EgoAdapt: A Multi-Scene Egocentric Adaptation Method for CVPR 2026 HD-EPIC VQA Challenge

This technical report presents our solution, EgoAdapt (Egocentric Adaptation via Category, Calibration, and Consistency), to the CVPR 2026 HD-EPIC VQA challenge. HD-EPIC evaluates whether a vision-language model can reason over realistic first-person kitchen videos, where the evidence for an answer may be a short hand-object interaction, a long recipe trajectory, a spatial relation to a fixture, or a subtle gaze cue. The benchmark contains 26K multiple-choice questions across seven macro-categories: recipe, ingredient, nutrition, fine-grained action, 3D perception, object motion, and gaze. We observe that the main difficulty is not only model capacity, but also the mismatch between a single generic inference recipe and the heterogeneous temporal, spatial, and semantic structure of the benchmark. Our method, EgoAdapt, introduces three inference-time components: (1) category-conditioned routing with per-category prompts, frame budgets, and sampling rates; (2) calibrated option scoring that evaluates all candidate answers with letter-token likelihoods and generation agreement instead of relying only on direct generation; and (3) test-time consistency adaptation that aggregates predictions across option permutations and verification-style prompts for ambiguous cases. This design substantially improves over the available HD-EPIC baselines.

ReTrack: Evidence-Driven Dual-Stream Directional Anchor Calibration Network for Composed Video Retrieval

With the rapid growth of video data, Composed Video Retrieval (CVR) has emerged as a novel paradigm in video retrieval and is receiving increasing attention from researchers. Unlike unimodal video retrieval methods, the CVR task takes a multi-modal query consisting of a reference video and a piece of modification text as input. The modification text conveys the user's intended alterations to the reference video. Based on this input, the model aims to retrieve the most relevant target video. In the CVR task, there exists a substantial discrepancy in information density between video and text modalities. Traditional composition methods tend to bias the composed feature toward the reference video, which leads to suboptimal retrieval performance. This limitation is significant due to the presence of three core challenges: (1) modal contribution entanglement, (2) explicit optimization of composed features, and (3) retrieval uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose the evidence-dRivRn dual-sTream diRectionAl anChor calibration networK (ReTrack). ReTrack is the first CVR framework that improves multi-modal query understanding by calibrating directional bias in composed features. It consists of three key modules: Semantic Contribution Disentanglement, Composition Geometry Calibration, and Reliable Evidence-driven Alignment. Specifically, ReTrack estimates the semantic contribution of each modality to calibrate the directional bias of the composed feature. It then uses the calibrated directional anchors to compute bidirectional evidence that drives reliable composed-to-target similarity estimation. Moreover, ReTrack exhibits strong generalization to the Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) task, achieving SOTA performance across three benchmark datasets in both CVR and CIR scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/Lee-zixu/ReTrack

MELT: Improve Composed Image Retrieval via the Modification Frequentation-Rarity Balance Network

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a modification text as a query to retrieve a target image satisfying the requirement of ``modifying the reference image according to the text instructions''. However, existing CIR methods face two limitations: (1) frequency bias leading to ``Rare Sample Neglect'', and (2) susceptibility of similarity scores to interference from hard negative samples and noise. To address these limitations, we confront two key challenges: asymmetric rare semantic localization and robust similarity estimation under hard negative samples. To solve these challenges, we propose the Modification frEquentation-rarity baLance neTwork MELT. MELT assigns increased attention to rare modification semantics in multimodal contexts while applying diffusion-based denoising to hard negative samples with high similarity scores, enhancing multimodal fusion and matching. Extensive experiments on two CIR benchmarks validate the superior performance of MELT. Codes are available at https://github.com/luckylittlezhi/MELT.