GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
IF-Prune: Information-Flow Guided Token Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Models
Authors: Guohao Sun; Yufei Wang; Sizhuo Ma; Yuege Xie; Yuting Cheng; Zhiqiang Tao; Jian Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) with dynamic resolution vision encoders achieve strong performance, but face significant efficiency challenges due to long input sequences. A common approach is to assess the importance of tokens and prune those that are less informative. Recent methods utilizing a small VLM to provide the importance map of visual tokens have outperformed existing rule-based and similarity-driven pruning approaches, particularly under high pruning ratios. However, directly using the small VLM remains unreliable, as it utilizes the aggregated visual attention weights as importance score, which can lead to noisy guidance if the generated tokens are incorrect.To address this, we invert the approach by having it detect non-informative visual tokens according to the user's input query. By adding a variational information bottleneck in the small VLM, we can approximate the entropy of each visual token as pruning guidance. Such a posteriori-guided pruning method allows the large VLM to retain its reasoning capacity with improved efficiency. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. With only 5% of visual tokens retained, the large VLM preserves 95% of its original performance, outperforming the state of the art by 8%.
Curvature-Aware Zeroth-Order Optimization for Memory-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation
Authors: Junming Zhang; Shuyu Yin; Peilin Liu; Rendong Ying; Fei Wen
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to enhance the cross-domain performance of pre-trained models by adapting to unlabeled test data.While most existing TTA methods rely on backpropagation (BP) for finetuning, BP-free methods such as zeroth-order (ZO) methods are more desired in practical on-device scenarios. ZO methods rely only on forward computation, which can largely reduce the complexity and memory overhead of on-device deployment.However, ZO methods suffer from much higher variance compared with first-order methods in estimating the gradient.To address this, we propose an improved ZO method to substantially boost the performance of ZO optimization based TTA.First, we provide an observation to reveal the persistent low-rank Hessian structure of the loss during the adaptation process. Based on this insight, we then propose a loss-landscape curvature-aware zeroth-order (CAZO) method, which leverages a sliding-average estimation of the diagonal Hessian to construct a covariance matrix for anisotropic perturbation sampling. CAZO operates by freezing pretrained weights and optimizing minimal adapter parameters via forward-only passes based gradient estimation, which can substantially reduce the memory overhead compared to BP-based methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAZO significantly outperforms existing TTA methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while maintaining an excellent balance between accuracy and memory efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Hollyming/CAZO.
Hidden Monotonicity: Explaining Deep Neural Networks via their DC Decomposition
Authors: Jakob Paul Zimmermann; Georg Loho
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: It has been demonstrated in various contexts that monotonicity leads to better explainability in neural networks. However, not every function can be well approximated by a monotone neural network.We demonstrate that monotonicity can still be used in two ways to boost explainability. First, we use an adaptation of the decomposition of a trained ReLU network into two monotone and convex parts, thereby overcoming numerical obstacles from an inherent blowup of the weights in this procedure. Our proposed saliency methods -- SplitCAM and SplitLRP --improve onstate of the art results on both VGG16 and Resnet18 networks on ImageNet-S across all Quantus saliency metric categories.Second, we exhibit that training a model as the difference between two monotone neural networks results in a system with strong self-explainability properties.
VL-RouterBench: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Model Routing
Authors: Zhehao Huang; Baijiong Lin; Jingyuan Zhang; Jingying Wang; Yuhang Liu; Ning Lu; Tao Li; Xiaolin Huang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-model routing has evolved from an engineering technique into essential infrastructure, yet existing work lacks a systematic, reproducible benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs). We present VL-RouterBench to assess the overall capability of VLM routing systems systematically. The benchmark is grounded in raw inference and scoring logs from VLMs and constructs quality and cost matrices over sample-model pairs. In scale, VL-RouterBench covers 14 datasets across 3 task groups, totaling 30,540 samples, and includes 15 open-source models and 2 API models, yielding 519,180 sample-model pairs and a total input-output token volume of 34,494,977. The evaluation protocol jointly measures average accuracy, average cost, and throughput, and builds a ranking score from the harmonic mean of normalized cost and accuracy to enable comparison across router configurations and cost budgets. On this benchmark, we evaluate 10 routing methods and baselines and observe a significant routability gain, while the best current routers still show a clear gap to the ideal Oracle, indicating considerable room for improvement in router architecture through finer visual cues and modeling of textual structure. We open-source the complete data construction and evaluation toolchain to promote comparability, reproducibility, and practical deployment in multimodal routing research.
RevINN: An End-to-End Invertible Neural Network for Reversible Adversarial Examples Generation
Authors: Jielun Huang; Chi-Man Pun; Guoheng Huang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that Reversible Adversarial Examples (RAE) can mislead unauthorized deep neural networks while remaining usable for authorized users, effectively preventing image data leakage. Existing RAE methods rely on reversibly embedding perturbation information into the original adversarial examples to enable restoration. However, this two-stage process often results in RAEs with inferior attack effectiveness and visual quality compared to the original versions. To solve these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end Invertible Neural Network for Reversible Adversarial Examples Generation (RevINN), which directly generates RAEs in one stage by scrambling the intrinsic frequency information of images. Specifically, our RevINN consists of the Cross-Frequency Modulation Attack (CFMA) module and the High-Frequency Perturbation Enhancement (HFPE) module. CFMA selectively exchanges discriminative information between low- and high-frequency wavelet components to achieve adversariality. To fully alter high-frequency semantics, HFPE innovatively employs a tri-branch structure for fine-grained modulation among high-frequency subbands, enhancing perturbation strength. Finally, the modified components are recomposed into RAEs via the inverse wavelet transform. Our RevINN is optimized with adversarial, perceptual, and invertible losses, and can restore images based on the reversibility of the wavelet operations and network modules. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RevINN achieves state-of-the-art RAE generation quality. The code is available at: https://github.com/WongJaylen/RevINN.
BiomedCCPL: Causal Conditional Prompt Learning for Biomedical Vision-Language Models
Authors: Xueliang Cui; Juncai Zhang; Jiacheng Hou; Dan Lu; Hao Zhang; Ruxin Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for adapting to downstream biomedical tasks with limited training samples. However, their generalization to unseen classes within the same dataset remains limited, as the image-text alignment semantics often rely on spurious cues present in seen classes that do not transfer. To tackle this, we propose BiomedCCPL (Causal Conditional Prompt Learning), a framework that uses VGAP (Visual Grounder with Adaptive Prototype) to generate image-conditional prompts from multi-scale adaptive prototypes and employs SCD (Synergistic Causal Disentanglement) to regularize the generation of image-conditional prompts. Guided by insights from a causal analysis of generalization to unseen classes, SCD leverages multiple synergistic learning objectives to perform front-door adjustment, ensuring that the dynamically generated image-conditional prompts focus on underlying diagnostic image features shared across seen and unseen classes. Experiments on 11 datasets across 9 modalities demonstrate that BiomedCCPL effectively enhances the model's data efficiency and generalization ability. In particular, on the Base-to-Novel task, BiomedCCPL achieves an average HM of 79.98%, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 6.45%. Code is available at https://github.com/burgers0708/BiomedCCPL.
Neural Gabor Splatting: Enhanced Gaussian Splatting with Neural Gabor for High-frequency Surface Reconstruction
Authors: Haato Watanabe; Nobuyuki Umetani
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as a powerful approach for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Its explicit representation with Gaussian primitives enables fast training, real-time rendering, and convenient post-processing such as editing and surface reconstruction. However, 3DGS suffers from a critical drawback: the number of primitives grows drastically for scenes with high-frequency appearance details, since each primitive can represent only a single color, requiring multiple primitives for every sharp color transition.To overcome this limitation, we propose Neural Gabor splatting, which augments each Gaussian primitive with a lightweight multi-layer perceptron (MLP) that models a wide range of color variations within a single primitive. To further control primitive numbers, we introduce a frequency-aware densification strategy that selects mismatch primitives for pruning and cloning based on frequency energy.Our method achieves accurate reconstruction of challenging high-frequency surfaces. We demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on both standard benchmarks, such as Mip-NerRF360 and high-frequency surface datasets (e.g., checkered patterns), supported by comprehensive ablation studies.
RaUF: Learning the Spatial Uncertainty Field of Radar
Authors: Shengpeng Wang; Kuangyu Wang; Wei Wang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Millimeter-wave radar offers unique advantages in adverse weather but suffers from low spatial fidelity, severe azimuth ambiguity, and clutter-induced spurious returns. Existing methods mainly focus on improving spatial perception effectiveness via coarse-to-fine cross-modal supervision, yet often overlook the ambiguous feature-to-label mapping, which may lead to ill-posed geometric inference and pose fundamental challenges to downstream perception tasks. In this work, we propose RaUF, a spatial uncertainty field learning framework that models radar measurements through their physically grounded anisotropic properties. To resolve conflicting feature-to-label mapping, we design an anisotropic probabilistic model that learns fine-grained uncertainty. To further enhance reliability, we propose a Bidirectional Domain Attention mechanism that exploits the mutual complementarity between spatial structure and Doppler consistency, effectively suppressing spurious or multipath-induced reflections. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and real-world datasets demonstrate that RaUF delivers highly reliable spatial detections with well-calibrated uncertainty. Moreover, downstream case studies further validate the enhanced reliability and scalability of RaUF under challenging real-world driving scenarios. Our project will be available at https://shengpeng.wang/rauf.
Attention-aware Inference Optimizations for Large Vision-Language Models with Memory-efficient Decoding
Authors: Fatih Ilhan; Gaowen Liu; Ramana Rao Kompella; Selim Furkan Tekin; Tiansheng Huang; Zachary Yahn; Yichang Xu; Ling Liu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in multi-modal reasoning, but their inference time efficiency remains a significant challenge due to the memory overhead during decoding, especially when the query and answer of VLMs consist of long sequences of visual and text tokens. This paper presents AttentionPack, an adaptive and attention-aware optimization framework tailored for large vision-language models with improving memory-efficiency during decoding, focusing on addressing the challenges due to the increased high number of visual inputs and interactions, particularly in long-context tasks with multiple high-resolution images or videos. AttentionPack is novel in two aspects: (i) We introduce a multi-head attention compaction method for economically storing key and value matrices by exploiting the implicit low-rank structure, and (ii) we develop a token-specific attention-aware decompression mechanism to reduce latency overhead. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that AttentionPack improves memory efficiency by up to 8x, enabling higher batch sizes and faster batch inference while preserving the model output quality or longer context lengths for superior retrieval performance. We also report the effectiveness of AttentionPack combined with eviction, quantization and kernel fusion, showing further efficiency gains for resource-limited environments.
RoadGIE: Towards A Global-Scale Aerial Benchmark for Generalizable Interactive Road Extraction
Authors: Chenxu Peng; Chenxu Wang; Yimian Dai; Yongxiang Liu; Ming-Ming Cheng; Xiang Li
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Accurate road segmentation from aerial imagery is fundamental to many geospatial applications. However, existing datasets often suffer from limited scene diversity, low semantic granularity, and poor structural continuity, restricting their generalization across environments. To address these challenges, we introduce WorldRoadSeg-360K, the largest and most diverse road segmentation dataset to date, comprising 366,947 high-resolution images collected from 38 countries and 223 cities across various terrains and continents. WorldRoadSeg-360K serves as a comprehensive benchmark and reveals key challenges in handling diverse and structurally complex scenes. Automated approaches often struggle to preserve road connectivity, while current interactive methods lack efficient, topology-sensitive tools for real-world road editing. To this end, we present RoadGIE, establishing a novel interactive paradigm for road extraction in remote sensing. Unlike prior point- or box-based prompting strategies, RoadGIE supports connectivity-aware prompts, including clicks and scribbles, which inherently align with the topology of road networks. To improve structural consistency and mitigate performance degradation during iterative interactions, RoadGIE integrates an expert-guided prompting strategy and adapts the skeleton-based recall loss for interactive scenarios. Meanwhile, to alleviate user intent ambiguity, RoadGIE introduces a topo-semantic instantiation during training to enhance interaction stability and consistency. RoadGIE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both segmentation accuracy and topological consistency on WorldRoadSeg-360K and other benchmarks, while maintaining efficient operation with only 3.7 million parameters and real-time processing capabilities.
UniGeoRS: A Unified Benchmark for Tri-view Geo-Localization
Authors: Xiao Liang; Huaizhi Tang; Feiyang Zhang; Shiji Yuan; Chun Hu; Dezhi Zheng; Kang Ma
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) aims to estimate an image's geographic location by matching it with geo-referenced images from different viewpoints, supporting applications such as autonomous driving, UAV navigation, and visual surveillance. However, due to the high cost of image collection, current CVGL datasets often suffer from limited diversity in both drone and ground imagery, which constrains model generalization. Furthermore, existing methods primarily focus on either ground-to-satellite or drone-to-satellite matching, lacking a unified framework capable of handling image matching across all three platforms: satellite, drone, and ground. To this end, we introduce the Unified Geo-localization dataset with Real-world and Synthetic imagery (UniGeoRS), a comprehensive benchmark featuring satellite, drone, and ground-view images, with a particular emphasis on the richness and diversity of drone and ground perspectives, enabling more realistic and flexible evaluations of CVGL. Additionally, we propose Cross-Attention-based Matching Enhancement (CAME), a unified framework for CVGL. By dynamically aggregating contextual information from top-ranked candidates, CAME refines feature representations and enhances cross-view matching robustness. Experimental results show (1) The Proposed UniGeoRS benchmark is necessary for training and evaluating the CVGL model across all three platforms. (2) UniGeoRS improves model generalization across diverse conditions. (3) CAME consistently boosts performance across state-of-the-art CVGL approaches.
AHS: Adaptive Head Synthesis via Synthetic Data Augmentations
Authors: Taewoong Kang; Hyojin Jang; Sohyun Jeong; Seunggi Moon; Gihwi Kim; Hoon Jin Jung; Jaegul Choo
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent digital media advancements have created increasing demands for sophisticated portrait manipulation techniques, particularly head swapping--where one image's head is seamlessly integrated onto another's body. Current approaches predominantly rely on face-centered cropped data with limited view angles, significantly restricting their real-world applicability. These methods struggle with diverse head expressions, varying hairstyles, and natural blending beyond facial regions. To address these limitations, we propose Adaptive Head Synthesis (AHS), which effectively handles full upper-body images with varied head poses and expressions. AHS incorporates a novel head reenacted synthetic data augmentation strategy to overcome self-supervised training constraints, enhancing generalization across diverse facial expressions and orientations without requiring paired training data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance in challenging real-world scenarios, producing visually coherent results that preserve both identity and expression fidelity across various head orientations and hairstyles. Notably, our method shows exceptional robustness in maintaining facial identity while drastic expression changes and faithfully preserving accessories while significant head pose variations.
Your Dissimilarities Define You: Complementary Learning Exploiting Class Diversities
Authors: Dimitrios Katsikas; Nikolaos Passalis; Anastasios Tefas
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: In this work, we exploit class dissimilarities to provide complementary learning information beyond correct classification, that is not fully utilized in existing learning paradigms. To model these dissimilarities, we introduce the concept of an opposite-class, which consists of everything that is not part of a corresponding class, i.e., all samples from non-target classes or samples from unknown classes. By setting appropriately encoded target distributions over the non-target classes, we explicitly optimize the model's activation distributions across all non-target classes, which enhances class dissimilarity information and enables better control over the geometry of the representations. We analyze the convergence dynamics of our proposed approach, both theoretically and empirically, showing that it naturally pushes the representations towards neural collapse, leading to more discriminative and robust features. Our extensive evaluation across multiple classification settings demonstrates consistent improvements of our method on closed-set, open-set, few-shot classification, and domain generalization. Code: https://github.com/katdimitris/Complementary-Dissimilarity-Loss
DriveVLN: Towards Mapless Vision-and-Language Navigation in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Dongqian Guo; Haoran Wei; Wencheng Han; Runzhou Tao; Zhongying Qiu; Jianfei Yang; Jianbing Shen
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Autonomous driving has made substantial progress recently, achieving reliable performance in most real-world environments. However, existing algorithms still depend heavily on high-definition maps, making them ineffective in mapless scenarios such as indoor parking lots. These limitations hinder seamless point-to-point navigation and restrict the broader deployment of the autonomous driving system.To address this challenge, we propose DriveVLN, a new task that extends Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) to autonomous driving. DriveVLN employs visual and linguistic priors to guide vehicles toward destinations based solely on concise natural-language descriptions, without access to predefined maps or routes. Unlike conventional VLN, which relies on detailed step-wise instructions in indoor environments, DriveVLN requires models to produce navigation information based on diverse visual cues and history, including signs, landmarks, and textual indicators.We further develop a CARLA-based simulation engine comprising over 200 realistic scenes reconstructed from real road scans, enabling large-scale training and closed-loop evaluation. A baseline model is established through supervised fine-tuning on real data, followed by reinforcement learning in simulation.Comprehensive experiments show that DriveVLN effectively bridges map-based and mapless driving, providing a new foundation for unified, language-driven autonomous navigation in complex real-world environments.
Cross-modal Fuzzy Alignment Network for Text-Aerial Person Retrieval and A Large-scale Benchmark
Authors: Yifei Deng; Chenglong Li; Yuyang Zhang; Guyue Hu; Jin Tang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-aerial person retrieval aims to identify targets in UAV-captured images from eyewitness descriptions, supporting intelligent transportation and public security applications. Compared to ground-view text-image person retrieval, UAV-captured images often suffer from degraded visual information due to drastic variations in viewing angles and flight altitudes, making semantic alignment with textual descriptions very challenging. To address this issue, we propose a novel Cross-modal Fuzzy Alignment Network (CFANet), which quantifies the token-level reliability by fuzzy logic to achieve accurate fine-grained alignment and incorporates ground-view images as a bridge agent to further mitigate the gap between aerial images and text descriptions, for text-aerial person retrieval. In particular, we design the Fuzzy Token Alignment module that employs the fuzzy membership function to dynamically model token-level association strength and suppress the influence of unobservable or noisy tokens. It can alleviate the semantic inconsistencies caused by missing visual cues and significantly enhance the robustness of token-level semantic alignment. Moreover, to further mitigate the gap between aerial images and text descriptions, we design a Context-Aware Dynamic Alignment module to incorporates the ground-view agent as a bridge in text-aerial alignment and adaptively combine direct alignment and agent-assisted alignment to improve the robustness. In addition, we construct a large-scale benchmark dataset called AERI-PEDES by using a chain-of-thought to decompose text generation into attribute parsing, initial captioning, and refinement, thus boosting textual accuracy and semantic consistency. Experiments on AERI-PEDES and TBAPR demonstrate the superiority of our method. The code and dataset will be publicly released.