GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Generalized and Personalized Federated Learning with Black-Box Foundation Models via Orthogonal Transformations
Authors: Eun Gyung Kong; Jewon Yeom; Yonghoon Jeon; Taesup Kim
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) facilitates decentralized model training while preserving data privacy. However, achieving both robust generalization and effective personalization simultaneously in heterogeneous (non-IID) environments remains a formidable challenge. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of proprietary Foundation Models (FMs) introduces a critical requirement for dual privacy: (a) protecting sensitive client data and (b) securing the server's valuable intellectual property. This mandates strictly black-box access to the FM. To address these multifaceted challenges, we introduce FedOT, a novel FL framework optimized for black-box FMs. FedOT employs a shared global task-dependent classifier while facilitating local adaptation through client-specific orthogonal transformations applied externally to the FM embeddings. This architecture inherently guarantees that the FM's internal parameters remain inaccessible and unmodified. By enforcing orthogonality, FedOT effectively mitigates gradient conflicts across diverse clients, which is theoretically bounded, preserves the semantic integrity of the FM representations, and achieves robust performance under significant data heterogeneity. The synergy of global and local parameters optimally balances generalization and personalization, markedly outperforming baseline FL methods across diverse benchmarks. Extensive empirical analysis, including rigorous multi-seed validation and scalability assessments, substantiates the robustness, efficiency, and superior performance of FedOT.
TopoCL: Topological Contrastive Learning for Medical Imaging
Authors: Guangyu Meng; Pengfei Gu; Peixian Liang; John P. Lalor; Erin Wolf Chambers; Danny Z. Chen
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Contrastive learning (CL) has become a powerful approach for learning representations from unlabeled images. However, existing CL methods focus predominantly on visual appearance features while neglecting topological characteristics (e.g., connectivity patterns, boundary configurations, cavity formations) that provide valuable cues for medical image analysis. To address this limitation, we propose a new topological CL framework (TopoCL) that explicitly exploits topological structures during contrastive learning for medical imaging. Specifically, we first introduce topology-aware augmentations that control topological perturbations using a relative bottleneck distance between persistence diagrams, preserving medically relevant topological properties while enabling controlled structural variations. We then design a Hierarchical Topology Encoder that captures topological features through self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms. Finally, we develop an adaptive mixture-of-experts (MoE) module to dynamically integrate visual and topological representations. TopoCL can be seamlessly integrated with existing CL methods. We evaluate TopoCL on five representative CL methods (SimCLR, MoCo-v3, BYOL, DINO, and Barlow Twins) and five diverse medical image classification datasets. The experimental results show that TopoCL achieves consistent improvements: an average gain of 3.26% in linear probe classification accuracy with strong statistical significance, verifying its effectiveness.
Scaling Zero-Shot Reference-to-Video Generation
Authors: Zijian Zhou; Shikun Liu; Haozhe Liu; Haonan Qiu; Zhaochong An; Weiming Ren; Zhiheng Liu; Xiaoke Huang; Kam-Woh Ng; Tian Xie; Xiao Han; Yuren Cong; Hang Li; Chuyan Zhu; Aditya Patel; Tao Xiang; Sen He
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Reference-to-video (R2V) generation aims to synthesize videos that align with a text prompt while preserving the subject identity from reference images. However, current R2V methods are hindered by the reliance on explicit reference image-video-text triplets, whose construction is highly expensive and difficult to scale. We bypass this bottleneck by introducing Saber, a scalable zero-shot framework that requires no explicit R2V data. Trained exclusively on video-text pairs, Saber employs a masked training strategy and a tailored attention-based model design to learn identity-consistent and reference-aware representations. Mask augmentation techniques are further integrated to mitigate copy-paste artifacts common in reference-to-video generation. Moreover, Saber demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities across a varying number of references and achieves superior performance on the OpenS2V-Eval benchmark compared to methods trained with R2V data.
MAPS: Preserving Vision-Language Representations via Module-Wise Proximity Scheduling for Better Vision-Language-Action Generalization
Authors: Chengyue Huang; Mellon M. Zhang; Robert Azarcon; Glen Chou; Zsolt Kira
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit strong priors from pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but naive fine-tuning often disrupts these representations and harms generalization. Existing fixes -- freezing modules or applying uniform regularization -- either overconstrain adaptation or ignore the differing roles of VLA components. We present MAPS (Module-Wise Proximity Scheduling), the first robust fine-tuning framework for VLAs. Through systematic analysis, we uncover an empirical order in which proximity constraints should be relaxed to balance stability and flexibility. MAPS linearly schedules this relaxation, enabling visual encoders to stay close to their pretrained priors while action-oriented language layers adapt more freely. MAPS introduces no additional parameters or data, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing VLAs. Across MiniVLA-VQ, MiniVLA-OFT, OpenVLA-OFT, and challenging benchmarks such as SimplerEnv, CALVIN, LIBERO, as well as real-world evaluations on the Franka Emika Panda platform, MAPS consistently boosts both in-distribution and out-of-distribution performance (up to +30%). Our findings highlight empirically guided proximity to pretrained VLMs as a simple yet powerful principle for preserving generalization in VLM-to-VLA transfer.
$\oslash$ Source Models Leak What They Shouldn't $\nrightarrow$: Unlearning Zero-Shot Transfer in Domain Adaptation Through Adversarial Optimization
Authors: Arnav Devalapally; Poornima Jain; Kartik Srinivas; Vineeth N. Balasubramanian
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: The increasing adaptation of vision models across domains, such as satellite imagery and medical scans, has raised an emerging privacy risk: models may inadvertently retain and leak sensitive source-domain specific information in the target domain. This creates a compelling use case for machine unlearning to protect the privacy of sensitive source-domain data. Among adaptation techniques, source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) calls for an urgent need for machine unlearning (MU), where the source data itself is protected, yet the source model exposed during adaptation encodes its influence. Our experiments reveal that existing SFDA methods exhibit strong zero-shot performance on source-exclusive classes in the target domain, indicating they inadvertently leak knowledge of these classes into the target domain, even when they are not represented in the target data. We identify and address this risk by proposing an MU setting called SCADA-UL: Unlearning Source-exclusive ClAsses in Domain Adaptation. Existing MU methods do not address this setting as they are not designed to handle data distribution shifts. We propose a new unlearning method, where an adversarially generated forget class sample is unlearned by the model during the domain adaptation process using a novel rescaled labeling strategy and adversarial optimization.We also extend our study to two variants: a continual version of this problem setting and to one where the specific source classes to be forgotten may be unknown.Alongside theoretical interpretations, our comprehensive empirical results show that our method consistently outperforms baselines in the proposed setting while achieving retraining-level unlearning performance on benchmark datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/D-Arnav/SCADA
Spectral-Geometric Neural Fields for Pose-Free LiDAR View Synthesis
Authors: Yinuo Jiang; Jun Cheng; Yiran Wang; Cheng Cheng
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown remarkable success in image novel view synthesis (NVS), inspiring extensions to LiDAR NVS. However, most methods heavily rely on accurate camera poses for scene reconstruction. The sparsity and textureless nature of LiDAR data also present distinct challenges, leading to geometric holes and discontinuous surfaces. To address these issues, we propose SG-NLF, a pose-free LiDAR NeRF framework that integrates spectral information with geometric consistency. Specifically, we design a hybrid representation based on spectral priors to reconstruct smooth geometry. For pose optimization, we construct a confidence-aware graph based on feature compatibility to achieve global alignment. In addition, an adversarial learning strategy is introduced to enforce cross-frame consistency, thereby enhancing reconstruction quality. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, especially in challenging low-frequency scenarios. Compared to previous state-of-the-art methods, SG-NLF improves reconstruction quality and pose accuracy by over 35.8% and 68.8%. Our work can provide a novel perspective for LiDAR view synthesis.
SVAgent: Storyline-guided Long Video Understanding via Cross-Modal Multi-Agent Collaboration
Authors: Zhongyu Yang; Zuhao Yang; Shuo Zhan; Tan Yue; Wei Pang; Yingfang Yuan
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Video question answering (VideoQA) is a challenging task that requires integrating spatial, temporal, and semantic information to capture the complex dynamics of video sequences. Although recent advances have introduced various approaches for video understanding, most existing methods still rely on locating relevant frames to answer questions rather than reasoning through the evolving storyline as humans do. Humans naturally interpret videos through coherent storylines, an ability that is crucial for making robust and contextually grounded predictions. To address this gap, we propose SVAgent, a storyline-guided cross-modal multi-agent framework for VideoQA. The storyline agent progressively constructs a narrative representation based on frames suggested by a refinement suggestion agent that analyzes historical failures. In addition, cross-modal decision agents independently predict answers from visual and textual modalities under the guidance of the evolving storyline. Their outputs are then evaluated by a meta-agent to align cross-modal predictions and enhance reasoning robustness and answer consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that SVAgent achieves superior performance and interpretability by emulating human-like storyline reasoning in video understanding.
VDOT: Efficient Unified Video Creation via Optimal Transport Distillation
Authors: Yutong Wang; Haiyu Zhang; Tianfan Xue; Yu Qiao; Yaohui Wang; Chang Xu; Xinyuan Chen
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: The rapid development of generative models has significantly advanced image and video applications. Among these, video creation, aimed at generating videos under various conditions, has gained substantial attention. However, existing video creation models either focus solely on a few specific conditions or suffer from excessively long generation times due to complex model inference, making them impractical for real-world applications. To mitigate these issues, we propose an efficient unified video creation model, named VDOT. Concretely, we model the training process with the distribution matching distillation (DMD) paradigm. Instead of using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) minimization, we additionally employ a novel computational optimal transport (OT) technique to optimize the discrepancy between the real and fake score distributions. The OT distance inherently imposes geometric constraints, mitigating potential zero-forcing or gradient collapse issues that may arise during KL-based distillation within the few-step generation scenario, and thus, enhances the efficiency and stability of the distillation process. Further, we integrate a discriminator to enable the model to perceive real video data, thereby enhancing the quality of generated videos. To support training unified video creation models, we propose a fully automated pipeline for video data annotation and filtering that accommodates multiple video creation tasks. Meanwhile, we curate a unified testing benchmark, UVCBench, to advance the field. Experiments demonstrate that our 4-step VDOT outperforms or matches the performance of other baselines with 50 denoising steps. Code is available at https://vdot-page.github.io.
Dynamic Exposure Burst Image Restoration
Authors: Woohyeok Kim; Jaesung Rim; Daeyeon Kim; Sunghyun Cho
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Burst image restoration aims to reconstruct a high-quality image from burst images, which are typically captured using manually designed exposure settings.Although these exposure settings significantly influence the final restoration performance, the problem of finding optimal exposure settings has been overlooked.In this paper, we present Dynamic Exposure Burst Image Restoration (DEBIR), a novel burst image restoration pipeline that enhances restoration quality by dynamically predicting exposure times tailored to the shooting environment.In our pipeline, Burst Auto-Exposure Network (BAENet) estimates the optimal exposure time for each burst image based on a preview image, as well as motion magnitude and gain.Subsequently, a burst image restoration network reconstructs a high-quality image from burst images captured using these optimal exposure times.For training, we introduce a differentiable burst simulator and a three-stage training strategy. Our experiments demonstrate that our pipeline achieves state-of-the-art restoration quality. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our approach on a real-world camera system, demonstrating its practicality.
TRivia: Self-supervised Fine-tuning of Vision-Language Models for Table Recognition
Authors: Junyuan Zhang; Bin Wang; Qintong Zhang; Fan Wu; Zichen Wen; Jialin Lu; Junjie Shan; Ziqi Zhao; Shuya Yang; Ziling Wang; Ziyang Miao; Huaping Zhong; Yuhang Zang; Xiaoyi Dong; Ka-Ho Chow; Conghui He
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Table recognition (TR) aims to transform table images into semi-structured representations such as HTML or Markdown.As a core component of document parsing, TR has long relied on supervised learning, with recent efforts dominated by fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) using labeled data.While VLMs have brought TR to the next level, pushing performance further demands large-scale labeled data that is costly to obtain.Consequently, although proprietary models have continuously pushed the performance boundary, open-source models, often trained with limited resources and, in practice, the only viable option for many due to privacy regulations, still lag far behind.To bridge this gap, we introduce TRivia, a self-supervised fine-tuning method that enables pretrained VLMs to learn TR directly from unlabeled table images in the wild. Built upon Group Relative Policy Optimization, TRivia automatically identifies unlabeled samples that most effectively facilitate learning and eliminates the need for human annotations through a question-answering-based reward mechanism. An attention-guided module generates diverse questions for each table image, and the ability to interpret the recognition results and answer them correctly provides feedback to optimize the TR model.This closed-loop process allows the TR model to autonomously learn to recognize, structure, and reason over tables without labeled data. Leveraging this pipeline, we present TRivia-3B, an open-sourced, compact, and state-of-the-art TR model that surpasses existing systems (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro, MinerU2.5) on three popular benchmarks.
Hyperbolic Relational Prompts for Intersectional Fairness in Medical VLMs
Authors: Jiayu Qian; Zongxian Yang; Guanxing Chen; Pengwei Hu; KC Tan; Yan Wang; Yu-An Huang; Zhi-An Huang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Ensuring fairness in medical vision-language models (VLMs) is essential for equitable healthcare, yet existing models amplify biases across demographic subgroups such as race and gender. Traditional fairness mitigation approaches relying on broad distribution alignment, fall short in addressing these nuanced intersectional disparities. We propose fairness-aware relational prompting (FRP), a novel framework that reformulates prompt generation as a dynamic, fairness-aware reasoning process. FRP constructs a relational graph to capture fine-grained, sample-level similarities and employs a hyperbolic graph layer to explicitly model the hierarchical structure of intersectional identities. Leveraging hyperbolic geometry enables reasoning over complex attribute combinations, effectively reducing entrenched biases. Evaluations on the FairVLMed and Harvard-GF datasets demonstrate that FRP achieves state-of-the-art diagnostic performance, with an area under the curve of 77.50% and 85.94% respectively, while substantially improving the demographic parity difference and equalized odds difference.
AudioStory: Generating Long-Form Narrative Audio with Large Language Models
Authors: Yuxin Guo; Teng Wang; Yuying Ge; Shijie Ma; Yixiao Ge; Wei Zou
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-audio (TTA) generation excel at synthesizing short audio clips but struggle with long-form narrative audio, which requires temporal coherence and compositional reasoning. To fill this gap, we propose AudioStory, a unified framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with TTA systems to generate structured, long-form audio narratives. AudioStory possesses strong instruction-following reasoning generation capabilities. It employs LLMs to decompose complex narrative queries into temporally ordered sub-tasks with contextual cues, enabling coherent scene transitions and emotional tone consistency. AudioStory has two appealing features: (1) Decoupled bridging mechanism: AudioStory disentangles LLM-diffuser collaboration into two specialized components, i.e., a bridging query for intra-event semantic alignment and a residual query for inter-event coherence preservation. (2) End-to-end training: By unifying instruction comprehension and audio generation within a single end-to-end framework, AudioStory eliminates the need for modular training pipelines while enhancing synergy between components. Furthermore, we establish a benchmark AudioStory-10K, encompassing diverse domains such as animated soundscapes and natural sound narratives. Extensive experiments show the superiority of AudioStory on both single-audio generation and narrative audio generation, surpassing prior TTA baselines in both instruction-following ability and audio fidelity. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.
Perception Characteristics Distance: Measuring Stability and Robustness of Perception System in Dynamic Conditions under a Certain Decision Rule
Authors: Boyu Jiang; Liang Shi; Zhengzhi Lin; Lanxin Xiang; Loren Stowe; Feng Guo
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: The safety of autonomous driving systems (ADS) depends on accurate perception across distance and driving conditions. The outputs of AI perception algorithms are stochastic, which has a major impact on decision making and safety outcomes, including time-to-collision estimation. However, current perception evaluation metrics do not reflect the stochastic nature of perception algorithms. We therefore introduce the Perception Characteristics Distance (PCD), a novel metric incorporating model output uncertainty as represented by the farthest distance at which an object can be reliably detected. To represent a system's overall perception capability in terms of reliable detection distance, we used the averaged PCD values across multiple detection quality and probabilistic thresholds to produce the average PCD (aPCD). For empirical validation, we present the SensorRainFall dataset, collected on the Virginia Smart Roads using a sensor-equipped vehicle (cameras, radar, and LiDAR) controlled under different weather (clear and rainy) and illumination conditions (daylight, streetlight, and night). The dataset includes ground-truth distances, bounding boxes, and segmentation masks for target objects. Experiments with state-of-the-art models show that aPCD captures meaningful differences across weather, daylight, and illumination conditions, which traditional evaluation metrics fail to reflect. PCD provides an uncertainty-aware measure of perception performance, supporting safer and more robust ADS operation, while the SensorRainFall dataset offers a valuable benchmark for evaluation. The SensorRainFall dataset is publicly available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/datadrivenwheels/sensorrainfall, and the evaluation code is available at https://github.com/datadrivenwheels/PCD_Python
DialogueVPR: Towards Conversational Visual Place Recognition
Authors: Yukun Song; Changwei Wang; Xingtian Pei; Shibiao Xu; Wenhao Xu; Shunpeng Chen; Yu Zhang; Ke Zhang; Rongtao Xu; Xuxiang Feng; Pengyang Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Inspired by how humans communicate spatial information, language-guided geo-localization has gained significant traction for its intuitive and practical value. Despite this progress, most methods still rely on a static, one-shot retrieval paradigm, which fails to handle the ambiguity and incompleteness inherent in real-world natural language descriptions. We propose a paradigm shift to reasoning retrieval and introduce Dialogue Place Recognition (DlgPR), which casts localization as an interactive, dialogue-driven reasoning process. To support this new task, we present DlgQuest-Cities, the first large-scale dialogue-based benchmark for place recognition, and a unified reasoning framework that couples a cross-modal multi-level retriever with an intelligent questioner, DQ-pilot. DQ-pilot is trained in a curriculum: supervised fine-tuning on a curated DQ-cities-20k subset followed by reinforcement refinement on a harder DQ-cities-10k split via GRPO. Two task-aligned metrics guide learning: a Discriminative Difficulty Index (DDI) for curriculum sampling and a Positional Retrieval Gain (PRG) reward that directly measures retrieval improvement induced by a question. Experiments show this reasoning-based approach significantly outperforms baselines. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.