ICML 2026 Papers

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) suffer from high inference latency due to long visual sequences. To enable efficient, on-demand utilization of visual information, we argue that visual necessity should be assessed by its semantic impact on the output distribution, rather than inferred from intermediate interaction signals such as attention weights. We propose a training-free framework based on token embedding subspace decomposition, which we term a prediction-conditioned Semantic Lens. Specifically, at fixed decoding intervals, we perform QR decomposition on the Top-K candidate token embeddings to construct an orthogonal semantic basis. We then introduce Semantic IImpact–Driven Visual Scheduling (SIVS), which measures how visual inputs impact model predictions by projecting visual-induced hidden-state variations onto this semantic lens. SIVS provides a geometrically grounded, impact-driven criterion for dynamic visual KV scheduling. Empirical results demonstrate that SIVS achieves ~87% visual KV compression while maintaining over 99% of model performance.

Text-to-Image (T2I) models and Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual generation. However, their reliance on a single-pass generation paradigm limits their ability to handle complex prompts requiring iterative refinement. To enable multi-round Reflective Visual Generation (RVG), we formalize the *Reason--Reflect--Rectify* (R$^3$) loop as a core framework and introduce R$^3$-Bench, a benchmark of over 600 expert-annotated instances that quantifies iterative reasoning and rectification capabilities. Evaluation on R$^3$-Bench reveals a critical gap: while state-of-the-art models can identify generation errors, they fail to generate actionable rectification instructions. To bridge this gap, we propose R$^3$-Refiner, a dual-stage framework leveraging Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and a Hierarchical Reward Mechanism (HRM) to better align rectification with reflective reasoning. Experiments show that R$^3$-Refiner achieves significant improvements on R$^3$-Bench (+12.0% in Reflective Verdict Score, +9.0% in Rectification Score), and can be seamlessly integrated with various MLLMs to enhance the generation quality of different T2I models on GenEval++ and T2I-CompBench. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaomoguhz/R3-Bench.

Diffusion models have significantly advanced the field of talking head generation (THG). However, slow inference speeds and prevalent non-autoregressive paradigms severely constrain the application of diffusion-based THG models. In this study, we propose REST, a pioneering diffusion-based, real-time, end-to-end streaming audio-driven talking head generation framework. To support real-time end-to-end generation, a compact video latent space is first learned through a spatiotemporal variational autoencoder with a high compression ratio. Additionally, to enable semi-autoregressive streaming within the compact video latent space, we introduce an ID-Context Cache mechanism, which integrates ID-Sink and Context-Cache principles into key-value caching for maintaining identity consistency and temporal coherence during long-term streaming generation. Furthermore, an Asynchronous Streaming Distillation (ASD) strategy is proposed to mitigate error accumulation and enhance temporal consistency in streaming generation, leveraging a non-streaming teacher with an asynchronous noise schedule to supervise the streaming student. REST bridges the gap between autoregressive and diffusion-based approaches, achieving a breakthrough in efficiency for applications requiring real-time THG. Experimental results demonstrate that REST outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both generation speed and overall performance.

Panoptic Video Scene Graph Generation (PVSG) aims to identify relations between pixel-level entities in a video, serving as a novel paradigm for structured video parsing. However, this task faces two key challenges. First, the interactions between entities are temporally fragmented and sparse, meaning videos are dominated by irrelevant content with limited salient information. Second, the distribution of relations exhibits a significant long-tailed pattern, making models struggle to perform well on tail categories with insufficient data. To address these issues, we propose SegPVSG, an innovative, temporal-segment-aware PVSG framework consisting of two key components: TempFocusNet (TFN) and Relation-centric Generative Video Augmentation (RGVA) module. TFN is a localization-then-recognition network that improves PVSG performance by explicitly localizing and focusing on salient segments before relation recognition. Meanwhile, RGVA is a novel augmentation module that generates realistic, context-consistent video segments for rare relations and coherently inserts them into original videos. Our method outperforms prior methods by +3.53 mR@20 and +5.9 mR@50, demonstrating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/ticatt/SegPVSG.

Current motion-controlled image-to-video generation models rigidly follow user-provided trajectories that are often sparse, imprecise, and causally incomplete. Such reliance often yields unnatural or implausible outcomes, especially by missing secondary causal consequences. To address this, we introduce MotiMotion, a novel framework that reformulates motion control as a reasoning-then-generation problem. To encourage causally grounded and commonsense-consistent interactions, we leverage a training-free vision-language reasoner to refine image-space coordinates of primary trajectories and to hallucinate plausible secondary motions. To further improve motion naturalness, we propose a confidence-aware control scheme that modulates guidance strength, enabling the model to closely follow high-confidence plans while correcting artifacts under low-confidence inputs with its internal generative priors. To support systematic evaluation, we curate a new image-to-video benchmark, MotiBench, consisting of interaction-centric scenes where new events are triggered by motion. Both VLM-based evaluation and a human study on MotiBench demonstrate that MotiMotion produces videos with more plausible object behaviors and interaction, and is preferred over existing approaches.

Should an LVLM use the same video processing pipeline for \emph{comprehending the main idea of a 2-hour movie} and \emph{counting the birds appearing in a 15-second clip}? We present Task-Aware Mechanism (TAM), a hybrid-gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) vision tower that adapts frame count and resolution to the user query and video length. TAM introduces a compact 0.1B text-only \emph{Inductor} trained on our TA-116K dataset to infer task types, enabling task-aware visual budgeting and routing: a soft-gated MoE vision encoder for stability, and hard-gated resolution-specific projectors/pipelines for efficient specialization. The explicit budget also separates task classification from downstream visual-language reasoning, making routing decisions easier to inspect and helping diagnose when fixed visual pipelines under-sample temporal or spatial evidence. Built on Qwen2-7B, TallVA-8B-A7B achieves state-of-the-art performance among models with comparable LLMs on most video benchmarks and remains competitive against stronger-LLM baselines, showing that task-aware visual budgeting makes video understanding more holistic.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for advancing Large Language Models (LLMs), where both pre-training and RL post-training stages are grounded in the same log-likelihood formulation. In contrast, recent RL approaches for diffusion models, most notably Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization (DDPO), optimize an objective different from the pretraining objectives--score/flow matching loss. In this work, we establish a novel theoretical analysis: DDPO is an implicit form of score/flow matching with noisy targets, which increases variance and slows convergence. Building on this analysis, we introduce \textbf{Advantage Weighted Matching (AWM)}, a policy-gradient method for diffusion. It uses the score/flow-matching loss and reweights each sample by its advantage. In effect, AWM raises the influence of high-reward samples and suppresses low-reward ones while keeping the modeling objective identical to pretraining. This simple yet effective design yields substantial benefits: on the GenEval, OCR, and PickScore benchmarks, AWM delivers up to a $\mathbf{34}\times$ speedup over Flow-GRPO (which builds on DDPO), when applied to Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium and FLUX, without compromising generation quality. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/scxue/advantage_weighted_matching}.

Text-to-Image Person Re-Identification (TI-ReID) retrieves visible pedestrian images using text queries. Yet in low-light or nighttime settings, visible images lack sufficient identity details, while infrared images effectively capture pedestrian contours and textures. To enable all-day surveillance, we propose a dual cross-modal retrieval task called Text-to-Visible-Infrared Re-Identification (TVI-ReID) and construct corresponding tri-modal datasets. Compared to TI-ReID, TVI-ReID faces two key challenges: (1) **complex hybrid discrepancies** in dual cross-modal retrieval from three modalities, and (2) **semantic inconsistency** between pretraining and downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose a Cross-Modal Semantic Decoupling and Transfer (CSDT) framework. CSDT constructs color-related and color-irrelevant feature subspaces via Semantic Decoupling Learning (SDL) to align shared semantics across text and dual image modalities, reducing hybrid discrepancies. Moreover, Semantic Distribution Transfer (SDT) adapts pretrained text-visible alignment to text-infrared matching. Extensive experiments on tri-modal datasets show our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art TI-ReID methods.

Depth estimation for transparent objects remains a fundamental challenge, as RGB-based cues often fail in regions affected by refraction and light transmission. Polarization provides physically grounded information related to surface orientation and material properties, offering reliable geometric cues even in the absence of texture. In this work, we introduce PolarDepth, a monocular framework that incorporates both RGB and polarization inputs, including the degree and angle of linear polarization (DoLP and AoLP), to estimate dense depth and localize transparent regions. PolarDepth injects polarization-derived physical priors by estimating the refractive index, zenith angle, and azimuth angle from polarization measurements and embedding them into an implicit geometric representation that constrains depth inference in ambiguous transparent regions. To support model development and evaluation, we introduce PTOD, a dataset with synchronized RGB, polarization, and depth data and manually annotated transparent region masks. Experimental results demonstrate that PolarDepth achieves state-of-the-art performance in transparent object depth estimation. The findings highlight the effectiveness of embedding polarization-derived physical priors into learned representations for robust perception in complex visual environments.

Current state-of-the-art segmentation models encode entire images before focusing on specific objects. This wastes computational resources. We introduce FLIP (Fovea-Like Input Patching), a parameter-efficient vision model that realizes object segmentation through biologically-inspired top-down attention. FLIP selectively samples multi-resolution patches centered on objects of interest from the input. As a result, it allocates high-resolution processing to object centers while maintaining coarser peripheral context. This off-grid, scale-invariant design enables FLIP to outperform META's Segment Anything models (SAM, SAM2 and fast variants) by large margins: With more than 440 $ \times$ fewer parameters, FLIP-Tiny (0.51M parameters) reaches a mean IoU of 79.90\% while SAM2-L reaches 75.87\% IoU (224.45M parameters). FLIP-Large even achieves 83.26\% mean IoU (96.6M parameters), still running about $2 \times$ faster than SAM2-L. We evaluate on six benchmarks in total. In five established benchmarks (Hypersim, KITTI-360, OpenImages, COCO, LVIS) FLIP consistently outperforms SAM and various variants of it. In our novel ObjaScale dataset, which stress-tests scale invariance with objects ranging from 0.0001\% up to 25\% of the image area, we show that FLIP segments even very small objects accurately, where existing models fail severely. FLIP opens new possibilities for real-time, object-centric vision and offers much higher energy efficiency. We believe that FLIP can act as a powerful foundation model, as it is very well-suited to track objects over time, for example, when being integrated into slot-based scene segmentation architectures.

Low-bit model quantization for image super-resolution (SR) is a longstanding task that is renowned for its surprising compression and acceleration ability. However, accuracy degradation is inevitable when compressing the full-precision (FP) model to ultra-low bit widths ($2\sim4$ bits). Experimentally, we observe that the degradation of quantization is mainly attributed to the quantization of activation instead of model weights. Considering that the activation quantization error is hard to minimize, minimizing the impact of the error emerges as a good choice, which is described by the condition number. Therefore, we propose CondiQuant, a condition number-based low-bit post-training quantization for image super-resolution. Specifically, we formulate the quantization error of activation as the condition number of weight metrics. By decoupling the representation ability and the quantization sensitivity, we design an efficient proximal gradient descent algorithm to iteratively minimize the condition number and maintain the output. With comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that CondiQuant outperforms existing state-of-the-art post-training quantization methods in accuracy without computation overhead and gains the theoretically optimal compression ratio in model parameters. Our code will be released soon.

With the evolution of generative models, deepfakes have achieved near-perfect semantic realism, leaving forensic traces only in subtle structural anomalies. However, existing single-view paradigms often fail to generalize, as dominant semantic features overwhelm subtle artifact cues within entangled representations. This imbalance leads to overconfident yet brittle predictions—a phenomenon we term the Semantic Masking Effect. To address this challenge, we propose a reliable framework called Divide-and-Conquer Multi-View Evidential Learning (DiCoME) for Deepfake Detection. In the "Divide'' phase, we employ Geometric View Purification to decompose the entangled representation space through principled geometric projection. This process suppresses semantic interference within artifact-sensitive representations, forming the foundation for decorrelated yet complementary semantic and artifact views. In the "Conquer'' phase, we leverage Uncertainty-Aware Evidential Learning to synthesize these distinct views. By explicitly modeling the "epistemic conflict'' between semantic and artifact cues, this mechanism provides calibrated uncertainty estimates instead of forcing rigid deterministic decisions. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches in generalization performance, while providing reliable uncertainty estimation for trustworthy deepfake detection. Code is available at https://github.com/kxl0825/DiCoME.git.

Flow matching models have recently emerged as an efficient alternative to diffusion, especially for text-guided image generation and editing, offering faster inference through continuous-time dynamics. However, existing flow-based editors predominantly support global or single-instruction edits and struggle with multi-instance scenarios, where multiple parts of a reference input must be edited independently without semantic interference. We identify this limitation as a consequence of globally conditioned velocity fields and joint attention mechanisms, which entangle concurrent edits. To address this issue, we introduce Instance-Disentangled Attention, a mechanism that partitions joint attention operations, enforcing binding between instance-specific textual instructions and spatial regions during velocity field estimation. We evaluate our approach on both natural image editing and a newly introduced benchmark of text-dense infographics with region-level editing instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach promotes edit disentanglement and locality while preserving global output coherence, enabling single-pass, instance-level editing.

Deep learning–based watermarking has substantially improved robustness to real-world noise, but its performance degrades as the payload dimension increases. In contrast, coding-based methods such as quantization index modulation (QIM) do not suffer from this curse of dimensionality, although they are less robust to real-world noise. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we propose OrthoMark, a framework that decouples robust feature extraction from message encoding. OrthoMark first learns a distortion-invariant feature representation using a deep robust feature extractor, and then performs watermark encoding and decoding in this feature domain using coding-based methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OrthoMark significantly improves the trade-off among visual quality, robustness, and capacity compared to prior deep watermarking methods, with particularly large gains in the high capacity regime, effectively overcoming the curse of dimensionality. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/QQiuyp/OrthoMark}.

In this paper, we introduce LATO, a novel topology-preserving latent representation that enables scalable, flow matching-based synthesis of explicit 3D meshes. LATO represents a mesh as a Vertex Displacement Field (VDF) anchored on surface, incorporating a sparse voxel Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to compress this explicit signal into a structured, topology-aware voxel latent. To decapsulate the mesh, the VAE decoder progressively subdivides and prunes latent voxels to instantiate precise vertex locations. In the end, a dedicated connection head queries the voxel latent to predict edge connectivity between vertex pairs directly, allowing mesh topology to be recovered without isosurface extraction or heuristic meshing. For generative modeling, LATO adopts a two-stage flow matching process, first synthesizing the structure voxels and subsequently refining the voxel-wise topology features. Compared to prior isosurface/triangle-based diffusion models and autoregressive generation approaches, LATO generates meshes with complex geometry, well-formed topology while being highly efficient in inference.

Multi-modal image generation, particularly subject-driven customization, has garnered growing attention in recent years. Despite the rapid advancement of generative models, their evaluation remains largely lagging. Existing methods, whether embedding-based or Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based, evaluate alignment with each modal condition in isolation, which contradicts the simultaneous condition alignment objective of multi-modal image generation, leading to poor consistency with human judgments. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{UFO}, the first \textbf{U}ni\textbf{F}ied framework for \textbf{O}mni-condition alignment simultaneous evaluation. Specifically, UFO introduces a novel Atomized Chain-of-Evaluation paradigm, \emph{i.e.}, it first decomposes omni-condition alignment into a sequential chain of fine-grained, disentangled Atomic Evaluation Units (AEUs), categorizes them into distinct modality-relevance classes, and then employs general or dedicated functional calls for accurate verification of different AEU types. Experimental results demonstrate that UFO achieves the highest correlation with human evaluation preferences, delivering an average improvement of 15.25\%. Furthermore, we present UFO-Bench, a dedicated benchmark designed to holistically evaluate the performance of existing customization models under the diverse mutual interactions of textual and visual conditions.

Human spatial understanding arises from jointly perceiving geometry and semantics, enabling consistent object identification and localization across viewpoints and time. Current video segmentation models depend on explicit object appearance memory banks for instance tracking, yet they remain vulnerable to large viewpoint changes and long-term occlusions. Leveraging the spatial consistency afforded by modern feed-forward 3D reconstruction models, we propose the Geometry Grounded Tracking Anything Model (G$^2$TAM), a unified framework for promptable instance tracking in 3D using only unordered RGB images or videos. G$^2$TAM employs spatially aligned geometric representations as implicit memory, ensuring stable instance identity and localization across frames and views. At its core is a cross-modal spatial encoder that integrates visual and textual prompts into a shared geometric space, enabling end-to-end spatial reconstruction and instance-consistent mask prediction. To support training and evaluation, we construct InsTrack, a large-scale dataset with a dedicated validation split for benchmarking. Extensive experiments show that G$^2$TAM delivers strong cross-view consistency, promptable instance spatial tracking, video object segmentation, and spatial reconstruction, establishing a foundation for interactive, geometry-grounded spatial reasoning.

Recent advances in generative video models have blurred the boundary between real and synthetic content, raising urgent concerns about digital authenticity. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are appealing for AI-generated video (AIGV) detection due to their broad perceptual and reasoning capabilities; however, existing MLLM-based detectors still suffer from hallucination and unstable reasoning, leading to high false-alarm rates and generic, non-verifiable explanations. To address these issues, we propose Hermes, an evidence-driven agentic framework for trustworthy and explainable AIGV detection. Hermes realizes three key capabilities: (1) Adaptive Instance-Conditioned Detection Strategy Planning, (2) Evidence-Centric Reasoning and Verification, and (3) Graph-Grounded Evidence Deliberation. Specifically, Hermes uses instance-conditioned retrieval-augmented generation to analyze each video and retrieve authenticity-verification knowledge for composing a tailored detection strategy. It then constructs a verifiable Evidence Reasoning Graph (ERG) to keep reasoning grounded in concrete video evidence and reduce attention drift. Finally, multi-agent deliberation audits and refines the ERG to reconcile conflicting evidence and improve reliability. With these capabilities and a library of forensic tools, Hermes enables structured, verifiable, and interpretable decision-making. Extensive experiments show that Hermes achieves state-of-the-art performance while producing auditable explanations for trustworthy video forensics.

Despite recent progress, recovering parametric CAD construction sequences from geometric input, such as meshes or point clouds, is a key challenge for design and manufacturing, as existing CAD reconstruction and generation methods are largely restricted to difficult-to-edit formats like meshes or Breps or editable simple sketch-and-extrude pipelines and low-complexity datasets. We introduce CADFit, a hybrid optimization-based CAD reconstruction framework that recovers complex, editable CAD construction sequences from meshes by incrementally fitting and validating parametric operations using geometric feedback. Our approach is distinguished by formulating reconstruction as an IoU-driven optimization over structured CAD programs and supporting a rich set of operations, including extrusions, revolutions, fillets, and chamfers. Experiments on multiple CAD benchmarks show that CADFit outperforms state-of-the-art mesh-to-CAD methods in volumetric Intersection-over-Union and Chamfer Distance, while substantially reducing the Invalid Ratio of reconstructed CAD programs, particularly for complex designs. We further present a multimodal pipeline that enables end-to-end reconstruction of CAD construction sequences from images by combining image-based geometry reconstruction with CADFit. By enabling accurate reconstruction of higher-complexity CAD models, CADFit provides a practical foundation for generating richer datasets and advancing future learning-based approaches to CAD reverse engineering. The code is available at: https://github.com/ghadinehme/CADFit.