GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
See What I Mean: Aligning Vision and Language Representations for Video Fine-grained Object Understanding
Authors: Boyuan Sun; Bo-Wen Yin; Yuan-Ming Li; Xihan Wei; Qibin Hou
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We present SWIM (See What I Mean), a novel training strategy that aligns vision and language representations to enable fine-grained object understanding solely from textual prompts. Unlike existing approaches that require explicit visual prompts, such as masks or points, SWIM leverages mask supervision only during training to guide cross-modal attention, allowing the model to automatically attend to the user-specified object at inference.Our cross-attention analysis of pretrained multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveals a systematic discrepancy: Attribute words produce sharp, localized activations in the visual modality, whereas object nouns yield diffuse and scattered patterns due to semantic reference bias and distributed high-level representations. To address this misalignment, we construct NL-Refer, an enriched dataset, in which each object mask is paired with a precise natural language referring expression. SWIM extracts multi-layer cross-attention maps from object nouns and enforces spatial consistency with ground-truth masks. Experimental results demonstrate that SWIM substantially improves text-visual alignment and achieves superior performance over visual-prompt-based methods on fine-grained object understanding benchmarks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/HumanMLLM/SWIM.
StreamingTOM: Streaming Token Compression for Efficient Video Understanding
Authors: Xueyi Chen; Keda Tao; Kele Shao; Huan Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Unlike offline processing, streaming video vision-language models face two fundamental constraints: causality and accumulation. Causality prevents access to future frames that offline methods exploit, while accumulation causes tokens to grow unbounded, creating efficiency bottlenecks. However, existing approaches only regulate post-LLM kv-cache, leaving costly pre-LLM prefill unchanged. We introduce StreamingTOM, a training-free, plug-and-play two-stage framework that addresses both pre-LLM and post-LLM bottlenecks. Causal Temporal Reduction imposes a fixed per-frame budget and selects tokens based on adjacent-frame changes and token saliency, drastically reducing per-frame prefill cost by processing only a compact subset of visual tokens, ensuring predictable latency. Online Quantized Memory stores tokens in 4-bit format, retrieves relevant groups on demand, and dequantizes them, keeping the active kv-cache bounded regardless of stream length. Experiments demonstrate our method achieves 15.7x kv-cache compression ratio; compared to prior SOTA (LiveVLM), it delivers 1.2x lower peak memory and 2x faster TTFT. StreamingTOM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among training-free methods with an average of 63.8% on offline benchmarks and 55.8% accuracy and 3.7 score on RVS. These results demonstrate that real-time streaming video understanding with bounded active memory is achievable without model retraining.
Local Motion Matters: A Deconstruct-Recompose Paradigm for Reinforcement Learning Pre-training from Videos
Authors: Jinwen Wang; Youfang Lin; Xiaobo Hu; Shuo Wang; Kai Lv
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Pre-training on large-scale videos to improve reinforcement learning efficiency is promising yet remains challenging. Existing methods typically treat the agent as an indivisible entity, modeling motion patterns globally. Such global modeling is tightly coupled with the morphology, hindering transfer across domains. In contrast, despite the vast disparity in global motions, the local components exhibit similar motion patterns across different agents. Building on this insight, we propose a novel Deconstruct-Recompose Paradigm (DRP) for learning transferable local motion representations. Specifically, in the Deconstruct phase, we identify multiple local points and track their frame-wise motions, defining each as an Atomic Action. We introduce a Dual-Attention Encoder (DAE) to learn local motion representations from these Atomic Actions, capturing their spatiotemporal relationships. In the Recompose phase, we compose local motion representations with a learnable Motion Aggregation Token '[MAT]' via latent dynamics model learning. Additionally, an adapter bridges local motion and downstream action-specific dynamics to accelerate policy learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively transfers to diverse robotic control and manipulation tasks, significantly improving sample efficiency and performance.
VirtueBench: Evaluating Trustworthiness under Uncertainty in Long Video Understanding
Authors: Xueqing Yu; Bohan Li; Yan Li; Zhenheng Yang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made remarkable progress in multimodal understanding tasks, yet their evaluation on long video understanding remains unreliable. Due to limited frame inputs, key frames necessary for answering the question may be missing from the model's input. However, models that truthfully refuse to answer under such uncertainty are marked as incorrect, while those that guess may coincidentally produce the correct answer and thus obtain deceptively higher accuracy, leading to misleading evaluation results and encouraging models to guess rather than respond honestly. To address this issue, we introduce VirtueBench, a benchmark explicitly designed to assess model trustworthiness under uncertainty. VirtueBench constructs multiple frame-sampling levels for each video and provides ground truths that distinguish between answerable and unanswerable cases. Evaluations on 25 open-source and commercial VLMs reveal distinct refusal behaviors across different model families, with refusal accuracy ranging from over 70% in the best models to nearly 0% in the worst. Moreover, most models exhibit a substantial drop in refusal when the prompt does not explicitly require them to do so. These findings highlight the need for developing trustworthy VLMs for multimodal understanding, guided by benchmarks and leaderboards that emphasize reliability and trustworthiness.
Haptic Neural Fields: Bringing Tactile Interactions to 3D Rendered Scenes
Authors: Antonio Luigi Stefani; Niccolò Bisagno; Nicola Conci; Eckehard Steinbach; Francesco De Natale
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We address the problem of making 3D scenes interactive by asking: what would objects feel like if touched in a virtual environment? While neural scene representations achieve high visual realism, they fall short in modeling physical interactions, such as the vibration patterns produced when surfaces are explored with different actions. We propose a framework that learns the correspondence between scene, user action, and haptic response, enabling the generation of tactile signals from simulated interactions in 3D scenes. Our approach leverages a neural field representation conditioned on geometry information and interaction dynamics to synthesize material-specific vibrotactile signals. Experiments show that the generated signals reliably convey both material properties and the user action. This paves the way toward interactive, touch-aware virtual environments with realistic haptic feedback. Project page available here.
HUMORCHAIN: Theory-Guided Multi-Stage Reasoning for Interpretable Multimodal Humor Generation
Authors: Jiajun Zhang; Shijia Luo; Ruikang Zhang; Qi Su
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Humor, as both a creative human activity and a social binding mechanism, has long posed a major challenge for AI generation. Although producing humor requires complex cognitive reasoning and social understanding, theories of humor suggest that it follows learnable patterns and structures, making it theoretically possible for generative models to acquire them implicitly. In recent years, multimodal humor has become a prevalent form of online communication, especially among Gen Z, highlighting the need for AI systems capable of integrating visual understanding with humorous language generation. However, existing data-driven approaches lack explicit modeling or theoretical grounding of humor, often producing literal descriptions that fail to capture its underlying cognitive mechanisms, resulting in the generated image descriptions that are fluent but lack genuine humor or cognitive depth. To address this limitation, we propose HUMORCHAIN (HUmor-guided Multi-step Orchestrated Reasoning Chain for Image Captioning), a theory-guided multi-stage reasoning framework. It integrates visual semantic parsing, humor- and psychology-based reasoning, and a fine-tuned discriminator for humor evaluation, forming an interpretable and controllable cognitive reasoning chain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly embed cognitive structures from humor theories into multimodal humor generation, enabling a structured reasoning process from visual understanding to humor creation. Experiments on Meme-Image-No-Text, Oogiri-GO, and OxfordTVG-HIC datasets show that HUMORCHAIN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in human humor preference, Elo/BT scores, and semantic diversity, demonstrating that theory-driven structured reasoning enables large language models to generate humor aligned with human perception.
Goal Force: Teaching Video Models To Accomplish Physics-Conditioned Goals
Authors: Nate Gillman; Yinghua Zhou; Zitian Tang; Evan Luo; Arjan Chakravarthy; Daksh Aggarwal; Michael Freeman; Chen Sun
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advancements in video generation have enabled the development of "world models" capable of simulating potential futures for robotics and planning. However, specifying precise goals for these models remains a challenge; text instructions are often too abstract to capture physical nuances, while target images are frequently infeasible to specify for dynamic tasks. To address this, we introduce Goal Force, a novel framework that allows users to define goals via explicit force vectors and intermediate dynamics, mirroring how humans conceptualize physical tasks. We train a video generation model on a curated dataset of synthetic causal primitives--such as elastic collisions and falling dominos--teaching it to propagate forces through time and space. Despite being trained on simple physics data, our model exhibits remarkable zero-shot generalization to complex, real-world scenarios, including tool manipulation and multi-object causal chains. Our results suggest that by grounding video generation in fundamental physical interactions, models can emerge as implicit neural physics simulators, enabling precise, physics-aware planning without reliance on external engines.
Selectively Extracting and Injecting Visual Attributes into Text-to-Image Models
Authors: Seunghwan Choi; Jooyeol Yun; Youngdo Lee; Jaegul Choo
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-image models are increasingly utilized in design workflows, but articulating nuanced design intentions solely through text remains a challenge. This work proposes a method that extracts visual attributes from a reference image and injects them directly into the generation pipeline. Specifically, the method optimizes a text token to selectively represent the target attribute using a custom training prompt and two novel embeddings, termed distilled and residual. A wide range of attributes can be extracted through this approach, including shape, material, pose, and camera shot and angle. The effectiveness of the method is validated on various target attributes and text prompts drawn from a newly constructed dataset. The method outperforms existing approaches in selectively extracting and applying target attributes across diverse contexts. Ultimately, the proposed method enables intuitive and controllable text-to-image generation, streamlining the design process.
LoFA: Learning to Predict Personalized Prior for Fast Adaptation of Visual Generative Models
Authors: Yiming Hao; Mutian Xu; Chongjie Ye; Jie Qin; Shunlin Lu; Yipeng Qin; Xiaoguang Han
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Personalizing visual generative models to meet specific user needs has gained increasing attention, yet current methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) remain impractical due to their demand for task-specific data and lengthy optimization. While a few hypernetwork-based approaches attempt to predict adaptation weights directly, they struggle to map fine-grained user prompts to complex LoRA distributions, limiting their practical applicability. To bridge this gap, we propose LoFA, a general framework that efficiently predicts personalized priors for fast model adaptation. We first identify a key property of LoRA: structured distribution patterns emerge in the relative changes between LoRA and base model parameters. Building on this, we design a two-stage hypernetwork: first predicting relative distribution patterns that capture key adaptation regions, then using these to guide final LoRA weight prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently predicts high-quality personalized priors within seconds, across multiple tasks and user prompts, even outperforming conventional LoRA that requires hours of processing.
GeoTikzBridge: Advancing Multimodal Code Generation for Geometric Perception and Reasoning
Authors: Jiayin Sun; Caixia Sun; Boyu Yang; Hailin Li; Xiao Chen; Yi Zhang; Errui Ding; Liang Li; Chao Deng; Junlan Feng
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable perceptual and reasoning abilities. However, they struggle to perceive fine-grained geometric structures, constraining their ability of geometric understanding and visual reasoning. To address this, we propose GeoTikzBridge, a framework that enhances local geometric perception and visual reasoning through tikz-based code generation. Within this framework, we build two models supported by two complementary datasets. The GeoTikzBridge-Base model is trained on GeoTikz-Base dataset, the largest image-to-tikz dataset to date with 2.5M pairs (16 xlarger than existing open-sourced datasets). This process is achieved via iterative data expansion and a localized geometric transformation strategy. Subsequently, GeoTikzBridge-Instruct is fine-tuned on GeoTikz-Instruct dataset which is the first instruction-augmented tikz dataset supporting visual reasoning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance among open-sourced MLLMs. Furthermore, GeoTikzBridge models can serve as plug-and-play reasoning modules for any MLLM(LLM), enhancing reasoning performance in geometric problem-solving.
Face-Guided Sentiment Boundary Enhancement for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Sentiment Localization
Authors: Cailing Han; Zhangbin Li; Jinxing Zhou; Wei Qian; Jingjing Hu; Yanghao Zhou; Zhangling Duan; Dan Guo
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Point-level weakly-supervised temporal sentiment localization (P-WTSL) aims to detect sentiment-relevant segments in untrimmed multimodal videos using timestamp sentiment annotations, which greatly reduces the costly frame-level labeling. To tackle the intrinsic challenges of imprecise sentiment boundaries in P-WTSL, we propose the Face-guided Sentiment Boundary Enhancement Network FSENet, a unified framework that leverages fine-grained facial features to guide sentiment localization. Specifically, our approach first introduces the Face-guided Sentiment Discovery (FSD) module, which integrates facial features into multimodal interaction via dual-branch modeling for effective sentiment stimuli clues; We then propose the Point-aware Sentiment Semantics Contrast (PSSC) strategy to discriminate sentiment semantics of candidate points (frame-level) near annotation points via contrastive learning, thereby enhancing the model's ability to recognize sentiment boundaries. At last, we design the Boundary-aware Sentiment Pseudo-label Generation (BSPG) approach to convert sparse point annotations into temporally smooth supervisory pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments and visualizations on the benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance under full supervision, video-level, and point-level weak supervision, thereby showcasing the strong generalization ability of our FSENet across different annotation settings.
VLA Models Are More Generalizable Than You Think: Revisiting Physical and Spatial Modeling
Authors: Weiqi Li; Quande Zhang; Ruifeng Zhai; Liang Lin; Guangrun Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models achieve strong in-distribution performance but degrade sharply under novel camera viewpoints and visual perturbations. We show that this brittleness primarily arises from misalignment in Spatial Modeling, rather than Physical Modeling. To address this, we propose a one-shot adaptation framework that recalibrates visual representations through lightweight, learnable updates. Our first method, Feature Token Modulation (FTM), applies a global affine transformation to visual tokens and improves Libero viewpoint accuracy from 48.5% to 87.1% with only 4K parameters. Building on this, Feature Linear Adaptation (FLA) introduces low-rank updates to the ViT encoder, achieving 90.8% success with 4.7M parameters--matching LoRA-scale finetuning at far lower cost. Together, these results reveal substantial untapped robustness in pretrained VLA models and demonstrate that targeted, minimal visual adaptation is sufficient to restore viewpoint generalization.
SIMSPINE: A Biomechanics-Aware Simulation Framework for 3D Spine Motion Annotation and Benchmarking
Authors: Muhammad Saif Ullah Khan; Didier Stricker
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Modeling spinal motion is fundamental to understanding human biomechanics, yet remains underexplored in computer vision due to the spine's complex multi-joint kinematics and the lack of large-scale 3D annotations. We present a biomechanics-aware keypoint simulation framework that augments existing human pose datasets with anatomically consistent 3D spinal keypoints derived from musculoskeletal modeling. Using this framework, we create the first open dataset, named SIMSPINE, which provides sparse vertebra-level 3D spinal annotations for natural full-body motions in indoor multi-camera capture without external restraints. With 2.14 million frames, this enables data-driven learning of vertebral kinematics from subtle posture variations and bridges the gap between musculoskeletal simulation and computer vision. In addition, we release pretrained baselines covering fine-tuned 2D detectors, monocular 3D pose lifting models, and multi-view reconstruction pipelines, establishing a unified benchmark for biomechanically valid spine motion estimation. Specifically, our 2D spine baselines improve the state-of-the-art from 0.63 to 0.80 AUC in controlled environments, and from 0.91 to 0.93 AP for in-the-wild spine tracking.Together, the simulation framework and SIMSPINE dataset advance research in vision-based biomechanics, motion analysis, and digital human modeling by enabling reproducible, anatomically grounded 3D spine estimation under natural conditions.
ResCa: Residual Caching for Diffusion Transformers Acceleration
Authors: Haipeng Fang; Yu Li; Fan Tang; Yixing Lu; Juan Cao; Sheng Tang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion transformers have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality image and video generation, but their computational overhead remains a significant challenge. Existing token reduction-based acceleration techniques, such as caching and merging, attempt to reduce this cost from both temporal and spatial perspectives, but often compromise generation quality by introducing non-updated or non-self denosing directions. In this paper, we propose Residual Caching (ResCa), a novel, training-free framework that introduces a proxy denoising perspective to overcome these limitations. ResCa achieves acceleration while maintaining a denoising trajectory that is both self and updated. The core idea is to perform true denoising on only one proxy token within each trajectory-based cluster, and use its computed multi-order residuals to guide the simulated denoising of all other tokens. ResCa can be seamlessly integrated into various diffusion models, including DiT, FLUX, and HunyuanVideo. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving up to a 5.5 times acceleration in GFLOPs while maintaining near-lossless generation quality on FLUX. Project page: https://fanghaipeng.github.io/ResCa.
Omni2Sound: Towards Unified Video-Text-to-Audio Generation
Authors: Yusheng Dai; Zehua Chen; Yuxuan Jiang; Qiuhong Ke; Jianfei Cai; Jun Zhu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Training a unified model integrating video-to-audio (V2A), text-to-audio (T2A), and joint video-text-to-audio (VT2A) generation offers significant application flexibility, yet faces two unexplored foundational challenges: (1) the scarcity of high-quality audio captions with tight V-A-T alignment, leading to severe semantic conflict between multimodal conditions, and (2) cross-task and intra-task competition, manifesting as an adverse V2A-T2A performance trade-off and modality bias in the VT2A task. First, to address data scarcity, we introduce SoundAtlas, a large-scale dataset (470k pairs) that significantly outperforms existing benchmarks and even human experts in quality. Powered by a novel agentic pipeline, it integrates Vision-to-Language Compression to mitigate visual bias of MLLMs, a Junior-Senior Agent Hand-off for a five times cost reduction, and rigorous Post-hoc Filtering to ensure fidelity. Consequently, SoundAtlas delivers semantically rich and temporally detailed captions with tight V-A-T alignment. Second, we propose Omni2Sound, a unified VT2A diffusion model supporting flexible input modalities. To resolve the inherent cross-task and intra-task competition, we design a three-stage multi-task progressive training schedule that converts cross-task competition into joint optimization and mitigates modality bias in the VT2A task, maintaining both audio-visual alignment and off-screen audio generation faithfulness. Finally, we construct VGGSound-Omni, a comprehensive benchmark for unified evaluation, including challenging off-screen tracks. With a standard DiT backbone, Omni2Sound achieves unified SOTA performance across all three tasks within a single model, demonstrating strong generalization across benchmarks with heterogeneous input conditions.
Composing Concepts from Images and Videos via Concept-prompt Binding
Authors: Xianghao Kong; Zeyu Zhang; Yuwei Guo; Zhuoran Zhao; Songchun Zhang; Anyi Rao
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Visual concept composition, which aims to integrate different elements from images and videos into a single, coherent visual output, still falls short in accurately extracting complex concepts from visual inputs and flexibly combining concepts from both images and videos. We introduce Bind & Compose, a one-shot method that enables flexible visual concept composition by binding visual concepts with corresponding prompt tokens and composing the target prompt with bound tokens from various sources. It adopts a hierarchical binder structure for cross-attention conditioning in Diffusion Transformers to encode visual concepts into corresponding prompt tokens for accurate decomposition of complex visual concepts. To improve concept-token binding accuracy, we design a Diversify-and-Absorb Mechanism that uses an extra absorbent token to eliminate the impact of concept-irrelevant details when training with diversified prompts. To enhance the compatibility between image and video concepts, we present a Temporal Disentanglement Strategy that decouples the training process of video concepts into two stages with a dual-branch binder structure for temporal modeling. Evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves superior concept consistency, prompt fidelity, and motion quality over existing approaches, opening up new possibilities for visual creativity.