GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Beyond Objects: Contextual Synthetic Data Generation for Fine-Grained Classification
Authors: William Yang; Xindi Wu; Zhiwei Deng; Esin Tureci; Olga Russakovsky
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) models are increasingly used for synthetic dataset generation, but generating synthetic training data to improve fine-grained classification performance remains challenging. Fine-tuning the T2I model with a few real examples can help generate more appropriate synthetic training data; however, this fine-tuning may also introduce overfitting and reduce diversity in the generated samples. We propose a fine-tuning strategy BOB (Beyond OBjects) for mitigating these concerns. Given a small set of real examples, we first describe them using class-agnostic attributes such as scene background and object pose. We then explicitly condition on these attributes during fine-tuning of the T2I model and marginalize them out during generation. This design mitigates overfitting, thus preserving the T2I model's generative prior and reducing estimation errors, and further minimizes unintended inter-class associations. Extensive experiments across multiple T2I models, backbones, and datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in low-shot fine-grained classification when augmented with synthetic data. Concretely, BOB outperforms DataDream by 7.4% on the Aircraft dataset (from 50.0% to 57.4% when fine-tuning a CLIP classifier with 5 real images augmented with 100 synthetic images). Additionally, in three of the four datasets, the fine-tuning downstream models with synthetic data generated from BOB and five real images achieves better performance than fine-tuning with 10 real images. Collectively, BOB outperforms prior art in 18 of 24 experimental settings, with over 2% accuracy improvements in 14 of these settings.
Masking Teacher and Reinforcing Student for Distilling Vision-Language Models
Authors: Byung-Kwan Lee; Yu-Chiang Frank Wang; Ryo Hachiuma
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) have recently achieved remarkable multimodal understanding, but their massive size makes them impractical for deployment on mobile or edge devices. This raises the need for compact yet capable VLMs that can efficiently learn from powerful large teacher. However, distilling knowledge from large teacher to small student remains challenging due to their large size gap: the student often fails to reproduce the teacher's complex, high-dimensional representations, leading to unstable learning and degraded performance. To address this, we propose Masters (Masking teacher and reinforcing student), a mask-progressive reinforcement learning (RL) distillation framework. Masters first masks and non-dominant weights of the teacher to reduce unnecessary complexity, then progressively restores the teacher from mask to gradually increase the teacher capacity during training. This strategy allows the student to learn richer representations of teacher in a smooth and stable manner. To further refine knowledge transfer, Masters integrates an offline RL stage with two complementary rewards: an accuracy reward that measures the correctness of the generated responses, and a distillation reward that quantifies the ease of their responses' transferability from teacher to student. Unlike online think-answer RL paradigms that are computationally expensive and generate lengthy responses, our offline RL leverages pre-generated responses from masked teachers. These provide rich yet efficient guidance, enabling the students to achieve strong performance without requiring the think-answer process. Extensive experiments across diverse VLM benchmarks demonstrate that Masters outperforms existing compact VLMs and partially surpasses large ones, while being far more efficient. Moreover, gradually increasing the teacher sizes during distillation (e.g., from 14B to 38B) yields smoother convergence and stronger generalization than one-shot distillation (e.g., 38B), revealing a scalable path toward efficient and deployable VLMs.
DextER: Language-driven Dexterous Grasp Generation with Embodied Reasoning
Authors: Junha Lee; Eunha Park; Minsu Cho
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Language-driven dexterous grasp generation requires the models to understand task semantics, 3D geometry, and complex hand-object interactions. While vision-language models have been applied to this problem, existing approaches directly map observations to grasp parameters without intermediate reasoning about physical interactions. We present DextER, Dexterous Grasp Generation with Embodied Reasoning, which introduces contact-based embodied reasoning for multi-finger manipulation. Our key insight is that predicting which hand links contact where on the object surface provides an embodiment-aware intermediate representation, bridging task semantics with physical constraints. DextER autoregressively generates embodied contact tokens specifying which finger links contact where on the object surface, followed by grasp tokens encoding the hand configuration. On DexGYS, DextER achieves 67.14% success rate, outperforming state-of-the-art by 3.83 p.p. with 96.4% improvement in intention alignment. We also demonstrate steerable generation through partial contact specification, providing fine-grained control over grasp synthesis.
Lighting in Motion: Spatiotemporal HDR Lighting Estimation
Authors: Christophe Bolduc; Julien Philip; Li Ma; Mingming He; Paul Debevec; Jean-François Lalonde
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We present Lighting in Motion (LiMo), a diffusion-based approach to spatiotemporal lighting estimation. LiMo targets both realistic high-frequency detail prediction and accurate illuminance estimation. To account for both, we propose generating a set of mirrored and diffuse spheres at different exposures, based on their 3D positions in the input. Making use of diffusion priors, we fine-tune powerful existing diffusion models on a large-scale customized dataset of indoor and outdoor scenes, paired with spatiotemporal light probes. For accurate spatial conditioning, we demonstrate that depth alone is insufficient and we introduce a new geometric condition to provide the relative position of the scene to the target 3D position. Finally, we combine diffuse and mirror predictions at different exposures into a single HDRI map leveraging differentiable rendering.We thoroughly evaluate our method and design choices to establish LiMo as state-of-the-art for both spatial control and prediction accuracy.
Contact-Aware Neural Dynamics
Authors: Changwei Jing; Jai Krishna Bandi; Jianglong Ye; Yan Duan; Pieter Abbeel; Xiaolong Wang; Sha Yi
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system identification, which tunes explicit simulator parameters, is often insufficient to align the intricate, high-dimensional, and state-dependent dynamics of the real world. To overcome this, we propose an implicit sim-to-real alignment framework that learns to directly align the simulator's dynamics with contact information. Our method treats the off-the-shelf simulator as a base prior and learns a contact-aware neural dynamics model to refine simulated states using real-world observations. We show that using tactile contact information from robotic hands can effectively model the non-smooth discontinuities inherent in contact-rich tasks, resulting in a neural dynamics model grounded by real-world data. We demonstrate that this learned forward dynamics model improves state prediction accuracy and can be effectively used to predict policy performance and refine policies trained purely in standard simulators, offering a scalable, data-driven approach to sim-to-real alignment.
VL-Eraser: Vacuum Distillation for Machine Unlearning in Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yili Wang; Lu Dai; Tairan Huang; Yijie Xu; Hui Xiong
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Machine unlearning (MU) aims to remove sensitive or undesired content from pre-trained models. Existing MU methods are commonly characterized as gradually degrading model performance on undesired data to realize approximate forgetting. Despite their successes, the effectiveness in multimodal unlearning tasks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we first conduct an in-depth analysis and reveal that traditional MU methods tend to disrupt cross-modal alignment, leading to incomplete forgetting in multimodal scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose VL-Eraser, a novel unlearning paradigm for VLM unlearning. VL-Eraser reformulates unlearning in VLMs as a two-stage process: distillation and deletion. Specifically, VL-Eraser first introduces a vacuum distillation that disentangles undesired knowledge from the intricate parameters of VLMs and transfers it into low-rank adapters (LoRA). After distillation, unlearning is efficiently achieved by deleting the LoRA parameters from the original model. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that VL-Eraser achieves superior unlearning performance while preserving utility compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.
CASR: A Robust Cyclic Framework for Arbitrary Large-Scale Super-Resolution with Distribution Alignment and Self-Similarity Awareness
Authors: Wenhao Guo; Zhaoran Zhao; Peng Lu; Sheng Li; Qian Qiao; RuiDe Li
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Arbitrary-Scale SR (ASISR) remains fundamentally limited by cross-scale distribution shift: once the inference scale leaves the training range, noise, blur, and artifacts accumulate sharply. We revisit this challenge from a cross-scale distribution transition perspective and propose CASR, a simple yet highly efficient cyclic SR framework that reformulates ultra-magnification as a sequence of in-distribution scale transitions. This design ensures stable inference at arbitrary scales while requiring only a single model. CASR tackles two major bottlenecks: distribution drift across iterations and patch-wise diffusion inconsistencies. The proposed SSAM module aligns structural distributions via superpixel aggregation, preventing error accumulation, while SARM module restores high-frequency textures by enforcing correlation-guided consistency and preserving self-similarity structure through correlation alignment. Despite using only a single model, our approach significantly reduces distribution drift, preserves long-range texture consistency, and achieves superior generalization even at extreme magnification.
Bootstrap Your Own AV-Proxies: Adaptive Contrastive and Prototype Learning for Audio-Visual Segmentation
Authors: Junbo Zhang; Hang Su; Zhaofan Li; Hang Dong; Chao Sun
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to accurately segment sounding objects in video frames by leveraging audio-visual correspondence cues. However, it remains challenging due to the intrinsic semantic incompleteness within a single modality and the semantic gap between audio and visual representations. Traditional feature-fusion decoding approaches struggle to suppress fusion noise effectively, while recent methods that incorporate data-dependent priors often increase the complexity of modeling audio-visual correlations, leading to poor cross-domain generalization. To address these issues, we propose a novel adaptive contrastive and prototype learning framework, BYOAVP, for AVS. Specifically, we design a Self-Supervised Audio Enhancement (SSAE) module that introduces contrastive learning to adaptively align audio representations with gradient-blocked visual embeddings, thus narrowing the semantic gap between modalities. Furthermore, a Dynamic Prototype Constraint (DPC) module is developed to refine pixel-wise category perception via momentum-based prototype updating, while enhancing localization of sounding regions through cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance across two AVS benchmarks and six sub-tasks, exhibiting strong robustness and generalization ability.
CoordSpeaker: Exploiting Gesture Captioning for Coordinated Caption-Empowered Co-Speech Gesture Generation
Authors: Fengyi Fang; Sicheng Yang; Wenming Yang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Co-speech gesture generation has significantly advanced human-computer interaction, yet speaker movements remain constrained due to the omission of text-driven non-spontaneous gestures (e.g., bowing while talking). Existing methods face two key challenges: 1) the semantic prior gap due to the lack of descriptive text annotations in gesture datasets, and 2) the difficulty in achieving coordinated multimodal control over gesture generation. To address these challenges, this paper introduces CoordSpeaker, a comprehensive framework that enables coordinated caption-empowered co-speech gesture synthesis. Our approach first bridges the semantic prior gap through a novel gesture captioning framework, leveraging a motion-language model to generate descriptive captions at multiple granularities. Building upon this, we propose a conditional latent diffusion model with unified cross-dataset motion representation and a hierarchically controlled denoiser to achieve highly controlled, coordinated gesture generation. CoordSpeaker pioneers the first exploration of gesture understanding to tackle the semantic gap in gesture generation while offering a novel perspective of bidirectional gesture-text mapping. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces high-quality gestures that are both rhythmically synchronized with speeches and semantically coherent with arbitrary captions, achieving superior performance with higher efficiency compared to existing approaches.
Self-Corrected Image Generation with Explainable Latent Rewards
Authors: Yinyi Luo; Hrishikesh Gokhale; Marios Savvides; Jindong Wang; Shengfeng He
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite significant progress in text-to-image generation, aligning outputs with complex prompts remains challenging, particularly for fine-grained semantics and spatial relations. This difficulty stems from the feed-forward nature of generation, which requires anticipating alignment without fully understanding the output. In contrast, evaluating generated images is more tractable. Motivated by this asymmetry, we propose xLARD, a self-correcting framework that uses multimodal large language models to guide generation through Explainable Latent Rewards. xLARD introduces a lightweight corrector that refines latent representations based on structured feedback from model-generated references. A key component is a differentiable mapping from latent edits to interpretable reward signals, enabling continuous latent-level guidance from non-differentiable image-level evaluations. This mechanism allows the model to understand, assess, and correct itself during generation. Experiments across diverse generation and editing tasks show that xLARD improves semantic alignment and visual fidelity while maintaining generative priors, offering a data-efficient and generalizable solution to bridging the gap between comprehension and synthesis.
FlashMotion: Few-Step Controllable Video Generation with Trajectory Guidance
Authors: Quanhao Li; Zhen Xing; Rui Wang; Haidong Cao; Qi Dai; Daoguo Dong; Zuxuan Wu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in trajectory-controllable video generation have achieved remarkable progress. Previous methods mainly use adapter-based architectures for precise motion control along predefined trajectories.However, all these methods rely on a multi-step denoising process, leading to substantial time redundancy and computational overhead.While existing video distillation methods successfully distill multi-step generators into few-step, directly applying these approaches to trajectory-controllable video generation results in noticeable degradation in both video quality and trajectory accuracy.To bridge this gap, we introduce FlashMotion, a novel training framework designed for few-step trajectory-controllable video generation.We first train a trajectory adapter on a multi-step video generator for precise trajectory control.Then, we distill the generator into a few-step version to accelerate video generation.Finally, we finetune the adapter using a hybrid strategy that combines diffusion and adversarial objectives, aligning it with the few-step generator to produce high-quality, trajectory-accurate videos.For evaluation, we introduce FlashBench, a benchmark for long-sequence trajectory-controllable video generation that measures both video quality and trajectory accuracy across varying numbers of foreground objects. Experiments on two adapter architectures show that FlashMotion surpasses existing video distillation methods and previous multi-step models in both visual quality and trajectory consistency.
Quantum-Gated Task-interaction Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Model-based Class-Incremental Learning
Authors: Linjie Li; Huiyu Xiao; Jiarui Cao; Zhenyu Wu; Yang Ji
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to continuously accumulate knowledge from a stream of tasks and construct a unified classifier over all seen classes. Although pretrained models (PTMs) have shown promising performance in CIL, they still struggle with the entanglement of multi-task subspaces, leading to catastrophic forgetting when task routing parameters are poorly calibrated or task-level representations are rigidly fixed. To address this issue, we propose a novel Quantum-Gated Task-interaction Knowledge Distillation (QKD) framework that leverages quantum gating to guide inter-task knowledge transfer. Specifically, we introduce a quantum-gated task modulation gating mechanism to model the relational dependencies among task embedding, dynamically capturing the sample-to-task relevance for both joint training and inference across streaming tasks.  Guided by the quantum gating outputs, we perform task-interaction knowledge distillation guided by these task-embedding-level correlation weights from old to new adapters, enabling the model to bridge the representation gaps between independent task subspaces. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QKD effectively mitigates forgetting and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/Frank-lilinjie/CVPR26-QKD
Neu-PiG: Neural Preconditioned Grids for Fast Dynamic Surface Reconstruction on Long Sequences
Authors: Julian Kaltheuner; Hannah Dröge; Markus Plack; Patrick Stotko; Reinhard Klein
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Temporally consistent surface reconstruction of dynamic 3D objects from unstructured point cloud data remains challenging, especially for very long sequences. Existing methods either optimize deformations incrementally, risking drift and requiring long runtimes, or rely on complex learned models that demand category-specific training. We present Neu-PiG, a fast deformation optimization method based on a novel preconditioned latent-grid encoding that distributes spatial features parameterized on the position and normal direction of a keyframe surface. Our method encodes entire deformations across all time steps at various spatial scales into a multi-resolution latent grid, parameterized by the position and normal direction of a reference surface from a single keyframe. This latent representation is then augmented for time modulation and decoded into per-frame 6-DoF deformations via a lightweight multi-layer perceptron (MLP). To achieve high-fidelity, drift-free surface reconstructions in seconds, we employ Sobolev preconditioning during gradient-based training of the latent space, completely avoiding the need for any explicit correspondences or further priors. Experiments across diverse human and animal datasets demonstrate that Neu-PiG outperforms state-the-art approaches, offering both superior accuracy and scalability to long sequences while running at least 60x faster than existing training-free methods and achieving inference speeds on the same order as heavy pre-trained models.
VecAttention: Vector-wise Sparse Attention for Accelerating Long Context Inference
Authors: Anmin Liu; Ruixuan Yang; Huiqiang Jiang; Bin Lin; Minmin Sun; Yong Li; Chen Zhang; Tao Xie
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Long-context video understanding and generation pose a significant computational challenge for Transformer-based video models due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. While existing sparse attention methods employ coarse-grained patterns to improve efficiency, they typically incur redundant computation and suboptimal performance. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose VecAttention, a novel vector-wise sparse attention framework that achieves superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs for video models. We observe that video attention maps exhibit a strong vertical-vector sparse pattern, and further demonstrate that this vertical-vector pattern offers consistently better accuracy-sparsity trade-offs compared with existing coarse-grained sparse patterns. Based on this observation, VecAttention dynamically selects and processes only informative vertical vectors through a lightweight important-vector selection that minimizes memory access overhead and an optimized vector sparse attention kernel. Comprehensive evaluations on video understanding (VideoMME, LongVideoBench, and VCRBench) and generation (VBench) tasks show that VecAttention delivers a 2.65xspeedup over full attention and a 1.83xspeedup over state-of-the-art sparse attention methods, with comparable accuracy to full attention.
GIFSplat: Generative Prior-Guided Iterative Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Views
Authors: Tianyu Chen; Wei Xiang; Kang Han; Yu Lu; Di Wu; Gaowen Liu; Ramana Rao Kompella
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Feed-forward 3D reconstruction offers substantial runtime advantages over per-scene optimization, which remains slow at inference and often fragile under sparse views. However, existing feed-forward methods still have potential for further performance gains, especially for out-of-domain data, and struggle to retain second-level inference time once a generative prior is introduced. These limitations stem from the one-shot prediction paradigm in existing feed-forward pipeline: models are strictly bounded by capacity, lack inference-time refinement, and are ill-suited for continuously injecting generative priors. We introduce GIFSplat, a purely feed-forward iterative refinement framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting from sparse unposed views. A small number of forward-only residual updates progressively refine current 3D scene using rendering evidence, achieve favorable balance between efficiency and quality. Furthermore, we distill a frozen diffusion prior into Gaussian-level cues from enhanced novel renderings without gradient backpropagation or ever-increasing view-set expansion, thereby enabling per-scene adaptation with generative prior while preserving feed-forward efficiency. Across DL3DV, RealEstate10K, and DTU, GIFSplat consistently outperforms state-of-the-art feed-forward baselines, improving PSNR by up to +2.1 dB, and it maintains second-scale inference time without requiring camera poses or any test-time gradient optimization. The project page can be found at: https://terencepp.github.io/gifsplat-project-page/.