CVPR 2026 Papers

Deep Neural Networks achieve high performance in vision tasks by learning features from regions of interest (ROI) within images, but their performance degrades when deployed on out-of-distribution (OOD) data that differs from training data. This challenge has led to OOD detection methods that aim to identify and reject unreliable predictions. Although prior work shows that OOD detection performance varies by artefact type, the underlying causes remain underexplored. To this end, we identify a previously unreported bias in OOD detection: for hard-to-detect artefacts (near-OOD), detection performance typically improves when the artefact shares visual similarity (e.g. colour) with the model's ROI and drops when it does not - a phenomenon we term the Invisible Gorilla Effect. For example, in a skin lesion classifier with red lesion ROI, we show the method Mahalanobis Score achieves a 31.5% higher AUROC when detecting OOD red ink (similar to ROI) compared to black ink (dissimilar) annotations. We annotated artefacts by colour in 11,355 images from three public datasets (e.g. ISIC) and generated colour-swapped counterfactuals to rule out dataset bias. We then evaluated 40 OOD methods across 7 benchmarks and found significant performance drops for most methods when artefacts differed from the ROI. Our findings highlight an overlooked failure mode in OOD detection and provide guidance for more robust detectors. Code and annotations available at https://github.com/HarryAnthony/Invisible_Gorilla_Effect.

Conventional monocular depth estimators suffer from visual ambiguities and nuisances. We demonstrate that language can improve the fidelity of estimates by providing additional information through text as a condition, thereby reducing the solution space for depth estimates. This conditional distribution is learned during text-to-image pre-training of diffusion models. To generate images under various viewpoints and layouts that reflect textual descriptions, the model implicitly encodes object shapes and their spatial relationships, comprising the 3-dimensional (3D) scene structure. We investigate the benefits of integrating text descriptions into the training and inference of the diffusion-based monocular depth estimators (MDE). We experiment with three different diffusion-based MDEs, namely Marigold, Lotus, and E2E-FT, and their variants. By training on HyperSim and Virtual KITTI, and evaluating on NYUv2, KITTI, ETH3D, ScanNet, and DIODE, we find that our strategy of integrating text into MDEs improves the overall accuracy of depth estimates, especially in small areas. The effect is also targeted in that improvements are more pronounced in specific regions described in the text. Naturally, this lends to iterative refinement of the depth estimate by providing additional descriptions of the 3D scene. Separately, we find that incorporating text can accelerate convergence of training and the inference diffusion trajectory.

We present Lighting in Motion (LiMo), a diffusion-based approach to spatiotemporal lighting estimation. LiMo targets both realistic high-frequency detail prediction and accurate illuminance estimation. To account for both, we propose generating a set of mirrored and diffuse spheres at different exposures, based on their 3D positions in the input. Making use of diffusion priors, we fine-tune powerful existing diffusion models on a large-scale customized dataset of indoor and outdoor scenes, paired with spatiotemporal light probes. For accurate spatial conditioning, we demonstrate that depth alone is insufficient and we introduce a new geometric condition to provide the relative position of the scene to the target 3D position. Finally, we combine diffuse and mirror predictions at different exposures into a single HDRI map leveraging differentiable rendering.We thoroughly evaluate our method and design choices to establish LiMo as state-of-the-art for both spatial control and prediction accuracy.

Robust depth estimation aims to maintain high-quality depths across diverse conditions. However, most existing methods estimate depth without taking into account the object-level information. As a result, the predicted depth may easily deviate within objects and become blurred under adverse conditions. To overcome this weakness, we propose RoSAMDepth, a novel framework that can assist robust self-supervised depth estimation in leveraging rich and diverse object-level priors from the Segment Anything Model (SAM). We focus on incorporating object-level information across three key aspects: a segment-guided representation contrasting method that injects object-level awareness into the feature representation space; an adaptive regional outlier masking strategy combined with a regional Gaussian likelihood loss that enforces regional depth smoothness; and an object-level reliability estimation strategy that mitigates the influence of unreliable supervision. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and diverse weather conditions demonstrate that our method produces sharper, more accurate depth predictions, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

We present DeSOPE, a large-scale dataset for 6DoF deformed objects. Most 6D object pose methods assume rigid or articulated objects, an assumption that fails in practice as objects deviate from their canonical shapes due to wear, impact, or deformation. To model this, we introduce the DeSOPE dataset, which features high-fidelity 3D scans of 26 common object categories, each captured in one canonical state and three deformed configurations, with accurate 3D registration to the canonical mesh. Additionally, it features an RGB-D dataset with 133K frames across diverse scenarios and 665K pose annotations produced via a semi-automatic pipeline. We begin by annotating 2D masks for each instance, then compute initial poses using an object pose method, refine them through an object-level SLAM system, and finally perform manual verification to produce the final annotations. We evaluate several object pose methods and find that performance drops sharply with increasing deformation, suggesting that robust handling of such deformations is critical for practical applications. The project page and dataset are available at https://desope-6d.github.io/.

Estimating the 3D motion of scene points from 2D observations, typically parameterized by optical flow and motion in depth, is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Existing learning-based methods usually rely on supervised regression from densely labeled data, but their dependence on annotations and limited use of geometric constraints restricts generalization, motivating unsupervised solutions. Unsupervised 3D motion estimation is challenging because motion along the viewing direction is unobservable, and optical flow and motion in depth are geometrically coupled, making their separation ambiguous. Event cameras capture per-pixel brightness changes asynchronously with microsecond latency, providing high temporal resolution and motion continuity. Projecting event streams along different axes reveals spatiotemporal expansion and contraction patterns that encode depth variation and geometric structure, offering rich cues for unsupervised estimation. Leveraging these properties, we propose an unsupervised event-based 3D motion estimation framework that jointly models optical flow and motion in depth. We first derive an analytical relationship to infer initial motion in depth from estimated flow and further refine it using a directional expansion modulation module that captures horizontal and vertical expansion-contraction patterns in event projections. Finally, motion in depth is incorporated into optical flow warping under a contrast maximization objective. Experiments on the CarlaEvent3D dataset show that our method achieves competitive accuracy and strong generalization, advancing unsupervised 3D motion estimation in the event domain.

Accurately recovering hand poses within the body context remains a major challenge in 3D whole-body pose estimation. This difficulty arises from a fundamental supervision gap: whole-body pose estimators are trained on full-body datasets with limited hand diversity, while hand-only estimators, trained on hand-centric datasets, excel at detailed finger articulation but lack global body awareness. To address this, we propose Hand4Whole++, a modular framework that leverages the strengths of both pre-trained whole-body and hand pose estimators. We introduce CHAM (Conditional Hands Modulator), a lightweight module that modulates the whole-body feature stream using hand-specific features extracted from a pre-trained hand pose estimator. This modulation enables the whole-body model to predict wrist orientations that are both accurate and coherent with the upper-body kinematic structure, without retraining the full-body model. In parallel, we directly incorporate finger articulations and hand shapes predicted by the hand pose estimator, aligning them to the full-body mesh via differentiable rigid alignment. This design allows Hand4Whole++ to combine globally consistent body reasoning with fine-grained hand detail. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hand4Whole++ substantially improves hand accuracy and enhances overall full-body pose quality.

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) has been widely adopted in the perception systems of autonomous vehicles and mobile robots. However, existing approaches often struggle to maintain temporal consistency in depth estimation across consecutive frames. This inconsistency not only causes jitter but can also lead to estimation failures when the depth range changes abruptly. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a consistency-aware monocular depth estimation framework that leverages wheel odometry from a mobile robot to achieve stable and coherent depth predictions over time. Specifically, we estimate camera pose and sparse depth from triangulation using optical flow between consecutive frames. The sparse depth estimates are used to update a recursive Bayesian estimate of the metric scale, which is then applied to rescale the relative depth predicted by a pre-trained depth estimation foundation model. The proposed method is evaluated on the KITTI, TartanAir, MS2, and our own dataset, demonstrating robust and accurate depth estimation performance.

Model merging aims to combine multiple task-specific experts into a single model, but inter-task interference often causes severe degradation, especially when the experts are trained on heterogeneous objectives. Existing data-free methods are practical, yet largely rely on parameter-space heuristics without explicitly modeling task statistics. In this paper, we show that under a local linear approximation, the input covariance of each task can be estimated directly from its fine-tuning update, providing a principled bridge between parameter changes and data geometry in the data-free setting. Based on this insight, we propose ACE-Merging, a closed-form model merging framework with adaptive covariance normalization, a collective structural prior, and spectral refinement. Across both vision and language benchmarks, ACE-Merging achieves strong overall performance among data-free baselines. In particular, it improves the average score on GPT-2 by more than 4 points over prior methods, while also delivering strong scalability and competitive efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/unravel-xu/ACE-Merging/tree/main.

We revisit the problem of estimating the fundamental matrix of a pair of perspective cameras, a cornerstone of geometric computer vision. As is well-known, linear solvers require at least 8 point correspondences, whereas nonlinear minimal solvers require just 7 in the uncalibrated case or 5 in the calibrated case. In this paper, we consider a special case of the 7-point problem where 5 of the points are configured to lie on two lines, which has previously been shown to have a unique solution. As a theoretical contribution, we offer a completely elementary analysis of how this uniqueness manifests in the standard 7-point algorithm. On a practical level, we provide the first linear solver for the minimal problem associated to this special configuration. Additionally, we evaluate a heuristic 5-point fundamental matrix solver based on the construction of virtual midpoints. When combined with early non-minimal fitting, the runtime and accuracy of our solver is competitive with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on multiple benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/CIVA-Lab/v-umlaut.

In this paper, we introduce Object-WIPER, a training-free framework for removing dynamic objects and their associated visual effects from videos, and inpainting them with semantically consistent and temporally coherent content. Our approach leverages a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion transformer (DiT). Given an input video, a user-provided object mask, and query tokens describing the target object and its effects, we localize relevant visual tokens via visual-text cross-attention and visual self-attention. This produces an intermediate effect mask that we fuse with the user mask to obtain a final foreground token mask to replace. We first invert the video through the DiT to obtain structured noise, then reinitialize the masked tokens with Gaussian noise while preserving background tokens. During denoising, we copy values for the background tokens saved during inversion to maintain scene fidelity. To address the lack of suitable evaluation, we introduce a new object removal metric that rewards temporal consistency among foreground tokens across consecutive frames, coherence between foreground and background tokens within each frame, and dissimilarity between the input and output foreground tokens. Experiments on DAVIS and a newly curated real-world associated effect benchmark WIPER-Bench show that Object-WIPER surpasses both training-based and training-free baselines in terms of the metric, achieving clean removal and temporally stable reconstruction without any retraining. Our new benchmark, source code, and pre-trained models will be publicly available.

Estimating human gaze targets from images in-the-wild is an important and formidable task. Existing approaches primarily employ brittle, multi-stage pipelines that require explicit inputs, like head bounding boxes and human pose, in order to identify the subject of gaze analysis. As a result, detection errors can cascade and lead to failure. Moreover, these prior works lack the flexibility of specifying the gaze analysis task via natural language prompting, an approach which has been shown to have significant benefits in convenience and scalability for other image analysis tasks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Promptable Gaze Target Estimation (PGE) task, a new end-to-end, concept-driven paradigm for gaze analysis. PGE conditions gaze prediction on flexible user text or visual prompts (e.g., "the boy in the red shirt" or "person in point [0.52, 0.48]") to identify a specific subject for gaze analysis. This approach integrates subject localization with gaze estimation, and eliminates the rigid dependency on intermediate analysis stages. We develop a scalable data engine to generate Gaze-Co (Gaze Estimation with Concepts), a dataset and benchmark of 120K high-quality, prompt-annotated image pairs. We also propose GazeAnywhere, the first model designed for PGE. GazeAnywhere uses a transformer-based detector to fuse features from frozen encoders and simultaneously solves subject localization, in/out-of-frame presence, and gaze target heatmap estimation. GazeAnywhere achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple PGE benchmarks, setting a strong baseline for this new problem even on a difficult out-of-domain, real-world clinical dataset. GazeAnywhere is open-sourced in github.com/IrohXu/GazeAnywhere.

Accurate uncertainty estimation is essential for reliable appearance-based gaze tracking. However, domain shifts between training and testing often lead to incorrect uncertainty estimates, which is a problem overlooked in existing uncertainty-aware gaze tracking models. To overcome this problem efficiently, we formulate uncertainty estimation as a conditional distribution problem and treat the correction process as an output-level conditional distribution matching task. We therefore introduce a data-efficient post-hoc calibration method to align the predicted, high-error conditional distribution with the empirically observed distribution extracted from a small set of calibration samples. To more faithfully assess the accuracy of the resulting uncertainty estimates, we further introduce a new metric, Coverage Probability Error (CPE), to quantify the distribution-level mismatch between prediction and observation. We validate the calibration procedure across four domain shift scenarios to demonstrate improved uncertainty accuracy and its practical benefits.

Supervised and unsupervised homography estimation methods depend on image pairs tailored to specific modalities to achieve high accuracy. However, their performance deteriorates substantially when applied to unseen modalities. To address this issue, we propose a training data synthesis method that generates unaligned image pairs with ground-truth offsets from a single input image. Our approach renders the image pairs with diverse textures and colors while preserving their structural information. These synthetic data empower the trained model to achieve greater robustness and improved generalization across various domains. Additionally, we design a network to fully leverage cross-scale information and decouple color information from feature representations, thus improving estimation accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our training data synthesis method improves generalization performance. The results also confirm the effectiveness of the proposed network.

Event cameras asynchronously capture brightness changes with microsecond latency, offering exceptional temporal precision but suffering from severe noise and signal inconsistencies. Unlike conventional signals, events carry state information through polarities and process information through inter-event time intervals. However, existing event filters often ignore the latter, producing outputs that are sparser than the raw input and limiting the reconstruction of continuous irradiance dynamics. We propose the Event Density Flow Filter (EDFilter), a framework that models event generation as threshold-crossing probability fluxes arising from the stochastic diffusion of irradiance trajectories. EDFilter performs nonparametric, kernel-based estimation of probability flux and reconstructs the continuous event density flow using an O(1) recursive solver, enabling real-time processing. The Rotary Event Dataset (RED), featuring microsecond-resolution ground-truth irradiance flow under controlled illumination is also presented for event quality evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that EDFilter achieves high-fidelity, physically interpretable event denoising and motion reconstruction.

Even when told to "do nothing," modern diffusion models subtly alter their output relative to the input they are supposed to preserve. We call this effect No-Op Drift. We introduce the Drift Kernel K_M(sigma), defined as the expected perceptual deviation induced when running a diffusion model at noise strength sigma under a null instruction. Using 120,000 baseline samples (30,000 per model across SD15, SD21, SDXL, and InstructPix2Pix) and 9,600 ablation samples (four strengths, null versus strict copy prompts), we show that variance-driven diffusion models follow a quadratic form K_M(sigma) approximately equal to k_M sigma^2 plus c_M, with aggregate R^2 equal to 0.97. We derive this scaling from first principles via a Taylor expansion of the decoder, yielding k_M equal to Tr(J_D J_D^T), which depends only on the decoder Jacobian and not on prompts. To validate mechanistic structure, we construct synthetic decoders that reproduce the two regimes seen in practice: quadratic variance-driven drift and flat, high-variance edit-driven drift. We show that prompt wording has negligible effect (less than 17 percent coefficient difference), proving that drift is structural and not prompt-induced. We release NoOp-Bench, a benchmark with 10,000 inputs and full code for reproducible kernel estimation. Additional proofs, ablations, LPIPS and CLIP metrics, and extended visualizations appear in the Supplementary Material.