GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
CineVerse: Consistent Keyframe Synthesis for Cinematic Scene Composition
Authors: Quynh Phung; Long Mai; Fabian David Caba Heilbron; Feng Liu; Jia-Bin Huang; Cusuh Ham
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-shot generation requires preserving the identity of characters and settings across frames. Cinematic scene composition goes beyond standard multi-shot generation, introducing additional challenges such as expressing complex interactions among multiple characters and visual effects to convey creative narratives--challenges existing datasets cannot fully address. We present CineVerse a large-scale dataset of diverse movie scenes labeled with shot-level annotations tailored for filmmaking. CineVerse includes refined scene descriptions, shot-type information, and newly extracted shot, character, setting descriptions. We validate our dataset by developing a baseline framework that first generates a scene plan containing detailed information for the overall scene and each individual shot, then produces a set of coherent keyframes. Our results show significant improvements in controlling and synthesizing cinematic content through the added context provided by CineVerse.
Language Integration in Fine-Tuning Multimodal Large Language Models for Image-Based Regression
Authors: Roy H. Jennings; Genady Paikin; Roy Shaul; Evgeny Soloveichik
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promise for image-based regression tasks, but current approaches face key limitations. Recent methods fine-tune MLLMs using preset output vocabularies and generic task-level prompts (e.g., "How would you rate this image?"), assuming this mimics human rating behavior. Our analysis reveals that these approaches provide no benefit over image-only training. Models using preset vocabularies and generic prompts perform equivalently to image-only models, failing to leverage semantic understanding from textual input. We propose Regression via Transformer-Based Classification (RvTC), which replaces vocabulary-constrained classification with a flexible bin-based approach. Unlike approaches that address discretization errors through complex distributional modeling, RvTC eliminates manual vocabulary crafting through straightforward bin increase, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four image assessment datasets using only images. More importantly, we demonstrate that data-specific prompts dramatically improve performance. Unlike generic task descriptions, prompts containing semantic information about specific images enable MLLMs to leverage cross-modal understanding. On the AVA dataset, adding challenge titles to prompts substantially improves our already state-of-the-art image-only baseline. We demonstrate through empirical evidence from the AVA and AGIQA-3k datasets that MLLMs benefit from semantic prompt information, surpassing mere statistical biases. We validate RvTC across two different MLLM architectures, demonstrating consistent improvements and method generalizability.
Towards Reliable Test-Time Adaptation: Style Invariance as a Correctness Likelihood
Authors: Gilhyun Nam; Taewon Kim; Joonhyun Jeong; Eunho Yang
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables efficient adaptation of deployed models, yet it often leads to poorly calibrated predictive uncertainty--a critical issue in high-stakes domains such as autonomous driving, finance, and healthcare. Existing calibration methods typically assume fixed models or static distributions, resulting in degraded performance under real-world, dynamic test conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce Style Invariance as a Correctness Likelihood (SICL), a framework that leverages style-invariance for robust uncertainty estimation. SICL estimates instance-wise correctness likelihood by measuring prediction consistency across style-altered variants, requiring only the model's forward pass. This makes it a plug-and-play, backpropagation-free calibration module compatible with any TTA method. Comprehensive evaluations across four baselines, five TTA methods, and two realistic scenarios with three model architecture demonstrate that SICL reduces calibration error by an average of 13%p compared to conventional calibration approaches.
MBTI: Metric-Based Textual Inversion for Fine-Grained Image Generation
Authors: Byungkwan Chae; Youngjae Choi; Heewon Kim
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion-based data augmentation increases semantic diversity but often fails to preserve class-defining cues in fine-grained categories, which harms few-shot classifica- tion. We present Metric-Based Textual Inversion (MBTI), a textual-inversion training scheme that explicitly lever- ages inter-class relations while learning a pseudo-token per class from a few images. At each iteration, MBTI se- lects top-K support embeddings from previously learned classes and pushes the current embedding token away from these supports using a diffusion-based distance computed on denoiser noise predictions under matched latents and timesteps. This metric-aware objective enlarges inter-class margins while retaining class-specific attributes, yielding more representative synthetic samples Across few-shot, fine- grained classification settings, MBTI consistently improves accuracy over textual inversion-based baselines and pro- duces sharper, more discriminative details.
PRISM-CAFO: Prior-conditioned Remote-sensing Infrastructure Segmentation and Mapping for CAFOs
Authors: Oishee Bintey Hoque; Nibir Chandra Mandal; Kyle Luong; Amanda Wilson; Samarth Swarup; Madhav Marathe; Abhijin Adiga
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large-scale livestock operations pose significant risks to human health and the environment, while also being vulnerable to threats such as infectious diseases and extreme weather events. As the number of such operations continues to grow, accurate and scalable mapping has become increasingly important. In this work, we present an infrastructure-first, explainable pipeline for identifying and characterizing Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) from aerial and satellite imagery. Our method (i) detects candidate infrastructure (e.g., barns, feedlots, manure lagoons, silos) with a domain-tuned YOLOv8 detector, then derives SAM2 masks from these boxes and filters component-specific criteria; (ii) extracts structured descriptors (e.g., counts, areas, orientations, and spatial relations) and fuses them with deep visual features using a lightweight spatial cross-attention classifier; and (iii) outputs both CAFO type predictions and mask-level attributions that link decisions to visible infrastructure. Through comprehensive evaluation, we show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with Swin-B+PRISM-CAFO surpassing the best performing baseline by up to 15%. Beyond strong predictive performance across diverse U.S. regions, we run systematic gradient-activation analyses that quantify the impact of domain priors and show how specific infrastructure (e.g., barns, lagoons) shapes classification decisions. We release code, infrastructure masks, and descriptors to support transparent, scalable monitoring of livestock infrastructure, enabling risk modeling, change detection, and targeted regulatory action. Github: https://github.com/Nibir088/PRISM-CAFO.
Gaussian Representations for Video
Authors: Sachin Shah; Anustup Choudhury; Guan-Ming Su; Jaclyn Pytlarz; Christopher A. Metzler; Trisha Mittal
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: We introduce Gaussian representations for videos (GaRV), a novel video encoding and decoding scheme based upon 3D Gaussians. Unlike traditional representations, which encode videos as sequences of frames, or neural representations, which encode videos within the weights of a neural network, we encode videos as a collection of 3D Gaussians within a space-time volume. The key advantage of our approach is that it enables efficient and flexible rasterization-based video decoding. With a slight drop in overall compression rate, GaRV offers a 8-50ximprovement in decoding time and 2.5-15xreduction in GPU memory compared with neural counterparts. Existing Gaussian video techniques require 2-30xmore disk space, while also using more GPU resources than GaRV.Moreover, GaRV offers unique flexibility in how and when pixels are decoded: One can non-sequentially decode frames/regions without penalty and can selectively decode regions at high-resolution to enable low-cost foveated video decoding.
Semantic Map Guided Bird's-Eye View Learning for Online HD Map Construction
Authors: Huantao Ren; Hesham M. Eraqi; ABM Musa; Mohamed Moustafa
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vectorized High-Definition (HD) maps offer rich and precise environmental information about driving scenes, playing a crucial role in improving driver safety by supporting autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Processing individual camera images creates fragmented view of the world requiring complex and error-prone merging. Existing multi-view camera methods train deep neural networks to directly generate a unified bird's-eye view (BEV) features used to learn HD map construction. Nevertheless, a significant limitation is the lack of direct supervision of the learned BEV features based on the ground-truth map elements. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel method, referred to as Semantic Map Guidance (SMG), for explicit alignment of the learned BEV features and the corresponding semantic representations by utilizing ground-truth label during training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SMG method by incorporating it into multiple state-of-the-art BEV-based methods for online HD map construction task. We perform extensive experiments on two widely used HD map datasets, nuScenes and Argoverse 2, demonstrating that SMG, without any bells and whistles, consistently improves the accuracy of all the tested networks by using the same base network implementation and hyperparameters without any additional inference time.
X-JEPA: A Novel Joint Learning Cross-Modal Predictive Alignment Framework for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval
Authors: Shabnam Choudhury; Yash Salunkhe; Vaibhav Rajan; Subhasis Chaudhuri; Biplab Banerjee
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: The growing scale and heterogeneity of remote sensing (RS) imagery demand robust, scalable frameworks for content-based image retrieval across sensor modalities. We introduce X-JEPA, a novel predictive self-supervised architecture explicitly designed for cross-modal remote sensing image retrieval (RS-CMIR), and the first to extend joint embedding predictive paradigms beyond unimodal domains. Unlike prior contrastive or reconstruction-based methods, X-JEPA formulates representation learning as a latent forecasting task: predicting the semantic embedding of a target modality given context from another. To enforce modality-invariant alignment, we propose a geometry-aware Prediction Space Alignment (PSA) loss, which captures the structure of the latent space without requiring pixel-level reconstruction or modality pairing. We evaluate X-JEPA on two large-scale benchmarks--BEN-14K (Sentinel-1/Sentinel-2) and fMoW (RGB/Sentinel) across both unimodal and cross-modal retrieval tasks. X-JEPA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised baselines, including MAE, SatMAE, CrossMAE, CSMAE-SESD, CROMA, SkySense, DeCUR and REJEPA, achieving up to 11.0% F1-score improvement in cross-modal retrieval and 9.8% in unimodal settings. Despite its high retrieval accuracy, the model remains lightweight, requiring fewer parameters and yielding 8-10% F1-score gains on average, establishing a new state-of-the-art for scalable, sensor-agnostic RS-CMIR.
VLMs Guided Interpretable Decision Making in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Xin Hu; Taotao Jing; Renran Tian; Zhengming Ding
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advancements in autonomous driving have explored the use of vision-language models (VLMs) within visual question answering (VQA) frameworks for direct driving decision-making. However, these approaches often depend on handcrafted prompts and suffer from inconsistent performance, limiting their robustness and generalization in real-world scenarios. In this work, we evaluate state-of-the-art open-source VLMs on high-level decision-making tasks using ego-view visual inputs and identify critical limitations in their ability to deliver reliable, context-aware decisions. Motivated by these observations, we propose a novel approach that shifts the role of VLMs from direct decision generators to semantic enhancers. Specifically, we leverage their strong general scene understanding to enrich existing vision-based benchmarks with structured, linguistically rich scene descriptions. Building on this enriched representation, we introduce a multi-modal interactive architecture that fuses visual and linguistic features for more accurate decision-making and interpretable textual explanations. Furthermore, we design a post-hoc refinement module that utilizes VLMs to enhance prediction reliability. Extensive experiments on two autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, offering a promising direction for integrating VLMs into reliable and interpretable autonomous driving systems.
Confidence Through Parallel Attention for Depth and Uncertainty Estimation in Dynamic Environments
Authors: Onkar Susladkar; Rohit Pawar; Chirag Sehgal; Samaksh Ujjawal; Sparsh Mittal
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Monocular depth estimation is crucial for robotics, offering a lightweight and scalable alternative to stereo or LiDAR-based systems. While recent methods have achieved high accuracy, their efficacy degrades under real-world conditions such as occlusion, texture ambiguity, and domain shifts. We introduce ConFiDeNet, a unified framework that jointly predicts metric depth and associated uncertainty, enabling risk-aware robotic perception. ConFiDeNet employs a lightweight parallel attention module that efficiently fuses semantic cues from DINOv2 dense descriptors and SAM2-based segmentation for densely occluded objects, enhancing structural understanding without sacrificing real-time performance. Furthermore, we explicitly condition the model on environment type, improving generalization across diverse indoor and outdoor scenes without retraining. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results across six datasets under both supervised and zero-shot settings, outperforming nine prior techniques, including Marigold, ZeoDepth, PatchFusion, and MonoProb. With significantly faster inference and high prediction confidence, ConFiDeNet is readily deployable for embodied AI, self-driving applications, and robotic manipulation tasks.
Enhancing Monocular 3D Hand Reconstruction with Learned Texture Priors
Authors: Giorgos Karvounas; Nikolaos Kyriazis; Iason Oikonomidis; Georgios Pavlakos; Antonis A. Argyros
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: We revisit the role of texture in monocular 3D hand reconstruction, not as an afterthought for photorealism, but as a dense, spatially grounded cue that can actively support pose and shape estimation. Our observation is simple: even in high-performing models, the overlay between predicted hand geometry and image appearance is often imperfect, suggesting that texture alignment may be an underused supervisory signal. We propose a lightweight texture module that embeds per-pixel observations into UV texture space and enables a novel dense alignment loss between predicted and observed hand appearances. Our approach assumes access to a differentiable rendering pipeline and a model that maps images to 3D hand meshes with known topology, allowing us to back-project a textured hand onto the image and perform pixel-based alignment. The module is self-contained and easily pluggable into existing reconstruction pipelines. To isolate and highlight the value of texture-guided supervision, we augment HaMeR, a high-performing yet unadorned transformer architecture for 3D hand pose estimation. The resulting system improves both accuracy and realism, demonstrating the value of appearance-guided alignment in hand reconstruction.
ACuRE: Accurate Continuity-Regularized SpO2 Estimation Using Liquid Time-Constant Networks
Authors: Shahzad Ahmad; Divya Mishra; Sania Bano; Sukalpa Chanda; Yogesh Singh Rawat
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) is a vital measure of respiratory and circulatory health, essential for detecting hypoxemia in conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart failure. Current non-contact SpO2 estimation methods using remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) struggle with motion artifacts, illumination variability, and limited temporal modeling, hindering their practical use. We propose ACuRE, a novel framework that integrates two branch 3D-ResNet-18 for AC/DC signal separation, Liquid Time-Constant (LTC) networks for continuous-time dynamics, and a physics-informed partial differential equation (PDE) loss based on mass conservation. ACuRE overcomes these challenges by isolating pulsatile (AC) and baseline (DC) signals for enhanced robustness, using LTC networks to capture nonlinear physiological dynamics, and applying PDE regularization to ensure signal continuity. This achieves a significant reduction in mean absolute error compared to baselines, with strong performance under motion and illumination stress. Evaluated across multiple datasets, ACuRE demonstrates robust accuracy and generalization, offering a scalable solution for video based health monitoring in telemedicine and low resource settings.
SceneShine: Illumination-aware Human Scene Gaussian Re-Splatting from Mobile Device Video
Authors: Xuqian Ren; Wenjia Wang; Mai Ngoc Nguyen; Juho Kannala; Esa Rahtu
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Standard 3DGS falls short in precise relighting and shadowing needed to realistically integrate humans into novel environments. We bridge this gap with SceneShine an illumination-aware framework designed for seamless composition through physically-based avatar relighting and shadow casting. Relighting human surfaces in in-the-wild videos is inherently ill-posed, often making the simultaneous disentanglement of scene lighting and BRDF properties difficult. We overcome this ambiguity by utilizing a pseudo-global light map prior to guide BRDF parameter decomposition, significantly reducing relighting artifacts. Additionally, we implement point-based ray tracing to manage human-scene occlusions and dynamically update scene colors for accurate shadow casting. We also introduce a new synthetic dataset for evaluation. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses existing approaches in reconstruction fidelity and identity preservation while achieving highly convincing illumination-aware integration.
Gene-DML: Dual-Pathway Multi-Level Discrimination for Gene Expression Prediction from Histopathology Images
Authors: Yaxuan Song; Jianan Fan; Hang Chang; Weidong Cai
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Accurately predicting gene expression from histopathology images offers a scalable and non-invasive approach to molecular profiling, with significant implications for precision medicine and computational pathology. However, existing methods often underutilize the cross-modal representation alignment between histopathology images and gene expression profiles across multiple representational levels, thereby limiting their prediction performance. To address this, we propose Gene-DML, a unified framework that structures latent space through Dual-pathway Multi-Level discrimination to enhance correspondence between morphological and transcriptional modalities. The multi-scale instance-level discrimination pathway aligns hierarchical histopathology representations extracted at local, neighbor, and global levels with gene expression profiles, capturing scale-aware morphological-transcriptional relationships. In parallel, the cross-level instance-group discrimination pathway enforces structural consistency between individual (image/gene) instances and modality-crossed (gene/image, respectively) groups, strengthening the alignment across modalities. By jointly modeling fine-grained and structural-level discrimination, Gene-DML is able to learn robust cross-modal representations, enhancing both predictive accuracy and generalization across diverse biological contexts. Extensive experiments on public spatial transcriptomics datasets demonstrate that Gene-DML achieves state-of-the-art performance in gene expression prediction. The code and processed datasets are available at https://github.com/YXSong000/Gene-DML.
PatchEAD: Unifying Industrial Visual Prompting Frameworks for Patch-Exclusive Anomaly Detection
Authors: Po-Han Huang; Jeng-Lin Li; Po-Hsuan Huang; Ming-Ching Chang; Wei-Chao Chen
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Industrial anomaly detection is increasingly relying on foundation models, aiming for strong out-of-distribution generalization and rapid adaptation in real-world deployments. Notably, past studies have primarily focused on textual prompt tuning, leaving the intrinsic visual counterpart fragmented into processing steps specific to each foundation model. We aim to address this limitation by proposing a unified patch-focused framework, Patch-Exclusive Anomaly Detection (PatchEAD), enabling training-free anomaly detection that is compatible with diverse foundation models. The framework constructs visual prompting techniques, including an alignment module and foreground masking. Our experiments show superior few-shot and batch zero-shot performance compared to prior work, despite the absence of textual features. Our study further examines how backbone structure and pretrained characteristics affect patch-similarity robustness, providing actionable guidance for selecting and configuring foundation models for real-world visual inspection. These results confirm that a well-unified patch-only framework can enable quick, calibration-light deployment without the need for carefully engineered textual prompts.
DODA: Adapting Object Detectors to Dynamic Agricultural Environments in Real-Time with Diffusion
Authors: Shuai Xiang; Pieter M. Blok; James Burridge; Haozhou Wang; Wei Guo
Venue: WACV 2026 (main)

Abstract: Object detection has wide applications in agriculture, but domain shifts of diverse environments limit the broader use of the trained models. Existing domain adaptation methods usually require retraining the model for new domains, which is impractical for agricultural applications due to constantly changing environments. In this paper, we propose DODA (**D**iffusion for **O**bject-detection **D**omain Adaptation in **A**griculture), a diffusion-based framework that can adapt the detector to a new domain in just 2 minutes. DODA incorporates external domain embeddings and an improved layout-to-image approach, allowing it to generate high-quality detection data for new domains without additional training. We demonstrate DODA's effectiveness on the Global Wheat Head Detection dataset, where fine-tuning detectors on DODA-generated data yields significant improvements across multiple domains. DODA provides a simple yet powerful solution for agricultural domain adaptation, reducing the barriers for growers to use detection in personalised environments.