GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
UCAN: Unified Convolutional Attention Network for Expansive Receptive Fields in Lightweight Super-Resolution
Authors: Cao Thien Tan; Phan Thi Thu Trang; Do Nghiem Duc; Ho Ngoc Anh; Hanyang Zhuang; Nguyen Duc Dung
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Hybrid CNN-Transformer architectures achieve strong results in image super-resolution, but scaling attention windows or convolution kernels significantly increases computational cost, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. We present UCAN, a lightweight network that unifies convolution and attention to expand the effective receptive field efficiently. UCAN combines window-based spatial attention with a Hedgehog Attention mechanism to model both local texture and long-range dependencies, and introduces a distillation-based large-kernel module to preserve high-frequency structure without heavy computation. In addition, we employ cross-layer parameter sharing to further reduce complexity. On Manga109 (4x), UCAN-L achieves 31.63 dB PSNR with only 48.4G MACs, surpassing recent lightweight models. On BSDS100, UCAN attains 27.79 dB, outperforming methods with significantly larger models. Extensive experiments show that UCAN achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, making it well-suited for practical high-resolution image restoration.
Splat-Based Metal Artifact Reduction in Cone-Beam CT via Compact Attenuation Modeling
Authors: Kiseok Choi; Jaemin Cho; Inchul Kim; Min H. Kim
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: X-ray computed tomography (CT) suffers from severe metal artifacts when high-attenuation objects such as dental fillings or orthopedic implants are present. These artifacts originate from the polychromatic nature of X-rays, where attenuation varies strongly with photon energy and material composition, breaking the monochromatic assumption used by conventional reconstruction algorithms. Recent neural rendering approaches attempt to address this mismatch through differentiable polychromatic projection models, but they still struggle with smoothness bias, loss of fine structures, and prohibitive computation when extended to large-scale cone-beam CT. We introduce a splat-based metal artifact reduction framework that incorporates a physically grounded polychromatic forward model into a continuous Gaussian representation for cone-beam CT. Each Gaussian encodes the energy-dependent attenuation of the underlying material using a compact material parameterization, which enables efficient joint optimization of geometric and material properties without relying on a metal mask. This compact attenuation formulation captures the essential variation across biological tissues and metallic implants, allowing our model to explain metal-induced nonlinearity while preserving high-frequency structure. Experiments on simulated and real cone-beam CT scans show that our method converges significantly faster and suppresses metal artifacts more effectively than existing reconstruction and neural field-based approaches.
Measuring the (Un)Faithfulness of Concept-Based Explanations
Authors: Shubham Kumar; Narendra Ahuja
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Deep vision models perform input-output computations that are hard to interpret. Concept-based explanation methods (CBEMs) increase interpretability by re-expressing parts of the model with human-understandable semantic units, or concepts. Checking if the derived explanations are faithful--that is, they represent the model's internal computation--requires a surrogate that combines concepts to compute the output. Simplifications made for interpretability inevitably reduce faithfulness, resulting in a tradeoff between the two. State-of-the-art unsupervised CBEMs (U-CBEMs) are seemingly more interpretable, while also being more faithful to the model. However, we observe that the reported improvement in faithfulness artificially results from either (1) using overly complex surrogates, which introduces an unmeasured cost to the explanation's interpretability, or (2) relying on deletion-based approaches that, as we demonstrate, do not properly measure faithfulness. We propose Surrogate Faithfulness (SURF), which (1) replaces prior complex surrogates with a simple, linear surrogate that measures faithfulness without changing the explanation's interpretability and (2) introduces well-motivated metrics that assess loss across all output classes, not just the predicted class. We validate SURF with a measure-over-measure study by proposing a simple sanity check--explanations with random concepts should be less faithful-which prior surrogates fail. SURF enables the first reliable faithfulness benchmark of U-CBEMs, revealing that many visually compelling U-CBEMs are not faithful. Code is released.
Preserving Source Video Realism: High-Fidelity Face Swapping for Cinematic Quality
Authors: Zekai Luo; Zongze Du; Zhouhang Zhu; Hao Zhong; Muzhi Zhu; Wen Wang; Yuling Xi; Chenchen Jing; Hao Chen; Chunhua Shen
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Video face swapping is crucial in film and entertainment production, where achieving high fidelity and temporal consistency over long and complex video sequences remains a significant challenge. Inspired by recent advances in reference-guided image editing, we explore whether rich visual attributes from source videos can be similarly leveraged to enhance both fidelity and temporal coherence in video face swapping. Building on this insight, this work presents LivingSwap, the first video reference guided face swapping model. Our approach employs keyframes as conditioning signals to inject the target identity, enabling flexible and controllable editing. By combining keyframe conditioning with video reference guidance, the model performs temporal stitching to ensure stable identity preservation and high-fidelity reconstruction across long video sequences. To address the scarcity of data for reference-guided training, we construct a paired face-swapping dataset, Face2Face, and further reverse the data pairs to ensure reliable ground-truth supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, seamlessly integrating the target identity with the source video's expressions, lighting, and motion, while significantly reducing manual effort in production workflows. Project webpage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/LivingSwap
TRANSPORTER: Transferring Visual Semantics from VLM Manifolds
Authors: Alexandros Stergiou
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: How do video understanding models acquire their answers? Although current Vision Language Models (VLMs) reason over complex scenes with diverse objects, action performances, and scene dynamics, understanding and controlling their internal processes remains an open challenge. Motivated by recent advancements in text-to-video (T2V) generative models, this paper introduces a logits-to-video (L2V) task alongside a model-independent approach, TRANSPORTER, to generate videos that capture the underlying rules behind VLMs' predictions. Given the high-visual-fidelity produced by T2V models, TRANSPORTER learns an optimal transport coupling to VLM's high-semantic embedding spaces. In turn, logit scores define embedding directions for conditional video generation. TRANSPORTER generates videos that reflect caption changes over diverse object attributes, action adverbs, and scene context. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations across VLMs demonstrate that L2V can provide a fidelity-rich, novel direction for model interpretability that has not been previously explored.
BALM: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Balanced Multimodal Learning under Imbalanced Missing Rates
Authors: Phuong-Anh Nguyen; Tien Anh Pham; Duc-Trong Le; Cam-Van Thi Nguyen
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Learning from multiple modalities often suffers from imbalance, where information-rich modalities dominate optimization while weaker or partially missing modalities contribute less. This imbalance becomes severe in realistic settings with imbalanced missing modalities (IMR), where each modality is absent with different probabilities, distorting representation learning and gradient dynamics. We revisit this issue from a training-process perspective and propose BALM, a model-agnostic plug-in framework to achieve balanced multimodal learning under IMR. The framework consists of two complementary modules. The Feature Calibration Module (FCM) operates at the representation level, recalibrating unimodal features through global contextual information to build a shared representation basis across heterogeneous missing patterns. The Gradient Rebalancing Module (GRM) works at the optimization level, equalizing learning dynamics across modalities by modulating gradient magnitudes and directions from distributional and spatial perspectives. BALM can be seamlessly integrated into diverse backbones, including multimodal emotion recognition (MER) models, without altering their architectures. Experimental results across multiple MER benchmarks confirm that BALM consistently enhances robustness and improves performance under diverse missing and imbalance settings.
PerformRecast: Expression and Head Pose Disentanglement for Portrait Video Editing
Authors: Jiadong Liang; Bojun Xiong; Jie Tian; Hua Li; Xiao Long; Yong Zheng; Huan Fu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: This paper primarily investigates the task of expression-only portrait video performance editing based on a driving video, which plays a crucial role in animation and film industries. Most existing research mainly focuses on portrait animation, which aims to animate a static portrait image according to the facial motion from the driving video. As a consequence, it remains challenging for them to disentangle the facial expression from head pose rotation and thus lack the ability to edit facial expression independently. In this paper, we propose PerformRecast, a versatile expression-only video editing method which is dedicated to recast the performance in existing film and animation. The key insight of our method comes from the characteristics of 3D Morphable Face Model (3DMM), which models the face identity, facial expression and head pose of 3D face mesh with separate parameters. Therefore, we improve the keypoints transformation formula in previous methods to make it more consistent with 3DMM model, which achieves a better disentanglement and provides users with much more fine-grained control. Furthermore, to avoid the misalignment around the boundary of face in generated results, we decouple the facial and non-facial regions of input portrait images and pre-train a teacher model to provide separate supervision for them. Extensive experiments show that our method produces high-quality results which are more faithful to the driving video, outperforming existing methods in both controllability and efficiency. Our code, data and trained models are available at https://youku-aigc.github.io/PerformRecast.
4D Primitive-Mache: Glueing Primitives for Persistent 4D Scene Reconstruction
Authors: Kirill Mazur; Marwan Taher; Andrew J. Davison
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We present 4DPM, a dynamic reconstruction system that receives a casual monocular RGB video as input, and outputs a complete and persistent reconstruction of the scene.  In other words, we reconstruct not only the currently visible parts of the scene, but also all previously viewed parts, which enables replaying the complete reconstruction across all timesteps. Our method decomposes the scene into a set of rigid 3D primitives, which are assumed to be moving through the scene. Using estimated dense 2D correspondences, we jointly infer the rigid motion of these primitives through an optimisation pipeline, yielding a 4D reconstruction of the scene, i.e. providing 3D geometry dynamically moving through time. To achieve this, we also introduce a mechanism to extrapolate motion for objects that become invisible, employing motion-grouping techniques to maintain continuity. The resulting system enables 4D spatio-temporal awareness, offering capabilities such as replayable 3D reconstructions of articulated objects through time, multi-object scanning, and object permanence. On object scanning and multi-object datasets, our system significantly outperforms existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Animatable 3D Avatars with Cloth Dynamics from a Single Image
Authors: Joohyun Kwon; Geonhee Sim; Gyeongsik Moon
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing single-image 3D human avatar methods primarily rely on rigid joint transformations, limiting their ability to model realistic cloth dynamics. We present DynaAvatar, a zero-shot framework that reconstructs animatable 3D human avatars with motion-dependent cloth dynamics from a single image. Trained on large-scale multi-person motion datasets, DynaAvatar employs a Transformer-based feed-forward architecture that directly predicts dynamic 3D Gaussian deformations without subject-specific optimization. To overcome the scarcity of dynamic captures, we introduce a static-to-dynamic knowledge transfer strategy: a Transformer pretrained on large-scale static captures provides strong geometric and appearance priors, which are efficiently adapted to motion-dependent deformations through lightweight LoRA fine-tuning on dynamic captures. We further propose the DynaFlow loss, an optical flow-guided objective that provides reliable motion-direction geometric cues for cloth dynamics in rendered space. Finally, we reannotate the missing or noisy SMPL-X fittings in existing dynamic capture datasets, as most public dynamic capture datasets contain incomplete or unreliable fittings that are unsuitable for training high-quality 3D avatar reconstruction models. Experiments demonstrate that DynaAvatar produces visually rich and generalizable animations, outperforming prior methods. Code, pretrained models, and reannotations will be released.
HandDreamer: Zero-Shot Text to 3D Hand Model Generation using Corrective Hand Shape Guidance
Authors: Green Rosh; Prateek Kukreja; Vishakha SR; Pawan Prasad B H
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: The emergence of virtual reality has necessitated the generation of detailed and customizable 3D hand models for interaction in the virtual world. However, the current methods for 3D hand model generation are both expensive and cumbersome, offering very little customizability to the users. While recent advancements in zero-shot text-to-3D synthesis have enabled the generation of diverse and customizable 3D models using Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), they do not generalize very well to 3D hand model generation, resulting in unnatural hand structures, view-inconsistencies and loss of details. To address these limitations, we introduce HandDreamer, the first method for zero-shot 3D hand model generation from text prompts. Our findings suggest that view-inconsistencies in SDS is primarily caused due to the ambiguity in the probability landscape described by the text prompt, resulting in similar views converging to different modes of the distribution. This is particularly aggravated for hands due to the large variations in articulations and poses. To alleviate this, we propose to use MANO hand model based initialization and a hand skeleton guided diffusion process to provide a strong prior for the hand structure and to ensure view and pose consistency. Further, we propose a novel corrective hand shape guidance loss to ensure that all the views of the 3D hand model converges to view-consistent modes, without leading to geometric distortions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art methods, paving a new way forward in 3D hand model generation.
Learning Latent Proxies for Controllable Single-Image Relighting
Authors: Haoze Zheng; Zihao Wang; Xianfeng Wu; Yajing Bai; Yexin Liu; Yun Li; Xiaogang Xu; Harry Yang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Single-image relighting is highly under-constrained: small illumination changes can produce large, nonlinear variations in shading, shadows, and specularities, while geometry and materials remain unobserved. Existing diffusion-based approaches either rely on intrinsic- or G-buffer-based pipelines that require dense and fragile supervision, or operate purely in latent space without physical grounding, making fine-grained control of direction, intensity, and color unreliable. We observe that full intrinsic decomposition is unnecessary for accurate relighting. Instead, sparse but physically meaningful cues--indicating where illumination should change and how materials should respond--are sufficient to guide a diffusion model. Based on this insight, we introduce LightCtrl that integrates minimal physical priors at two levels: a few-shot latent proxy encoder that extracts compact material-geometry cues from limited PBR supervision, and a lighting-aware mask that identifies illumination-sensitive regions and steers the denoiser toward shading-relevant pixels. To compensate for scarce PBR data, we refine the proxy branch using a DPO-based objective that aligns predicted cues with perceptually preferred relighting behavior. We further present ScaLight, a large-scale object-level dataset with systematically varied illumination and complete camera-light metadata, enabling physically consistent and controllable training. Across object- and scene-level benchmarks, our method achieves photometrically faithful relighting with accurate continuous control, surpassing prior diffusion- and intrinsic-based baselines, including gains of up to +2.4 dB PSNR and 35% lower RMSE under controlled lighting shifts.
Edit-aware RAW reconstruction
Authors: Abhijith Punnappurath; Luxi Zhao; Ke Zhao; Hue Nguyen; Radek Grzeszczuk; Michael S. Brown
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Users frequently edit camera images post-capture to achieve their preferred photofinishing style. While editing in the RAW domain provides greater accuracy and flexibility, most edits are performed on the camera's display-referred output (e.g., 8-bit sRGB JPEG) since RAW images are rarely stored. Existing RAW reconstruction methods can recover RAW data from sRGB images, but these approaches are typically optimized for pixel-wise RAW reconstruction fidelity and tend to degrade under diverse rendering styles and editing operations. We introduce a plug-and-play, edit-aware loss function that can be integrated into any existing RAW reconstruction framework to make the recovered RAWs more robust to different rendering styles and edits. Our loss formulation incorporates a modular, differentiable image signal processor (ISP) that simulates realistic photofinishing pipelines with tunable parameters. During training, parameters for each ISP module are randomly sampled from carefully designed distributions that model practical variations in real camera processing. The loss is then computed in sRGB space between ground-truth and reconstructed RAWs rendered through this differentiable ISP. Incorporating our loss improves sRGB reconstruction quality by up to 1.5-2 dB PSNR across various editing conditions. Moreover, when applied to metadata-assisted RAW reconstruction methods, our approach enables fine-tuning for target edits, yielding further gains. Since photographic editing is the primary motivation for RAW reconstruction in consumer imaging, our simple yet effective loss function provides a general mechanism for enhancing edit fidelity and rendering flexibility across existing methods.
View-Aware Semantic Alignment for Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification
Authors: Quan Zhang; Zeqiang Cai; Peiming Zhao; Jingze Wu; Cailun Wu; Hongbo Chen; Jianhuang Lai
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification (AGPReID) remains highly challenging due to drastic viewpoint variations between drones and fixed cameras. Existing methods typically follow a view-invariant paradigm, aligning shared features across views to achieve robustness. However, view-invariant inherently enforces part-level alignment, which ignores view-specific cues and discriminative identity information. To this end, this work proposes ViSA (View-aware Semantic Alignment), a view-aware framework that achieves cross-view semantic consistency containing an Expert-driven Token Generation Module (ETGM) and a Dual-branch Local Fusion Module (DLFM). Technically, the former constructs a set of view-aware experts to generate adaptive semantic queries that perceive viewpoint-specific patterns, while the latter leverages graph reasoning to extract and align local regions responsive to different experts under varying viewpoints. Extensive experiments on three large-scale AGPReID benchmarks including AG-ReID.v2, CARGO and LAGPeR demonstrate that ViSA consistently achieves superior performance, with a notable 10.06% mAP improvement on the challenging CARGO cross-view protocol. The code will be available.
ChangeBridge: Spatiotemporal Image Generation with Multimodal Controls for Remote Senisng
Authors: Zhenghui Zhao; Chen Wu; Xiangyong Cao; Di Wang; Hongruixuan Chen; Datao Tang; Liangpei Zhang; Zhuo Zheng
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Spatiotemporal image generation is a highly meaningful task, which can generate future scenes conditioned on given observations. However, existing change generation methods can only handle event-driven changes (e.g., new buildings) and fail to model cross-temporal variations (e.g., seasonal shifts). In this work, we propose ChangeBridge, a conditional spatiotemporal image generation model for remote sensing. Given pre-event images and multimodal event controls, ChangeBridge generates post-event scenes that are both spatially and temporally coherent. The core idea is a drift-asynchronous diffusion bridge. Specifically, it consists of three main modules: a) Composed Bridge Initialization, which replaces noise initialization. It starts the diffusion from a composed pre-event state, modeling a diffusion bridge process. b) Asynchronous Drift Diffusion, which uses a pixel-wise drift map, assigning different drift magnitudes to event and temporal evolution. This enables differentiated generation during the pre-to-post transition. c) Drift-Aware Denoising, which embeds the drift map into the denoising network, guiding drift-aware reconstruction. Experiments show that ChangeBridge can generate better cross-spatiotemporal aligned scenarios compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ChangeBridge shows great potential for land-use planning and as a data generation engine for a series of change detection tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenghuizhao/ChangeBridge