GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Rethinking Position Embedding as a Context Controller for Multi-Reference and Multi-Shot Video Generation
Authors: Binyuan Huang; Yuning Lu; Weinan Jia; Hualiang Wang; Mu Liu; Daiqing Yang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent proprietary models such as Sora2 demonstrate promising progress in generating multi-shot videos conditioned on multiple reference characters. However, academic research on this problem remains limited. We study this task and identify a core challenge: when reference images exhibit highly similar appearances, the model often suffers from reference confusion, where semantically similar tokens degrade the model's ability to retrieve the correct context. To address this, we introduce PoCo (Position Embedding as a Context Controller), which incorporates position encoding as additional context control beyond semantic retrieval. By employing side information of tokens, PoCo enables precise token-level matching while preserving implicit semantic consistency modeling. Building on PoCo, we develop a multi-reference and multi-shot video generation model capable of reliably controlling characters with extremely similar visual traits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PoCo improves cross-shot consistency and reference fidelity compared with various baselines.
Complet4R: Geometric Complete 4D Reconstruction
Authors: Weibang Wang; Kenan Li; Zhuoguang Chen; Yijun Yuan; Hang Zhao
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We introduce Complet4R, a novel end-to-end framework for Geometric Complete 4D Reconstruction, which aims to recover temporally coherent and geometrically complete reconstruction for dynamic scenes. Our method formalizes the task of Geometric Complete 4D Reconstruction as a unified framework of reconstruction and completion, by directly accumulating full contexts onto each frame. Unlike previous approaches that rely on pairwise reconstruction or local motion estimation, Complet4R utilizes a decoder-only transformer to operate all context globally directly from sequential video input, reconstructing a complete geometry for every single timestamp, including occluded regions visible in other frames. Our method demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on our proposed benchmark for Geometric Complete 4D Reconstruction and the 3D Point Tracking task. Code will be released to support future research.
MSRL: Scaling Generative Multimodal Reward Modeling via Multi-Stage Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Chenglong Wang; Yifu Huo; Yang Gan; Qiaozhi He; Qi Meng; Bei Li; Yan Wang; Junfu Liu; Tianhua Zhou; Jingbo Zhu; Tong Xiao
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal reward modeling have been largely driven by a paradigm shift from discriminative to generative approaches. Building on this progress, recent studies have further employed reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to enhance multimodal reward models (MRMs). Despite their success, RLVR-based training typically depends on labeled multimodal preference data, which are costly and labor-intensive to obtain, making it difficult to scale the training of MRMs. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Multi-Stage Reinforcement Learning (MSRL) approach, which can achieve scalable reinforcement learning for MRMs with limited multimodal data. MSRL redefines the conventional RLVR-based training paradigm by first learning a generalizable reward reasoning capability from large-scale textual preference data and then progressively transferring this capability to multimodal tasks through caption-based and fully multimodal reinforcement learning stages. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-modal knowledge distillation approach to improve preference generalization within MSRL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSRL effectively scales the RLVR-based training of generative MRMs and substantially improves their performance across both visual understanding and visual generation tasks (e.g., 68.5%-74.8% on VLReward Bench, 69.2%-75.4% on GenAI-Bench), without requiring additional multimodal preference annotations.
PixelRush: Ultra-Fast, Training-Free High-Resolution Image Generation via One-step Diffusion
Authors: Hong-Phuc Lai; Phong Nguyen; Anh Tran
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Pre-trained diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images but remain inherently limited by their native training resolution. Recent training-free approaches have attempted to overcome this constraint by introducing interventions during the denoising process; however, these methods incur substantial computational overhead, often requiring more than five minutes to produce a single 4K image.In this paper, we present PixelRush, the first tuning-free framework for practical high-resolution text-to-image generation. Our method builds upon the established patch-based inference paradigm but eliminates the need for multiple inversion and regeneration cycles. Instead, PixelRush enables efficient patch-based denoising within a low-step regime. To address artifacts introduced by patch blending in few-step generation, we propose a seamless blending strategy. Furthermore, we mitigate over-smoothing effects through a noise injection mechanism. PixelRush delivers exceptional efficiency, generating 4K images in approximately 20 seconds representing a 10xto 35xspeedup over state-of-the-art methods while maintaining superior visual fidelity. Extensive experiments validate both the performance gains and the quality of outputs achieved by our approach.
ShadowDraw: From Any Object to Shadow-Drawing Compositional Art
Authors: Rundong Luo; Noah Snavely; Wei-Chiu Ma
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We introduce ShadowDraw, a framework that transforms ordinary 3D objects into shadow-drawing compositional art. Given a 3D object, our system predicts scene parameters---including object pose and lighting---together with a partial line drawing, such that the cast shadow completes the drawing into a recognizable image. To this end, we optimize scene configurations to reveal meaningful shadows, employ shadow contour to guide line drawing generation, and adopt automatic evaluation to enforce shadow-drawing coherence and visual quality. Experiments show that ShadowDraw produces compelling results across diverse inputs, from real-world scans and curated datasets to generative assets, and naturally extends to multi-object scenes, animations, and physical deployments. Our work provides a practical pipeline for creating shadow-drawing art and broadens the design space of computational visual art, bridging the gap between algorithmic design and artistic storytelling.
Cross-Scale Pansharpening via ScaleFormer and the PanScale Benchmark
Authors: Ke Cao; Xuanhua He; Xueheng Li; Lingting Zhu; Yingying Wang; Ao Ma; Zhanjie Zhang; Man Zhou; Chengjun Xie; Jie Zhang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multi-spectral images by fusing the spatial detail of panchromatic images with the spectral richness of low-resolution MS data. However, most existing methods are evaluated under limited, low-resolution settings, limiting their generalization to real-world, high-resolution scenarios. To bridge this gap, we systematically investigate the data, algorithmic, and computational challenges of cross-scale pansharpening. We first introduce PanScale, the first large-scale, cross-scale pansharpening dataset, accompanied by PanScale-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating generalization across varying resolutions and scales. To realize scale generalization, we propose ScaleFormer, a novel architecture designed for multi-scale pansharpening. ScaleFormer reframes generalization across image resolutions as generalization across sequence lengths: it tokenizes images into patch sequences of the same resolution but variable length proportional to image scale. A Scale-Aware Patchify module enables training for such variations from fixed-size crops. ScaleFormer then decouples intra-patch spatial feature learning from inter-patch sequential dependency modeling, incorporating Rotary Positional Encoding to enhance extrapolation to unseen scales. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms SOTA methods in fusion quality and cross-scale generalization. The datasets and source code are available at https://github.com/caoke-963/ScaleFormer.
Camera Control for Text-to-Image Generation via Learning Viewpoint Tokens
Authors: Xinxuan Lu; Charless Fowlkes; Alexander C. Berg
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Current text-to-image models struggle to provide precise camera control using natural language alone. In this work, we present a framework for precise camera control with global scene understanding in text-to-image generation by learning parametric camera tokens. We fine-tune image generation models for viewpoint-conditioned text-to-image generation on a curated dataset that combines 3D-rendered images for geometric supervision and photorealistic augmentations for appearance and background diversity. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while preserving image quality and prompt fidelity. Unlike prior methods that overfit to object-specific appearance correlations, our viewpoint tokens learn factorized geometric representations that transfer to unseen object categories. Our work shows that text-vision latent spaces can be endowed with explicit 3D camera structure, offering a pathway toward geometrically-aware prompts for text-to-image generation. Project page: https://randdl.github.io/viewtoken_control/
MatLat: Material Latent Space for PBR Texture Generation
Authors: Kyeongmin Yeo; Yunhong Min; Jaihoon Kim; Minhyuk Sung
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We propose a generative framework for producing high-quality PBR textures on a given 3D mesh. As large-scale PBR texture datasets are scarce, our approach focuses on effectively leveraging the embedding space and diffusion priors of pretrained latent image generative models while learning a material latent space, MatLat, through targeted fine-tuning. Unlike prior methods that freeze the embedding network, which leads to distribution shifts when encoding additional PBR channels and hinders subsequent diffusion training, we fine-tune the pretrained VAE so that new material channels can be incorporated with minimal latent distribution deviation. We further show that correspondence-aware attention alone is insufficient for cross-view consistency unless the latent-to-image mapping preserves locality. To enforce this locality, we introduce a regularization in the VAE fine-tuning that crops latent patches, decodes them, and aligns the corresponding image regions to maintain strong pixel-latent spatial correspondence. Ablation studies and comparison with previous baselines demonstrate that our framework improves PBR texture fidelity and that each component is critical for achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our project page is available at https://matlat-proj.github.io.
LoG3D: Ultra-High-Resolution 3D Shape Modeling via Local-to-Global Partitioning
Authors: Xinran Yang; Shuichang Lai; Jiangjing Lyu; Hongjie Li; Bowen Pan; Yuanqi Li; Jie Guo; Zhengkang Zhou; Yanwen Guo
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Generating high-fidelity 3D contents remains a fundamental challenge due to the complexity of representing arbitrary topologies--such as open surfaces and intricate internal structures--while preserving geometric details. Prevailing methods based on signed distance fields (SDFs) are hampered by costly watertight preprocessing and struggle with non-manifold geometries, while point-cloud representations often suffer from sampling artifacts and surface discontinuities. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel 3D variational autoencoder (VAE) framework built upon unsigned distance fields (UDFs)--a more robust and computationally efficient representation that naturally handles complex and incomplete shapes. Our core innovation is a local-to-global (LoG) architecture that processes the UDF by partitioning it into uniform subvolumes, termed UBlocks. This architecture couples 3D convolutions for capturing local detail with sparse transformers for enforcing global coherence. A Pad-Average strategy further ensures smooth transitions at subvolume boundaries during reconstruction. This modular design enables seamless scaling to ultra-high resolutions up to 2048^3-a regime previously unattainable for 3D VAEs. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction accuracy and generative quality, yielding superior surface smoothness and geometric flexibility.
It's Never Too Late: Noise Optimization for Collapse Recovery in Trained Diffusion Models
Authors: Anne Harrington; A. Sophia Koepke; Shyamgopal Karthik; Trevor Darrell; Alexei A. Efros
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Contemporary text-to-image models exhibit a surprising degree of mode collapse, as can be seen when sampling several images given the same text prompt. Previous work has attempted to address this issue by steering the model using guidance mechanisms, or by generating a large pool of candidates and refining them. In this work, we take a different direction and aim for diversity in generations via noise optimization. Specifically, we show that a simple noise optimization objective can mitigate mode collapse while preserving the fidelity of the base model. We also analyze the frequency characteristics of the noise and show that alternative noise initializations with different frequency profiles can improve both optimization and search. Our experiments demonstrate that noise optimization yields superior results in terms of generation quality and diversity.
StaR-KVQA: Structured Reasoning Traces for Implicit-Knowledge Visual Question Answering
Authors: Zhihao Wen; Wenkang Wei; Yuan Fang; Xingtong Yu; Hui Zhang; Weicheng Zhu; Xin Zhang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KVQA) requires models to ground entities in images and reason over factual knowledge. Recent work has introduced its implicit-knowledge variant, IK-KVQA, where a multimodal large language model (MLLM) is the sole knowledge source and answers are produced without external retrieval. Existing IK-KVQA approaches, however, are typically trained with answer-only supervision: reasoning remains implicit, justifications are often weak or inconsistent, and generalization after standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can be brittle. We propose StaR-KVQA, a framework that equips IK-KVQA with dual-path structured reasoning traces--symbolic relation paths over text and vision together with path-grounded natural-language explanations--to provide a stronger inductive bias than generic answer-only supervision. These traces act as modality-aware scaffolds that guide the model toward relevant entities and attributes, offering more structure than generic chain-of-thought supervision while not constraining reasoning to any single fixed path. With a single open-source MLLM, StaR-KVQA constructs and selects traces to build an offline trace-enriched dataset and then performs structure-aware self-distillation; no external retrievers, verifiers, or curated knowledge bases are used, and inference is a single autoregressive pass. Across benchmarks, StaR-KVQA consistently improves both answer accuracy and the transparency of intermediate reasoning, achieving up to +11.3% higher answer accuracy on OK-VQA over the strongest baseline.
A Causal Marriage between VLM and IRM from Understanding to Reasoning
Authors: Ziliang Chen; Tianang Xiao; Jusheng Zhang; Yongsen Zheng; Yang Liu; Zhao-rong Lai; Liang Lin
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP exhibit extraordinary out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, while the theoretical foundations underlying this robustness remain largely unexplored. This work establishes a connection between CLIP and Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM), the principled paradigm to overcome OOD problems, through token-level causal representation learning. Our key insight is that CLIP's contrastive objective, when optimally trained, recovers modality-invariant causal factors at the word-and-phrase granularity. By decomposing text prompts into class-specific tokens (causal factors) and class-agnostic context tokens (environmental factors), we prove that a vocabulary-constrained InfoNCE objective becomes formally equivalent to IRM's invariance criterion. Grounded in this equivalence, we propose a mid-training paradigm aiming to inject invariant learning signals into pre-trained CLIP without architectural modification, yielding CLIP-IRM with superior OOD performance. We further extend this causal alignment to multimodal reasoning via using CLIP-IRM's invariant alignment scores as process-level rewards in reinforcement learning, effectively transplanting IRM's guarantees to robust sequential decision-making in Multimodal Large Language Models. Extensive experiments validate our theoretical framework and present substantial improvements in both multimodal OOD understanding and reasoning tasks.
CamDirector: Towards Long-Term Coherent Video Trajectory Editing
Authors: Kejia Yin; Zhihao Shi; Weilin Wan; Yuhongze Zhou; Yuanhao Yu; Xinxin Zuo; Qiang Sun; Juwei Lu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Video (camera) trajectory editing aims to synthesize new videos that follow user-defined camera paths while preserving scene content and plausibly inpainting previously unseen regions, upgrading amateur footage into professionally styled videos. Existing VTE methods struggle with precise camera control and long-range consistency because they either inject target poses through a limited-capacity embedding or rely on single-frame warping with only implicit cross-frame aggregation in video diffusion models. To address these issues, we introduce a new VTE framework that 1) explicitly aggregates information across the entire source video via a hybrid warping scheme. Specifically, static regions are progressively fused into a world cache then rendered to target camera poses, while dynamic regions are directly warped; their fusion yields globally consistent coarse frames that guide refinement.2) processes video segments jointly with their history via a history-guided autoregressive diffusion model, while the world cache is incrementally updated to reinforce already inpainted content, enabling long-term temporal coherence. Finally, we present iPhone-PTZ, a new VTE benchmark with diverse camera motions and large trajectory variations, and achieve state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters.
SpiderCam: Low-Power Snapshot Depth from Differential Defocus
Authors: Marcos A. Ferreira; Tianao Li; John Mamish; Josiah Hester; Yaman Sangar; Qi Guo; Emma Alexander
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We introduce SpiderCam, an FPGA-based snapshot depth-from-defocus camera which produces 480x400 sparse depth maps in real-time at 32.5 FPS over a working range of 52 cm while consuming 611 mW of power in total. SpiderCam comprises a custom camera which simultaneously captures two differently focused images of the same scene, processed with a SystemVerilog implementation of depth from differential defocus (DfDD) on a low-power FPGA. To achieve state-of-the-art power consumption, we present algorithmic improvements to DfDD that overcome challenges caused by low-power sensors, and design a memory-local implementation for streaming depth computation on a device that is too small to store even a single image pair. We report the first sub-Watt total power measurement for passive FPGA-based 3D cameras in the literature.
Denoising, Fast and Slow: Difficulty-Aware Adaptive Sampling for Image Generation
Authors: Johannes Schusterbauer; Ming Gui; Yusong Li; Pingchuan Ma; Felix Krause; Björn Ommer
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion- and flow-based models usually allocate compute uniformly across space, updating all patches with the same timestep and number of function evaluations. While convenient, this ignores the heterogeneity of natural images: some regions are easy to denoise, whereas others benefit from more refinement or additional context. Motivated by this, we explore patch-level noise scales for image synthesis. We find that naively varying timesteps across image tokens performs poorly, as it exposes the model to overly informative training states that do not occur at inference. We therefore introduce a timestep sampler that explicitly controls the maximum patch-level information available during training, and show that moving from global to patch-level timesteps already improves image generation over standard baselines. By further augmenting the model with a lightweight per-patch difficulty head, we enable adaptive samplers that allocate compute dynamically where it is most needed. Combined with noise levels varying over both space and diffusion time, this yields Patch Forcing (PF), a framework that advances easier regions earlier so they can provide context for harder ones. PF achieves superior results on class-conditional ImageNet, remains orthogonal to representation alignment and guidance methods, and scales to text-to-image synthesis. Our results suggest that patch-level denoising schedules provide a promising foundation for adaptive image generation.
Revisiting the Necessity of Lengthy Chain-of-Thought in Vision-centric Reasoning Generalization
Authors: Yifan Du; Kun Zhou; Yingqian Min; Yue Ling; Wayne Xin Zhao; Youbin Wu; Ji-Rong Wen
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We study how different Chain-of-Thought (CoT) designs affect the acquisition of the generalizable visual reasoning ability in vision-language models (VLMs). While CoT data, especially long or visual CoT such as "think with image", has been widely used to supervise intermediate reasoning, it remains unclear why specific CoT designs help and which ones truly support generalizable reasoning. To systematically evaluate this, we focus on a controlled maze-solving task where reasoning rules are fully visual, difficulty can be tuned by grid size, and all the intermediate steps can be automatically generated. Using Qwen2.5-VL-7B under a standard SFT-then-RL pipeline, we compare three representative CoT formats: Language CoT, Grounding CoT (with spatial coordinate trajectories), and Visual CoT (with image manipulations). Our experiments reveal that visual and longer CoT mainly accelerate convergence but do not lift the final performance ceiling; concise CoT containing only essential grounding steps outperforms longer traces; and, strikingly, CoT retaining only the minimal grounding results generalizes best across different maze sizes. We further validate these insights on other vision-centric tasks. These findings highlight a "short is long" effect and provide practical guidance for constructing more generalizable SFT datasets for visual reasoning. Our code and data will be publicly released at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Revisiting-Visual-CoT.