GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
The Blind Spot of Adaptation: Quantifying and Mitigating Forgetting in Fine-tuned Driving Models
Authors: Runhao Mao; Hanshi Wang; Yixiang Yang; Qianli Ma; Jingmeng Zhou; Zhipeng Zhang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: The integration of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) into autonomous driving promises to solve long-tail scenarios, but this paradigm faces the critical and unaddressed challenge of catastrophic forgetting. The very fine-tuning process used to adapt these models to driving-specific data simultaneously erodes their invaluable pre-trained world knowledge, creating a self-defeating paradox that undermines the core reason for their use. This paper provides the first systematic investigation into this phenomenon. We introduce a new large-scale dataset of 180K scenes, which enables the first-ever benchmark specifically designed to quantify catastrophic forgetting in autonomous driving. Our analysis reveals that existing methods suffer from significant knowledge degradation. To address this, we propose the Drive Expert Adapter (DEA), a novel framework that circumvents this trade-off by shifting adaptation from the weight space to the prompt space. DEA dynamically routes inference through different knowledge experts based on scene-specific cues, enhancing driving-task performance without corrupting the model's foundational parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only achieves state-of-the-art results on driving tasks but also effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting, preserving the essential generalization capabilities that make VLMs a transformative force for autonomous systems. Dataset and code will be released.
Abstract 3D Perception for Spatial Intelligence in Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yifan Liu; Fangneng Zhan; Kaichen Zhou; Yilun Du; Paul Pu Liang; Hanspeter Pfister
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with 3D-related tasks such as spatial cognition and physical understanding, which are crucial for real-world applications like robotics and embodied agents. We attribute this to a modality gap between the 3D tasks and the 2D training of VLM, which led to inefficient retrieval of 3D information from 2D input. To bridge this gap, we introduce SandboxVLM, a simple yet effective framework that leverages abstract bounding boxes to encode geometric structure for VLMs. Specifically, we design a 3D Sandbox reconstruction and perception pipeline comprising four stages: generating multi-view priors with abstract control, proxy elevation, multi-view voting and clustering, and 3D-aware reasoning. Evaluated in zero-shot settings across multiple benchmarks and VLM backbones, our approach consistently improves spatial intelligence, achieving an 8.3% gain on SAT Real compared with baseline methods for instance. These results demonstrate that presenting VLMs with 3D abstractions substantially enhances their 3D reasoning ability without additional training, suggesting new possibilities for general-purpose embodied intelligence.
Learning to Infer Parameterized Representations of Plants from 3D Scans
Authors: Samara Ghrer; Christophe Godin; Stefanie Wuhrer
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Plants frequently contain numerous organs, organized in 3D branching systems defining the plant's architecture. Reconstructing the architecture of plants from unstructured observations is challenging because of self-occlusion and spatial proximity between organs, which are often thin structures. To achieve the challenging task, we propose an approach that allows to infer a parameterized representation of the plant's architecture from a given 3D scan of a plant. In addition to the plant's branching structure, this representation contains parametric information for each plant organ, and can therefore be used directly in a variety of tasks. In this data-driven approach, we train a recursive neural network with virtual plants generated using a procedural model. After training, the network allows to infer a parametric tree-like representation based on an input 3D point cloud. Our method is applicable to any plant that can be represented as binary axial tree. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on Chenopodium Album plants on reconstruction, segmentation and skeletonization, which are important problems in plant phenotyping. In addition to carrying out several tasks at once, our method achieves results on-par with strong baselines for each task. We apply our method, trained exclusively on synthetic data, to 3D scans and show that it generalizes well.
Investigating Self-Supervised Representations for Audio-Visual Deepfake Detection
Authors: Dragos-Alexandru Boldisor; Stefan Smeu; Dan Oneata; Elisabeta Oneata
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Self-supervised representations excel at many vision and speech tasks, but their potential for audio-visual deepfake detection remains underexplored. Unlike prior work that uses these features in isolation or buried within complex architectures, we systematically evaluate them across modalities (audio, video, multimodal) and domains (lip movements, generic visual content). We assess three key dimensions: detection effectiveness, interpretability of encoded information, and cross-modal complementarity. We find that most self-supervised features capture deepfake-relevant information, and that this information is complementary. Moreover, models primarily attend to semantically meaningful regions rather than spurious artifacts (such as the leading silence). Among the investigated features, audio-informed representations generalize best and achieve state-of-the-art results. However, generalization to realistic in-the-wild data remains challenging. Our analysis indicates this gap stems from intrinsic dataset difficulty rather than from features latching onto superficial patterns.
CLP: A Real-World Dataset of Contaminated Lens Protectors for Robust Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Sungyong Park; Sooyoung Choi; Hyunsuh Koh; Youngjae Choi; Heewon Kim
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: The reliability of autonomous systems in real-world environments is mainly dependent on the robustness of their visual perception.Although recent studies have advanced the handling of visual degradations, physical contaminants that adhere to the camera lens--such as mud, water droplets, and condensation--remain largely underexplored.To this end, we introduce the CLP (Contaminated Lens Protector) dataset, a real-world benchmark designed to evaluate perception performance under realistic lens-protector contamination.The CLP dataset offers degraded images across multiple types of contamination and various lens-to-protector distances, along with dense semantic segmentation masks and aligned restoration targets.This dataset enables robust segmentation and restoration studies in conditions that closely match those encountered by real-world autonomous systems.Experiments analyze strategies to improve perception under contamination with limited data, highlighting the importance of domain generalization, foundation models, data scale, and joint restoration-segmentation pipelines.
TF-SSD: A Strong Pipeline via Synergic Mask Filter for Training-free Co-salient Object Detection
Authors: Zhijin He; Shuo Jin; Siyue Yu; Shuwei Wu; Bingfeng Zhang; Li Yu; Jimin Xiao
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Co-salient Object Detection (CoSOD) aims to segment salient objects that consistently appear across a group of related images. Despite the notable progress achieved by recent training-based approaches, they still remain constrained by the closed-set datasets and exhibit limited generalization. However, few studies explore the potential of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to address CoSOD, which demonstrate a strong generalized ability and robust saliency understanding. In this paper, we investigate and leverage VFMs for CoSOD, and further propose a novel training-free method, TF-SSD, through the synergy between SAM and DINO. Specifically, we first utilize SAM to generate comprehensive raw proposals, which serve as a candidate mask pool. Then, we introduce a quality mask generator to filter out redundant masks, thereby acquiring a refined mask set. Since this generator is built upon SAM, it inherently lacks semantic understanding of saliency. To this end, we adopt an intra-image saliency filter that employs DINO's attention maps to identify visually salient masks within individual images. Moreover, to extend saliency understanding across group images, we propose an inter-image prototype selector, which computes similarity scores among cross-image prototypes to select masks with the highest score. These selected masks serve as final predictions for CoSOD. Extensive experiments show that our TF-SSD outperforms existing methods (e.g., 13.7% gains over the recent training-free method). Codes are available at https://github.com/hzz-yy/TF-SSD.
QueryOcc: Query-based Self-Supervision for 3D Semantic Occupancy
Authors: Adam Lilja; Ji Lan; Junsheng Fu; Lars Hammarstrand
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Learning 3D scene geometry and semantics from images is a core challenge in computer vision and a key capability for autonomous driving. Since large-scale 3D annotation is prohibitively expensive, recent work explores self-supervised learning directly from sensor data without manual labels. Existing approaches either rely on 2D rendering consistency, where 3D structure emerges only implicitly, or on discretized voxel grids from accumulated lidar point clouds, limiting spatial precision and scalability. We introduce QueryOcc, a query-based self-supervised framework that learns continuous 3D semantic occupancy directly through independent 4D spatio-temporal queries sampled across adjacent frames. The framework supports supervision from either pseudo-point clouds derived from vision foundation models or raw lidar data. To enable long-range supervision and reasoning under constant memory, we introduce a contractive scene representation that preserves near-field detail while smoothly compressing distant regions.QueryOcc surpasses previous camera-based methods by 26% in semantic RayIoU on the self-supervised Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark while running at 11.6 FPS, demonstrating that direct 4D query supervision enables strong self-supervised occupancy learning.
Structure-to-Intensity Diffusion for Adverse-Weather LiDAR Generation
Authors: Peiyang Ni; Longyu Yang; Lu Zhang; Kuniaki Saito; Yap-Peng Tan; Fumin Shen; Heng Tao Shen; Xiaofeng Zhu; Ping Hu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Adverse-weather LiDAR point cloud generation is challenged by complex weather-induced degradations. These degradations affect geometry and reflectance in fundamentally different ways, making joint modeling difficult and ambiguous, especially when diverse real-world training data is limited. To address this, we propose Structure-to-Intensity Diffusion (SiD), a diffusion-based framework that explicitly factorizes the denoising process at each time step: it first reconstructs the geometric structure, then conditions reflectance intensity denoising on the estimated structure. This structure-conditioned design decomposes the joint distribution, reduces modeling ambiguity, and leads to point clouds that are both geometrically coherent and radiometrically realistic. To mitigate data scarcity, we introduce Real-Prior Weather Simulation (RPWS), a degradation module that leverages real-world sensor statistics to synthesize physically plausible adverse-weather point clouds from clear scans. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, with similar model complexity, our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in generating adverse-weather LiDAR scans with both structural and radiometric properties more closely aligned with real-world data.
InstAP: Instance-Aware Vision-Language Pre-Train for Spatial-Temporal Understanding
Authors: Ashutosh Kumar; Rajat Saini; Jingjing Pan; Mustafa Erdogan; Mingfang Zhang; Betty Le Dem; Norimasa Kobori; Quan Kong
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Current vision-language pre-training (VLP) paradigms excel at global scene understanding but struggle with instance-level reasoning due to global-only supervision. We introduce InstAP, an Instance-Aware Pre-training framework that jointly optimizes global vision-text alignment and fine-grained, instance-level contrastive alignment by grounding textual mentions to specific spatial-temporal regions. To support this, we present InstVL, a large-scale dataset (2 million images, 50,000 videos) with dual-granularity annotations: holistic scene captions and dense, grounded instance descriptions. On the InstVL benchmark, InstAP substantially outperforms existing VLP models on instance-level retrieval, and also surpasses a strong VLP baseline trained on the exact same data corpus, isolating the benefit of our instance-aware objective. Moreover, instance-centric pre-training improves global understanding: InstAP achieves competitive zero-shot performance on multiple video benchmarks, including MSR-VTT and DiDeMo. Qualitative visualizations further show that InstAP localizes textual mentions to the correct instances, while global-only models exhibit more diffuse, scene-level attention.
AV-Reasoner: Improving and Benchmarking Clue-Grounded Audio-Visual Counting for MLLMs
Authors: Lidong Lu; Guo Chen; Zhu Wei; Zhiqi Li; Yicheng Liu; Tong Lu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite progress in video understanding, current MLLMs struggle with counting tasks. Existing benchmarks are limited by short videos, close-set queries, lack of clue annotations, and weak multimodal coverage. In this paper, we introduce CG-AV-Counting, a manually-annotated clue-grounded counting benchmark with 1,027 multimodal questions and 5,845 annotated clues over 497 long videos. It supports both black-box and white-box evaluation, serving as a comprehensive testbed for both end-to-end and reasoning-based counting. To explore ways to improve model's counting capability, we propose AV-Reasoner, a model trained with GRPO and curriculum learning to generalize counting ability from related tasks. AV-Reasoner achieves SOTA results across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of reinforcement learning. However, experiments reveal that on out-of-domain benchmarks, reasoning in the language space offers limited performance gains, suggesting the need for more robust cross-domain reasoning mechanisms.
HDW-SR: High-Frequency Guided Diffusion Model based on Wavelet Decomposition for Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Chao Yang; Boqian Zhang; Jinghao Xu; Guang Jiang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion-based methods have shown great promise in single image super-resolution (SISR); however, existing approaches often produce blurred fine details due to insufficient guidance in the high-frequency domain. To address this issue, we propose a High-Frequency Guided Diffusion Network based on Wavelet Decomposition (HDW-SR), which replaces the conventional U-Net backbone in diffusion frameworks. Specifically, we perform diffusion only on the residual map, allowing the network to focus more effectively on high-frequency information restoration. We then introduce wavelet-based downsampling in place of standard CNN downsampling to achieve multi-scale frequency decomposition, enabling sparse cross-attention between the high-frequency subbands of the pre-super-resolved image and the low-frequency subbands of the diffused image for explicit high-frequency guidance. Moreover, a Dynamic Thresholding Block (DTB) is designed to refine high-frequency selection during the sparse attention process. During upsampling, the invertibility of the wavelet transform ensures low-loss feature reconstruction. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that HDW-SR achieves competitive super-resolution performance, excelling particularly in recovering fine-grained image details. Code is available at https://github.com/Baty2023/HDW-SR.
WRIVINDER: Towards Spatial Intelligence for Geo-locating Ground Images onto Satellite Imagery
Authors: Chandrakanth Gudavalli; Tajuddin Manhar Mohammed; Abhay Yadav; Ananth Vishnu Bhaskar; Hardik Prajapati; Cheng Peng; Rama Chellappa; Shivkumar Chandrasekaran; B.S. Manjunath
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Aligning ground-level imagery with geo-registered satellite maps is crucial for mapping, navigation, and situational awareness, yet remains challenging under large viewpoint gaps or when GPS is unreliable. We introduce Wrivinder, a zero-shot, geometry-driven framework that aggregates multiple ground photographs to reconstruct a consistent 3D scene and align it with overhead satellite imagery. Wrivinder combines SfM reconstruction, 3D Gaussian Splatting, semantic grounding, and monocular depth-based metric cues to produce a stable zenith-view rendering that can be directly matched to satellite context for metrically accurate camera geo-localization. To support systematic evaluation of this task--which lacks suitable benchmarks--we also release MC-Sat, a curated dataset linking multi-view ground imagery with geo-registered satellite tiles across diverse outdoor environments. Together, Wrivinder and MC-Sat provide a first comprehensive baseline and testbed for studying geometry-centered cross-view alignment without paired supervision. In zero-shot experiments, Wrivinder achieves sub-30m geolocation accuracy across both dense and large-area scenes, highlighting the promise of geometry-based aggregation for robust ground-to-satellite localization. The MC-Sat dataset and Wrivinder codebase will be publicly released.
WaDi: Weight Direction-aware Distillation for One-step Image Synthesis
Authors: Lei Wang; Yang Cheng; Senmao Li; Ge Wu; Yaxing Wang; Jian Yang
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite the impressive performance of diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) in image generation, their slow inference limits practical deployment. Recent works accelerate inference by distilling multi-step diffusion into one-step generators. To better understand the distillation mechanism, we analyze U-Net/DiT weight changes between one-step students and their multi-step teacher counterparts. Our analysis reveals that changes in weight direction significantly exceed those in weight norm, highlighting it as the key factor during distillation. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Low-rank Rotation of weight Direction (LoRaD), a parameter-efficient adapter tailored to one-step diffusion distillation. LoRaD is designed to model these structured directional changes using learnable low-rank rotation matrices. We further integrate LoRaD into Variational Score Distillation (VSD), resulting in Weight Direction-aware Distillation (WaDi)--a novel one-step distillation framework. WaDi achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on COCO 2014 and COCO 2017 while using only approximately 10% of the trainable parameters of the U-Net/DiT. Furthermore, the distilled one-step model demonstrates strong versatility and scalability, generalizing well to various downstream tasks such as controllable generation, relation inversion, and high-resolution synthesis.
Polarization State Tracing for Reflection Removal and Color-Consistent Reconstruction
Authors: Dongyue Wang; Yang Lu; Jiandong Tian
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Colored glass is widely used in everyday settings, yet its reflective and absorptive properties often introduce ghost shadows and color bias in captured images. However, existing methods typically neglect the absorption issue, making it difficult to address color bias caused by colored glass. To address this, we are the first to apply polarization imaging theory to model the light transmission process within glass. Specifically, we propose a novel imaging model, the Polarization State Tracing Model (PSTM), which traces polarized light along multiple propagation paths and accounts for wavelength-selective absorption, enabling joint reflection removal and color-consistent reconstruction. Guided by PSTM, we design a Channel Ring Attention (CRA) mechanism to efficiently capture inter-angle polarization dependencies and enhance feature interaction across polarization channels, ensuring physically consistent recovery. Besides, the recovered polarization information can be directly applied to advanced downstream tasks, such as Shape-from-Polarization (SfP). We construct a real-world dataset, GlassPol, containing a wide range of glass materials, enabling testing under diverse optical conditions. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 3dB improvement in PSNR, establishing a new benchmark for polarized reflection removal.
VIAFormer: Voxel-Image Alignment Transformer for High-Fidelity Voxel Refinement
Authors: Tiancheng Fang; Bowen Pan; Lingxi Chen; Jiangjing Lyu; Chengfei Lv; Chaoyue Niu; Fan Wu
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: We propose VIAFormer, a Voxel-Image Alignment transFormer model designed for Multi-view Conditioned Voxel Refinement--the task of repairing incomplete noisy voxels using calibrated multi-view images as guidance. Its effectiveness stems from a synergistic design: an Image Index that provides explicit 3D spatial grounding for 2D image tokens, a Correctional Flow objective that learns a direct voxel-refinement trajectory, and a Hybrid Stream Transformer that enables robust cross-modal fusion. Experiments show that VIAFormer establishes a new state of the art in correcting both severe synthetic corruptions and realistic artifacts on the voxel shape obtained from powerful Vision Foundation Models. Beyond benchmarking, we demonstrate VIAFormer as a practical and reliable bridge in real-world 3D creation pipelines, paving the way for voxel-based methods to thrive in large-model, big-data wave.
MV-TAP: Tracking Any Point in Multi-View Videos
Authors: Jahyeok Koo; Inès Hyeonsu Kim; Mungyeom Kim; Junghyun Park; Seohyeon Park; Jaeyeong Kim; Jung Yi; Seokju Cho; Seungryong Kim
Venue: CVPR 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-view camera systems enable rich observations of complex real-world scenes, and understanding dynamic objects in multi-view settings has become central to various applications. Point tracking serves as a key mechanism for capturing dynamic motion. However, conventional single-view approaches often fail due to the limited geometric information available in monocular video, which becomes a critical bottleneck for multi-view extension. In this work, we present MV-TAP, a robust point tracker that tracks points across multi-view videos of dynamic scenes by leveraging cross-view information. MV-TAP utilizes camera geometry and a cross-view attention mechanism to aggregate spatio-temporal information across views, enabling more complete and reliable trajectory estimation in multi-view videos. To support this task, we construct a large-scale synthetic training dataset and real-world evaluation sets tailored for multi-view tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MV-TAP outperforms existing point-tracking methods on challenging benchmarks, establishing an effective baseline for advancing research in multi-view point tracking.