ICLR 2026 Papers

We propose a novel approach to image generation by decomposing an image into a structured sequence, where each element in the sequence shares the same spatial resolution but differs in the number of unique tokens used, capturing different level of visual granularity. Image generation is carried out through our newly introduced Next Visual Granularity (NVG) generation framework, which generates a visual granularity sequence beginning from an empty image and progressively refines it, from global layout to fine details, in a structured manner. This iterative process encodes a hierarchical, layered representation that offers fine-grained control over the generation process across multiple granularity levels. We train a series of NVG models for class-conditional image generation on the ImageNet dataset and observe clear scaling behavior. Compared to the VAR series, NVG consistently outperforms it in terms of FID scores (3.30 -> 3.03, 2.57 ->2.44, 2.09 -> 2.06). We also conduct extensive analysis to showcase the capability and potential of the NVG framework. Our code and models will be released.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in generative AI, with natural language emerging as the most common conditioning input. As underlying models grow more powerful, researchers are exploring increasingly diverse conditioning signals -- such as depth maps, edge maps, camera parameters, and reference images -- to give users finer control over generation. Among different modalities, sketches constitute a natural and long-standing form of human communication, enabling rapid expression of visual concepts. Yet algorithms that effectively handle true freehand sketches -- with their inherent abstraction and distortions -- remain largely unexplored. In this work, we distinguish between edge maps, often regarded as “sketches” in the literature, and genuine freehand sketches. We pursue the challenging goal of balancing photorealism with sketch adherence when generating images from freehand input. A key obstacle is the absence of ground-truth, pixel-aligned images: by their nature, freehand sketches do not have a single correct alignment. To address this, we propose a modulation-based approach that prioritizes semantic interpretation of the sketch over strict adherence to individual edge positions. We further introduce a novel loss that enables training on freehand sketches without requiring ground-truth pixel-aligned images. We show that our method outperforms existing approaches in both semantic alignment with freehand sketch inputs and in the realism and overall quality of the generated images.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant interest in extending their capabilities to multimodal scenarios, particularly for speech-to-speech conversational systems. However, existing multimodal models handling interleaved audio and text rely on autoregressive (AR) methods, overlooking that text depends on target-target relations whereas audio depends mainly on source-target relations. In this work, we propose Text-to-Talk (TtT), a unified audio-text framework that integrates AR text generation with non-autoregressive (NAR) audio diffusion in a single Transformer. By leveraging the any-order AR property of absorbing discrete diffusion, our approach provides a unified training objective for text and audio. To support this hybrid generation paradigm, we design a modality-aware attention mechanism that enforces causal decoding for text while allowing bidirectional modeling within audio spans, and further introduce three training strategies that reduce train-test discrepancies. During inference, TtT employs block-wise diffusion to synthesize audio in parallel while flexibly handling variable-length outputs. Comprehensive experiments on Audio-QA, ASR, AAC and speech-to-speech benchmarks show that TtT consistently surpasses strong AR and NAR baselines, with additional ablation and training-strategy analyses confirming the contribution of each component. We will open-source our models, data and code to facilitate future research in this direction.

Modern neural models capture rich priors and have complementary knowledge over shared data domains, e.g., images and videos. Integrating diverse knowledge from multiple sources—including visual generative models, visual language models, and sources with human-crafted knowledge such as graphics engines and physics simulators remains under-explored. We propose a probabilistic framework that combines information from these heterogeneous models, where expert models jointly shape a product distribution over outputs. To sample from this product distribution for controllable image/video synthesis tasks, we introduce an annealed MCMC sampler in combination with SMC-style resampling to enable efficient inference-time model composition. Our framework empirically yields better controllability than monolithic methods and additionally provides flexible user interfaces for specifying visual generation goals.

Subject-driven generation is a critical task in creative AI; yet current state-of-the-art methods present a stark trade-off. They either rely on computationally expensive, per-subject fine-tuning, sacrificing efficiency and zero-shot capability, or employ feed-forward architectures built on diffusion models, which are inherently plagued by slow inference speeds. Visual Auto-Regressive (VAR) models are renowned for their rapid sampling speeds and strong generative quality, making them an ideal yet underexplored foundation for resolving this tension. To bridge this gap, we introduce EchoGen, a pioneering framework that empowers VAR models with subject-driven generation capabilities. The core design of EchoGen is an effective dual-path injection strategy that disentangles a subject's high-level semantic identity from its low-level fine-grained details, enabling enhanced controllability and fidelity. We employ a semantic encoder to extract the subject's abstract identity, which is injected through decoupled cross-attention to guide the overall composition. Concurrently, a content encoder captures intricate visual details, which are integrated via a multi-modal attention mechanism to ensure high-fidelity texture and structural preservation. To the best of our knowledge, EchoGen is the first feed-forward subject-driven framework built upon VAR models. Both quantitative and qualitative results substantiate our design, demonstrating that EchoGen achieves subject fidelity and image quality comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods with significantly lower sampling latency.

Hallucination, where models generate fluent text unsupported by visual evidence, remains a major flaw in vision–language models and is especially critical in sign language translation (SLT). In SLT, meaning depends on precise grounding in video, and gloss-free models are particularly vulnerable because they map continuous signer movements directly into natural language without intermediate gloss supervision. We argue that hallucination arises when models rely on language priors rather than visual input. To capture this, we propose a token-level measure of reliability that quantifies how much the decoder uses visual information. Our method combines feature-based sensitivity, which measures internal changes when video is masked, with counterfactual signals, which capture probability differences between clean and altered video inputs. These signals are aggregated into a sentence-level reliability score, providing a compact and interpretable measure of visual grounding. We evaluate the proposed measure on two SLT benchmarks (PHOENIX-2014T and CSL-Daily) with both gloss-based and gloss-free models. Our results show that reliability predicts hallucination rates, generalizes across datasets and architectures, and decreases under visual degradations. Beyond these quantitative trends, we also find that reliability distinguishes grounded tokens from guessed ones, allowing risk estimation without references; when combined with text-based signals (confidence, perplexity, or entropy), it further improves hallucination risk estimation. Qualitative analysis further highlights why gloss-free models are more susceptible to hallucinations. Taken together, our findings establish reliability as a practical and reusable tool for diagnosing hallucinations in SLT, and lay groundwork for more robust hallucination detection in multimodal generation.

In this work, we propose aligning pretrained visual encoders to serve as tokenizers for latent diffusion models in image generation. Unlike training a variational autoencoder (VAE) from scratch, which primarily emphasizes low-level details, our approach leverages the rich semantic structure of foundation encoders. We introduce a three-stage alignment strategy called AlignTok: (1) freeze the encoder and train an adapter and a decoder to establish a semantic latent space; (2) jointly optimize all components with an additional semantic preservation loss, enabling the encoder to capture perceptual details while retaining high-level semantics; and (3) refine the decoder for improved reconstruction quality. This alignment yields semantically rich image tokenizers that benefit diffusion models. On ImageNet 256$\times$256, our tokenizer accelerates the convergence of diffusion models, reaching a gFID of 1.90 within just 64 epochs, and improves generation both with and without classifier-free guidance. Scaling to LAION, text-to-image models trained with our tokenizer consistently outperforms FLUX VAE and VA-VAE under the same training steps. Overall, our method is simple, scalable, and establishes a semantically grounded paradigm for continuous tokenizer design.

Understanding videos inherently requires reasoning over both visual and auditory information. To properly evaluate Omni-Large Language Models (Omni-LLMs), which are capable of processing multi-modal information including vision and audio, an effective benchmark must comprehensively cover three key aspects: (1) multi-modal dependency (i.e., questions that cannot be answered using vision or audio alone), (2) diverse audio information types (e.g., speech, sound events), and (3) varying scene spans. However, existing datasets fall short in one or more of these dimensions, limiting strict and comprehensive evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce JointAVBench, a novel benchmark with strict audio-video correlation, spanning five cognitive dimensions, four audio information types (speech, sound events, music, vocal traits), and three scene spans (single-, cross-, and full-scene). Given the high cost of manual annotation, we propose an automated pipeline that leverages state-of-the-art vision-LLMs, audio-LLMs, and general-purpose LLMs to synthesize questions and answers that strictly require joint audio-visual understanding. We evaluate leading vision-only, audio-only, and Omni-LLMs on our dataset. Results show that even the best-performing Omni-LLM achieves only 62.6\% average accuracy, outperforming uni-modal baselines but revealing substantial room for improvement, especially in cross-scene reasoning.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal capabilities, but they inherit the tendency to hallucinate from their underlying language models. While visual contrastive decoding has been proposed to mitigate this issue, existing methods often apply generic visual augmentations that disregard the specific context provided by the text query, limiting their effectiveness. This study introduces a novel training-free decoding strategy that addresses these limitations, featuring two key contributions. First, a self-augmentation prompting strategy that leverages the intrinsic knowledge of the model to dynamically align semantics between the query and the visual augmentation. Second, an adaptive thresholding algorithm that adaptively adjusts next token candidate size based on the output sparsity, utilizing full information from the logit distribution. Extensive experiments across four LVLMs and seven benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed decoding significantly enhances factual consistency compared to state-of-the-art decoding methods. This work highlights the importance of integrating query-dependent augmentation and entropy-aware decoding for improving effective generation of LVLMs. The source code will be released upon acceptance.

Auto-regressive (AR) models have recently made notable progress in image generation, achieving performance comparable to diffusion-based approaches. However, their computational intensity and sequential nature impede on-device deployment, causing disruptive latency. We address this via a cloud-device collaboration framework \textbf{CIAR}, which utilizes on-device self-verification to handle two key properties of visual synthesis: \textit{the vast token vocabulary} required for high-fidelity images and \textit{inherent spatial redundancy} which leads to extreme predictability in homogeneous regions, while object boundaries exhibit high uncertainty. Uniform verification wastes resources on such redundant tokens. Our solution centers on an on-device token uncertainty quantifier, which adopts continuous probability intervals to accelerate processing and make it feasible for large visual vocabularies instead of conventional discrete solution sets. Additionally, we incorporate a Interval-enhanced decoding module to further speed up decoding while maintaining visual fidelity and semantic consistency via a distribution alignment training strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIAR achieves a 2.18× speed-up and reduces cloud requests by 70\%, while preserving image quality compared to existing methods.

We propose **Stable Video Infinity (SVI)** that can generate non-looping, ultra-long videos with stable visual quality, while supporting per-clip prompt control and multi-modal conditioning. While existing long-video methods attempt to _**mitigate accumulated errors**_ via handcrafted anti-drifting (e.g., modified noise scheduler, frame anchoring), they remain limited to single-prompt extrapolation, producing homogeneous scenes with repetitive motions. We identify that the fundamental challenge extends beyond error accumulation to a critical discrepancy between the training assumption (seeing clean data) and the test-time autoregressive reality (conditioning on self-generated, error-prone outputs). To bridge this hypothesis gap, SVI incorporates **Error-Recycling Fine-Tuning**, a new type of efficient training that recycles the Diffusion Transformer (DiT)’s self-generated errors into supervisory prompts, thereby encouraging DiT to _**actively identify and correct its own errors**_. This is achieved by injecting, collecting, and banking errors through closed-loop recycling, autoregressively learning from error-injected feedback. Specifically, we (i) inject historical errors made by DiT to intervene on clean inputs, simulating error-accumulated trajectories in flow matching; (ii) efficiently approximate predictions with one-step bidirectional integration and calculate errors with residuals; (iii) dynamically bank errors into replay memory across discretized timesteps, which are resampled for new input. SVI is able to scale videos from seconds to infinite durations with no additional inference cost, while remaining compatible with diverse conditions (e.g., audio, skeleton, and text streams). We evaluate SVI on three benchmarks, including consistent, creative, and conditional settings, thoroughly verifying its versatility and state-of-the-art role.

Existing video-to-audio (V2A) generation methods predominantly rely on text prompts alongside visual information to synthesize audio. However, two critical bottlenecks persist: semantic granularity gaps in training data (e.g., conflating acoustically distinct sounds like different dog barks under coarse labels), and textual ambiguity in describing microacoustic features (e.g., "metallic clang" failing to distinguish impact transients and resonance decay). These bottlenecks make it difficult to perform fine-grained sound synthesis using text-controlled modes. To address these limitations, we propose **AC-Foley**, an audio-conditioned V2A model that directly leverages reference audio to achieve precise and fine-grained control over generated sounds. This approach enables: fine-grained sound synthesis (e.g., footsteps with distinct timbres on wood, marble, or gravel), timbre transfer (e.g., transforming a violin’s melody into the bright, piercing tone of a suona), zero-shot generation of sounds (e.g., creating unique weapon sound effects without training on firearm datasets) and better audio quality. By directly conditioning on audio signals, our approach bypasses the semantic ambiguities of text descriptions while enabling precise manipulation of acoustic attributes. Empirically, AC-Foley achieves state-of-the-art performance for Foley generation when conditioned on reference audio, while remaining competitive with SOTA video-to-audio methods even without audio conditioning.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly capable of answering medical questions that require joint reasoning over images and text, yet training general medical VQA systems is impeded by the lack of large, openly usable, high-quality corpora. We present MedVLSynther, a rubric-guided generator-verifier framework that synthesizes high-quality multiple-choice VQA items directly from open biomedical literature by conditioning on figures, captions, and in-text references. The generator produces self-contained stems and parallel, mutually exclusive options under a machine-checkable JSON schema; a multi-stage verifier enforces essential gates (self-containment, single correct answer, clinical validity, image-text consistency), awards fine-grained positive points, and penalizes common failure modes before acceptance. Applying this pipeline to PubMed Central yields MedSynVQA: 13,087 audited questions over 14,803 images spanning 13 imaging modalities and 28 anatomical regions. Training open-weight LMMs with reinforcement learning using verifiable rewards improves accuracy across six medical VQA benchmarks, achieving averages of 55.85 (3B) and 58.15 (7B), with up to 77.57 on VQA-RAD and 67.76 on PathVQA, outperforming strong medical LMMs. A Ablations verify that both generation and verification are necessary and that more verified data consistently helps, and a targeted contamination analysis detects no leakage from evaluation suites. By operating entirely on open literature and open-weight models, MedVLSynther offers an auditable, reproducible, and privacy-preserving path to scalable medical VQA training data.

The rapid development of large-scale models has catalyzed significant breakthroughs in the digital human domain. These advanced methodologies offer high-fidelity solutions for avatar driving and rendering, leading academia to focus on the next major challenge: audio-visual dyadic interactive virtual human. To facilitate research in this emerging area, we present SpeakerVid-5M dataset, the first large-scale, high-quality dataset designed for audio-visual dyadic interactive virtual human generation. Totaling over $8,743$ hours, SpeakerVid-5M contains more than $5.2$ million video clips of human portraits. It covers diverse scales and interaction types, including monadic talking, listening, and dyadic conversations. Crucially, the dataset is structured along two key dimensions: interaction type and data quality. First, it is categorized into four types (dialogue branch, single branch, listening branch and multi-turn branch) based on the interaction scenario. Second, it is stratified into a large-scale pre-training subset and a curated, high-quality subset for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). This dual structure accommodates a wide array of 2D virtual human tasks. In addition, we provide an autoregressive (AR)-based video chat baseline trained on this data, accompanied by a dedicated set of metrics and test data to serve as a benchmark (VidChatBench) for future work. Both the dataset and the corresponding data processing code will be publicly released.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have become a popular medium for decoding visual information due to their cost-effectiveness and high temporal resolution. However, current approaches face significant challenges in bridging the modality gap between EEG and image data. These methods typically rely on complex adaptation processes involving multiple stages, making it hard to maintain consistency and manage compounding errors. Furthermore, the computational overhead imposed by large-scale diffusion models limit their practicality in real-world brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. In this work, we present AVDE, a lightweight and efficient framework for visual decoding from EEG signals. First, we leverage LaBraM, a pre-trained EEG model, and fine-tune it via contrastive learning to align EEG and image representations. Second, we adopt an autoregressive generative framework based on a "next-scale prediction" strategy: images are encoded into multi-scale token maps using a pre-trained VQ-VAE, and a transformer is trained to autoregressively predict finer-scale tokens starting from EEG embeddings as the coarsest representation. This design enables coherent generation while preserving a direct connection between the input EEG signals and the reconstructed images. Experiments on two datasets show that AVDE outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in both image retrieval and reconstruction tasks, while using only 10% of the parameters. In addition, visualization of intermediate outputs shows that the generative process of AVDE reflects the hierarchical nature of human visual perception. These results highlight the potential of autoregressive models as efficient and interpretable tools for practical BCI applications.

Object-level manipulation—relocating or reorienting objects in images or videos while preserving scene realism—is central to film post-production, AR, and creative editing. Yet existing methods struggle to jointly achieve three core goals: background preservation, geometric consistency under viewpoint shifts, and user-controllable transformations. Geometry-based approaches offer precise control but require explicit 3D reconstruction and generalize poorly; diffusion-based methods generalize better but lack fine-grained geometric control. We present **Ctrl&Shift**, an end-to-end diffusion framework to achieve geometry-consistent object manipulation without explicit 3D representations. Our key insight is to decompose manipulation into two stages—object removal and reference-guided inpainting under explicit camera pose control—and encode both within a unified diffusion process. To enable precise, disentangled control, we design a multi-task, multi-stage training strategy that separates background, identity, and pose signals across tasks. To improve generalization, we introduce a scalable real-world dataset construction pipeline that generates paired image and video samples with estimated relative camera poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that **Ctrl&Shift** achieves state-of-the-art results in fidelity, viewpoint consistency, and controllability. *To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify fine-grained geometric control and real-world generalization for object manipulation—without relying on any explicit 3D modeling.*

Generating interactive 3D scenes from text requires not only synthesizing assets but arranging them with spatial intelligence—support, affordances, and plausibility. However, training data for interactive scenes is dominated by a few indoor datasets, so learning-based methods overfit to in-distribution layouts and struggle to compose diverse arrangements (e.g., outdoor settings and small-on-large relations). Meanwhile, LLM-based layout planners can propose diverse arrangements, but the lack of visual grounding often yields implausible placements that violate commonsense physics. We propose Scenethesis, a training-free, agentic framework that couples LLM-based scene planning with vision-guided layout refinement. Given a text prompt, Scenethesis first drafts a coarse layout with an LLM; a vision module refines the layout and extracts scene structure to capture inter-object relations. A novel optimization stage enforces pose alignment and physical plausibility, and a final judge verifies spatial coherence and triggers targeted repair when needed. Across indoor and outdoor prompts, Scenethesis produces realistic, relation-rich, and physically plausible 3D interactive scenes, reducing collisions and stability failures compared to SOTA methods, making it practical for virtual content creation, simulation, and embodied AI.

Hypergraph network data, which capture multi-way interactions among entities, have become increasingly prevalent in the big data era, spanning fields such as social science, medical research, and biology. Generating synthetic hyperlinks with attributes from an observed hypergraph has broad applications in data augmentation, simulation, and advancing the understanding of real-world complex systems. This task, however, poses unique challenges due to special properties of hypergraphs, including discreteness, hyperlink sparsity, and the mixed data types of hyperlinks and their attributes, rendering many existing generative models unsuitable. In this paper, we introduce ReLaSH (REconstructing joint LAtent Spaces for Hypergraphs with attributes), a general generative framework for producing realistic synthetic hypergraph data with hyperlink attributes via training a likelihood-based joint embedding model and reconstructing the joint latent space. Given a hypergraph dataset, ReLaSH first embeds the hyperlinks and their attributes into a joint latent space by training a likelihood-based model, and then reconstructs this joint latent space using a distribution-free generator. The generation task is completed by first sampling embeddings from the distribution-free generator and then decoding them into hyperlinks and attributes through the trained likelihood-based model. Compared with existing generative models, ReLaSH explicitly accounts for the unique structure of hypergraphs and jointly models hyperlinks and their attributes. Moreover, the likelihood-based embedding model provides efficiency and interpretability relative to deep black-box architectures, while the distribution-free generator in the joint latent space ensures flexibility. We theoretically demonstrate consistency and generalizability of ReLaSH. Empirical results on a range of real-world datasets from diverse domains demonstrate the strong performance of ReLaSH, underscoring its broad utility and effectiveness in practical applications.

Visual autoregressive (VAR) models generate images through next-scale prediction, naturally achieving coarse-to-fine, fast, high-fidelity synthesis mirroring human perception. In practice, this hierarchy can drift at inference time, as limited capacity and accumulated error cause the model to deviate from its coarse-to-fine nature. We revisit this limitation from an information-theoretic perspective and deduce that ensuring each scale to contribute high-frequency content not explained by earlier scales mitigates the train–inference discrepancy. With this insight, we propose Scaled Spatial Guidance (SSG), a training-free, inference-time guidance that steers generation toward the intended hierarchy while maintaining global coherence. SSG emphasizes target high-frequency signals, defined as the semantic residual, isolated from a coarser prior. To obtain this prior, we leverage a principled frequency-domain procedure, Discrete Spatial Enhancement (DSE), devised to sharpen and better isolate the semantic residual through frequency-aware construction. SSG applies broadly across VAR models leveraging discrete visual tokens, regardless of tokenization design or conditioning modality. Experiments demonstrate SSG yields consistent gains in fidelity and diversity while preserving low latency, revealing untapped efficiency in coarse-to-fine image generation.