GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Residual Connections Harm Generative Representation Learning
Authors: Xiao Zhang; Ruoxi Jiang; William Gao; Rebecca Willet; Michael Maire
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We show that introducing a weighting factor to reduce the influence of identity shortcuts in residual networks significantly enhances semantic feature learning in generative representation learning frameworks, such as masked autoencoders (MAEs) and diffusion models. Our modification improves linear probing accuracy for both, notably increasing ImageNet accuracy from 67.8% to 72.7% for MAEs with a VIT-B/16 backbone, while also boosting generation quality for diffusion models. This significant gap suggests that, while residual connection structure serves an essential role in facilitating gradient propagation, it may have a harmful side effect of reducing capacity for abstract learning by virtue of injecting an echo of shallower representations into deeper layers. We ameliorate this downside via a fixed formula for monotonically decreasing the contribution of identity connections as layer depth increases. Our design promotes the gradual development of feature abstractions, without impacting network trainability. Analyzing the representations learned by our modified residual networks, we find correlation between low effective feature rank and downstream task performance.
Learning What Matters: Prioritized Concept Learning via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection
Authors: Qian Yang; Shivam Chandhok; Oscar Mañas; Kanishk Jain; Aishwarya Agrawal; Leonid Sigal
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Instruction tuning has been central to the success of recent vision-language models (VLMs), but it remains expensive-requiring large-scale datasets, high-quality annotations, and large compute budgets. We propose PRioritized cOncept learninG via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection (PROGRESS), a data- and compute-efficient framework that enables VLMs to dynamically select what to learn next based on their evolving needs during training. At each stage, the model tracks its learning progress across skills and selects the most informative samples-those it has not already mastered and that are not too difficult to learn at the current stage of training. This strategy effectively controls skill acquisition and the order in which skills are learned. Specifically, we sample from skills showing the highest learning progress, prioritizing those with the most rapid improvement. Unlike prior methods, PROGRESS requires no upfront answer annotations, queries answers only on a need basis, avoids reliance on additional supervision from auxiliary VLMs, and does not require compute-heavy gradient computations for data selection. Experiments across multiple instruction-tuning datasets of varying scales demonstrate that PROGRESS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with much less data and supervision. Additionally, we show strong cross-architecture generalization and transferability to larger models, validating PROGRESS as a scalable solution for efficient learning.
SANER: Switchable Adapter with Non-parametric Enhanced Routing for Person De-Reidentification
Authors: Yimin Liu; Nan Pu; Fengxiang Yang; Wenjing Li; Zhihui Li; Zhun Zhong
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Person De-Reidentification (De-ReID) is an emerging and safety-critical task that aims to selectively forget specific individuals in surveillance systems while preserving the recognition capability for others. Existing methods typically learn both forgetting and retaining objectives within a unified feature space, which leads to conflicting optimization goals and may cause unexpected performance degradation on novel or retained identities. We provide a new perspective to handle De-ReID through feature space decoupling. Although it is a promising solution, discriminating which feature space should be used for the given novel query remain unsolved. To alleviate these challenges, we propose SANER, advancing De-ReID with a Switchable Adapter (SA) and a test-time Non-parametric Enhanced Routing (NER) algorithm. SA decouples the pre-trained feature space into two task-specific subspaces with a forgetting adapter and a retaining adapter. The former suppresses identity-specific semantics for de-identification, while the latter preserves discriminative cues for accurate re-ID. In addition, SA is further enhanced with NER to adaptively analyze optimal feature space routing for the given query at test-time by comparing the query with pre-computed prototypes in the original feature space. Extensive experiments on multiple De-ReID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SANER, achieving new state-of-the-art De-ReID performance.
Learning to Focus and Precise Cropping:A Reinforcement Learning Framework with Information Gaps and Grounding Loss for MLLMs
Authors: Xuanpu Zhao; Zhentao Tan; Dianmo Sheng; Tianxiang Chen; Yao Liu; Yue Wu; Tao Gong; Qi Chu; Nenghai Yu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: To enhance the perception and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models in complex visual scenes, recent research has introduced agent-based workflows. In these works, MLLMs autonomously utilize image cropping tool to analyze regions of interest for question answering. While existing training strategies, such as those employing supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, have made significant progress, our empirical analysis reveals a key limitation. We demonstrate the model's strong reliance on global input and its weak dependence on the details within the cropped region. To address this issue, we propose a novel two-stage reinforcement learning framework that does not require trajectory supervision. In the first stage, we introduce the "Information Gap" mechanism by adjusting the granularity of the global image. This mechanism trains the model to answer questions by focusing on cropped key regions, driven by the information gain these regions provide. The second stage further enhances cropping precision by incorporating a grounding loss, using a small number of bounding box annotations. Experiments show that our method significantly enhances the model's attention to cropped regions, enabling it to achieve state-of-the-art performance on high-resolution visual question-answering benchmarks. Our method provides a more efficient approach for perceiving and reasoning fine-grained details in MLLMs. Code is available at: https://github.com/XuanPu-Z/LFPC.
SeaCache: Spectral-Evolution-Aware Cache for Accelerating Diffusion Models
Authors: Jiwoo Chung; Sangeek Hyun; MinKyu Lee; Byeongju Han; Geonho Cha; Dongyoon Wee; Youngjun Hong; Jae-Pil Heo
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion models are a strong backbone for visual generation, but their inherently sequential denoising process leads to slow inference. Previous methods accelerate sampling by caching and reusing intermediate outputs based on feature distances between adjacent timesteps. However, existing caching strategies typically rely on raw feature differences that entangle content and noise. This design overlooks spectral evolution, where low-frequency structure appears early and high-frequency detail is refined later. We introduce Spectral-Evolution-Aware Cache (SeaCache), a training-free cache schedule that bases reuse decisions on a spectrally aligned representation. Through theoretical and empirical analysis, we derive a Spectral-Evolution-Aware (SEA) filter that preserves content-relevant components while suppressing noise. Employing SEA-filtered input features to estimate redundancy leads to dynamic schedules that adapt to content while respecting the spectral priors of the underlying diffusion model. Extensive experiments on diverse visual generative models and the baselines show that SeaCache achieves state-of-the-art latency-quality trade-offs.
SafeRoPE: Risk-specific Head-wise Embedding Rotation for Safe Generation in Rectified Flow Transformers
Authors: Xiang Yang; Feifei Li; Mi Zhang; Geng Hong; Xiaoyu You; Min Yang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent Text-to-Image (T2I) models based on rectified-flow transformers (e.g., SD3, FLUX) achieve high generative fidelity but remain vulnerable to unsafe semantics, especially when triggered by multi-token interactions. Existing mitigation methods largely rely on fine-tuning or attention modulation for concept unlearning; however, their expensive computational overhead and design tailored to U-Net-based denoisers hinder direct adaptation to transformer-based diffusion models (e.g., MMDiT). In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the attention mechanism in MMDiT and find that unsafe semantics concentrate within interpretable, low-dimensional subspaces at head level, where a finite set of safety-critical heads is responsible for unsafe feature extraction. We further observe that perturbing the Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) applied to the query and key vectors can effectively modify some specific concepts in the generated images. Motivated by these insights, we propose SafeRoPE, a lightweight and fine-grained safe generation framework for MMDiT. Specifically, SafeRoPE first constructs head-wise unsafe subspaces by decomposing unsafe embeddings within safety-critical heads, and computes a Latent Risk Score (LRS) for each input vector via projection onto these subspaces. We then introduce head-wise RoPE perturbations that can suppress unsafe semantics without degrading benign content or image quality. SafeRoPE combines both head-wise LRS and RoPE perturbations to perform risk-specific head-wise rotation on query and key vector embeddings, enabling precise suppression of unsafe outputs while maintaining generation fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SafeRoPE achieves SOTA performance in balancing effective harmful content mitigation and utility preservation for safe generation of MMDiT. Codes are available at https://github.com/deng12yx/SafeRoPE.
Self-Paced and Self-Corrective Masked Prediction for Movie Trailer Generation
Authors: Sidan Zhu; Hongteng Xu; Dixin Luo
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: As a challenging video editing task, movie trailer generation involves selecting and reorganizing movie shots to create engaging trailers. Currently, most existing automatic trailer generation methods employ a "selection-then-ranking" paradigm (i.e., first selecting key shots and then ranking them), which suffers from inevitable error propagation and limits the quality of the generated trailers. Beyond this paradigm, we propose a new self-paced and self-corrective masked prediction method called SSMP, which achieves state-of-the-art results in automatic trailer generation via bi-directional contextual modeling and progressive self-correction. In particular, SSMP trains a Transformer encoder that takes the movie shot sequences as prompts and generates corresponding trailer shot sequences accordingly. The model is trained via masked prediction, reconstructing each trailer shot sequence from its randomly masked counterpart. The mask ratio is self-paced, allowing the task difficulty to adapt to the model and thereby improving model performance.When generating a movie trailer, the model fills the shot positions with high confidence at each step and re-masks the remaining positions for the next prediction, forming a progressive self-correction mechanism that is analogous to how human editors work. Both quantitative results and user studies demonstrate the superiority of SSMP in comparison to existing automatic movie trailer generation methods. Demo and code are available at: https://github.com/Dixin-Lab/SSMP.
LangRef3DGS: Natural Language-Guided 3D Referential Segmentation from Partial Observations via 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Xulun Ye; Qin Zhang; Kun Zhou
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Language-guided 3D segmentation is crucial for linking 3D perception with semantic understanding, yet it remains vulnerable to the sparse and occluded views common in real-world RGB-D data. To overcome this, we present a real-time framework that leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to build a semantically continuous and differentiable embedding field from partial observations. Our approach integrates two key components: a Dirichlet Process (DP) for the adaptive discovery of novel object categories, and a gradient low-rank mechanism that enhances class separability by reducing feature redundancy. This combination enables robust open-vocabulary segmentation guided directly by text prompts. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves strong performance, exhibiting superior accuracy, robustness to partial inputs, and a powerful capacity for novel class discovery.Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Tap12345/LangGS.
GenErase: Generalizable and Semantically-Aware Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models
Authors: Korada Sri Vardhana; Soma Biswas
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models power modern creative tools, but their open-ended generative nature raises safety, ethical, and copyright concerns. Retraining or fine-tuning to remove every unsafe or copyrighted concept is impractical, motivating training-free interventions that suppress specific semantics while preserving general visual quality. Existing guard-railing methods face a core trade-off: they are either rigid, failing to generalize to paraphrased or context-shifted prompts, or coarse, distorting unrelated content and fidelity. We present GenErase (GENeralizable ERAsure with SEmantic Awareness), a training-free, geometry-grounded framework for robust concept removal in diffusion models. GenErase enforces semantic orthogonality in the cross-attention value space via an explicit erase-and-replace operation, guided by a per-token preserve projector and a hard geometric gate. This design enables precise erasure, explicit protection of critical semantics, and stability across layers, paraphrases, and multi-concept cases. Extensive experiments on identity, object, and style erasure, together with a new GenBench-40 benchmark, show that GenErase achieves state-of-the-art erasure fidelity and superior paraphrase-level generalization, establishing it as a practical and principled guard-rail for safe, real-time diffusion deployment.
RawMetaDiff: Unlocking Extreme Darkness from Dual-Exposure RAW with Meta-Guided Diffusion
Authors: Panjun Liu; Jiyuan Xia; Yuanshen Guan; Yong Li; Zhiqiang Lang; Ruikang Xu; Chang Chen; Dehua Song; Fenglong Song; Zhiwei Xiong
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Extreme low-light Raw image restoration remains challenging due to overwhelming noise and severe detail loss.In this paper, we exploit the potential of the dual-exposure setting for this severely ill-posed problem.Existing methods suffer from unreliable cross-exposure alignment, resulting in degraded detail recovery and compromised color fidelity. To address these challenges, we propose RawMetaDiff, a novel generative diffusion framework that restores a high-fidelity Raw image from a short-exposure input, conditioned on a potentially misaligned long-exposure reference under the guidance of Raw metadata.At its core, we propsed two complementary mechanisms: the Meta-Assistant Color Transfer (MACT) enforces color consistency by aligning global color statistics along the channel dimension,while the Meta-Normed Cross Attention (MNCA) leverages Raw metadata to establish robust cross-exposure spatial correspondences and inject shadow details.To support robust diffusion training, we first collect a 1K real-world, dual-exposure Raw dataset, namely DERaw, and then design a realistic degradation model to synthesize data that closely approximates real-world conditions.Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that RawMetaDiff significantly outperforms existing methods, justifying an effective new solution for extreme low-light Raw image restoration from the generative perspective.
VideoRealBench: A Chain-of-Thought Realism Evaluation Benchmark for Generated Human-Centric Videos
Authors: Min Yang; Xinwen Zhang; Jialei Tang; Xin Zhou; Kehan Li; Zeyi Huang; Limin Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: With the great advancement of video generation models, a growing number of content creators and researchers are leveraging these technologies to produce large volumes of human-centric videos for content creation and customized data generation for specific tasks. Although existing video generation models are capable of producing videos with high visual quality, their inadequate understanding of video realism results in generating unrealistic videos. While various evaluators have emerged to assess the quality of generated videos, they are trained from low-quality generated videos and data annotations, leading to misaligned ratings with human preferences. They also lack interpretability due to the absence of chain-of-thought reasoning. To address these issues, we propose VideoRealBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the realism of generated human-centric videos. We leverage a rating scale designed from human preferences to score videos and provide three-step rationales, thereby creating a finely-annotated dataset VideoRealDataset and proposing an evaluator VideoRealEval capable of providing reliable scores along with detailed rationales. VideoRealEval achieves a Pearson's linear correlation coefficient (PLCC) of 57.07% and a Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SROCC) of 56.78% on VideoRealDataset, demonstrating closer alignment with human preferences than existing evaluators. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/VideoRealBench.
Premier: Personalized Preference Modulation with Learnable User Embedding in Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Zihao Wang; Yuxiang Wei; Xinpeng Zhou; Tianyu Zhang; Tao Liang; Yalong Bai; Hongzhi Zhang; Wangmeng Zuo
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-image generation has advanced rapidly, yet it still struggles to capture the nuanced user preferences. Existing approaches typically rely on multimodal large language models to infer user preferences, but the derived prompts or latent codes rarely reflect them faithfully, leading to suboptimal personalization. We present Premier, a novel preference modulation framework for personalized image generation. Premier represents each user's preference as a learnable embedding and introduces a preference adapter that fuses the user embedding with the text prompt. To enable accurate and fine-grained preference control, the fused preference embedding is further used to modulate the generative process. To enhance the distinctness of individual preference and improve alignment between outputs and user-specific styles, we incorporate a dispersion loss that enforces separation among user embeddings. When user data are scarce, new users are represented as linear combinations of existing preference embeddings learned during training, enabling effective generalization. Experiments show that Premier outperforms prior methods under the same history length, achieving stronger preference alignment and superior performance on text consistency, ViPer proxy metrics, and expert evaluations.
NimbusGS: Unified 3D Scene Reconstruction under Hybrid Weather
Authors: Yanying Li; Jinyang Li; Shengfeng He; Yangyang Xu; Junyu Dong; Yong Du
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We present NimbusGS, a unified framework for reconstructing high-quality 3D scenes from degraded multi-view inputs captured under diverse and mixed adverse weather conditions. Unlike existing methods that target specific weather types, NimbusGS addresses the broader challenge of generalization by modeling the dual nature of weather: a continuous, view-consistent medium that attenuates light, and dynamic, view-dependent particles that cause scattering and occlusion. To capture this structure, we decompose degradations into a global transmission field and per-view particulate residuals. The transmission field represents static atmospheric effects shared across views, while the residuals model transient disturbances unique to each input. To enable stable geometry learning under severe visibility degradation, we introduce a geometry-guided gradient scaling mechanism that mitigates gradient imbalance during the self-supervised optimization of 3D Gaussian representations. This physically grounded formulation allows NimbusGS to disentangle complex degradations while preserving scene structure, yielding superior geometry reconstruction and outperforming task-specific methods across diverse and challenging weather conditions.
Computer Vision with a Superpixelation Camera
Authors: Sasidharan Mahalingam; Rachel Brown; Atul Ingle
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Conventional cameras generate a lot of data that can be challenging to process in resource-constrained applications. Usually, cameras generate data streams on the order of the number of pixels in the image. However, most of this captured data is redundant for many downstream computer vision algorithms. We propose a novel camera design, which we call SuperCam, that adaptively processes captured data by performing superpixel segmentation on the fly. We show that SuperCam performs better than current state-of-the-art superpixel algorithms under memory-constrained situations. We also compare how well SuperCam performs when the compressed data is used for downstream computer vision tasks. Our results demonstrate that the proposed design provides superior output for image segmentation, object detection, and monocular depth estimation in situations where the available memory on the camera is limited. We posit that superpixel segmentation will play a crucial role as more computer vision inference models are deployed in edge devices. SuperCam would allow computer vision engineers to design more efficient systems for these applications.
Elastic3D: Controllable Stereo Video Conversion with Guided Latent Decoding
Authors: Nando Metzger; Prune Truong; Goutam Bhat; Konrad Schindler; Federico Tombari
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: The growing demand for immersive 3D content calls for automated monocular-to-stereo video conversion. We present a controllable, direct end-to-end method for upgrading a conventional video to a binocular one. Our approach, based on (conditional) latent diffusion, avoids artifacts due to explicit depth estimation and warping. The key to its high-quality stereo video output is a novel, guided VAE decoder that ensures sharp and epipolar-consistent stereo video output. Moreover, our method gives the user control over the strength of the stereo effect (respectively, the disparity range) at inference time, via an intuitive, scalar tuning knob. Experiments on three different datasets of real-world stereo videos show that our method outperforms both traditional warping-based and recent warping-free baselines and sets a new standard for reliable, controllable stereo video conversion. Please check the project page for the video samples: elastic3d.github.io