GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Scaling Self-Supervised and Cross-Modal Pretraining for Volumetric CT Transformers
Authors: Cris Claessens; Christiaan Viviers; Giacomo D'Amicantonio; Egor Bondarev; Fons van der Sommen
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We introduce SPECTRE, a fully transformer-based foundation model for volumetric computed tomography (CT). Our Self-Supervised & Cross-Modal Pretraining for CT Representation Extraction (SPECTRE) approach utilizes scalable 3D Vision Transformer architectures and modern self-supervised and vision-language pretraining strategies to learn general-purpose CT representations. Volumetric CT poses unique challenges, such as extreme token scaling, geometric anisotropy, and weak or noisy clinical supervision, that make standard transformer and contrastive learning recipes ineffective out of the box. The framework jointly optimizes a local transformer for high-resolution volumetric feature extraction and a global transformer for whole-scan context modeling, making large-scale 3D attention computationally tractable. Notably, SPECTRE is trained exclusively on openly available CT datasets, demonstrating that high-performing, generalizable representations can be achieved without relying on private data. Pretraining combines DINO-style self-distillation with SigLIP-based vision-language alignment using paired radiology reports, yielding features that are both geometrically consistent and clinically meaningful. Across multiple CT benchmarks, SPECTRE consistently outperforms prior CT foundation models in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, establishing SPECTRE as a scalable, open, and fully transformer-based foundation model for 3D medical imaging.
Hierarchically Robust Zero-shot Vision-language Models
Authors: Junhao Dong; Yifei Zhang; Hao Zhu; Yew-Soon Ong; Piotr Koniusz
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can perform zero-shot classification but are susceptible to adversarial attacks. While robust fine-tuning improves their robustness, existing approaches align fixed text embeddings with an image embedding,  sacrificing natural performance and robustness. A  robustness degradation also occurs when a model faces adversarial attacks targeting superclasses (parent classes, e.g., mammal) in addition to their base (leaf) classes (e.g., cat). Thus, to enhance adversarial robustness and leverage the inherent hierarchical properties of class space, we propose a novel adversarial fine-tuning framework based on hierarchical embeddings and several levels of adversarially robust alignment of image-text modalities. Additional mechanisms place visual embeddings at the desired depth of hierarchy, and we provide a theoretical connection between the depth of embedding in the hierarchy and the maximum viable margin size. Our model naturally realizes several margin sizes, boosting generalization of adversaries for robustification. As various trees with different parent labels can share the same leaf labels, we also consider aligning over multiple trees to boost semantic variety. Experiments across several datasets are performed.
PACT: Phase-Like Transition Constraints in Adapter-Based Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models
Authors: Xuan Wang; Guiguang Ding; Jungong Han
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Continual Learning (CL) enables Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to acquire new capabilities while retaining prior knowledge, for example, by employing task-specific adapters. Existing CL approaches typically optimize these adapters to convergence, often with (near-)orthogonality constraints to reduce interference; however, isolating adapters in orthogonal subspaces can suppress cross-task transfer and sharing. To address this problem, we provide a new perspective based on PAC-Bayesian analysis: once the per-task optimization has converged, adapters should be further shaped to satisfy \underline P hase-like tr\underline A nsition \underline C ons\underline T raints (PACT) -- a two-part formulation that (i) specifies a phase-like transition relation among adapters and (ii) imposes explicit constraints that enforce this relation. Under PACT, adapter dynamics resemble the phase transition of water: the system gravitates toward either a "frozen" (history-preserving, tightly constrained) or a "melted" (task-adaptive, free) regime, while moving between them smoothly rather than via hard thresholds. We operationalize PACT by coupling stability and plasticity regularizers within a two-branch Vision Transformer (ViT), seeding adapters with a Stable Adapter Initialization (SAI), and introducing a Prior Anchoring (PA) mechanism, thereby inducing phase-like adapter dynamics. Across diverse CL settings, PACT surpasses state-of-the-art methods while reducing the number of trainable parameters by 36.96% relative to standard adapter-based baselines. Our code will be released publicly.
AnchorFlow: Training-Free 3D Editing via Latent Anchor-Aligned Flows
Authors: Zhenglin Zhou; Fan Ma; Chengzhuo Gui; Xiaobo Xia; Hehe Fan; Yi Yang; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Training-free 3D editing aims to modify 3D shapes based on human instructions without model finetuning. It plays a crucial role in 3D content creation. However, existing approaches often struggle to produce strong or geometrically stable edits, largely due to inconsistent latent anchors introduced by timestep-dependent noise during diffusion sampling. To address these limitations, we introduce AnchorFlow, which is built upon the principle of latent anchor consistency. Specifically, AnchorFlow establishes a global latent anchor shared between the source and target trajectories, and enforces coherence using a relaxed anchor-alignment loss together with an anchor-aligned update rule. This design ensures that transformations remain stable and semantically faithful throughout the editing process. By stabilizing the latent reference space, AnchorFlow enables more pronounced semantic modifications. Moreover, AnchorFlow is mask-free. Without mask supervision, it effectively preserves geometric fidelity. Experiments on the Eval3DEdit benchmark show that AnchorFlow consistently delivers semantically aligned and structurally robust edits across diverse editing types. Project page: https://zhenglinzhou.github.io/AnchorFlow/.
Recurrent Video Masked Autoencoders
Authors: Daniel Zoran; Nikhil Parthasarathy; Yi Yang; Drew A Hudson; João Carreira; Andrew Zisserman
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We present Recurrent Video Masked-Autoencoders (RVM): a novel approach to video representation learning that leverages recurrent computation to model the temporal structure of video data. RVM couples an asymmetric masking objective with a transformer-based recurrent neural network to aggregate information over time, training solely on a simple pixel reconstruction loss. This design yields a highly efficient "generalist" encoder: RVM achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art video models (e.g. VideoMAE, V-JEPA) on video-level tasks like action classification, and point and object tracking, while matching or exceeding the performance of image models (e.g. DINOv2) on tasks that require strong geometric and dense spatial features. Notably, RVM achieves strong performance in the small-model regime without requiring knowledge distillation, exhibiting up to 30xgreater parameter efficiency than competing video masked autoencoders. Finally, we demonstrate that \model's recurrent nature allows for stable feature propagation over long temporal horizons with linear computational cost, overcoming some of the limitations of standard spatio-temporal attention-based video models. Ablation studies further highlight the factors driving the model's success, with qualitative results showing that RVM learns rich representations of scene semantics, structure, and motion.
CLEP: Contrastive Language-Pose Pretraining
Authors: Sen Jia; Huayu Wang; Hsiang-Wei Huang; Zhaochong An; Jenq-Neng Hwang; Huaping Zhang; Lei Li
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Aligning natural language descriptions with precise 3D human poses remains a big challenge due to the scarcity of effective pose representation mechanisms and large-scale, semantically rich datasets. To overcome these limitations, we first introduce **CLEP-2M**, the largest 3D pose-language dataset to date, comprising two million high-quality 3D pose-language pairs. This dataset provides a **20-fold** increase in scale and far richer semantic diversity than existing benchmarks. Second, we propose **CLEP**, a novel contrastive pretraining framework. The core of CLEP is HierFormer, a hierarchical pose encoder specifically designed for language alignment. Its key innovation is a Cross-Scale Attention Fusion (CSAF) mechanism that dynamically integrates features from the joint, limb, and body levels. This enables CLEP to precisely align complex, multi-scale text descriptions with the pose representation. Extensive experimental evaluations on CLEP-2M and PoseScript demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches across a range of downstream tasks. CLEP shows exceptional zero-shot generalization, achieving a 34.8 mRecall on the human-annotated PoseScript-H benchmark--a nearly **6-fold** improvement from the baseline. Furthermore, CLEP demonstrates superior performance on pose generation and fine-grained pose editing. These results establish CLEP as a strong multimodal foundation model for human-centric understanding and generation tasks.
SDDF: Specificity-Driven Dynamic Focusing for Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Detection
Authors: Jiaming Liang; Yifeng Zhan; Chunlin Liu; Weihua Zheng; Bingye Peng; Qiwei Liang; Boyang Cai; Xiaochun Mai; Qiang Nie
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims to detect known and unknown objects in the open world by leveraging text prompts. Benefiting from the emergence of large-scale vision--language pre-trained models, OVOD has demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. However, when dealing with camouflaged objects, the detector often fails to distinguish and localize objects because the visual features of the objects and the background are highly similar. To bridge this gap, we construct a benchmark named OVCOD-D by augmenting carefully selected camouflaged object images with fine-grained textual descriptions. Due to the limited scale of available camouflaged object datasets, we adopt detectors pre-trained on large-scale object detection datasets as our baseline methods, as they possess stronger zero-shot generalization ability. In the specificity-aware sub-descriptions generated by multimodal large models, there still exist confusing and overly decorative modifiers. To mitigate such interference, we design a sub-description principal component contrastive fusion strategy that reduces noisy textual components. Furthermore, to address the challenge that the visual features of camouflaged objects are highly similar to those of their surrounding environment, we propose a specificity-guided regional weak alignment and dynamic focusing method, which aims to strengthen the detector's ability to discriminate camouflaged objects from background. Under the open-set evaluation setting, the proposed method achieves an AP of 56.4 on the OVCOD-D benchmark. Project code and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/Zh1fen/SDDF.
GardenDesigner: Encoding Aesthetic Principles into Jiangnan Garden Construction via a Chain of Agents
Authors: Mengtian Li; Fan Yang; Ruixue Xiong; Yiyan Fan; Zhifeng Xie; Zeyu Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Jiangnan gardens, a prominent style of Chinese classical gardens, hold great potential as digital assets for film and game production and digital tourism. However, manual modeling of Jiangnan gardens heavily relies on expert experience for layout design and asset creation, making the process time-consuming. To address this gap, we propose GardenDesigner, a novel framework that encodes aesthetic principles for Jiangnan garden construction and integrates a chain of agents based on procedural modeling. The water-centric terrain and explorative pathway rules are applied by terrain distribution and road generation agents. Selection and spatial layout of garden assets follow the aesthetic and cultural constraints. Consequently, we propose asset selection and layout optimization agents to select and arrange objects for each area in the garden. Additionally, we introduce GardenVerse for Jiangnan garden construction, including expert-annotated garden knowledge to enhance the asset arrangement process. To enable interaction and editing, we develop an interactive interface and tools in Unity, in which non-expert users can construct Jiangnan gardens via text input within one minute. Experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that GardenDesigner can generate diverse and aesthetically pleasing Jiangnan gardens. Project page is available at https://monad-cube.github.io/GardenDesigner.
Lens Component Deletion based on Differentiable Ray Tracing
Authors: Wenguan Zhang; Qirun Zhang; Tuo Sun; Jiajian He; Jiahui Xu; Huajun Feng; Qi Li
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: To achieve compactness or cost reduction for optical lens systems, designers typically rely on commercial software to design lens systems independently of post-processing algorithms, leading to excessive dependence on designers' expertise and often requiring significant time. Recently, joint optimization approaches utilizing differentiable ray tracing have emerged, demonstrating significant potential in lens design tasks. However, existing pipelines lack accurate and efficient diffraction modeling capabilities for miniature optical systems. In this work, we propose a novel lens component deletion pipeline for miniature optical systems, which automatically deletes the suitable lens component, and then optimizes both the lens system and the post-processing network to achieve joint aberration correction. Additionally, we introduce a novel metric for evaluating the contribution of each lens component within an optical system, aimed at identifying the lens component that has the least impact on the system. We also develop an efficient differentiable point spread function estimation method based on the Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction model, significantly reducing GPU memory consumption. Our proposed pipeline achieves lens component deletion while maintaining imaging quality comparable to the original lens system, thereby enabling the compactness or cost-effective optimization of miniature optical systems. Project page: https://github.com/WenguanZhang/HappyLens
MR. Illuminate: Zero-Shot Low-Light Image Enhancement with Diffusion Prior
Authors: Joshua Cho; Sara Aghajanzadeh; Zhen Zhu; David Forsyth
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: The primary axes of interest in low-light image enhancement (LLIE) are color constancy--ensuring consistent outputs across inputs of the same scene under varying illumination and noise--and generalization across diverse datasets. Existing methods, whether supervised, unsupervised, or zero-shot, rely on auxiliary loss functions and empirically selected hyperparameters, which yield strong results on the datasets used for evaluation but often exhibit limited generalization. To overcome these constraints, we propose MR. Illuminate (pronounced "Mister Illuminate"), the first deep learning-based solution for LLIE that requires no optimization and no degradation assumption. "MR." emphasizes our Modulate-Refine design: global illuminance and color are modulated via Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN), while local structure and color are refined through self-attention features within a pre-trained diffusion model, taking a unique approach from prior methods. Extensive quantitative evaluations show that our approach surpasses SOTA methods on standard LLIE benchmarks, while qualitative results demonstrate improved color fidelity. Moreover, without any modification to our framework, our method achieves competitive results on the auto white balance (AWB) task, underscoring its strong generalization capability.
Beyond Caption-Based Queries in Video Moment Retrieval
Authors: David Pujol-Perich; Albert Clapés; Dima Damen; Sergio Escalera; Michael Wray
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Current Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) models are trained on videos paired with captions, which are written by annotators after watching the videos. These captions are used as textual queries---which we term caption-based queries. This annotation process induces a visual bias, leading to overly descriptive and fine-grained queries, which significantly differ from the more general search queries that users are likely to employ in practice. In this work, we investigate the degradation of existing VMR methods, particularly of DETR architectures, when trained on caption-based queries but evaluated on search queries. For this, we introduce three benchmarks by modifying the textual queries in three public VMR datasets---i.e., HD-EPIC, YouCook2 and ActivityNet-Captions. Our analysis reveals two key generalization challenges: (i) A language gap, arising from the linguistic under-specification of search-queries, and (ii) a multi-moment gap, caused by the shift from single moment to multi-moment queries. We also identify a critical issue in these architectures---an active decoder-query collapse---as a primary cause of the poor generalization to multi-moment instances. We mitigate this issue with architectural modifications that effectively increase the number of active decoder queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach improves performance on search queries by up to 14.82% mAP_m, and up to 21.83% mAP_m on multi-moment search queries.
AutoDebias: An Automated Framework for Detecting and Mitigating Backdoor Biases in Text-to-Image Models
Authors: Hongyi Cai; Mohammad Mahdinur Rahman; MingKang Dong; Muxin Pu; Moayad Aloqaily; Jie Li; Xinfeng Li; Jialie Shen; Meikang Qiu; Qingsong Wen
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) models generate high-quality images but are vulnerable to malicious backdoor attacks that inject harmful biases (e.g., trigger-activated gender or racial stereotypes). Existing debiasing methods, often designed for natural statistical biases, struggle with these deliberate and subtle injected attacks. We propose AutoDebias, a framework that automatically identifies and mitigates these malicious biases in T2I models without prior knowledge of the specific attack vectors. Specifically, AutoDebias leverages vision-language models to detect trigger-activated visual patterns and constructs neutralization guides by generating counter-prompts. These guides drive a CLIP-guided training process that breaks the harmful associations while preserving the original model's image quality and diversity. Unlike methods designed for natural bias, AutoDebias effectively addresses subtle, injected stereotypes and multiple interacting attacks. We evaluate the framework on a new benchmark covering 17 distinct backdoor attack scenarios, including challenging cases where multiple backdoors co-exist. AutoDebias detects malicious patterns with 91.6% accuracy and reduces the backdoor success rate from 90% to negligible levels, while preserving the visual fidelity of the original model.
Vision-Oriented Lightweight Neural Architecture Search with Budget-Adaptive Evaluation
Authors: Yi Fan; Yu-Bin Yang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: In the deep-learning-based computer vision community, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become the de-facto tool for acquiring task-optimal network structures. Nevertheless, NAS methods are trapped in a fundamental accuracy-efficiency dilemma: training-based approaches deliver reliable performance but incur prohibitive search costs, whereas training-free strategies are ultra-fast but often yield relatively unreliable rankings. To reconcile this conflict, we propose a vision-oriented lightweight training-based NAS framework. We first design six micro vision tasks whose training time is negligible, yet together they probe a broad spectrum of representational capacities. Built upon these tasks, we introduce a budget-adaptive performance evaluator to produce the most accurate ranking attainable within the limit. Experiments on popular NAS benchmarks show that our method achieves a ranking correlation higher than existing methods. Furthermore, we construct a search space from prevalent neural blocks and run our method at a cost close to training-free methods; the discovered architecture surpasses the current state-of-the-art under identical training recipes. Our codes are available at https://github.com/fanyi-plus/tf-nas.
NVGS: Neural Visibility for Occlusion Culling in 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Brent Zoomers; Florian Hahlbohm; Joni Vanherck; Lode Jorissen; Marcus Magnor; Nick Michiels
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting can exploit frustum culling and level-of-detail strategies to accelerate rendering of scenes containing a large number of primitives. However, the semi-transparent nature of Gaussians prevents the application of another highly effective technique: occlusion culling. We address this limitation by proposing a novel method to learn the viewpoint-dependent visibility function of all Gaussians in a trained model using a small, shared MLP across instances of an asset in a scene. By querying it for Gaussians within the viewing frustum prior to rasterization, our method can discard occluded primitives during rendering. Leveraging Tensor Cores for efficient computation, we integrate these neural queries directly into a novel instanced software rasterizer. Our approach outperforms the current state of the art for composed scenes in terms of VRAM usage and image quality, utilizing a combination of our instanced rasterizer and occlusion culling MLP, and exhibits complementary properties to existing LoD techniques. The source code is available at https://brent-zoomers.github.io/nvgs/
CADC: Content Adaptive Diffusion-Based Generative Image Compression
Authors: Xihua Sheng; Lingyu Zhu; Tianyu Zhang; Dong Liu; Shiqi Wang; Jing Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion-based generative image compression has demonstrated remarkable potential for achieving realistic reconstruction at ultra-low bitrates. The key to unlocking this potential lies in making the entire compression process content-adaptive, ensuring that the encoder's representation and the decoder's generative prior are dynamically aligned with the semantic and structural characteristics of the input image. However, existing methods suffer from three critical limitations that prevent effective content adaptation. First, isotropic quantization applies a uniform quantization step, failing to adapt to the spatially varying complexity of image content and creating a misalignment with the diffusion model's noise-dependent prior. Second, the information concentration bottleneck---arising from the dimensional mismatch between the high-dimensional noisy latent and the diffusion decoder's fixed input---prevents the model from adaptively preserving essential semantic information in the primary channels. Third, existing textual conditioning strategies either need significant textual bitrate overhead or rely on generic, content-agnostic textual prompts, thereby failing to provide adaptive semantic guidance efficiently. To overcome these limitations, we propose a content-adaptive diffusion-based image codec (CADC) with three technical innovations: 1) an Uncertainty-Guided Adaptive Quantization (UGAQ) method that learns spatial uncertainty maps to adaptively align quantization distortion with content characteristics; 2) an Auxiliary Decoder-Guided Information Concentration (ADGIC) method that uses a lightweight auxiliary decoder to enforce content-aware information preservation in the primary latent channels; and 3) a Bitrate-Free Adaptive Textual Conditioning (BFATC) method that derives content-aware textual descriptions from the auxiliary reconstructed image, enabling semantic guidance without bitrate cost. Comprehensive experimental results show that our codec achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality at ultra-low bitrates.