GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
MGDHand: Multi-Granularity Prior-to-Inertial Distillation Framework for Sequential 3D Hand Pose Estimation from Sparse IMUs
Authors: Xinyi Wang; Pengfei Ren; Haoyang Zhang; Hanling Zhan; Yingxi Li; Liang Xie; Yue Gao; Erwei Yin
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: 3D hand pose estimation (HPE) from sparse inertial measurement units (IMUs) has shown great potential in human-computer interaction. However, due to the significant semantic gap between sparse local motion information and structured global pose information, estimating hand poses from sparse IMU signals is ambiguous and challenging. Knowledge distillation can transfer rich knowledge from the stronger teacher to the student model, so that the student enhances performance. Existing approaches distill morphological priors into the IMU-based student model, effectively improving its accuracy in complex scenarios. Nevertheless, overlooking the visual-inertial inherent semantic mismatch and information density difference leads to difficulties for students to learn coupled priors. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Granularity Prior-to-Inertial Distillation Framework for Sequential 3D HPE from Sparse IMUs (MGDHand). We first pre-train a MANO-IMU fusion model as a teacher to encode static geometric morphology prior, dynamic kinematic prior and temporal motion prior. Then, a Multi-Granularity Decoupled Distillation (MGDistill) scheme is proposed to bridge the semantic gap. MGDistill includes a Static Shape Distillation module to transfer time-invariant hand shape priors, and a Dynamic Pose Distillation module to transfer complex joint kinematics and dense pose priors. Additionally,  a Temporal Motion Distillation module transfers the fast-changing motion priors (velocity and acceleration).  Extensive experiments on public dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under sparse IMUs.
FailureAtlas: Mapping the Failure Landscape of T2I Models via Active Exploration
Authors: Muxi Chen; Zhaohua Zhang; Chenchen Zhao; Mingyang Chen; Wenyu Jiang; Tianwen Jiang; Jianhuan Zhuo; Yu Tang; Qiuyong Xiao; Jihong Zhang; Qiang Xu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Static benchmark-driven evaluation has provided a valuable foundation for analyzing Text-to-Image (T2I) models.However, the fixed and predetermined prompt sets in benchmarks inherently limit diagnostic depth, making it difficult to uncover the full landscape of models' systematic failures or isolate their root causes.We argue for a complementary paradigm: active exploration, and introduce FailureAtlas, the first framework designed to autonomously explore and map the vast failure landscapes of T2I models at scale.Unlike benchmarks that evaluate a fixed prompt set, FailureAtlas performs guided exploration in the input space, framing error discovery as a structured search for minimal, failure-inducing concepts. While this is a computationally explosive problem, we make it tractable with novel acceleration techniques. When applied to Stable Diffusion models, our method uncovers hundreds of thousands of previously unknown error slices (e.g., over 247,000 in SD1.5 alone) and provides the first large-scale evidence linking these failures to data scarcity in the training set. By providing a principled and scalable engine for deep model auditing, FailureAtlas establishes a new, diagnostic-first methodology to guide the development of more robust generative AI. The code is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/FailureAtlas.
Saliency-Guided Representation with Consistency Policy Learning for Visual Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jingbo Sun; Qichao Zhang; Songjun Tu; Xing Fang; Yupeng Zheng; Haoran Li; Ke Chen; Dongbin Zhao
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Zero-shot unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) offers a promising direction for building generalist agents capable of generalizing to unseen tasks without additional supervision. Among existing approaches, successor representations (SR) have emerged as a prominent paradigm due to their effectiveness in structured, low-dimensional settings. However, SR methods struggle to scale to high-dimensional visual environments. Through empirical analysis, we identify two key limitations of SR in visual URL: (1) SR objectives often lead to suboptimal representations that attend to dynamics-irrelevant regions, resulting in inaccurate successor measures and degraded task generalization; and (2) these flawed representations hinder SR policies from modeling multi-modal skill-conditioned action distributions and ensuring skill controllability. To address these limitations, we propose Saliency-Guided Representation with Consistency Policy Learning (SRCP), a novel framework that improves zero-shot generalization of SR methods in visual URL. SRCP decouples representation learning from successor training by introducing a saliency-guided dynamics task to capture dynamics-relevant representations, thereby improving successor measure and task generalization. Moreover, it integrates a fast-sampling consistency policy with URL-specific classifier-free guidance and tailored training objectives to improve skill-conditioned policy modeling and controllability. Extensive experiments on 16 tasks across 4 datasets from the ExORL benchmark demonstrate that SRCP achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization in visual URL and is compatible with various SR methods.
I-Scene: 3D Instance Models are Implicit Generalizable Spatial Learners
Authors: Lu Ling; Yunhao Ge; Yichen Sheng; Aniket Bera
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Generalization remains the central challenge for interactive 3D scene generation. Existing learning-based approaches ground spatial understanding in limited scene dataset, restricting generalization to new layouts. We instead reprogram a pre-trained 3D instance generator to act as a scene-level learner via, replacing dataset-bounded supervision with model-centric spatial supervision. This reprogramming unlocks the generator's transferable spatial knowledge, enabling generalization to unseen layouts and novel object compositions. Remarkably, spatial reasoning still emerges even when the training scenes are randomly composed objects. This demonstrates that the generator's transferable scene prior provides a rich learning signal for inferring proximity, support, and symmetry from purely geometric cues. Replacing widely used canonical space, we instantiate this insight with a view-centric formulation of the scene space, yielding a fully feed-forward, generalizable scene generator that learns spatial relations directly from the instance model. Quantitative and qualitative results show that a 3D instance generator is an implicit spatial learner and reasoner, pointing toward foundation models for interactive 3D scene understanding and generation. The code is accessible at \href https://luling06.github.io/I-Scene-project/  the project page .
When Pretty Isn't Useful: Investigating Why Modern Text-to-Image Models Fail as Reliable Training Data Generators
Authors: Krzysztof Adamkiewicz; Brian B. Moser; Stanislav Frolov; Tobias Christian Nauen; Federico Raue; Andreas Dengel
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models produce visually stunning images and demonstrate excellent prompt following. But do they perform well as synthetic vision data generators? In this work, we revisit the promise of synthetic data as a scalable substitute for real training sets and uncover a surprising performance regression. We generate large-scale synthetic datasets using state-of-the-art T2I models released between 2022 and 2025, train standard classifiers solely on this synthetic data, and evaluate them on real test data. Despite observable advances in visual fidelity and prompt adherence, classification accuracy on real test data consistently declines with newer T2I models as training data generators. Our analysis reveals a hidden trend: These models collapse to a narrow, aesthetic-centric distribution that undermines diversity and real data distribution coverage. Overall, our findings challenge a growing assumption in vision research, namely that progress in generative realism implies progress in data realism. We thus highlight an urgent need to rethink the capabilities of modern T2I models as reliable training data generators.
Cleaning the Pool: Progressive Filtering of Unlabeled Pools in Deep Active Learning
Authors: Denis Huseljic; Marek Herde; Lukas Rauch; Paul Hahn; Bernhard Sick
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing active learning (AL) strategies capture fundamentally different notions of data value, e.g., uncertainty or representativeness. Consequently, the effectiveness of strategies can vary substantially across datasets, models, and even AL cycles. Committing to a single strategy risks suboptimal performance, as no single strategy dominates throughout the entire AL process. We introduce REFINE, an ensemble AL method that combines multiple strategies without knowing in advance which will perform best. In each AL cycle, REFINE operates in two stages: (1) Progressive filtering iteratively refines the unlabeled pool by considering an ensemble of AL strategies, retaining promising candidates capturing different notions of value. (2) Coverage-based selection then chooses a final batch from this refined pool, ensuring all previously identified notions of value are accounted for. Extensive experiments across 6 classification datasets and 3 foundation models show that REFINE consistently outperforms individual strategies and existing ensemble methods. Notably, progressive filtering serves as a powerful preprocessing step that improves the performance of any individual AL strategy applied to the refined pool, which we demonstrate on an audio spectrogram classification use case. Finally, the ensemble of REFINE can be easily extended with upcoming state-of-the-art AL strategies.
Seeing Clearly, Reasoning Confidently: Plug-and-Play Remedies for Vision Language Model Blindness
Authors: Xin Hu; Haomiao Ni; Yunbei Zhang; Jihun Hamm; Zechen Li; Zhengming Ding
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in broad visual understanding, yet they remain challenged by object-centric reasoning on rare objects due to the scarcity of such instances in pretraining data. While prior efforts alleviate this issue by retrieving additional data or introducing stronger vision encoders, these methods are still computationally intensive during finetuning VLMs and don't fully exploit the original training data. In this paper, we introduce an efficient plug-and-play module that substantially improves VLMs' reasoning over rare objects by refining visual tokens and enriching input text prompts, without VLMs finetuning. Specifically, we propose to learn multi-modal class embeddings for rare objects by leveraging prior knowledge from vision foundation models and synonym-augmented text descriptions, compensating for limited training examples. These embeddings refine the visual tokens in VLMs through a lightweight attention-based enhancement module that improves fine-grained object details. In addition, we use the learned embeddings as object-aware detectors to generate informative hints, which are injected into the text prompts to help guide the VLM's attention toward relevant image regions. Experiments on two benchmarks show consistent and substantial gains for pretrained VLMs in rare object recognition and reasoning. Further analysis reveals how our method strengthens the VLM's ability to focus on and reason about rare objects. Code is available at https://github.com/XinHu98/seeing
Thinking with Drafts: Speculative Temporal Reasoning for Efficient Long Video Understanding
Authors: Pengfei Hu; Meng Cao; Yingyao Wang; Yi Wang; Jiahua Dong; Jun Song; Yu Cheng; Bo Zheng; Xiaodan Liang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Long video understanding is essential for human-like intelligence, enabling coherent perception and reasoning over extended temporal contexts. While the emerging thinking-with-frames paradigm--which alternates between global temporal reasoning and local frame examination--has advanced the reasoning capabilities of video multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), it suffers from a significant efficiency bottleneck due to the progressively growing and redundant multi-modal context. To address this, we propose SpecTemp, a reinforcement learning-based Speculative Temporal reasoning framework that decouples temporal perception from reasoning via a cooperative dual-model design. In SpecTemp, a lightweight draft MLLM rapidly explores and proposes salient frames from densely sampled temporal regions, while a powerful target MLLM focuses on temporal reasoning and verifies the draft's proposals, iteratively refining its attention until convergence. This design mirrors the collaborative pathways of the human brain, balancing efficiency with accuracy. To support training, we construct the SpecTemp-80K dataset, featuring synchronized dual-level annotations for coarse evidence spans and fine-grained frame-level evidence. Experiments across multiple video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that SpecTemp not only maintains competitive accuracy but also significantly accelerates inference compared with existing thinking-with-frames methods.
Dataset Distillation by Influence Matching
Authors: Haoru Tan; Wang Wang; Sitong Wu; Xiuzhe Wu; Yang-Tian Sun; Chirui Chang; Shaofeng Zhang; Xiaojuan Qi
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We revisit dataset distillation from an outcome-centric perspective. Rather than aligning process surrogates (per-step gradients or training trajectories), Influence Matching (Inf-Match) aligns the final outcome of training: it learns a compact synthetic set whose effect on the converged parameters matches that of the full dataset. Concretely, we introduce a fully differentiable, sample-level influence estimator that quantifies parameter shifts from adding or removing data, without time-consuming inverse-Hessian products or convexity assumptions. The estimator runs in linear time by unrolling the optimization dynamics and applying a first-order Taylor approximation. We then learn the synthetic set by minimizing the mismatch between its influence and that of the real dataset, yielding outcome alignment rather than heuristic process imitation. Inf-Match delivers the best accuracy across standard classification benchmarks. For instance, on Tiny-ImageNet (IPC=10), Inf-Match attains 31.5%, a +4.7% improvement over NCFM. Beyond classification, Inf-Match scales to vision-language distillation on Flickr30K, outperforming strong process-matching baselines. For instance, with 200 to 1000 synthetic samples, our method achieved a leading impressive average on image/text retrieval tasks, higher than NCFM by 2.5%. The code will be released via https://github.com/hrtan/infmatch.
Clinically-Grounded Counterfactual Reasoning for Medical Video Diagnosis
Authors: Jianzhe Gao; Churan Wang; Weiyi Zhang; Jianghua Li; Li-An Li; Wenguan Wang; Yixin Zhu; Yizhou Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Clinical video diagnosis, in which physicians assess dynamic tissue responses across procedural stages, is critical for detecting diseases such as cervical and colorectal cancers. Recent spatiotemporal models map visual progressions directly to diagnostic outputs, yet overlook two hallmarks of expert reasoning: clinically grounded diagnostic principles and hypothesis-driven counterfactual thinking. This gap leads existing methods to conflate causal pathological cues with non-pathological variations, thereby limiting their reliability in data-scarce settings. Here we show that explicitly modeling counterfactual tissue evolution, guided by clinical rules that encode expert diagnostic principles, substantially improves diagnostic robustness-emulating the hypothesis-driven reasoning clinicians employ in practice. We introduce MEDVCR, comprising a Counterfactual Generator (CG) that synthesizes hypothetical tissue transitions via diffusion modeling, a Counterfactual Representation Learning (CRL) module that enforces temporal consistency, pathological separability, and counterfactual alignment, and a Dual Diagnostic Prediction (DDP) strategy that combines video-level context with frame-level counterfactual contrast. On two representative tasks, MEDVCR achieves 93.0% Recall@1 on colposcopy (+10.2%) and 94.8% Average Precision (AP) on colonoscopy (+2.6%), outperforming all state-of-the-art (SOTA)  baselines. We anticipate that this counterfactual reasoning paradigm will open new avenues for vision-based clinical diagnostic tasks toward more transparent and interpretable decision support.
RGB-Event based Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: A Benchmark Dataset and An Asymmetric RWKV Fusion Framework
Authors: Xiao Wang; Haiyang Wang; Shiao Wang; Qiang Chen; Jiandong Jin; Haoyu Song; Bo Jiang; Chenglong Li
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing pedestrian attribute recognition methods are generally developed based on RGB frame cameras. However, these approaches are constrained by the limitations of RGB cameras, such as sensitivity to lighting conditions and motion blur, which hinder their performance. Furthermore, current attribute recognition primarily focuses on analyzing pedestrians' external appearance and clothing, lacking an exploration of emotional dimensions. In this paper, we revisit these issues and propose a novel multi-modal RGB-Event attribute recognition task by drawing inspiration from the advantages of event cameras in low-light, high-speed, and low-power consumption. Specifically, we introduce the first large-scale multi-modal pedestrian attribute recognition dataset, termed EventPAR, comprising 100K paired RGB-Event samples that cover 50 attributes related to both appearance and six human emotions, diverse scenes, and various seasons. By retraining and evaluating mainstream PAR models on this dataset, we establish a comprehensive benchmark and provide a solid foundation for future research in terms of data and algorithmic baselines. In addition, we propose a novel RWKV-based multi-modal pedestrian attribute recognition framework, featuring an RWKV visual encoder and an asymmetric RWKV fusion module. Extensive experiments are conducted on our proposed dataset as well as two simulated datasets (MARS-Attribute and DukeMTMC-VID-Attribute), achieving state-of-the-art results. The source code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.
Efficient Video Object Segmentation and Tracking with Recurrent Dynamic Submodel
Authors: Weidong Tang; Zhiyuan Liang; Xinyan Wan; Chen Zhu; Zhaopan Xu; Pengfei Zhou; Yan Song; Yang You; Wangbo Zhao
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large vision foundation models, such as SAM2, have achieved remarkable performance in video object segmentation and tracking (VOST). However, their effectiveness is hindered by significant computational overhead. While model pruning is a widely used strategy to address this issue, traditional static and input-agnostic pruning approaches fall short in managing the diverse and complex nature of video data effectively. A promising alternative is dynamic networks, yet they often struggle to translate theoretical computational reductions into actual acceleration. Furthermore, both static and dynamic approaches typically focus on visual features of individual frames while neglecting the temporal correlations between them, limiting their performance in handling complex video streams.To address these challenges, we propose Recurrent Dynamic Submodel (RDS), a dynamic architecture that adaptively selects submodel blocks for each frame. Specifically, it has a lightweight Prediction-aware Router (PAR), which leverages both the segmentation mask from the previous frame and the visual features of the current frame to make routing decisions, enabling the submodel to explicitly capture the temporal nature of video data. Additionally, to reduce the cost of adapting the dynamic submodel, we introduce an Importance-aware LoRA (I-LoRA), tuning parameters only in the most critical blocks. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves an optimal trade-off between performance and speed, requiring minimal trainable parameters and training data.
Zero-Shot Depth Completion with Vision-Language Model
Authors: Zhiqiang Yan; Yuan Wu; Gim Hee Lee
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in semantic understanding tasks under language guidance, yet their potential for geometric perception remains largely underexplored. This paper introduces the first VLM-based depth completion framework. With almost no architectural modifications, we propose a sparse depth injection mechanism that extends the capability of VLM toward 3D perception through three key aspects: visual tokenization, textual prompt, and textual supervision. At the visual input side, sparse depth is tokenized to provide absolute scale and accurate geometric cues, alleviating the scale and camera ambiguities of RGB-only inputs. At the textual input side, a binary mask derived from sparse depth serves as a prompt, instructing the model where to complete and where to preserve. At the supervision side, the model is fine-tuned using text labels generated from sparse depth, requiring no ground-truth depth. Benefiting from the strong semantic priors and cross-modal expressiveness of VLM, our framework achieves superior zero-shot performance across diverse sensors, sparsity levels, and scenes.
Towards Holistic Modeling for Video Frame Interpolation with Auto-regressive Diffusion Transformers
Authors: Xinyu Peng; Han Li; Yuyang Huang; Ziyang Zheng; Yaoming Wang; Xin Chen; Wenrui Dai; Chenglin Li; Junni Zou; Hongkai Xiong
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing video frame interpolation (VFI) methods often adopt a frame-centric approach, processing videos as independent short segments (e.g., triplets), which leads to temporal inconsistencies and motion artifacts. To overcome this, we propose a holistic, video-centric paradigm named Local Diffusion Forcing for Video Frame Interpolation (LDF-VFI). Our framework is built upon an auto-regressive diffusion transformer that models the entire video sequence to ensure long-range temporal coherence. To mitigate error accumulation inherent in auto-regressive generation, we introduce a novel skip-concatenate sampling strategy that effectively maintains temporal stability. Furthermore, LDF-VFI incorporates sparse, local attention and tiled VAE encoding, a combination that not only enables efficient processing of long sequences but also allows generalization to arbitrary spatial resolutions (e.g., 4K) at inference without retraining. An enhanced conditional VAE decoder, which leverages multi-scale features from the input video, further improves reconstruction fidelity. Empirically, LDF-VFI achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging VFI benchmarks, demonstrating superior per-frame quality and temporal consistency, especially in scenes with large motion.