GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Mostly Text, Smart Visuals: Asymmetric Text-Visual Pruning for Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Sijie Li; Biao Qian; Jungong Han
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Network pruning is an effective technique for enabling lightweight Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which primarily incorporates both weights and activations into the importance metric. However, existing efforts typically process calibration data from different modalities in a unified manner, overlooking modality-specific behaviors. This raises a critical challenge: how to address the divergent behaviors of textual and visual tokens for accurate pruning of LVLMs. To this end, we systematically investigate the sensitivity of visual and textual tokens to the pruning operation by decoupling their corresponding weights, revealing that: (i) the textual pathway should be calibrated via text tokens, since it exhibits higher sensitivity than the visual pathway; (ii) the visual pathway exhibits high redundancy, permitting even 50% sparsity. Motivated by these insights, we propose a simple yet effective Asymmetric Text-Visual Weight Pruning method for LVLMs, dubbed ATV-Pruning, which establishes the importance metric for accurate weight pruning by selecting the informative tokens from both textual and visual pathways. Specifically, ATV-Pruning integrates two primary innovations: first, a calibration pool is adaptively constructed by drawing on all textual tokens and a subset of visual tokens; second, we devise a layer-adaptive selection strategy to yield important visual tokens. Finally, extensive experiments across standard multimodal benchmarks verify the superiority of our ATV-Pruning over state-of-the-art methods.
Remedying Target-Domain Astigmatism for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection
Authors: Yongwei Jiang; Yixiong Zou; Yuhua Li; Ruixuan Li
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) aims to adapt pretrained detectors from a source domain to target domains with limited annotations, suffering from severe domain shifts and data scarcity problems. In this work, we find a previously overlooked phenomenon: models exhibit dispersed and unfocused attention in target domains, leading to imprecise localization and redundant predictions, just like a human cannot focus on visual objects. Therefore, we call it the target-domain Astigmatism problem. Analysis on attention distances across transformer layers reveals that regular fine-tuning inherently shows a trend to remedy this problem, but results are still far from satisfactory, which we aim to enhance in this paper. Biologically inspired by the human fovea-style visual system, we enhance the fine-tuning's inherent trend through a center-periphery attention refinement framework, which contains (1) a Positive Pattern Refinement module to reshape attention toward semantic objects using class-specific prototypes, simulating the visual center region; (2) a Negative Context Modulation module to enhance boundary discrimination by modeling background context, simulating the visual periphery region; and (3) a Textual Semantic Alignment module to strengthen center-periphery distinction through cross-modal cues. Our bio-inspired approach transforms astigmatic attention into focused patterns, substantially improving adaptation to target domains. Experiments on six challenging CD-FSOD benchmarks consistently demonstrate improved detection accuracy and establish new state-of-the-art results.
The LLM Bottleneck: Why Open-Source Vision LLMs Struggle with Hierarchical Visual Recognition
Authors: Yuwen Tan; Yuan Qing; Boqing Gong
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: This paper reveals that many open-source large language models (LLMs) lack hierarchical knowledge about our visual world, unaware of even well-established biology taxonomies. This shortcoming makes LLMs a bottleneck for vision LLMs' hierarchical visual recognition (e.g., recognizing Anemone Fish but not Vertebrate). We arrive at these findings using about one million four-choice visual question answering (VQA) tasks constructed from six taxonomies and four image datasets. Interestingly, finetuning a vision LLM using our VQA tasks reaffirms LLMs' bottleneck effect because the VQA tasks improve the LLMs' hierarchical consistency in text-only tasks more than the vision LLMs'. We believe that one cannot make vision LLMs understand our visual world hierarchically until LLMs possess corresponding taxonomy knowledge.
Test-Time Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Null-Text Embedding Optimisation
Authors: Taehoon Kim; Henry Gouk; Timothy Hospedales
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Test-time alignment (TTA) aims to adapt models to specific rewards during inference. However, existing methods tend to either under-optimise or over-optimise (reward hack) the target reward function. We propose Null-Text Test-Time Alignment (Null-TTA), which aligns diffusion models by optimising the unconditional embedding in classifier-free guidance, rather than manipulating latent or noise variables. Due to the structured semantic nature of the text embedding space, this ensures alignment occurs on a semantically coherent manifold and prevents reward hacking (exploiting non-semantic noise patterns to improve the reward). Since the unconditional embedding in classifier-free guidance serves as the anchor for the model's generative distribution, Null-TTA directly steers model's generative distribution towards the target reward rather than just adjusting the samples, even without updating model parameters. Thanks to these desirable properties, we show that Null-TTA achieves state-of-the-art target test-time alignment while maintaining strong cross-reward generalisation. This establishes semantic-space optimisation as an effective and principled novel paradigm for TTA.
FedHarmony: Harmonizing Heterogeneous Label Correlations in Federated Multi-Label Learning
Authors: Zhiqiang Kou; Junxiang Wu; Wenke Huang; Wenwen He; Ming-Kun Xie; Changwei Wang; Yuheng Jia; Di Jiang; Yang Liu; Xin Geng; Qiang Yang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Federated Multi-Label Learning is a distributed paradigm where multiple clients possess heterogeneous multi-label data and perform collaborative learning under privacy constraints without sharing raw data. However, modeling label correlations under heterogeneous distributions remains challenging. Due to client-specific label spaces and varying co-occurrence patterns, correlations learned by individual clients inevitably deviate from the global structure, a phenomenon we term label correlation drift. To address this, we propose FedHarmony, a framework that harmonizes heterogeneous label correlations across clients. It introduces consensus correlation, capturing agreement among clients and serving as a global teacher to correct biased local estimates. During aggregation, FedHarmony evaluates each client by both data size and correlation quality, assigning weights accordingly. Moreover, we develop an accelerated optimization algorithm and theoretically establish faster convergence without sacrificing accuracy. Experiments on real-world federated multi-label datasets show that FedHarmony consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
SPEAR-1: Scaling Beyond Robot Demonstrations via 3D Understanding
Authors: Nikolay Nikolov; Giuliano Albanese; Sombit Dey; Aleksandar Yanev; Luc Van Gool; Jan-Nico Zaech; Danda Pani Paudel
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Robotic Foundation Models (RFMs) hold great promise as generalist, end-to-end systems for robot control.Yet their ability to generalize across new environments, tasks, and embodiments remains limited.We argue that a major bottleneck lies in their foundations: most RFMs are built by fine-tuning internet-pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs).However, these VLMs are trained on 2D image-language tasks and lack the 3D spatial reasoning inherently required for embodied control in the 3D world.Bridging this gap directly with large-scale robotic data is costly and difficult to scale.Instead, we propose to enrich easy-to-collect non-robotic image data with 3D annotations and enhance a pretrained VLM with 3D understanding capabilities.Following this strategy, we train SPEAR-VLM, a 3D-aware VLM that infers object coordinates in 3D space from a single 2D image.Building on SPEAR-VLM, we introduce our main contribution,  SPEAR-1: a robotic foundation model that integrates grounded 3D perception with language-instructed embodied control.Trained on ~45M frames from 24 Open X-Embodiment datasets, SPEAR-1 outperforms or matches state-of-the-art models such as \pi_0-FAST and \pi_ 0.5 , while it uses 20xfewer robot demonstrations.This carefully-engineered training strategy unlocks new VLM capabilities and as a consequence boosts the reliability of embodied control beyond what is achievable with only robotic data.We make our model weights and 3D-annotated datasets publicly available.
MuViT: Multi-Resolution Vision Transformers for Learning Across Scales in Microscopy
Authors: Albert Dominguez Mantes; Gioele La Manno; Martin Weigert
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Modern microscopy routinely produces gigapixel images that contain structures across multiple spatial scales, from fine cellular morphology to broader tissue organization. Many analysis tasks require combining these scales, yet most vision models operate at a single resolution or derive multi-scale features from one view, limiting their ability to exploit the inherently multi-resolution nature of microscopy data. We introduce MuViT, a transformer architecture built to fuse true multi-resolution observations from the same underlying image. MuViT embeds all patches into a shared world-coordinate system and extends rotary positional embeddings to these coordinates, enabling attention to integrate large-scale context with high-resolution detail within a single encoder. Across synthetic benchmarks, kidney histopathology, and high-resolution mouse-brain microscopy, MuViT delivers consistent improvements over strong ViT and CNN baselines. Multi-resolution MAE pretraining further produces scale-consistent representations that enhance downstream tasks. These results demonstrate that explicit world-coordinate modelling provides a simple yet powerful mechanism for leveraging multi-resolution information in large-scale microscopy analysis. Code is available at github.com/weigertlab/muvit.
Stealing Split Learning Bottom Models by Recovering Embedding Geometry
Authors: Qinbo Zhang; Yanhang Shi; Ziyi Zhang; Hao Wang; Sai Qian Zhang; Jian Li
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vertical federated learning (VFL) trains models by splitting computation across clients and a server that only exchange intermediate embeddings. Recent work shows that a server even if honest-but-curious can steal a client's bottom model by querying the system and regressing on the returned embeddings, and in response, defenses perturb or decouple the embedding channel. We show these defenses remain vulnerable. We propose VENOM, a geometry-aware stealing attack. VENOM first learns a contrastive space over server-observed embeddings, then builds a neighborhood graph and trains a surrogate bottom model to match targets and respect local geometry via a neighbor-matching loss alongside pointwise and feature-shape alignment. This strategy preserves the relational structure that defenses fail to erase, effectively recoupling the embeddings produced by multi-branch and noise-based defenses. Across six datasets, VENOM consistently outperforms standard stealing methods under no defense and multiple defenses, and remains effective with out-of-distribution (OOD) auxiliary data.
SuP: Sub-cloud Driven Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Sheldon Fung; Wei Pan; Ling Cao; Fei Hou; Ling Chen; Shasha Mao; Hongdong Li; Xuequan Lu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: While existing point-cloud-registration methods can well handle high-overlap scenarios of two point clouds, they often struggle with low-overlap scenarios, due to inevitable geometric/semantic ambiguities in the non-overlapping regions. In this paper, we introduce SuP, a novel framework that reformulates low-overlap registration as a high-overlap sub-cloud pairs (anchor pairs) mining problem. Central to SuP is our Dual-phase Sub-cloud Anchor Mining (DSAM) module, which first subdivides the source and target point clouds into multiple sub-clouds, followed by introducing a dual-phase weighting pipeline: 1) an efficient overlap-guided prior-weighting scheme (OPS) that leverages feature salience to identify candidate anchor pairs, and 2) a multi-scale post-weighting network (MPN) that exploits neighborhood feature consensus to further identify anchor pairs. Subsequently, final correspondences are generated through a merge-to-match module using the anchor pairs. To train DSAM, we design an alignment-aware weighting loss that uses on-the-fly alignment errors as supervision. Comprehensive experiments on the color-enhanced 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch demonstrate that SuP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher registration recall and more accurate alignment, especially under challenging low-overlap conditions.
Low-Resolution Editing is All You Need for High-Resolution Editing
Authors: Junsung Lee; Hyunsoo Lee; Yong Jae Lee; Bohyung Han
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: High-resolution content creation is rapidly emerging as a central challenge in both the vision and graphics communities. Images serve as the most fundamental modality for visual expression, and content generation that aligns with the user intent requires effective, controllable high-resolution image manipulation mechanisms. However, existing approaches remain limited to low-resolution settings, typically supporting only up to 1K resolution. In this work, we introduce the task of high-resolution image editing and propose a test-time optimization framework to address it. Our method performs patch-wise optimization on high-resolution source images, followed by a fine-grained detail transfer module and a novel synchronization strategy to maintain consistency across patches. Extensive experiments show that our method produces high-quality edits, facilitating high-resolution content creation.
When Token Pruning is Worse than Random: Understanding Visual Token Information in VLLMs
Authors: Yahong Wang; Juncheng Wu; Zhangkai Ni; Longzhen Yang; Yihang Liu; Chengmei Yang; Ying Wen; Lianghua He; Xianfeng Tang; Hui Liu; Yuyin Zhou
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) incur high computational costs due to their reliance on hundreds of visual tokens to represent images. While token pruning offers a promising solution for accelerating inference, this paper, however, identifies a key observation: in deeper layers (e.g., beyond the 20th), existing training-free pruning methods perform no better than random pruning. We hypothesize that this degradation is caused by "vanishing token information", where visual tokens progressively lose their salience with increasing network depth. To validate this hypothesis, we quantify a token's information content by measuring the change in the model output probabilities upon its removal. Using this proposed metric, our analysis of the information of visual tokens across layers reveals three key findings: (1) As layers deepen, the information of visual tokens gradually becomes uniform and eventually vanishes at an intermediate layer, which we term as "information horizon", beyond which the visual tokens become redundant;(2) The position of this horizon is not static; it extends deeper for visually intensive tasks, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), compared to more general tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA);(3) This horizon is also strongly correlated with model capacity, as stronger VLLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL) employ deeper visual tokens than weaker models (e.g., LLaVA-1.5).Based on our findings, we show that simple random pruning in deep layers efficiently balances performance and efficiency. Moreover, integrating random pruning consistently enhances existing methods. Using DivPrune with random pruning achieves state-of-the-art results, maintaining 96.9% of Qwen-2.5-VL-7B performance while pruning 50% of visual tokens. The code is available at https://github.com/YahongWang1/Information-Horizon.
Parse, Search, and Confirmation: Training-Free Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Structured Spatial Memory
Authors: Yu Qi; Hongyu Li; Shaofei Huang; Tianrui Hui; Yaxiong Wang; Lechao Cheng; Zhun Zhong; Si Liu; Meng Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: In this paper, we tackle the Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (AVDN) task in the training-free setting for resource-efficient high-altitude UAV navigation.Naively applying MLLMs leads to unreliable navigation due to weak directional grounding and the lack of explicit spatial memory.To address these issues, we propose PSC-AVDN, a training-free framework that tightly couples a three-stage Parsing-Search-Confirmation reasoning pipeline with a Structured Spatial Memory (SSM).The parsing stage uses an LLM to convert ambiguous dialogue instructions into stable geometric directional and destination cues.A Search Chain-of-Thought (S-CoT) then performs stepwise target exploration under high-altitude observations, and a Confirmation Chain-of-Thought (C-CoT) conducts fine-grained verification around candidate regions to resolve visual ambiguity.Meanwhile, SSM integrates three complementary sources of spatial cues, including multi-scale visual observation, spatial visual memory, and structured geometric memory to provide global spatial context and long-horizon consistency.Extensive experiments on ANDH and ANDH-Full show that PSC-AVDN establishes new state-of-the-art performance in the training-free setting, matching or surpassing several finetuned methods.
Rethinking Diffusion Model-Based Video Super-Resolution: Leveraging Dense Guidance from Aligned Features
Authors: Jingyi Xu; Meisong Zheng; Ying Chen; Minglang Qiao; Xin Deng; Mai Xu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion model (DM) based Video Super-Resolution (VSR) approaches achieve impressive perceptual quality. Diffusion model (DM) based Video Super-Resolution (VSR) approaches achieve impressive perceptual quality. However, existing DM-based VSR methods over-prioritize perceptual synthesis while neglecting fidelity gains from accurate alignment and sufficient compensation. In this paper, within the DM-based VSR pipeline, we revisit the role of alignment and compensation between adjacent video frames and reveal two crucial observations: (a) the feature domain is better suited than the pixel domain for information compensation due to its stronger spatial and temporal correlations, and (b) warping at an upscaled resolution better preserves high-frequency information, but this benefit is not necessarily monotonic. Therefore, we propose a novel Densely Guided diffusion model with Aligned Features for Video Super-Resolution (DGAF-VSR), with an Optical Guided Warping Module (OGWM) to maintain high-frequency details in the aligned features and a Feature-wise Temporal Condition Module (FTCM) to deliver dense guidance in the feature domain. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that DGAF-VSR surpasses state-of-the-art methods in key aspects of VSR, including perceptual quality (35.82% DISTS reduction), fidelity (0.20 dB PSNR gain), and temporal consistency (30.37% tLPIPS reduction).
Revisiting F-measure Optimization in Multi-Label Classification: A Sampling-based Approach
Authors: Zixun Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: The F-measure is a widely used metric in multi-label classification, where multiple labels are predicted simultaneously for a single instance. The optimal prediction rule for F-measure requires estimating q^2+1 probabilities, where q is the number of labels. Existing approaches train q multinomial estimators (multi-class classifiers) to directly estimate these probabilities, followed by a matrix multiplication for making predictions. However, this method has two major drawbacks. First, the matrix multiplication incurs a time complexity of \mathcal O (q^3), which becomes computationally expensive for large q. Second, training multinomial estimators is challenging due to the sparsity of the underlying distributions, which results from the inherent imbalance in multi-label datasets and is further exacerbated by the label transformation required by the method itself. In this paper, we first demonstrate that matrix multiplication can be reformulated as a series of convolutions by exploiting a special structure in the matrix. These convolutions can then be efficiently computed using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), reducing the time complexity to \mathcal O (q^2\log q). To avoid multinomial label transformation, we propose an indirect sampling-then-estimation approach to estimate the required probabilities. This method trains only q binary estimators instead of multinomial ones, thereby alleviating the sparsity issue, simplifying the training process, and improving performance. We provide theoretical guarantees for the consistency of the proposed sampling-based method and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on diverse datasets. The code is available in: https://github.com/ZixunWang/MLC-F1-Sampling.
TANGO: Text-Anchored Guided Optimization for Robust Fine-tuning Vision-Language Models under Label Noise
Authors: Tengfei Ma; Weiran Pan; Wei Wei
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Fine-tuning large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is crucial for specialized tasks, but their performance is often undermined by the label noise prevalent in real-world datasets. Traditional approaches to learning with noisy labels typically rely on a self-referential loop, using a model's own predictions to correct errors. While recent VLM-specific methods have begun to leverage cross-modal information to aid in noise detection, we explore an alternative direction: using the text modality not just to identify noise, but to establish a source of ground truth that is fully independent of the training data's potentially corrupt labels. To this end, we propose Text-ANchored Guided Optimization (TANGO), a framework centered on "semantic anchors"--a set of pure, immutable reference points generated from diverse text descriptions. Building upon these anchors, our approach reframes two key aspects of learning with noisy labels. First, we replace the conventional linear classifier with a parameter-free Text-Anchored Classifier, making predictions a direct, weighted consensus of the clean anchors. Second, we introduce an Anchor-Guided Refinement mechanism that validates each sample's given label against this external ground truth, providing a more robust signal for sample selection and label correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this approach achieves competitive and often state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be publicly available.