Abstract:Recently, state space models have demonstrated efficient video segmentation through linear-complexity state space compression. However, Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS) requires pixel-level spatiotemporal modeling capabilities to maintain temporal consistency in segmentation of semantic objects. While state space models can preserve common semantic information during state space compression, the fixed-size state space inevitably forgets specific information, which limits the models' capability for pixel-level segmentation. To tackle the above issue, we proposed a Refining Specifics State Space Model approach (RS-SSM) for video semantic segmentation, which performs complementary refining of forgotten spatiotemporal specifics. Specifically, a Channel-wise Amplitude Perceptron (CwAP) is designed to extract and align the distribution characteristics of specific information in the state space. Besides, a Forgetting Gate Information Refiner (FGIR) is proposed to adaptively invert and refine the forgetting gate matrix in the state space model based on the specific information distribution. Consequently, our RS-SSM leverages the inverted forgetting gate to complementarily refine the specific information forgotten during state space compression, thereby enhancing the model's capability for spatiotemporal pixel-level segmentation. Extensive experiments on four VSS benchmarks demonstrate that our RS-SSM achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/CVPR2026-RS-SSM.
Abstract:Lifelong person re-identification (LReID) aims to learn from varying domains to obtain a unified person retrieval model. Existing LReID approaches typically focus on learning from scratch or a visual classification-pretrained model, while the Vision-Language Model (VLM) has shown generalizable knowledge in a variety of tasks. Although existing methods can be directly adapted to the VLM, since they only consider global-aware learning, the fine-grained attribute knowledge is underleveraged, leading to limited acquisition and anti-forgetting capacity. To address this problem, we introduce a novel VLM-driven LReID approach named Vision-Language Attribute Disentanglement and Reinforcement (VLADR). Our key idea is to explicitly model the universally shared human attributes to improve inter-domain knowledge transfer, thereby effectively utilizing historical knowledge to reinforce new knowledge learning and alleviate forgetting. Specifically, VLADR includes a Multi-grain Text Attribute Disentanglement mechanism that mines the global and diverse local text attributes of an image. Then, an Inter-domain Cross-modal Attribute Reinforcement scheme is developed, which introduces cross-modal attribute alignment to guide visual attribute extraction and adopts inter-domain attribute alignment to achieve fine-grained knowledge transfer. Experimental results demonstrate that our VLADR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 1.9\%-2.2\% and 2.1\%-2.5\% on anti-forgetting and generalization capacity. Our source code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/CVPR2026-VLADR
Abstract:Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities across vision-language tasks, yet still face the challenge of compute-difficulty mismatch. Through empirical analyses, we identify that existing decoding methods may waste compute on easy cases while underserving hard ones, affecting both model effectiveness and efficiency. To address this issue, we first develop a theoretical framework that links sampling coverage, instance difficulty, and residual risk. Our analysis reveals that multimodal reasoning exhibits a heavy-tailed difficulty distribution; a small subset of hard or ambiguous samples dominates the residual failure probability. Based on this insight, we propose Coverage-Aware Multimodal Decoding (CAMD), an adaptive inference mechanism that dynamically allocates computation according to estimated uncertainty. CAMD integrates evidence-weighted scoring, posterior coverage estimation, and sequential Bayesian updating to balance efficiency and reliability under a limited token budget. Experiments on various benchmark datasets and baselines demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our approach.
Abstract:Training stability remains a critical bottleneck for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), often manifesting as a trade-off between reasoning plasticity and general capability retention. We identify a root cause as the geometric conflict between plasticity and stability gradients, which leads to destructive interference. Crucially, we argue that deterministic projection methods are suboptimal for GRPO as they overlook the intrinsic stochasticity of group-based gradient estimates. To address this, we propose Probabilistic Conflict Resolution (PCR), a Bayesian framework that models gradients as random variables. PCR dynamically arbitrates conflicts via an uncertainty-aware ``soft projection'' mechanism, optimizing the signal-to-noise ratio. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PCR significantly smooths the training trajectory and achieves superior performance in various reasoning tasks.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex tasks with advances in reasoning capabilities. However, existing reward mechanisms remain tightly coupled to final correctness and pay little attention to the underlying reasoning process: trajectories with sound reasoning but wrong answers receive low credit, while lucky guesses with flawed logic may be highly rewarded, affecting reasoning generalization. From a causal perspective, we interpret multi-candidate reasoning for a fixed question as a family of counterfactual experiments with theoretical supports. Building on this, we propose Group Causal Counterfactual Policy Optimization to explicitly train LLMs to learn generalizable reasoning patterns. It proposes an episodic causal counterfactual reward that jointly captures (i) robustness, encouraging the answer distribution induced by a reasoning step to remain stable under counterfactual perturbations; and (ii) effectiveness, enforcing sufficient variability so that the learned reasoning strategy can transfer across questions. We then construct token-level advantages from this reward and optimize the policy, encouraging LLMs to favor reasoning patterns that are process-valid and counterfactually robust. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate its advantages.
Abstract:Lifelong person Re-IDentification (L-ReID) exploits sequentially collected data to continuously train and update a ReID model, focusing on the overall performance of all data. Its main challenge is to avoid the catastrophic forgetting problem of old knowledge while training on new data. Existing L-ReID methods typically re-extract new features for all historical gallery images for inference after each update, known as "re-indexing". However, historical gallery data typically suffers from direct saving due to the data privacy issue and the high re-indexing costs for large-scale gallery images. As a result, it inevitably leads to incompatible retrieval between query features extracted by the updated model and gallery features extracted by those before the update, greatly impairing the re-identification performance. To tackle the above issue, this paper focuses on a new task called Re-index Free Lifelong person Re-IDentification (RFL-ReID), which requires performing lifelong person re-identification without re-indexing historical gallery images. Therefore, RFL-ReID is more challenging than L-ReID, requiring continuous learning and balancing new and old knowledge in diverse streaming data, and making the features output by the new and old models compatible with each other. To this end, we propose a Bidirectional Continuous Compatible Representation (Bi-C2R) framework to continuously update the gallery features extracted by the old model to perform efficient L-ReID in a compatible manner. We verify our proposed Bi-C2R method through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, which demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve leading performance on both the introduced RFL-ReID task and the traditional L-ReID task.
Abstract:Lifelong person Re-IDentification (LReID) aims to match the same person employing continuously collected individual data from different scenarios. To achieve continuous all-day person matching across day and night, Visible-Infrared Lifelong person Re-IDentification (VI-LReID) focuses on sequential training on data from visible and infrared modalities and pursues average performance over all data. To this end, existing methods typically exploit cross-modal knowledge distillation to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge. However, these methods ignore the mutual interference of modality-specific knowledge acquisition and modality-common knowledge anti-forgetting, where conflicting knowledge leads to collaborative forgetting. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a Cross-modality Knowledge Disentanglement and Alignment method, called CKDA, which explicitly separates and preserves modality-specific knowledge and modality-common knowledge in a balanced way. Specifically, a Modality-Common Prompting (MCP) module and a Modality-Specific Prompting (MSP) module are proposed to explicitly disentangle and purify discriminative information that coexists and is specific to different modalities, avoiding the mutual interference between both knowledge. In addition, a Cross-modal Knowledge Alignment (CKA) module is designed to further align the disentangled new knowledge with the old one in two mutually independent inter- and intra-modality feature spaces based on dual-modality prototypes in a balanced manner. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of our CKDA against state-of-the-art methods. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/CKDA-AAAI2026.
Abstract:Test-time prompt tuning for vision-language models has demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities under zero-shot settings. However, tuning the learnable prompts solely based on unlabeled test data may induce prompt optimization bias, ultimately leading to suboptimal performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we analyze the underlying causes of prompt optimization bias from both the model and data perspectives. In terms of the model, the entropy minimization objective typically focuses on reducing the entropy of model predictions while overlooking their correctness. This can result in overconfident yet incorrect outputs, thereby compromising the quality of prompt optimization. On the data side, prompts affected by optimization bias can introduce misalignment between visual and textual modalities, which further aggravates the prompt optimization bias. To this end, we propose a Doubly Debiased Test-Time Prompt Tuning method. Specifically, we first introduce a dynamic retrieval-augmented modulation module that retrieves high-confidence knowledge from a dynamic knowledge base using the test image feature as a query, and uses the retrieved knowledge to modulate the predictions. Guided by the refined predictions, we further develop a reliability-aware prompt optimization module that incorporates a confidence-based weighted ensemble and cross-modal consistency distillation to impose regularization constraints during prompt tuning. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmark datasets involving both natural distribution shifts and cross-datasets generalization demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines, validating its effectiveness in mitigating prompt optimization bias.




Abstract:Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across vision-language tasks. However, they may suffer from hallucinations--generating outputs that are semantically inconsistent with the input image or text. Through causal analyses, we find that: (i) hallucinations with omission may arise from the failure to adequately capture essential causal factors, and (ii) hallucinations with fabrication are likely caused by the model being misled by non-causal cues. To address these challenges, we propose a novel reinforcement learning framework guided by causal completeness, which jointly considers both causal sufficiency and causal necessity of tokens. Specifically, we evaluate each token's standalone contribution and counterfactual indispensability to define a token-level causal completeness reward. This reward is used to construct a causally informed advantage function within the GRPO optimization framework, encouraging the model to focus on tokens that are both causally sufficient and necessary for accurate generation. Experimental results across various benchmark datasets and tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which effectively mitigates hallucinations in MLLMs.
Abstract:Current lifelong person re-identification (LReID) methods predominantly rely on fully labeled data streams. However, in real-world scenarios where annotation resources are limited, a vast amount of unlabeled data coexists with scarce labeled samples, leading to the Semi-Supervised LReID (Semi-LReID) problem where LReID methods suffer severe performance degradation. Existing LReID methods, even when combined with semi-supervised strategies, suffer from limited long-term adaptation performance due to struggling with the noisy knowledge occurring during unlabeled data utilization. In this paper, we pioneer the investigation of Semi-LReID, introducing a novel Self-Reinforcing Prototype Evolution with Dual-Knowledge Cooperation framework (SPRED). Our key innovation lies in establishing a self-reinforcing cycle between dynamic prototype-guided pseudo-label generation and new-old knowledge collaborative purification to enhance the utilization of unlabeled data. Specifically, learnable identity prototypes are introduced to dynamically capture the identity distributions and generate high-quality pseudo-labels. Then, the dual-knowledge cooperation scheme integrates current model specialization and historical model generalization, refining noisy pseudo-labels. Through this cyclic design, reliable pseudo-labels are progressively mined to improve current-stage learning and ensure positive knowledge propagation over long-term learning. Experiments on the established Semi-LReID benchmarks show that our SPRED achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/ICCV2025-SPRED