GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
OW-Rep: Open World Object Detection with Instance Representation Learning
Authors: Sunoh Lee; Minsik Jeon; Jihong Min; Junwon Seo
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Open World Object Detection (OWOD) addresses realistic scenarios where unseen object classes emerge, enabling detectors trained on known classes to detect unknown objects and incrementally incorporate the knowledge they provide. While existing OWOD methods primarily focus on detecting unknown objects, they often overlook the rich semantic relationships between detected objects, which are essential for scene understanding and applications in open-world environments (e.g., open-world tracking and novel class discovery). In this paper, we extend the OWOD framework to jointly detect unknown objects and learn semantically rich instance embeddings, enabling the detector to capture fine-grained semantic relationships between instances. To this end, we propose modules that leverage the rich and generalizable knowledge of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) and can be integrated into open-world object detectors. First, the Unknown Box Refine Module uses semantic masks from the Segment Anything Model to accurately localize unknown objects. The Embedding Transfer Module then distills instance-wise semantic similarities from VFM features to the detector's embeddings via a relaxed contrastive loss, enabling the detector to learn a semantically meaningful and generalizable instance feature. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves both unknown object detection and instance embedding quality, while also enhancing performance in downstream tasks such as open-world tracking.
Training-free Multi-view 4D Human Motion Reconstruction Virtual Reality System
Authors: Yijie Li; Ce Zheng; Yijie He; Joel Julin; Ryosuke Ichikari; Satoki Ogiso; Satoshi Nakae; Akihiro Sato; Takeshi Kurata; Laszlo A. Jeni
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Human mesh recovery offers substantial potential for detailed behavior analysis and understanding of complex human-environment interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel 4D Human Motion Reconstruction Virtual Reality System that integrates advanced 4D multi-view human mesh recovery and high-quality 3D environment reconstruction using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our system seamlessly combines detailed 4D human behavior capture with accurate 3D environment reconstruction, significantly extending traditional visual monitoring approaches. Visualization through an interactive Virtual Reality (VR) platform enables dynamic interaction representation using accurately reconstructed virtual environments and computer-generated (CG) avatars. Experimental results from realistic scenarios validate the effectiveness of our framework in providing immersive experiences and precise human-environment modeling, demonstrating a significant advancement in a practical human-centered representation approach. Our approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving reductions in mesh errors of 24% in PVE and 32% in MPJPE on the CHI3D dataset, and 17% in MPJPE and 64% in translation error on the Hi4D dataset compared to other multi-view methods. The project is available at: https://att100.github.io/MV4DHMR.
Beyond the Encoder: Joint Encoder-Decoder Contrastive Pre-Training Improves Dense Prediction
Authors: Sébastien Quetin; Tapotosh Ghosh; Farhad Maleki
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Contrastive learning methods in self-supervised settings have primarily focused on pre-training encoders, while decoders are typically introduced and trained separately for downstream dense prediction tasks. However, this conventional approach overlooks the potential benefits of jointly pre-training both encoder and decoder. In this paper, we propose DeCon, an efficient encoder-decoder self-supervised learning (SSL) framework that supports joint contrastive pre-training. We first extend existing SSL architectures to accommodate diverse decoders and their corresponding contrastive losses. Then, we introduce a weighted encoder-decoder contrastive loss with non-competing objectives to enable the joint pre-training of encoder-decoder architectures. By adapting a contrastive SSL framework for dense prediction, DeCon establishes consistent state-of-the-art performance on most of the evaluated tasks when pre-trained on Imagenet-1K, COCO and COCO+. Notably, when pre-training a ResNet-50 encoder on COCO dataset, DeCon improves COCO object detection and instance segmentation compared to the baseline framework by +0.37 AP and +0.32 AP, respectively, and boosts semantic segmentation by +1.42 mIoU on Pascal VOC and by +0.50 mIoU on Cityscapes. These improvements generalize across recent backbones, decoders, datasets, and dense tasks beyond segmentation and object detection, and persist in out-of-domain scenarios, including limited-data settings, demonstrating that joint pre-training significantly enhances representation quality for dense prediction. Code is available at https://github.com/sebquetin/DeCon.git.
Discrete Facial Encoding: A Framework for Data-driven Facial Display Discovery
Authors: Minh Tran; Maksim Siniukov; Zhangyu Jin; Mohammad Soleymani
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Facial expression analysis is central to understanding human behavior, yet existing coding systems such as the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) are constrained by limited coverage and costly manual annotation. In this work, we introduce \method (DFE), an unsupervised, data-driven alternative of compact and interpretable dictionary of facial expressions from 3D mesh sequences learned through a Residual Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (RVQ-VAE). Our approach first extracts identity-invariant expression features from images using a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), effectively disentangling factors such as head pose and facial geometry. We then encode these features using an RVQ-VAE, producing a sequence of discrete tokens from a shared codebook, where each token captures a specific, reusable facial deformation pattern that contributes to the overall expression. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that \method captures more precise facial behaviors than FACS and other facial encoding alternatives. We evaluate the utility of our representation across three high-level psychological tasks: stress detection, personality prediction, and depression detection. Using a simple Bag-of-Words model built on top of the learned tokens, our system consistently outperforms both FACS-based pipelines and strong image and video representation learning models such as Masked Autoencoders. Further analysis reveals that our representation covers a wider variety of facial displays, highlighting its potential as a scalable and effective alternative to FACS for psychological and affective computing applications.
Zero-shot Hierarchical Plant Segmentation via Foundation Segmentation Models and Text-to-image Attention
Authors: Junhao Xing; Ryohei Miyakawa; Yang Yang; Xinpeng Liu; Risa Shinoda; Hiroaki Santo; Yosuke Toda; Fumio Okura
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Foundation segmentation models achieve reasonable leaf instance extraction from top-view crop images without training (i.e., zero-shot). However, segmenting entire plant individuals with each consisting of multiple overlapping leaves remains challenging. This problem is referred to as a hierarchical segmentation task, typically requiring annotated training datasets that are often species-specific and require significant human labor. To address this, we introduce ZeroPlantSeg, a zero-shot segmentation for rosette-shaped plant individuals from top-view images. We integrate a foundation segmentation model, extracting leaf instances, and a vision-language model, reasoning about plants' structures to extract plant individuals without additional training. Evaluations on datasets with multiple plant species, growth stages, and shooting environments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing zero-shot methods and achieves better cross-domain performance than supervised methods. Implementations are available at https://github.com/JunhaoXing/ZeroPlantSeg.
Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Mutual Alignment through Joint Error
Authors: Dexuan Zhang; Thomas Westfechtel; Tatsuya Harada
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Most existing methods for unsupervised domain adaptation focus on learning domain-invariant representations. However, recent works have shown that the generalization on the target domain can fail due to the trade-off between marginal distribution alignment and joint error under a large domain shift. A few labeled target data points can enhance adaptation quality, but the distribution shift between labeled and unlabeled target data is often overlooked. Therefore, we propose a novel learning theory to address the joint error in semi-supervised domain adaptation that can reduce the mutual distribution shift between pairs from labeled and unlabeled domains. Furthermore, we introduce a discrepancy measurement between hypotheses to tackle the inconsistency of the loss functions in the algorithm and theory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baseline approaches, particularly in scenarios with large domain shifts and scarce labeled target data.
Distribution Highlighted Reference-based Label Distribution Learning for Facial Age Estimation
Authors: Satoshi Suzuki; Shin'ya Yamaguchi; Shoichiro Takeda; Takuhiro Kaneko; Shota Orihashi; Ryo Masumura
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Estimating age from facial images is a fundamental task. In this task, age labels have ambiguity because faces of the same individual across similar ages are often difficult to distinguish. To model this ambiguity, label distribution learning (LDL) trains a deep neural network (DNN) using a label distribution, i.e., the probability that an image belongs to each age, instead of a single age label. However, the heuristic constraints utilized for LDL often fail to accurately model the label ambiguity. Therefore, we propose a novel LDL method called distribution highlighted reference-based LDL (DHRL), which introduces an input-dependent constraint by utilizing a reference DNN pre-trained with any LDL method and minimizing the gap between the reference and target DNNs' outputs. DHRL incorporates two techniques to highlight the label ambiguity hidden in the pre-trained reference DNN's output: noisy augmentation-based ensembling (NAE) and different scale multi-temperature (DSM). NAE inputs noisy images to the reference DNN and provides an ensemble effect by averaging all the outputs. DSM sets multiple temperatures simultaneously in the gap minimization between the two DNNs' outputs. Experimental results indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various datasets and conditions.
VISTA: A Vision and Intent-Aware Social Attention Framework for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Stephane Da Silva Martins; Emanuel Aldea; Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-agent trajectory prediction is a key task in computer vision for autonomous systems, particularly in dense and socially interactive environments. Existing methods often struggle to jointly model goal-driven behavior and complex social dynamics, which leads to unrealistic predictions. In this paper, we introduce VISTA, a recursive goal-conditioned transformer architecture that features (1) a cross-attention fusion mechanism to integrate long-term goals with past motion, (2) a social-token attention module enabling fine-grained interaction modeling across agents, and (3) pairwise attention maps to show social influence patterns during inference. Our model enhances the single-agent goal-conditioned approach into a cohesive multi-agent forecasting framework. In addition to the standard evaluation metrics, we also consider trajectory collision rates, which capture the realism of the joint predictions. Evaluated on the high-density MADRAS benchmark and on SDD, VISTA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with dramatically improved interaction modeling. On MADRAS, our approach reduces the average collision rate of strong baselines from 2.14% to 0.03%, and on SDD, it achieves a 0% collision rate while outperforming SOTA models in terms of ADE/FDE and minFDE. These results highlight the model's ability to generate socially compliant, goal-aware, and interpretable trajectory predictions, making it well-suited for deployment in safety-critical autonomous systems.
IMKD: Intensity-Aware Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation for Camera-Radar Fusion
Authors: Shashank Mishra; Karan Patil; Didier Stricker; Jason Rambach
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: High-performance Radar-Camera 3D object detection can be achieved by leveraging knowledge distillation without using LiDAR at inference time. However, existing distillation methods typically transfer modality-specific features directly to each sensor, which can distort their unique characteristics and degrade their individual strengths. To address this, we introduce IMKD, a radar-camera fusion framework based on multi-level knowledge distillation that preserves each sensor's intrinsic characteristics while amplifying their complementary strengths. IMKD applies a three-stage, intensity-aware distillation strategy to enrich the fused representation across the architecture: (1) LiDAR-to-Radar intensity-aware feature distillation to enhance radar representations with fine-grained structural cues, (2) LiDAR-to-Fused feature intensity-guided distillation to selectively highlight useful geometry and depth information at the fusion level, fostering complementarity between the modalities rather than forcing them to align, and (3) Camera-Radar intensity-guided fusion mechanism that facilitates effective feature alignment and calibration. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark show that IMKD reaches 67.0% NDS and 61.0% mAP, outperforming all prior distillation-based radar-camera fusion methods. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/dfki-av/IMKD/.
WWE-UIE: A Wavelet & White Balance Efficient Network for Underwater Image Enhancement
Authors: Ching-Heng Cheng; Jen-Wei Lee; Chia-Ming Lee; Chih-Chung Hsu
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) aims to restore visibility and correct color distortions caused by wavelength-dependent absorption and scattering. Recent hybrid approaches, which couple domain priors with modern deep neural architectures, have achieved strong performance but incur high computational cost, limiting their practicality in real-time scenarios. In this work, we propose WWE-UIE, a compact and efficient enhancement network that integrates three interpretable priors. First, adaptive white balance alleviates the strong wavelength-dependent color attenuation, particularly the dominance of blue-green tones. Second, a wavelet-based enhancement block (WEB) performs multi-band decomposition, enabling the network to capture both global structures and fine textures, which are critical for underwater restoration. Third, a gradient-aware module (SGFB) leverages Sobel operators with learnable gating to explicitly preserve edge structures degraded by scattering. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that WWE-UIE achieves competitive restoration quality with substantially fewer parameters and FLOPs, enabling real-time inference on resource-limited platforms. Ablation studies and visualizations further validate the contribution of each component. The source code is available at https://github.com/chingheng0808/WWE-UIE.
Leveraging Semantic Attribute Binding for Free-Lunch Color Control in Diffusion Models
Authors: Héctor Laria; Alexandra Gomez-Villa; Jiang Qin; Muhammad Atif Butt; Bogdan Raducanu; Javier Vazquez-Corral; Joost van de Weijer; Kai Wang
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have enabled remarkable control over various attributes, yet precise color specification remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches, such as ColorPeel, rely on model personalization, requiring additional optimization and limiting flexibility in specifying arbitrary colors. In this work, we introduce ColorWave, a novel training-free approach that achieves exact RGB-level color control in diffusion models without fine-tuning. By systematically analyzing the cross-attention mechanisms within IP-Adapter, we uncover an implicit binding between textual color descriptors and reference image features. Leveraging this insight, our method rewires these bindings to enforce precise color attribution while preserving the generative capabilities of pretrained models. Our approach maintains generation quality and diversity, outperforming prior methods in accuracy and applicability across diverse object categories. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that ColorWave establishes a new paradigm for structured, color-consistent diffusion-based image synthesis.
ForestSplats: Deformable Transient Field for Gaussian Splatting in the Wild
Authors: Wongi Park; Myeongseok Nam; Siwon Kim; Sangwoo Jo; Soomok Lee
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has emerged, showing real-time rendering speeds and high-quality results in static scenes. Although 3D-GS shows effectiveness in static scenes, their performance significantly degrades in real-world environments due to transient objects, lighting variations, and diverse levels of occlusion. To tackle this, existing methods estimate occluders or transient elements by leveraging pre-trained models or integrating additional transient field pipelines. However, these methods still suffer from two defects: 1) Using semantic features from the Vision Foundation Model (VFM) limits generalization on unseen data due to reliance on prior knowledge. 2) The transient field requires significant memory to handle transient elements with per-view Gaussians and struggles to define clear boundaries for occluders, solely relying on photometric errors. To address these problems, we propose ForestSplats, a novel approach that leverages the deformable transient field and a superpixel-aware mask to efficiently represent transient elements in the 2D scene across unconstrained image collections and effectively decompose static scenes from transient distractors without VFM. We designed the transient field to be deformable, capturing per-view transient elements. Furthermore, we introduce a superpixel-aware mask that clearly defines the boundaries of occluders by considering photometric errors and superpixels. Additionally, we propose uncertainty-aware densification to avoid generating Gaussians within the boundaries of occluders during densification. Through extensive experiments across several benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that ForestSplats outperforms existing methods without VFM and shows significant memory efficiency in representing transient elements.
3D Cell Oversegmentation Correction via Geo-Wasserstein Divergence
Authors: Peter Chen; Bryan Chang; Olivia A Creasey; Julie Beth Sneddon; Zev J Gartner; Yining Liu
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: 3D cell segmentation methods are often hindered by oversegmentation, where a single cell is incorrectly split into multiple fragments. This degrades the final segmentation quality and is notoriously difficult to resolve, as oversegmentation errors often resemble natural gaps between adjacent cells. Our work makes two key contributions. First, we formulate 3D cell oversegmentation as a concrete learning problem and propose a geometry-aware framework to identify and correct these errors. Our approach builds a pre-trained classifier using both 2D geometric and 3D topological features extracted from flawed 3D segmentation results. Second, we introduce a novel metric, Geo-Wasserstein divergence, to quantify changes in 2D geometries. This captures the evolving trends of cell mask shape in a geometry-aware manner. We validate our method through extensive experiments on in-domain plant datasets, including both synthesized and real oversegmented cases, as well as on out-of-domain animal datasets to demonstrate transfer learning performance. An ablation study further highlights the contribution of the Geo-Wasserstein divergence. A clear pipeline is provided for end-users to build pre-trained models to any labeled dataset.
STRinGS: Selective Text Refinement in Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Abhinav Raundhal; Gaurav Behera; P. J. Narayanan; Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla; Makarand Tapaswi
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text as signs, labels, or instructions is a critical element of real-world scenes as they can convey important contextual information. 3D representations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) struggle to preserve fine-grained text details, while achieving high visual fidelity. Small errors in textual element reconstruction can lead to significant semantic loss. We propose STRinGS, a text-aware, selective refinement framework to address this issue for 3DGS reconstruction. Our method treats text and non-text regions separately, refining text regions first and merging them with non-text regions later for full-scene optimization. STRinGS produces sharp, readable text even in challenging configurations. We introduce a text readability measure OCR Character Error Rate (CER) to evaluate the efficacy on text regions. STRinGS results in a 63.6% relative improvement over 3DGS at just 7K iterations. We also introduce a curated dataset STRinGS-360 with diverse text scenarios to evaluate text readability in 3D reconstruction. Our method and dataset together push the boundaries of 3D scene understanding in text-rich environments, paving the way for more robust text-aware reconstruction methods.
DARB-Splatting: Generalizing Splatting with Decaying Anisotropic Radial Basis Functions
Authors: Hashiru Pramuditha; Vinasirajan Viruthshaan; Vishagar Arunan; Saeedha Nazar; Sameera Ramasinghe; Simon Lucey; Ranga Rodrigo
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Splatting-based 3D reconstruction methods have gained popularity with the advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting, efficiently synthesizing high-quality novel views. These methods commonly resort to using exponential family functions, such as the Gaussian function, as reconstruction kernels due to their anisotropic nature, ease of projection, and differentiability in rasterization. However, the field remains restricted to variations within the exponential family, leaving generalized reconstruction kernels largely underexplored, partly due to the lack of easy integrability in 3D to 2D projections. In this light, we show that a class of decaying anisotropic radial basis functions (DARBFs), which are non-negative functions of the Mahalanobis distance, supports splatting by approximating the Gaussian function's closed-form integration advantage. With this fresh perspective, we demonstrate varying performances across selected DARB reconstruction kernels, achieving comparable training convergence and memory footprints, with on-par PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS results.