriguing phenomenon: a previously unobserved yet exploitable link between sample quality and characteristics of the denoising trajectory during classifier-free guidance (CFG). Specifically, we identify a strong correlation between high-density regions of the sample distribution and the Accumulated Score Differences (ASD)--the cumulative divergence between conditional and unconditional scores. Leveraging this insight, we introduce CFG-Rejection, an efficient, plug-and-play strategy that filters low-quality samples at an early stage of the denoising process, crucially without requiring external reward signals or model retraining. Importantly, our approach necessitates no modifications to model architectures or sampling schedules and maintains full compatibility with existing diffusion frameworks. We validate the effectiveness of CFG-Rejection in image generation through extensive experiments, demonstrating marked improvements on human preference scores (HPSv2, PickScore) and challenging benchmarks (GenEval, DPG-Bench). We anticipate that CFG-Rejection will offer significant advantages for diverse generative modalities beyond images, paving the way for more efficient and reliable high-quality sample generation.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have significantly enhanced text-to-image (T2I) generation quality, enabling high-quality personalized content creation. However, fine-tuning these models requires substantial computational complexity and memory, limiting practical deployment under resource constraints. To tackle these challenges, we propose a memory-efficient fine-tuning framework called DiT-BlockSkip, integrating timestep-aware dynamic patch sampling and block skipping by precomputing residual features. Our dynamic patch sampling strategy adjusts patch sizes based on the diffusion timestep, then resizes the cropped patches to a fixed lower resolution. This approach reduces forward & backward memory usage while allowing the model to capture global structures at higher timesteps and fine-grained details at lower timesteps. The block skipping mechanism selectively fine-tunes essential transformer blocks and precomputes residual features for the skipped blocks, significantly reducing training memory. To identify vital blocks for personalization, we introduce a block selection strategy based on cross-attention masking. Evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive personalization performance qualitatively and quantitatively, while reducing memory usage substantially, moving toward on-device feasibility (e.g., smartphones, IoT devices) for large-scale diffusion transformers.