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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Conversational Image Segmentation: Grounding Abstract Concepts with Scalable Supervision

Aadarsh Sahoo, Georgia Gkioxari

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Conversational image segmentation grounds abstract, intent-driven concepts into pixel-accurate masks. Prior work on referring image grounding focuses on categorical and spatial queries (e.g., "left-most apple") and overlooks functional and physical reasoning (e.g., "where can I safely store the knife?"). We address this gap and introduce Conversational Image Segmentation (CIS) and ConvSeg, a benchmark spanning entities, spatial relations, intent, affordances, functions, safety, and physical reasoning. We also present ConvSeg-Net, which fuses strong segmentation priors with language understanding, and an AI-powered data engine that generates prompt-mask pairs without human supervision. We show that current language-guided segmentation models are inadequate for CIS, while ConvSeg-Net trained on our data engine achieves significant gains on ConvSeg and maintains strong performance on existing language-guided segmentation benchmarks. Project webpage: https://glab-caltech.github.io/converseg

Poster
Beyond Weak Supervision: MLLMs-Guided Graded Knowledge Distillation for Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection

Huafeng Chen, Chenguang Zhu, Yueming Lyu, Caifeng Shan

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Most Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) methods rely on costly pixel-level annotations. Recent studies have adopted unsupervised COD (UCOD) to eliminate labeling costs, but still suffer from two issues:1) insufficient supervision, leading to reliance on self-supervised backbone DINO and reduced model flexibility; and 2) ineffective use of pseudo-labels, which widens the performance gap with supervised methods and limits real-world applicability. In this paper, we propose a novel teacher-student framework for UCOD to address these two issues. To tackle the lack of supervision, we build a powerful teacher model by integrating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to generate high-quality pseudo-labels. However, the teacher model faces two challenges: 1) suboptimal performance of MLLMs in COD, and 2) cascading errors.To address these challenges, we first propose a Camouflaged-Aware Chain-of-Thought (CA-CoT) for MLLMs. CA-CoT guides MLLMs through step-by-step reasoning to simulate human perceptual processes, thereby enhancing their performance in COD.Subsequently, we design a Graded Mask Evaluator (GME) to mitigate cascading errors, which evaluates and grades the quality of masks generated by SAM, and then filters out the low-quality masks to provide more reliable supervision.To better leverage pseudo-labels, we propose Graded Knowledge Distillation (GKD), which adaptively enhances distillation at both image and pixel levels based on pseudo-label quality. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing UCOD approaches by a large margin. Notably, our method also achieves good performance under zero-shot settings. Code will be released.

Poster
UnReflectAnything: RGB-Only Highlight Removal by Rendering Synthetic Specular Supervision

Alberto Rota, Mert Kiray, Mert Asim Karaoglu, Patrick Ruhkamp, Elena De Momi, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam

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Specular highlights distort appearance, obscure texture, and hinder geometric reasoning in both natural and surgical imagery. We present UnReflectAnything, an RGB-only framework that removes highlights from a single image by predicting a highlight map together with a reflection-free diffuse reconstruction. The model uses a frozen vision transformer encoder to extract multi-scale features, a lightweight head to localize specular regions, and a token-level inpainting module that restores corrupted feature patches before producing the final diffuse image. To overcome the lack of paired supervision, we introduce a Virtual Highlight Synthesis pipeline that renders physically plausible specularities using monocular geometry, Fresnel-aware shading, and randomized lighting which enables training on arbitrary RGB images with correct geometric structure. UnReflectAnything generalizes across natural and surgical domains where non-Lambertian surfaces and non-uniform lighting create severe highlights and it achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks. Project Page: alberto-rota.github.io/UnReflectAnything

Oral
Improving Diffusion Generalization with Weak-to-Strong Segmented Guidance

Liangyu Yuan, Yufei Huang, Mingkun Lei, Tong Zhao, Ruoyu Wang, Changxi Chi, Yiwei Wang, Chi Zhang

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Diffusion models generate synthetic images through an iterative refinement process. However, the misalignment between the simulation-free objective and the iterative process often causes accumulated gradient error along the sampling trajectory, which leads to unsatisfactory results and a failure to generalize. Guidance techniques like Classifier Free Guidance (CFG) and AutoGuidance (AG) alleviate this by extrapolating between the main and inferior signal for stronger generalization. Despite empirical success, the effective operational regimes of prevalent guidance methods are still under-explored, leading to ambiguity when selecting the appropriate guidance method given a precondition. In this work, we first conduct synthetic comparisons to isolate and demonstrate the effective regime of guidance methods represented by CFG and AG from the perspective of weak-to-strong principle. Based on this, we propose a hybrid instantiation called SEG under the principle, taking the benefits of both. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the W2S principle along with SEG can be migrated into the training objective, improving the generalization ability of unguided diffusion models. We validate our approach with comprehensive experiments. At inference time, evaluations on SD3 and SD3.5 confirm that SEG outperforms existing training-free guidance variants. Training-time experiments on transformer architectures demonstrate the effective migration and performance gains in both conditional and unconditional settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AGI-Lab/SGG

Poster
FlexAvatar: Learning Complete 3D Head Avatars with Partial Supervision

Tobias Kirschstein, Simon Giebenhain, Matthias Nießner

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We introduce FlexAvatar, a method for creating high-quality and complete 3D head avatars from a single image. A core challenge lies in the limited availability of multi-view data and the tendency of monocular training to yield incomplete 3D head reconstructions. We identify the root cause of this issue as the entanglement between driving signal and target viewpoint when learning from monocular videos. To address this, we propose a transformer-based 3D portrait animation model with learnable data source tokens, so-called bias sinks, which enables unified training across monocular and multi-view datasets. This design leverages the strengths of both data sources during inference: strong generalization from monocular data and full 3D completeness from multi-view supervision. Furthermore, our training procedure yields a smooth latent avatar space that facilitates identity interpolation and flexible fitting to an arbitrary number of input observations. In extensive evaluations on single-view, few-shot, and monocular avatar creation tasks, we verify the efficacy of FlexAvatar. Many existing methods struggle with view extrapolation while FlexAvatar generates complete 3D head avatars with realistic facial animations.

Poster
MatchED: Crisp Edge Detection Using End-to-End, Matching-based Supervision

Bedrettin Cetinkaya, Sinan Kalkan, Emre Akbas

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Generating crisp, i.e., one-pixel-wide, edge maps remains one of the fundamental challenges in edge detection, affecting both traditional and learning-based methods. To obtain crisp edges, most existing approaches rely on two hand-crafted post-processing algorithms, Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) and skeleton-based thinning, which are non-differentiable and hinder end-to-end optimization. Moreover, all existing crisp edge detection methods still depend on such post-processing to achieve satisfactory results. To address this limitation, we propose MatchED, a lightweight, only 21K additional parameters, and plug-and-play matching-based supervision module that can be appended to any edge detection model for joint end-to-end learning of crisp edges. At each training iteration, MatchED performs one-to-one matching between predicted and ground-truth edges based on spatial distance and confidence, ensuring consistency between training and testing protocols. Extensive experiments on four popular datasets demonstrate that integrating MatchED substantially improves the performance of existing edge detection models. In particular, MatchED increases the Average Crispness (AC) metric by up to 2--4x compared to baseline models. Under the crispness-emphasized evaluation (CEval), MatchED further boosts baseline performance by up to 20--35% in ODS and achieves similar gains in OIS and AP, achieving SOTA performance that matches or surpasses standard post-processing for the first time. Code is available at https://cvpr26-matched.github.io.

Poster
PropFly: Learning to Propagate via On-the-Fly Supervision from Pre-trained Video Diffusion Models

Wonyong Seo, Jaeho Moon, Jaehyup Lee, Soo Ye Kim, Munchurl Kim

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Propagation-based video editing enables precise user control by propagating a single edited frame into following frames while maintaining the original context such as motion and structures.However, training such models requires large-scale, paired (source and edited) video datasets, which are costly and complex to acquire.Hence, we propose the PropFly, a training pipeline for Propagation-based video editing, relying on on-the-Fly supervision from pre-trained video diffusion models (VDMs) instead of requiring off-the-shelf or precomputed paired video editing datasets.Specifically, our PropFly leverages one-step clean latent estimations from intermediate noised latents with varying Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) scales to synthesize diverse pairs of 'source' (low-CFG) and 'edited' (high-CFG) latents on-the-fly. The source latent serves as structural information of the video, while the edited latent provides the target transformation for learning propagation.Our pipeline enables an additional adapter attached to the pre-trained VDM to learn to propagate edits via Guidance-Modulated Flow Matching (GMFM) loss, which guides the model to replicate the target transformation.Our on-the-fly supervision ensures the model to learn temporally consistent and dynamic transformations.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PropFly significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on various video editing tasks, producing high-quality editing results.

Poster
GEM-TFL: Bridging Weak and Full Supervision for Forgery Localization through EM-Guided Decomposition and Temporal Refinement

Xiaodong Zhu, Yuanming Zheng, Suting Wang, Junqi Yang, Yuhong Yang, Weiping Tu, Zhongyuan Wang

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Temporal Forgery Localization (TFL) aims to precisely identify manipulated segments within videos or audio streams, providing interpretable evidence for multimedia forensics and security. While most existing TFL methods rely on dense frame-level labels in a fully supervised manner, Weakly Supervised TFL (WS-TFL) reduces labeling cost by learning only from binary video-level labels. However, current WS-TFL approaches suffer from mismatched training and inference objectives, limited supervision from binary labels, gradient blockage caused by non-differentiable top-k aggregation, and the absence of explicit modeling of inter-proposal relationships. To address these issues, we propose GEM-TFL (Graph-based EM-powered Temporal Forgery Localization), a two-phase classification-regression framework that effectively bridges the supervision gap between training and inference. Built upon this foundation, (1) we enhance weak supervision by reformulating binary labels into multi-dimensional latent attributes through an EM-based optimization process; (2) we introduce a training-free temporal consistency refinement that realigns frame-level predictions for smoother temporal dynamics; and (3) we design a graph-based proposal refinement module that models temporal-semantic relationships among proposals for globally consistent confidence estimation. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that GEM-TFL achieves more accurate and robust temporal forgery localization, substantially narrowing the gap with fully supervised methods.

Poster
NexusFlow: Unifying Disparate Tasks under Partial Supervision via Invertible Flow Networks

Fangzhou Lin, Yuping Wang, Yuliang Guo, Zixun Huang, Xinyu Huang, Haichong Zhang, Kazunori Yamada, Zhengzhong Tu, Liu Ren, Ziming Zhang

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Partially Supervised Multi-Task Learning (PS-MTL) aims to leverage knowledge across tasks when annotations are incomplete. Existing approaches, however, have largely focused on the simpler setting of homogeneous, dense prediction tasks, leaving the more realistic challenge of learning from structurally diverse tasks unexplored. To this end, we introduce NexusFlow, a novel, lightweight, and plug-and-play framework effective in both settings. NexusFlow introduces a set of surrogate networks with invertible coupling layers to align the latent feature distributions of tasks, creating a unified representation that enables effective knowledge transfer. The coupling layers are bijective, preserving information while mapping features into a shared canonical space. This invertibility avoids representational collapse and enables alignment across structurally different tasks without reducing expressive capacity.We first evaluate NexusFlow on the core challenge of domain-partitioned autonomous driving, where dense map reconstruction and sparse multi-object tracking are supervised in different geographic regions, creating both structural disparity and a strong domain gap. NexusFlow sets a new state-of-the-art result on nuScenes, outperforming strong partially supervised baselines. To demonstrate generality, we further test NexusFlow on NYUv2 using three homogeneous dense prediction tasks, segmentation, depth, and surface normals, as a representative N-task PS-MTL scenario. NexusFlow yields consistent gains across all tasks, confirming its broad applicability.

Poster
Generalizable Video Quality Assessment via Weak-to-Strong Learning

Linhan Cao, Wei Sun, Xiangyang Zhu, Kaiwei Zhang, Jun Jia, Yicong Peng, Dandan Zhu, Guangtao Zhai, Xiongkuo Min

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Video quality assessment (VQA) seeks to predict the perceptual quality of a video in alignment with human visual perception, serving as a fundamental tool for quantifying quality degradation across video processing workflows. The dominant VQA paradigm relies on supervised training with human-labeled datasets, which, despite substantial progress, still suffers from poor generalization to unseen video content. In this work, we explore weak-to-strong (W2S) learning as a new paradigm for advancing VQA without reliance on human-labeled datasets. We first provide empirical evidence that a straightforward W2S strategy allows a strong student model to not only match its weak teacher on in-domain benchmarks but also surpass it on out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks, revealing a distinct weak-to-strong effect in VQA. Building on this insight, we propose a novel framework that enhances W2S learning from two aspects: (1) integrating homogeneous and heterogeneous supervision signals from diverse VQA teachers---including off-the-shelf VQA models and synthetic distortion simulators---via a learn-to-rank formulation, and (2) iterative W2S training, where each strong student is recycled as the teacher in subsequent cycles, progressively focusing on challenging cases. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results across both in-domain and OOD benchmarks, with especially strong gains in OOD scenarios. Our findings highlight W2S learning as a principled route to break annotation barriers and achieve scalable generalization in video quality assessment.

Poster