ICML 2026 Papers

High-fidelity image generation faces a trade-off between speed and quality. Diffusion models produce strong visuals but require costly iterative sampling. Existing efficient methods mainly distill pretrained models into few-step samplers, a challenging process that depends heavily on teacher-model quality. In this paper, we introduce XYZFlow, a framework that rethinks efficient generation through multidimensional scaling of flow matching. Unlike single-step mappings, XYZFlow enhances expressivity by making probability paths more identifiable and learnable through structured multidimensional conditioning. We view autoregressive modeling as implicit flow straightening, where richer context reduces trajectory ambiguity. XYZFlow realizes this idea through two orthogonal dimensions: temporal scaling, which uses non-Markovian conditioning on the full denoising history; and spatial scaling, enabled by Next Shortcut Prediction, which sequentially generates patches using preceding patches' denoising trajectories as priors. Experiments show that XYZFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 7.2-8.5x teacher speedups and competitive FID, while Next Shortcut Prediction delivers superior quality-latency trade-offs over model scaling or step reduction.

3D visual grounding requires robust cross-modal representation to achieve fine-grained semantic alignment and precise geometric reasoning. However, most methods employ unimodal pre-trained encoders that transfer visual and linguistic knowledge independently, inducing domain shift and poor cross-modal alignment. Meanwhile, spatial modeling with handcrafted priors limits cross-modal geometric representation, struggling to capture complex object relations due to spectral bias. To address these challenges, we propose Text-Aware Feature Tuning (TFT) and Decomposed Spectral Geometry (DSG) to enhance cross-modal semantic representation. Specifically, TFT injects linguistic context into the visual hierarchy to mitigate domain shift and facilitate early cross-modal alignment. DSG employs a learnable Fourier basis and explicitly decomposes pairwise relations into symmetric and antisymmetric spectral components, allowing the model to capture high-frequency geometric details and direction-aware relations for precise spatial reasoning. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer, Nr3D and Sr3D validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance with improvements of 2.05\% Acc@0.25 for 3DREC and 1.09\% mIoU for 3DRES on ScanRefer.

A truly universal AI-Generated Image (AIGI) detector must simultaneously generalize across diverse generative models and varied semantic content. Current methods learn a single, entangled forgery representation, conflating content-dependent flaws with content-agnostic artifacts, and are further constrained by outdated benchmarks. We propose OmniAID, a novel framework centered on a decoupled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that separates: (1) semantic flaws across distinct content domains via Routable Specialized Semantic Experts, and (2) content-agnostic universal artifacts from content-dependent flaws via a Fixed Universal Artifact Expert. A two-stage training strategy first specializes experts independently with domain-specific hard-sampling, then trains a lightweight gating network for effective input routing. By explicitly decoupling "what is generated'' (content-specific flaws) from "how it is generated'' (universal artifacts), OmniAID achieves robust generalization. We also introduce Mirage, a large-scale, contemporary dataset comprising a modern training set and a challenging test set. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniAID surpasses existing detectors, establishing a new standard for AIGI detection against modern, in-the-wild threats.

With the rapid development of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the growing demand for their applications, efficient compression of the image inputs has become increasingly important. Existing VLMs predominantly digest and understand high-bitrate compressed images, while their ability to interpret low-bitrate compressed images has yet to be explored by far. In this paper, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the ability of VLM against compressed images, varying existing widely used image codecs and diverse set of tasks, encompassing over one million compressed images in our benchmark. Next, we analyse the source of performance gap, by categorising the gap from a) the information loss during compression and b) generalisation failure of VLM. We visualize these gaps with concrete examples and identify that for compressed images, only the generalization gap can be mitigated. Finally, we propose a universal VLM adaptor to enhance model performance on images compressed by existing codecs. Consequently, we demonstrate that a single adaptor can improve VLM performance across images with varying codecs and bitrates by 10%-30%. We believe that our benchmark and enhancement method provide valuable insights and contribute toward bridging the gap between VLMs and compressed images. The source code is available at https://github.com/bblgbr/CompressVLMBench.

Preference optimization for diffusion models relies on reward functions that are both discriminative and computationally efficient. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as powerful reward providers. However, their computation and memory cost can be substantial, and optimizing a latent diffusion generator through a pixel-space reward introduces a domain mismatch that complicates alignment. In this paper, we propose DiNa-LRM, a diffusion-native latent reward model that formulates preference learning directly on noisy diffusion states. Our method introduces a noise-calibrated Thurstone likelihood with diffusion-noise-dependent uncertainty. DiNa-LRM leverages a pretrained latent diffusion backbone with a timestep-conditioned reward head, and supports inference-time noise ensembling, providing a diffusion-native mechanism for test-time scaling and robust rewarding. Across image alignment benchmarks, DiNa-LRM substantially outperforms existing diffusion-based reward baselines and achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art VLMs while maintaining a substantially lower computational cost. In preference optimization, we demonstrate that DiNa-LRM improves preference optimization dynamics, enabling faster and more resource-efficient model alignment.

Multimodal Large Language Models excel at offline audio-visual understanding, but their ability to serve as mobile assistants in continuous real-world streams remains underexplored. In daily phone use, mobile assistants must track streaming audio-visual inputs and respond at the right time, yet existing benchmarks are often restricted to multiple-choice questions or use shorter videos. In this paper, we introduce **PhoStream**, the first mobile-centric streaming benchmark that unifies on-screen and off-screen scenarios to evaluate video, audio, and temporal reasoning. PhoStream contains 5,572 open-ended QA pairs from 578 videos across 4 scenarios and 10 capabilities. We build it with an Automated Generative Pipeline backed by rigorous human verification, and evaluate models using a realistic Online Inference Pipeline and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation for open-ended responses. Experiments reveal a temporal asymmetry in LLM-judged scores (0--100): models perform well on Instant and Backward tasks (Gemini 3 Pro exceeds 80), but drop sharply on Forward tasks (16.40), largely due to early responses before the required visual and audio cues appear. This highlights a fundamental limitation: current MLLMs struggle to decide ***when*** to speak, not just ***what*** to say. Code and datasets will be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/PhoStream.

We present HOI-PAGE, a new approach that prioritizes part-level affordance reasoning to generate high-fidelity 4D human-object interactions (HOIs) from text prompts in a zero-shot fashion. In contrast to prior works that focus on global, whole body-object motion synthesis, our approach explicitly reasons about the underlying part-level mechanics of interactions using large language models (LLMs). We capture this reasoning in a structured part affordance graph (PAG) representation, serving as a high-level interaction scaffolding to guide a three-stage synthesis: first, decomposing input 3D objects into semantic parts; then, generating reference HOI videos from text prompts to extract part-based motion constraints; and finally, optimizing for 4D HOI motion sequences that mimic the reference dynamics while satisfying part-level contact constraints. Extensive experiments show that our approach is flexible and capable of generating complex multi-object or multi-person interaction sequences, with significantly improved realism and text alignment for zero-shot 4D HOI generation.

Monocular-to-stereo conversion synthesizes stereoscopic content from 2D videos for immersive 3D experiences. In modern Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) approaches, stereo inpainting of disocclusions is the critical bottleneck. Training-based methods achieve superior quality but rely on scarce stereo pairs or synthetic data with domain gaps. We address this through the first self-supervised framework learning from monocular videos via cycle consistency. Our key contribution is the **Geometric Reciprocity Theorem (GRT)**: under the nearest-neighbor DIBR formulation, the disocclusion mask when synthesizing a target view equals the mask of pixels lost when warping back from target to source, enabling analytical computation of test-time disocclusion masks directly from monocular images. This yields train-test consistency for the stated warping formulation, supporting self-supervised learning from unlimited monocular videos and substantial improvements over training-free and supervised state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/grt/

DeepSeek-OCR leverages visual–text compression to reduce long-text processing costs and accelerate inference, yet visual tokens remain prone to redundant textual and structural information. Moreover, current token pruning methods for conventional vision–language models (VLMs) fail to preserve textual fidelity due to improper compression mechanisms. By analyzing the decoding process of DeepSeek-OCR, we find that a distinct two-stage reading trajectory: the model initially prioritizes the majority of high-norm tokens, then subsequently redistributes its attention to the remaining ones. Motivated by this insight, we propose *RTPrune*, a two-stage token pruning method tailored for DeepSeek-OCR. In the first stage, we prioritize high-norm visual tokens that capture salient textual and structural information. In the second stage, the remaining tokens are paired and merged based on optimal transport theory to achieve efficient feature aggregation. We further introduce a dynamic pruning ratio that adapts to token similarity and textual density for OCR tasks, enabling a better efficiency–accuracy trade-off. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, as evidenced by 99.47\% accuracy and 1.23× faster prefill on OmniDocBench, achieved with 84.25\% token retention when applied to DeepSeek-OCR-Large. Code is released.

Text-guided image-to-video generation has made substantial progress, yet it still struggles to execute text-specified edits that require substantial changes to a reference image (e.g., object addition, deletion, or modification). Empirically, our analysis reveals that this stems from **visual dominance**, where the reference image causes severe attention dispersion, inhibiting the model's ability to incorporate new semantic information. To address this, we propose **AlignVid**, a training-free intervention that re-calibrates the model's internal attention distribution. Drawing on an energy-based perspective of attention, AlignVid employs Attention Scaling Modulation (**ASM**) to reduce attention entropy and concentrate focus on semantic tokens, alongside Guidance Scheduling (**GS**) to maintain generation stability. To rigorously assess this capability, we present **OmitI2V**, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating prompt adherence across object addition, deletion, and modification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlignVid effectively enhances semantic fidelity with negligible computational overhead.

Recent advancements in foundation models have revolutionized joint audio-video generation. However, existing approaches typically treat human-centric tasks including reference-based audio-video generation (R2AV), video editing (RV2AV) and audio-driven video animation (RA2V) as isolated objectives. Furthermore, achieving precise, disentangled control over multiple character identities and voice timbres within a single framework remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose DreamID-Omni, a unified framework for controllable human-centric audio-video generation. Specifically, we design a Symmetric Conditional Diffusion Transformer that integrates heterogeneous conditioning signals via a symmetric conditional injection scheme. To resolve the pervasive identity-timbre binding failures and speaker confusion in multi-person scenarios, we introduce a Dual-Level Disentanglement strategy: Synchronized RoPE at the signal level to ensure rigid attention-space binding, and Structured Captions at the semantic level to establish explicit attribute-subject mappings. Furthermore, we devise a Multi-Task Progressive Training scheme that leverages weakly-constrained generative priors to regularize strongly-constrained tasks, preventing overfitting and harmonizing disparate objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamID-Omni achieves comprehensive state-of-the-art performance across video, audio, and audio-visual consistency, even outperforming leading proprietary commercial models.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but still struggle with fine-grained perception, where decisive evidence is small and easily overwhelmed by global context. Recent "Thinking-with-Images" methods alleviate this by iteratively zooming in and out regions of interest during inference, but incur high latency due to repeated tool calls and visual re-encoding. To address this, we propose Region-to-Image Distillation, which transforms zooming from an inference-time tool into a training-time primitive, thereby internalizing the benefits of agentic zooming into a single forward pass of an MLLM. In particular, we first zoom in to micro-cropped regions to let strong teacher models generate high-quality VQA data, and then distill this region-grounded supervision back to the full image. After training on such data, the smaller student model improves "single-glance" fine-grained perception without tool use. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we further present ZoomBench, a hybrid-annotated benchmark spanning six fine-grained perceptual dimensions, together with a dual-view protocol that quantifies the global-regional "zooming gap". Experiments show that our models achieve leading performance across multiple fine-grained perception benchmarks (Figure 1), and also improve general multimodal cognition on benchmarks such as visual reasoning and GUI agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/Zooming-without-Zooming.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with numerical regression under longtailed target distributions. Token-level supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and point-wise regression rewards bias learning toward high-density regions, leading to regression-to-the-mean behavior and poor tail performance. We identify the lack of cross-sample relational supervision as a key limitation of existing MLLM training paradigms. To address it, we propose a distribution-aware reinforcement learning framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization, which introduces batch-level comparison-based supervision via the Concordance Correlation Coefficient-based reward to align predicted and ground-truth distributions in terms of correlation, scale, and mean. The framework is plug-and-play, requiring no architectural modification. Experiments on a unified suite of long-tailed regression benchmarks show consistent improvements over SFT and existing MLLM regression methods, with particularly strong gains in medium- and few-shot regimes.

While CLIP has achieved strong performance across vision–language tasks, fine-grained image–text alignment remains challenging. Recent efforts improve textual granularity by leveraging long, detailed descriptions and replacing CLIP’s text encoder with LLM, but often overlook the visual-side bottleneck: achieving finer alignment requires region- and pixel-level visual grounding. To address it, we propose PixCLIP, a framework that jointly enhances both sides by accommodating visual prompt regions and long-form text within a unified training objective. Firstly, to support training at this granularity, we develop an automated annotation pipeline that produces long-form descriptions with pixel-level localization, and use it to construct LongGRIT, a large-scale dataset with 1.5M samples. Furthermore, we introduce a three-branch pixel–text alignment framework that aligns image regions with corresponding textual descriptions across multiple granularities. Experiments show that PixCLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on pixel- and region-level alignment tasks while preserving strong results on standard global image–text retrieval benchmarks, even with arbitrarily shaped region prompts and long texts. Our code is available at https://github.com/StuHude/PixCLIP.

Point cloud data, with its inherent geometric and topological structures, plays a critical role in 3D vision tasks. However, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods predominantly focus on input token prompting, overlooking the intrinsic geometric information. To address this limitation, we propose TopAdapter, a novel PEFT framework that enhances geometric perception by injecting local topological information into pre-trained 3D vision models. TopAdapter leverages 0D, 1D, and 2D simplices from algebraic topology as fundamental building blocks, introducing two core modules: the Topology Injection module (ToInjection) and the Topology Transfer module (ToTransfer). ToInjection constructs multi-scale topological features using a simplex generator and dynamically fuses them with semantic features via a geometric controller, thereby enhancing geometric adaptability. ToTransfer propagates these topological primitives across Transformer layers, ensuring efficient transmission of geometric information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TopAdapter outperforms existing PEFT methods, achieving performance comparable to full fine-tuning across various benchmarks.

All-in-One Image Restoration (AiOIR) faces the fundamental challenge in reconciling conflicting optimization objectives across heterogeneous degradations. Existing methods are often constrained by coarse-grained control mechanisms or fixed mapping schedules, yielding suboptimal adaptation. To address this, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Diffusion Bridge Model (UDBM), which innovatively reformulates AiOIR as a stochastic transport problem steered by pixel-wise uncertainty. By introducing a relaxed diffusion bridge formulation, which replaces the strict terminal constraint with a relaxed constraint, we model the uncertainty of degradations while theoretically resolving the drift singularity inherent in standard diffusion bridges. Furthermore, we devise a dual modulation strategy: the noise schedule aligns diverse degradations into a shared high-entropy latent space, while the path schedule adaptively regulates the transport trajectory motivated by the viscous dynamics of entropy regularization. By effectively rectifying the transport geometry and dynamics, UDBM achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse restoration tasks within a single inference step. Code is available at https://github.com/Jabruson/UDBM.

Prompt learning for vision-language models (VLMs) primarily follows end-to-end or decoupled routes to balance base and new task performance, but suffers a fundamental bottleneck: sample-wise optimization within task-specific feature spaces traps models in local optima, hindering global optimality. To address this, we identify a key insight that VLMs can be prompted within a Coupled Prompt Field-a shared space where base and new tasks are mutually constrained-and present AlignedNorm, which enforces the field coupling. By dynamically aligning the norms of prompts to VLMs' native scale, our method enables joint optimization of both tasks. Without complex designs, our method matches leading decoupled approaches on 15 datasets across 4 experimental settings, offering both a new perspective and a practical solution to the local-optima dilemma in prompt learning.

We present IQA-Spider, the first image quality assessment (IQA) framework that unifies reasoning, grounding, and referring into a single LMM-based framework for multi-granularity quality understanding. Existing LMM-based IQA methods typically support only partial perception dimensions, such as quality description and question answering~(\textit{i.e.}, reasoning) or pixel-level grounding. This limitation largely stems from the absence of (i) a unified task and data formulation and (ii) effective optimization paradigms for multi-granularity learning. To address these limitations, we formulate a rigorous four-task paradigm covering global and local quality description, pixel-level grounding, and region-level referring. Based on this formulation, we construct a corresponding IQA dataset with a scalable and automatic annotation pipeline, thereby providing a solid foundation for unified multi-granularity learning. To further enable unified perception, we adopt a conflict-free two-stage design that progressively extends text-level multi-granularity understanding to pixel-level grounding: (i) the first stage equips the model with fine-grained text-level reasoning across multiple IQA tasks, and (ii) the second stage introduces a training-free text-to-point grounding paradigm, which bridges textual semantics and pixel-level perception by mapping token logits to spatial coordinates. Based on these efforts, we achieve IQA-Spider with unified multi-granularity explainable image quality assessment. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate strong performance, validating the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed formulation and framework. Our code and dataset will be released at: \href{https://github.com/Helen1p/IQA-Spider.git}{https://github.com/Helen1p/IQA-Spider.git}.

It is infeasible to encompass all possible disturbances within the training dataset. This raises a critical question regarding the robustness of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models when encountering unseen real-world visual disturbances, particularly under imperfect visual conditions. In this work, we conduct a systematic study based on recent state-of-the-art VLA models and reveal a significant performance drop when visual disturbances absent from the training data are introduced. To mitigate this issue, we propose a lightweight adapter module grounded in information theory, termed the Information Bottleneck Adapter (IB-Adapter), which selectively filters potential noise from visual inputs. Without requiring any extra data or augmentation strategies, IB-Adapter consistently improves over the baseline by an average of 30%, while adding fewer than 10M parameters, demonstrating notable efficiency and effectiveness. Furthermore, even with a 14x smaller backbone (0.5B parameters) and no pre-training on the Open X-Embodiment dataset, our model StableVLA achieves robustness competitive with 7B-scale state-of-the-art VLAs. With negligible parameter overhead (<10M), our approach maintains accuracy on long-horizon tasks and surpasses OpenPi under real-world visual disturbances. The code will be made publicly available.