GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
DENALI: A Dataset Enabling Non-Line-of-Sight Spatial Reasoning with Low-Cost LiDARs
Authors: Nikhil Behari; Diego Rivero; Luke Apostolides; Suman Ghosh; Paul Pu Liang; Ramesh Raskar
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Consumer LiDARs in mobile devices and robots typically output a single depth value per pixel. Yet internally, they record full time-resolved histograms containing direct and multi-bounce light returns; these multi-bounce returns encode rich non-line-of-sight (NLOS) cues that can enable perception of hidden objects in a scene. However, severe hardware limitations of consumer LiDARs make NLOS reconstruction with conventional methods difficult. In this work, we motivate a complementary direction: enabling NLOS perception with low-cost LiDARs through data-driven inference. We present DENALI, the first large-scale real-world dataset of space-time histograms from low-cost LiDARs capturing hidden objects. We capture time-resolved LiDAR histograms for 72,000 hidden-object scenes across diverse object shapes, positions, lighting conditions, and spatial resolutions. Using our dataset, we show that consumer LiDARs can enable accurate, data-driven NLOS perception. We further identify key scene and modeling factors that limit performance, as well as simulation-fidelity gaps that hinder current sim-to-real transfer, motivating future work toward scalable NLOS vision with consumer LiDARs.
VOLD: Reasoning Transfer from LLMs to Vision-Language Models via On-Policy Distillation
Authors: Walid Bousselham; Hilde Kuehne; Cordelia Schmid
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Training vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning remains a challenging task, i.a. due to the scarcity of high-quality image-text reasoning data. Conversely, text-based reasoning resources are abundant and scalable, but it is still an open question how to leveraging them for VLM reasoning. To address this problem, we propose VOLD, a framework to transfer reasoning capabilities from text-only teacher models to VLM student models. To this end, VOLD combines reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with on-policy distillation, which allows the student reasoning traces to be guided by the teacher model, resulting in a significant gain over using GRPO alone.We further show that a cold-start alignment is essential for an effective transfer during the online training phase in this scenario and that without sufficient distributional alignment between teacher and student, on-policy distillation fails to provide meaningful guidance.We evaluate VOLD across diverse benchmarks including MMMU-Pro, MathVision, MathVista, and LogicVista, showing that VOLD outperforms the baseline model significantly and improves over the state of the art by a margin.Our ablation shows the importance of a cold-start alignment via SFT for on-policy distillation with a text-only teacher
FoV-Net: Rotation-Invariant CAD B-rep Learning via Field-of-View Ray Casting
Authors: Matteo Ballegeer; Dries F. Benoit
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Learning directly from boundary representations (B-reps) has significantly advanced 3D CAD analysis. However, state-of-the-art B-rep learning methods rely on absolute coordinates and normals to encode global context, making them highly sensitive to rotations. Our experiments reveal that models achieving over 95% accuracy on aligned benchmarks can collapse to as low as 10% under arbitrary SO(3) rotations. To address this, we introduce FoV-Net, the first B-rep learning framework that captures both local surface geometry and global structural context in a rotation-invariant manner. Each face is represented by a Local Reference Frame (LRF) UV-grid that encodes its local surface geometry, and by Field-of-View (FoV) grids that capture the surrounding 3D context by casting rays and recording intersections with neighboring faces. Lightweight CNNs extract per-face features, which are propagated over the B-rep graph using a graph attention network. FoV-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on B-rep classification and segmentation benchmarks, demonstrating robustness to arbitrary rotations while also requiring less training data to achieve strong results.
Harmonic Canvas: Inversion-Free Editing for Visually-Guided Music Style Transfer
Authors: Yue Lei; Siqi Yang; Ting Zhong; Fan Zhou
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Music style transfer (MST) aims to reinterpret existing musical pieces in new stylistic forms while maintaining their melodic coherence. Conventional approaches conditioned on text or audio overlook the profoundly multimodal character of musical style. Visual ambience -- reflected in color, lighting, and composition -- encodes affective attributes that parallel timbre, rhythm, and harmony, which, however, remain underexplored in MST context. We introduce a flow-based, inversion-free framework for multimodal music style transfer that unifies textual and visual guidance. Our approach tackles two challenges: (1) capturing cross-modal semantics beyond language through a dual-encoder fusion module that merges CLIP- and ViT-derived embeddings, and (2) preserving melodic identity using a differentiable normalized chroma constraint that regulates pitch-class consistency along the generative flow. We reorganize and extend the MeLBench and MusicCaps collections into a genre-structured multimodal dataset to support style-aware analysis. Quantitative and perceptual evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves superior control, structural fidelity, and cross-modal expressiveness, underscoring the role of visual perception in music generation. Our demo is available online.
VideoCoF: Unified Video Editing with Temporal Reasoner
Authors: Xiangpeng Yang; Ji Xie; Yiyuan Yang; Yue Ma; Yan Huang; Min Xu; Qiang Wu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing video editing methods face a critical trade-off: expert models offer precision but rely on task-specific priors like masks, hindering unification; conversely, unified temporal in-context learning models are mask-free but lack explicit spatial cues, leading to weak instruction-to-region mapping and imprecise localization. To resolve this conflict, we propose VideoCoF, a novel Chain-of-Frames approach inspired by Chain-of-Thought reasoning. VideoCoF enforces a "seeing, reasoning, then editing" procedure by compelling the video diffusion model to first predict reasoning tokens (edit-region latents) before generating the target video tokens. This explicit reasoning step removes the need for user-provided masks while achieving precise instruction-to-region alignment and fine-grained video editing. Furthermore, we introduce a RoPE alignment strategy that leverages these reasoning tokens to ensure motion alignment and enable length extrapolation beyond the training duration. We demonstrate that with a minimal data cost of only 50k video pairs, VideoCoF achieves state-of-the-art performance on VideoCoF-Bench, validating the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Our code, weight, data are available at https://github.com/knightyxp/VideoCoF.
RE-VLM: Event-Augmented Vision-Language Model for Scene Understanding
Authors: Hanqing Liu; Mingjie Liu; Luoping Cui; Endian Lin; Donghong Jiang; Chuang Zhu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Conventional vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to interpret scenes captured under adverse conditions (e.g., low light, high dynamic range, or fast motion) because standard RGB images degrade in such environments. Event cameras provide a complementary modality: they asynchronously record per-pixel brightness changes with high temporal resolution and wide dynamic range, preserving motion cues where frames fail. We propose RE-VLM, the first dual-stream vision-language model that jointly leverages RGB images and event streams for robust scene understanding across both normal and challenging conditions. RE-VLM employs parallel RGB and event encoders together with a progressive training strategy that aligns heterogeneous visual features with language. To address the scarcity of RGB-Event-Text supervision, we further propose a graph-driven pipeline that converts synchronized RGB-Event streams into verifiable scene graphs, from which we synthesize captions and question-answer (QA) pairs. To develop and evaluate RE-VLM, we construct two datasets: PEOD-Chat, targeting illumination-challenged scenes, and RGBE-Chat, covering diverse scenarios. On captioning and VQA benchmarks, RE-VLM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art RGB-only and event-only models with comparable parameter counts, with particularly large gains under challenging conditions. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of event-augmented VLMs in achieving robust vision-language understanding across a wide range of real-world environments. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/bupt-ai-cz/RE-VLM.
Scaling-Aware Data Selection for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Systems
Authors: Tolga Dimlioglu; Nadine Chang; Maying Shen; Rafid Mahmood; Jose M. Alvarez
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large-scale deep learning models for physical AI applications depend on diverse training data collection efforts. These models and correspondingly, the training data, must address the different evaluation criteria necessary for the models to be deployable in real-world environments. Data selection policies can guide the development of the training set, but current frameworks do not account for the ambiguity in how data points affect different metrics. In this work, we propose Mixture Optimization via Scaling-Aware Iterative Collection (MOSAIC), a general data selection framework that operates by: (i) partitioning the dataset into domains; (ii) fitting neural scaling laws from each data domain to the evaluation metrics; and (iii) optimizing a data mixture by iteratively adding data from domains that maximize the change in metrics. We apply MOSAIC to autonomous driving (AD), where an End-to-End (E2E) planner model is evaluated on the Extended Predictive Driver Model Score (EPDMS), an aggregate of driving rule compliance metrics. Here, MOSAIC outperforms a diverse set of baselines on EPDMS with up to 80% less data.
Neural Dynamic GI: Random-Access Neural Compression for Temporal Lightmaps in Dynamic Lighting Environments
Authors: Jianhui Wu; Jian Zhou; Zhi Zhou; Zhangjin Huang; Chao Li
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: High-quality global illumination (GI) in real-time rendering is commonly achieved using precomputed lighting techniques, with lightmap as the standard choice. To support GI for static objects in dynamic lighting environments, multiple lightmaps at different lighting conditions need to be precomputed, which incurs substantial storage and memory overhead.To overcome this limitation, we propose Neural Dynamic GI (NDGI), a novel compression technique specifically designed for temporal lightmap sets. Our method utilizes multi-dimensional feature maps and lightweight neural networks to integrate the temporal information instead of storing multiple sets explicitly, which significantly reduces the storage size of lightmaps. Additionally, we introduce a block compression (BC) simulation strategy during the training process, which enables BC compression on the final generated feature maps and further improves the compression ratio. To enable efficient real-time decompression, we also integrate a virtual texturing (VT) system with our neural representation. Compared with prior methods, our approach achieves high-quality dynamic GI while maintaining remarkably low storage and memory requirements, with only modest real-time decompression overhead. To facilitate further research in this direction, we will release our temporal lightmap dataset precomputed in multiple scenes featuring diverse temporal variations.
A Faster Path to Continual Learning
Authors: Wei Li; Hangjie Yuan; Zixiang Zhao; Borui Kang; Ziwei Liu; Tao Feng
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Continual Learning (CL) aims to train neural networks on a dynamic stream of tasks without forgetting previously learned knowledge. Among optimization-based approaches, C-Flat has emerged as a promising solution due to its plug-and-play nature and its ability to encourage uniformly low-loss regions for both new and old tasks. However, C-Flat requires three additional gradient computations per iteration, imposing substantial overhead on the optimization process. In this work, we propose C-Flat Turbo, a faster yet stronger optimizer that significantly reduces the training cost. We show that the gradients associated with first-order flatness contain direction-invariant components relative to the proxy-model gradients, enabling us to skip redundant gradient computations in the perturbed ascent steps. Moreover, we observe that these flatness-promoting gradients progressively stabilize across tasks, which motivates a linear scheduling strategy with an adaptive trigger to allocate larger turbo steps for later tasks. Experiments show that C-Flat Turbo is 1.0x to 1.25x faster than C-Flat across a wide range of CL methods, while achieving comparable or even improved accuracy.
HAD: Heterogeneity-Aware Distillation for Lifelong Heterogeneous Learning
Authors: Xuerui Zhang; Xuehao Wang; Zhan Zhuang; Linglan Zhao; Ziyue Li; Xinmin Zhang; Zhihuan Song; Yu Zhang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Lifelong learning aims to preserve knowledge acquired from previous tasks while incorporating knowledge from a sequence of new tasks. However, most prior work explores only streams of homogeneous tasks (*e.g.*, only classification tasks) and neglects the scenario of learning across heterogeneous tasks that possess different structures of outputs. In this work, we formalize this broader setting as lifelong heterogeneous learning (LHL).Departing from conventional lifelong learning, the task sequence of LHL spans different task types, and the learner needs to retain heterogeneous knowledge for different output space structures.To instantiate the LHL, we focus on LHL in the context of dense prediction (LHL4DP), a realistic and challenging scenario.To this end, we propose the Heterogeneity-Aware Distillation (HAD) method, an exemplar-free approach that preserves previously gained heterogeneous knowledge by self-distillation in each training phase.The proposed HAD comprises two complementary components, including a distribution-balanced heterogeneity-aware distillation loss to alleviate the global imbalance of prediction distribution and a salience-guided heterogeneity-aware distillation loss that concentrates learning on informative edge pixels extracted with the Sobel operator.Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed HAD method significantly outperforms existing methods in this new scenario.
PaQ-DETR: Learning Pattern and Quality-Aware Dynamic Queries for Object Detection
Authors: Zhengjian Kang; Jun Zhuang; Kangtong Mo; Qi Chen; Rui Liu; Ye Zhang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Detection Transformer (DETR) has redefined object detection by casting it as a set prediction task within an end-to-end framework. Despite its elegance, DETR and its variants still rely on fixed learnable queries and suffer from severe query utilization imbalance, which limits adaptability and leaves the model capacity underused. We propose PaQ-DETR (Pattern and Quality-Aware DETR), a unified framework that enhances both query adaptivity and supervision balance. It learns a compact set of shared latent patterns capturing global semantics and dynamically generates image-specific queries through content-conditioned weighting. In parallel, a quality-aware one-to-many assignment strategy adaptively selects positive samples based on localization-classification consistency, enriching supervision and promoting balanced query optimization. Experiments on COCO, CityScapes, and other benchmarks show consistent gains of 1.5%-4.2% mAP across DETR backbones, including ResNet and Swin-Transformer. Beyond accuracy improvement, our method provides interpretable insights into how dynamic patterns cluster semantically across object categories.
VCU-Bridge: Hierarchical Visual Connotation Understanding via Semantic Bridging
Authors: Ming Zhong; Yuanlei Wang; Liuzhou Zhang; Ruichuan An; Renrui Zhang; Hao Liang; Ming Lu; Ying Shen; Wentao Zhang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel on benchmarks, their processing paradigm differs from the human ability to integrate visual information. Unlike humans who naturally bridge details and high-level concepts, models tend to treat these elements in isolation. Prevailing evaluation protocols often decouple low-level perception from high-level reasoning, overlooking their semantic and causal dependencies, which yields non-diagnostic results and obscures performance bottlenecks. We present VCU-Bridge, a framework that operationalizes a human-like hierarchy of visual connotation understanding: multi-level reasoning that advances from foundational perception through semantic bridging to abstract connotation, with an explicit evidence-to-inference trace from concrete cues to abstract conclusions. Building on this framework, we construct HVCU-Bench, a benchmark for hierarchical visual connotation understanding with explicit, level-wise diagnostics. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate a consistent decline in performance as reasoning progresses to higher levels. We further develop a data generation pipeline for instruction tuning guided by Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and show that strengthening low-level capabilities yields measurable gains at higher levels. Interestingly, it not only improves on HVCU-Bench but also brings benefits on general benchmarks (average +2.53%), especially with substantial gains on MMStar (+7.26%), demonstrating the significance of the hierarchical thinking pattern and its effectiveness in enhancing MLLM capabilities.
Cross-Modal Emotion Transfer for Emotion Editing in Talking Face Video
Authors: Chanhyuk Choi; Taesoo Kim; Donggyu Lee; Siyeol Jung; Taehwan Kim
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Talking face generation has gained significant attention as a core application of generative models.To enhance the expressiveness and realism of synthesized videos, emotion editing in talking face video plays a crucial role.However, existing approaches often limit expressive flexibility and struggle to generate extended emotions.Label-based methods represent emotions with discrete categories, which fail to capture a wide range of emotions.Audio-based methods can leverage emotionally rich speech signals--and even benefit from expressive text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis--but they fail to express the target emotions because emotions and linguistic contents are entangled in emotional speeches.Images-based methods, on the other hand, rely on target reference images to guide emotion transfer, yet they require high-quality frontal views and face challenges in acquiring reference data for extended emotions (e.g., sarcasm).To address these limitations, we propose Cross-Modal Emotion Transfer (C-MET), a novel approach that generates facial expressions based on speeches by modeling emotion semantic vectors between speech and visual feature spaces.C-MET leverages a large-scale pretrained audio encoder and a disentangled facial expression encoder to learn emotion semantic vectors that represent the difference between two different emotional embeddings across modalities.Extensive experiments on the MEAD and CREMA-D datasets demonstrate that our method improves emotion accuracy by 14% over state-of-the-art methods, while generating expressive talking face videos--even for unseen extended emotions. Code, checkpoint, and demo are available at https://chanhyeok-choi.github.io/C-MET/.
Seeing What Matters: Visual Preference Policy Optimization for Visual Generation
Authors: Ziqi Ni; Yuanzhi Liang; Rui Li; Yi Zhou; Haibin Huang; Chi Zhang; Xuelong Li
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful tool for post-training visual generative models, with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) increasingly used to align generators with human preferences. However, existing GRPO pipelines rely on a single scalar reward per sample, treating each image or video as a holistic entity and ignoring the rich spatial and temporal structure of visual content. This coarse supervision hinders the correction of localized artifacts and the modeling of fine-grained perceptual cues. We introduce Visual Preference Policy Optimization (ViPO), a GRPO variant that lifts scalar feedback into structured, pixel-level advantages. ViPO employs a Perceptual Structuring Module that uses pretrained vision backbones to construct spatially and temporally aware advantage maps, redistributing optimization pressure toward perceptually important regions while preserving the stability of standard GRPO. Across both image and video benchmarks, ViPO consistently outperforms vanilla GRPO, improving in-domain alignment with human-preference rewards and enhancing generalization on out-of-domain evaluations. The method is architecture-agnostic, lightweight, and fully compatible with existing GRPO training pipelines, providing a more expressive and informative learning signal for visual generation.
Harnessing the Power of Foundation Models for Accurate Material Classification
Authors: Qingran Lin; Fengwei Yang; Chaolun Zhu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Material classification has emerged as a critical task in computer vision and graphics, supporting the assignment of accurate material properties to a wide range of digital and real-world applications. While traditionally framed as an image classification task, this domain faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of annotated data, limiting the accuracy and generalizability of trained models. Recent advances in vision-language foundation models (VLMs) offer promising avenues to address these issues, yet existing solutions leveraging these models still exhibit unsatisfying results in material recognition tasks. In this work, we propose a novel framework that effectively harnesses foundation models to overcome data limitations and enhance classification accuracy. Our method integrates two key innovations:(a) a robust image generation and auto-labeling pipeline that creates a diverse and high-quality training dataset with material-centric images, and automatically assigns labels by fusing object semantics and material attributes in text prompts; (b) a prior incorporation strategy to distill information from VLMs, combined with a joint fine-tuning method that optimizes a pre-trained vision foundation model alongside VLM-derived priors, preserving broad generalizability while adapting to material-specific features.Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements on multiple datasets. We show that our synthetic dataset effectively captures the characteristics of real world materials, and the integration of priors from vision-language models significantly enhances the final performance.