CVPR 2026 论文列表

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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4,042篇论文

按官方录用论文列表统计,可能与会议公布的数字略有出入。

  • Oral
    1383.4%
  • Poster
    3,90496.6%

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What Is It Like to Be a Noise? An Entropy-based Gaussian Noise Regularization for Diffusion Models

Pascal Chang, Kai Lascheit, Jingwei Tang, Markus Gross, Vinicius C. Azevedo

展开摘要

Inference-time optimization of diffusion latents enables powerful control but often degrades the statistical structure of true Gaussian noise, causing artifacts and reward hacking. To address this, we propose a Gaussianity regularizer that aligns a sample's local statistics with a typical Gaussian realization, rather than relying on pointwise likelihood. We formalize this by computing the KL divergence between the sample distribution and the Gaussian prior. To make the divergence computation tractable from a single sample, we lift each candidate latent into an empirical distribution induced by its statistics and model it as a pairwise Markov Random Field. This yields a Bethe-Kikuchi-style regularizer with 1D marginal, 2D spatial, and multi-scale terms. Our results show improved latent optimization stability and generation quality over prior approaches.

Poster
OrienPose: Orientation-Guided Novel View Synthesis for Single-Image Unseen Object Pose Estimation

Yating Liu, Zhaoshuai Qi, Yang Zou, Yongnan Yang, Shizhou Zhang, Yanning Zhang

展开摘要

Estimating the 3D pose of unseen objects from a single image remains a fundamental yet challenging problem in computer vision, especially under a CAD model-free setting.Pioneering attempts address this issue by matching templates generated through Novel View Synthesis (NVS), which essentially aims to learn the geometric transformation from a reference to a target view. While promising, these methods can only approximate this transformation under pixel-level supervision, as the starting orientation remains undefined. In the absence of explicit geometric constraints to verify the correctness of the predicted transformation, existing methods often synthesize novel views with geometry-distorted structures or severely blurred local textures, leading to unreliable template matching and suboptimal pose estimation results. To this end, we propose OrienPose, a novel object pose estimation framework via orientation-aware NVS from a single image. Specifically, we introduce the Orientation-Aware Guidance, which explicitly injects object orientation cues into the reference latent embedding to enhance orientation awareness during viewpoint transformation. We also introduce an orientation consistency loss that supervises viewpoint transformation at the geometric level, establishing sufficient supervision for explicit and geometry-consistent transformation guidance beyond pixel-level similarity. This loss justifies estimating the reference orientation rather than using its ground-truth pose, thereby ensuring the alignment of coordinate domains between the injected and supervised priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OrienPose achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-view unseen object pose estimation and impressive robustness to image degradations. Our code is available at https://github.com/pubyLu/OrienPose.

Poster
Towards Visual Query Localization in the 3D World

Liang Peng, Bohan Tan, Zhipeng Zhang, Haobo Li, Yifan Jiao, Xingping Dong, Libo Zhang

展开摘要

Visual query localization (VQL) aims to predict a spatial-temporal response of the most recent occurrence from a sequence given a query. Currently, most research focuses on visual query localization from 2D videos, while its counterpart in 3D space has received little attention. In this paper, we make the first attempt to visual query localization in the 3D world by introducing a novel benchmark, dubbed 3DVQL. Specifically, 3DVQL contains 2,002 sequences with around 170,000 frames and 6.4K response track segments from 38 object categories. Each sequence in 3DVQL is provided with multiple modalities including point clouds (PC), RGB and depth images to support flexible research. To ensure high-quality annotation, each sequence is manually annotated with multiple rounds of verification and refinement. To our best knowledge, 3DVQL is the first benchmark towards 3D multimodal visual query localization. To facilitate comparison for subsequent research, we implement a series of representative 3D multimodal VQL baselines using PC and RGB. The experimental results show that existing methods exhibit significant performance variations across different fusion modules. To encourage future research, we propose a lift and attention fusion algorithm named LaF, which significantly outperforms existing baseline models. Our benchmark and model will be publicly released at our webpage https://github.com/wuhengliangliang/3DVQL.

Poster
TGTrack: Temporal Generative Learning for Unified Single Object Tracking

Wanting Geng, Xin Chen, Chuanyu Sun, Jie Zhao, Ben Kang, Dong Wang, Huchuan Lu

展开摘要

Existing single object trackers typically treat temporal modeling superficially by passing limited inter-frame information, such as propagated tokens or template updates, without intrinsic temporal supervision learning. To address this limitation, we propose TGTrack, a new unified tracking framework that incorporates a temporally generative supervision task to guide the model in learning temporal dynamics. The core of TGTrack is a temporally generative learning paradigm equipped with a transformer-based generative decoder, which consists of a gated fusion module and an autoregressive prediction mechanism. This joint design enables the model to infer future scenarios from preceding information, thereby improving its ability to model both visual appearance and temporal dynamics. Furthermore, we introduce a time token embedding to explicitly encode the temporal position of each frame. Experiments on 11 benchmarks spanning five modalities show that TGTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance in robust unified tracking. For instance, TGTrack-B384 achieves an AUC of 75.3% on LaSOT. Code is available at https://github.com/wtg1/TGTrack.

Poster
Moving Border Ownership for Event-based Motion Segmentation

Zhiyuan Hua, Cornelia Fermuller, Yiannis Aloimonos

展开摘要

Event cameras provide accurate information at motion boundaries--exactly where disentangling ego-motion, object motion, and border ownership determines segmentation quality. We argue that the missing ingredient in dynamic scene interpretation is moving border ownership: detecting motion boundaries and assigning which side is foreground so occlusions are resolved by design. Traditional geometric motion segmentation pipelines (e.g., flow clustering, simple motion models) remain assumption-heavy and slow, while deep models often fail to generalize across sensors or datasets. We introduce a lightweight, ownership-aware predictor trained solely on synthetic events with perfect supervision for boundaries, ownership, and motion, generated via a Blender pipeline. Its key targets--a signed-distance ownership field and a motion mask--focus learning where events occur and yield stable gradients. The model runs in real time and generalizes without tuning: trained on synthetic events, it achieves zero-shot transfer on EED, EVIMO1, EVIMO2, and EMSMC, delivering state-of-the-art performance. By casting motion segmentation as ownership-aware edge understanding, we combine the robustness of model-based reasoning with the scalability of learning.

Poster
Direct Segmentation without Logits Optimization for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Jiahao Li, Yang Lu, Yachao Zhang, Fangyong Wang, Yuan Xie, Yanyun Qu

展开摘要

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) aims to segment arbitrary category regions in images using open-vocabulary prompts, necessitating that existing methods possess pixel-level vision-language alignment capability. Typically, this capability involves computing the cosine similarity, ie, logits, between visual and linguistic features, and minimizing the distribution discrepancy between the logits and the ground truth (GT) to generate optimal logits that are subsequently used to construct segmentation maps, yet it depends on time-consuming iterative training or model-specific attention modulation. In this work, we propose a more direct approach that eschews the logits-optimization process by directly deriving an analytic solution for the segmentation map. We posit a key hypothesis: the distribution discrepancy encodes semantic information; specifically, this discrepancy exhibits consistency across patches belonging to the same category but inconsistency across different categories. Based on this hypothesis, we directly utilize the analytic solution of this distribution discrepancy as the semantic maps. In other words, we reformulate the optimization of the distribution discrepancy as deriving its analytic solution, thereby eliminating time-consuming iterative training, freeing us from model-specific attention modulation, and achieving state-of-the-art performance on eight benchmark datasets.

Poster
Training High-Level Schedulers with Execution-Feedback Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon GUI Automation

Zehao Deng, Tianjie Ju, Zheng Wu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Gongshen Liu

展开摘要

The rapid development of large vision-language model (VLM) has greatly promoted the research of GUI agent. However, GUI agents still face significant challenges in handling long-horizon tasks. First, single-agent models struggle to balance high-level capabilities and low-level execution capability, facing prevalent issues of responsibility coupling and capability conflicts. Second, agents lack awareness of the task state, leading to progress loss in long-horizon tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a staged execution-feedback reinforcement learning algorithm. Unlike training a unified policy model, we focus on training high-level scheduling models. Specifically, we propose and train two agents: a Coordinator, responsible for the strategic planning and task decomposition; and a State Tracker, responsible for context compression and information management to maintain the task's state and coherence. Based on this, we built the Coordinator-Executor-State Tracker (CES) multi-agent framework, which can be integrated with any low-level Executor model, assisting the Executor in solving long-horizon tasks through task scheduling and state management. Experiments on long-horizon task benchmarks demonstrate that CES significantly enhances the system's planning and state management capabilities. Furthermore, analysis confirms that our trained high-level scheduling module is a generalizable, plug-and-play module that significantly enhances the long-horizon capabilities of various Executors.

Poster
Human Geometry Distribution for 3D Animation Generation

Xiangjun Tang, Biao Zhang, Peter Wonka

展开摘要

Generating realistic human geometry animations remains a challenging task, as it requires modeling natural clothing dynamics with fine-grained geometric details under limited data. To address these challenges, we propose two novel designs. First, we propose a compact distribution-based latent representation that enables efficient and high-quality geometry generation. We improve upon previous work by establishing a more uniform mapping between SMPL and avatar geometries. Second, we introduce a generative animation model that fully exploits the diversity of limited motion data. We focus on short-term transitions while maintaining long-term consistency through an identity-conditioned design. These two designs formulate our method as a two-stage framework: the first stage learns a latent space, while the second learns to generate animations within this latent space. We conducted experiments on both our latent space and animation model. We demonstrate that our latent space produces high-fidelity human geometry surpassing previous methods (90% lower Chamfer Dist.). The animation model synthesizes diverse animations with detailed and natural dynamics (2.2 x higher user study score), achieving the best results across all evaluation metrics.

Poster
MonoSAOD: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Sparsely Annotated Label

Junyoung Jung, Seokwon Kim, Jung Uk Kim

展开摘要

Monocular 3D Object Detection has achieved impressive performance on densely annotated datasets. However, it struggles when only a fraction of objects are labeled due to the high cost of 3D annotation. This sparsely-annotated setting is common in real-world scenarios where annotating every object is impractical.To address this, we propose a novel framework for sparsely-annotated monocular 3D object detection with two key modules.First, we propose Road-Aware Patch Augmentation (RAPA), which leverages sparse annotations by augmenting segmented object patches onto road regions while preserving 3D geometric consistency. Second, we propose Prototype-Based Filtering (PBF), which generates high-quality pseudo-labels by filtering predictions through prototype similarity and depth uncertainty. PBF maintains global 2D RoI feature prototypes and selects pseudo-labels that are both feature-consistent with learned prototypes and have reliable depth estimates.Our training strategy combines geometry-preserving augmentation with prototype-guided pseudo-labeling to achieve robust detection under sparse supervision.Extensive results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code will be publicly available.

Poster
Cross-Modal Attention Calibration for LVLM Hallucination Mitigation

Jiaming Li, JiaCheng Zhang, ZEQUN JIE, Lin Ma, Ming Li, Xiaonan Luo, Guanbin Li

展开摘要

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in visual-language understanding. Despite their success, LVLMs still suffer from generating hallucinations in complex generation tasks, leading to inconsistencies between visual inputs and generated content. To address this issue, some approaches have introduced inference-time interventions, such as contrastive decoding, to reduce overreliance on language priors. However, these approaches overlook hallucinations stemming from position bias and spurious inter-modality correlations. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Modal Attention Calibration (CMAC) method to mitigate hallucinations in LVLMs in a training-free manner. In this method, we design an Inter-Modality Decoding (IMD) module to alleviate hallucination by a novel contrastive decoding mechanism. IMD masks the value vectors associated with significant cross-modal attention weights as distortion, which addresses both uni-modality overreliance and misleading inter-modality correlations. Additionally, a Cross-Modal Position Calibration (CMPC) module shrinks the position gap of image tokens, alleviating the position bias in cross-modal attention. Experimental results on diverse hallucination benchmarks validate the superiority of our method over existing state-of-the-art techniques in reducing hallucinations for LVLM. Our code will be available.

Poster
Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments

Yichen Zeng, Hebaixu Wang, Meng Liu, Yu Zhou, Chen Gao, Kehan Chen, Gongping Huang

展开摘要

Audio-visual navigation enables embodied agents to navigate toward sound-emitting targets by leveraging both auditory and visual cues. However, most existing approaches rely on precomputed room impulse responses (RIRs) for binaural audio rendering, restricting agents to discrete grid positions and leading to spatially discontinuous observations. To establish a more realistic setting, we introduce Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments (SAVN-CE), where agents can move freely in 3D spaces and perceive temporally and spatially coherent audio-visual streams. In this setting, targets may intermittently become silent or stop emitting sound entirely, causing agents to lose goal information. To tackle this challenge, we propose MAGNet, a multimodal transformer-based model that jointly encodes spatial and semantic goal representations and integrates historical context with self-motion cues to enable memory-augmented goal reasoning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MAGNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 12.1% absolute improvement in success rate. These results also highlight its robustness to short-duration sounds and long-distance navigation scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/yichenzeng24/SAVN-CE.

Poster
Scaling Spatial Intelligence with Multimodal Foundation Models

Zhongang Cai, Ruisi Wang, Chenyang Gu, Fanyi Pu, Junxiang Xu, Yubo Wang, Wanqi Yin, Zhitao Yang, Chen Wei, Tongxi Zhou, Qingping SUN, Hui En Pang, Jiaqi Li, Oscar Qian, Zhiqian Lin, Xuanke Shi, Kewang Deng, Xiaoyang Han, Zukai Chen, Xiangyu Fan, Hanming Deng, Lewei Lu, Liang Pan, Bo Li, Ziwei Liu, Quan Wang, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang

展开摘要

Despite remarkable progress, multimodal foundation models still exhibit surprising deficiencies in spatial intelligence. In this work, we explore scaling up multimodal foundation models to cultivate spatial intelligence within the SenseNova-SI family, built upon established multimodal foundations including visual understanding models (i.e., Qwen3-VL and InternVL3) and unified understanding and generation models (i.e., Bagel). We take a principled approach to constructing high-performing and robust spatial intelligence by systematically curating SenseNova-SI-8M: eight million diverse data samples under a rigorous taxonomy of spatial capabilities. SenseNova-SI demonstrates unprecedented performance across a broad range of spatial intelligence benchmarks: 68.8% on VSI-Bench, 43.3% on MMSI, 85.7% on MindCube, 54.7% on ViewSpatial, 47.7% on SITE, 63.9% on BLINK, 55.5% on 3DSR, and 72.0% on EmbSpatial, while maintaining strong general multimodal understanding (e.g., 84.9% on MMBench-En). More importantly, we analyze the impact of data scaling, discuss early signs of emergent generalization capabilities enabled by diverse data training, analyze the risk of overfitting and language shortcuts, present a preliminary study on spatial chain-of-thought reasoning, and validate the potential downstream application. All newly trained multimodal foundation models are publicly released.

Poster
Breaking the Regional Perception Bottleneck of Multimodal Large Language Models via External Reasoning Framework

Jinrong Zhang, Zhaoyang Xu, Xusheng He, Xinrui Li, Na Zheng, Jianlong Wu

展开摘要

High-quality pixel-level responses remain a major bottleneck for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in regional perception. Existing approaches generally attach regression decoders to MLLM features, achieving strong grounding performance but compromising end-to-end design and increasing training costs. Researchers have applied parameter and data scaling to improve pure MLLMs' ability to generate pixel coordinates in natural language, yet the performance gains on grounding tasks remain markedly weaker than those in standard QA tasks. Our analysis shows the primary bottleneck is that conventional scaling fails to effectively enhance the key reasoning stage required for pixel-level regional perception. To address this, we propose R-Ground, a reasoning framework for MLLM-based grounding built upon a multimodal Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm. R-Ground leverages structured reasoning actions, multimodal feature alignment scoring, and regional feature weighted voting to perform scaling at the designated reasoning stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that R-Ground achieves effective reasoning scaling, enabling a 7B MLLM to match or even surpass a 72B model on the grounding task.

Poster
TextPecker: Rewarding Structural Anomaly Quantification for Enhancing Visual Text Rendering

Hanshen Zhu, Yuliang Liu, Xuecheng Wu, An-Lan Wang, Hao Feng, Dingkang Yang, Chao Feng, Can Huang, Jingqun Tang, Xiang Bai

展开摘要

Visual Text Rendering (VTR) remains a critical challenge in text-to-image generation, where even advanced models frequently produce text with structural anomalies such as distortion, blurriness, and misalignment. However, we find that leading MLLMs and specialist OCR models largely fail to perceive these structural anomalies, creating a critical bottleneck for both VTR evaluation and RL-based optimization. As a result, even state-of-the-art generators (e.g., SeedDream4.0, Qwen-Image) still struggle to render structurally faithful text. To address this, we propose TextPecker, a plug-and-play structural anomaly perceptive RL strategy that mitigates noisy reward signals and works with any text-to-image generator. To enable this capability, we construct a recognition dataset with character-level structural-anomaly annotations and develop a stroke-editing synthesis engine to expand structural-error coverage. Experiments show that TextPecker consistently improves diverse text-to-image models; even on the well-optimized Qwen-Image, it significantly yields average gains of 4% in structural fidelity and 8.7% in semantic alignment for Chinese text rendering, establishing a new state-of-the-art in high-fidelity VTR. Our work fills a gap in VTR optimization, providing a foundational step towards reliable and structural faithful visual text generation.

Poster
Learning What Helps: Task-Aligned Context Selection for Vision Tasks

Jingyu Guo, Emir Konuk, Fredrik Strand, Christos Matsoukas, Kevin Smith

展开摘要

Humans often resolve visual uncertainty by comparing an image with relevant examples, but ViTs lack the ability to identify which examples would improve their predictions. We present Task-Aligned Context Selection (TACS), a framework that learns to select paired examples which truly improve task performance rather than those that merely appear similar. TACS jointly trains a selector network with the task model through a hybrid optimization scheme combining gradient-based supervision and reinforcement learning, making retrieval part of the learning objective. By aligning selection with task rewards, TACS enables discriminative models to discover which contextual examples genuinely help. Across 18 datasets covering fine-grained recognition, medical image classification, and medical image segmentation, TACS consistently outperforms similarity-based retrieval, particularly in challenging or data-limited settings.

Poster
Rank-Guided Pseudo-Bias Learning for Robust Black-Box Adaptation

Rajeev Ranjan Dwivedi, Anshuman Dangwal, Vinod K. Kurmi

展开摘要

Pretrained vision encoders are widely used as frozen, black-box feature extractors, yet they often inherit spurious correlations that disproportionately harm underrepresented groups. We introduce PLD-Debias, a fully black-box debiasing framework that requires neither access to backbone parameters nor demographic annotations. Our method integrates three components: (1) Rank-Regularized Amplification, a lightweight adapter that exaggerates latent spurious directions; (2) Unsupervised Pseudo-Bias Induction, which clusters amplified features to infer high-fidelity proxy bias labels; and (3) Bias-Guided Refinement, combining supervised contrastive alignment with cluster-aware adaptive margins to purify representations and equalize decision boundaries. We theoretically show that these components jointly tighten a worst-group risk bound under spurious correlations. Empirically, PLD-Debias achieves state-of-the-art worst-group accuracy across CelebA, Waterbirds, and CMNIST, improving performance by 3-5 points over prior black-box methods while maintaining average accuracy. Remarkably, our pseudo-bias labels align with ground-truth bias annotations at over 90% fidelity, enabling oracle-level robustness without demographic supervision. Our results demonstrate that fairness and utility can be achieved through a plug-and-play classifier adapter for any frozen foundation model.

Poster
KaLOS finds Consensus: A Meta-Algorithm for Evaluating Inter-Annotator Agreement in Complex Vision Tasks

David Tschirschwitz, Volker Rodehorst

展开摘要

Progress in object detection benchmarks is stagnating. It is limited not by architectures but by the inability to distinguish model improvements from label noise. To restore trust in benchmarking the field requires rigorous quantification of annotation consistency to ensure the reliability of evaluation data. However, standard statistical metrics fail to handle the instance correspondence problem inherent to vision tasks. Furthermore, validating new agreement metrics remains circular because no objective ground truth for agreement exists. This forces reliance on unverifiable heuristics. We propose K\alphaLOS, a unified meta-algorithm that generalizes the "Localization First" principle to standardize dataset quality evaluation. By resolving spatial correspondence before assessing agreement, our framework transforms complex spatio-categorical problems into nominal reliability matrices. Unlike prior heuristic implementations, K\alphaLOS employs a principled, data-driven configuration; by statistically calibrating the localization parameters to the inherent agreement distribution, it generalizes to diverse tasks ranging from bounding boxes to volumetric segmentation or pose estimation. This standardization enables granular diagnostics beyond a single score. These include annotator vitality, collaboration clustering, and localization sensitivity. To validate this approach, we introduce a novel and empirically derived noise generator. Where prior validations relied on uniform error assumptions, our controllable testbed models complex and non-isotropic human variability. This provides evidence of the metric's properties and establishes K\alphaLOS as a robust standard for distinguishing signal from noise in modern computer vision benchmarks.

Poster
Personalized Federated Training of Diffusion Models with Privacy Guarantees

Kumar Kshitij Patel, Bingqing Jiang, A F M Mahfuzul Kabir, Weitong ZHANG, Difan Zou, Lingxiao Wang

展开摘要

We propose a federated framework for training diffusion models on decentralized and private datasets. The method learns a shared generative model alongside personalized client models, allowing clients to benefit from cross-client structure while ensuring that the shared model cannot reproduce any client's data on its own. We provide formal differential privacy guarantees for each client and establish utility bounds for conditional generation under a Gaussian mixture model, showing that collaboration improves sample quality relative to private non-collaborative training. Experiments on CIFAR-10, Colorized MNIST, and CelebA support these results: the method generates high-fidelity samples, improves performance on minority and underrepresented classes, and maintains strong protection against membership inference, memorization, and reconstruction attacks.

Poster
Dehallu3D: Hallucination-Mitigated 3D Generation from a Single Image via Cyclic View Consistency Refinement

Xiwen Wang, Shichao Zhang, Ruowei Wang, Mao Li, Chenyu Zhou, Ji-Zhe Zhou, Qijun Zhao, Hailun Zhang

展开摘要

Large 3D reconstruction models have revolutionized the 3D content generation field, enabling broad applications in virtual reality and gaming. Just like other large models, large 3D reconstruction models suffer from hallucinations as well, introducing structural outliers (e.g., odd holes or protrusions) that deviate from the input data. However, unlike other large models, hallucinations in large 3D reconstruction models remain severely underexplored, leading to malformed 3D-printed objects or insufficient immersion in virtual scenes. Such hallucinations majorly originate from that existing methods reconstruct 3D content from sparsely generated multi-view images which suffer from large viewpoint gaps and discontinuities. To mitigate hallucinations by eliminating the outliers, we propose Dehallu3D for 3D mesh generation. Our key idea is to design a balanced multi-view continuity constraint to enforce smooth transitions across dense intermediate viewpoints, while avoiding over-smoothing that could erase sharp geometric features. Therefore, Dehallu3D employs a plug-and-play optimization module with two key constraints: (i) adjacent consistency to ensure geometric continuity across views, and (ii) adaptive smoothness to retain fine details. We further propose the Outlier Risk Measure (ORM) metric to quantify geometric fidelity in 3D generation from the perspective of outliers. Extensive experiments show that Dehallu3D achieves high-fidelity 3D generation by effectively preserving structural details while removing hallucinated outliers.

Poster
Act Like a Pathologist: Tissue-Aware Whole Slide Image Reasoning

Wentao Huang, Weimin Lyu, Peiliang Lou, Qingqiao Hu, Xiaoling Hu, Shahira Abousamra, Wenchao Han, Ruifeng Guo, Jiawei Zhou, Chao Chen, Chen Wang

展开摘要

Computational pathology has advanced rapidly in recent years, driven by domain-specific image encoders and growing interest in using vision-language models to answer natural-language questions about diseases. Yet, the core problem behind pathology question-answering remains unsolved, considering that a gigapixel slide contains far more information than necessary for a given question. Pathologists naturally navigate tissue and morphology complexity by scanning broadly, and zooming in selectively according to the clinical questions. Current models, in contrast, rely on uniform patch sampling or broad attention maps, often attending equally to irrelevant regions while overlooking key visual evidence. In this work, we try to bring models closer to how humans actually examine slides. We propose a question-guided, tissue-aware, and coarse-to-fine retrieval framework, HistoSelect, that consists of two key components: a group sampler that identifies question-relevant tissue regions, followed by a patch selector that retrieves the most informative patches within those regions. By selecting only the most informative patches, our method becomes significantly more efficient: reducing visual token usage by 70% on average, while improving accuracy across three pathology QA tasks. Evaluated on 356,000 question-answer pairs, our approach outperforms existing methods and produces answers grounded in interpretable, pathologist-consistent regions. Our results suggest that bringing human-like search and attention patterns into WSI reasoning is a promising direction for building practical and reliable pathology VLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/winston52/HistoSelect.

Poster