NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction: Methods and Results

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction. The goal of the challenge participants was to develop automatic saliency map prediction methods for the provided video sequences. The novel dataset of 2,000 diverse videos with an open license was prepared for this challenge. The fixations and corresponding saliency maps were collected using crowdsourced mouse tracking and contain viewing data from over 5,000 assessors. Evaluation was performed on a subset of 800 test videos using generally accepted quality metrics. The challenge attracted over 20 teams making submissions, and 7 teams passed the final phase with code review. All data used in this challenge is made publicly available - https://github.com/msu-video-group/NTIRE26_Saliency_Prediction.

ViSAGE @ NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction

In this report, we present our champion solution for the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction held in conjunction with CVPR 2026. To exploit complementary inductive biases for video saliency, we propose Video Saliency with Adaptive Gated Experts (ViSAGE), a multi-expert ensemble framework. Each specialized decoder performs adaptive gating and modulation to refine spatio-temporal features. The complementary predictions from different experts are then fused at inference. ViSAGE thereby aggregates diverse inductive biases to capture complex spatio-temporal saliency cues in videos. On the Private Test set, ViSAGE ranked first on two out of four evaluation metrics, and outperformed most competing solutions on the other two metrics, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalization ability. Our code has been released at https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ViSAGE.

STABLE: Efficient Hybrid Nearest Neighbor Search via Magnitude-Uniformity and Cardinality-Robustness

Hybrid Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (Hybrid ANNS) is a foundational search technology for large-scale heterogeneous data and has gained significant attention in both academia and industry. However, current approaches overlook the heterogeneity in data distribution, thus ignoring two major challenges: the Compatibility Barrier for Similarity Magnitude Heterogeneity and the Tolerance Bottleneck to Attribute Cardinality. To overcome these issues, we propose the robuSt heTerogeneity-Aware hyBrid retrievaL framEwork, STABLE, designed for accurate, efficient, and robust hybrid ANNS under datasets with various distributions. Specifically, we introduce an enhAnced heterogeneoUs semanTic perceptiOn (AUTO) metric to achieve a joint measurement of feature similarity and attribute consistency, addressing similarity magnitude heterogeneity and improving robustness to datasets with various attribute cardinalities. Thereafter, we construct our Heterogeneous sEmantic reLation graPh (HELP) index based on AUTO to organize heterogeneous semantic relations. Finally, we employ a novel Dynamic Heterogeneity Routing method to ensure an efficient search. Extensive experiments on five feature vector benchmarks with various attribute cardinalities demonstrate the superior performance of STABLE.

Advancing Complex Video Object Segmentation via Tracking-Enhanced Prompt: The 1st Winner for 5th PVUW MOSE Challenge

In the Complex Video Object Segmentation task, researchers are required to track and segment specific targets within cluttered environments, which rigorously tests a method's capability for target comprehension and environmental adaptability. Although SAM3, the current state-of-the-art solution, exhibits unparalleled segmentation performance and robustness on conventional targets, it underperforms on tiny and semantic-dominated objects. The root cause of this limitation lies in SAM3's insufficient comprehension of these specific target types. To address this issue, we propose TEP: Advancing Complex Video Object Segmentation via Tracking-Enhanced Prompts. As a training-free approach, TEP leverages external tracking models and Multimodal Large Language Models to introduce tracking-enhanced prompts, thereby alleviating the difficulty SAM3 faces in understanding these challenging targets. Our method achieved first place (56.91%) on the test set of the PVUW Challenge 2026: Complex Video Object Segmentation Track.

The 1st Winner for 5th PVUW MeViS-Text Challenge: Strong MLLMs Meet SAM3 for Referring Video Object Segmentation

This report presents our winning solution to the 5th PVUW MeViS-Text Challenge. The track studies referring video object segmentation under motion-centric language expressions, where the model must jointly understand appearance, temporal behavior, and object interactions. To address this problem, we build a fully training-free pipeline that combines strong multimodal large language models with SAM3. Our method contains three stages. First, Gemini-3.1 Pro decomposes each target event into instance-level grounding targets, selects the frame where the target is most clearly visible, and generates a discriminative description. Second, SAM3-agent produces a precise seed mask on the selected frame, and the official SAM3 tracker propagates the mask through the whole video. Third, a refinement stage uses Qwen3.5-Plus and behavior-level verification to correct ambiguous or semantically inconsistent predictions. Without task-specific fine-tuning, our method ranks first on the PVUW 2026 MeViS-Text test set, achieving a Final score of 0.909064 and a J&F score of 0.7897. The code is available at https://github.com/Moujuruo/MeViSv2_Track_Solution_2026.

SJD-VP: Speculative Jacobi Decoding with Verification Prediction for Autoregressive Image Generation

Speculative Jacobi Decoding (SJD) has emerged as a promising method for accelerating autoregressive image generation. Despite its potential, existing SJD approaches often suffer from the low acceptance rate issue of speculative tokens due to token selection ambiguity. Recent works attempt to mitigate this issue primarily from the relaxed token verification perspective but fail to fully exploit the iterative dynamics of decoding. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis and make a novel observation that tokens whose probabilities increase are more likely to match the verification-accepted and correct token. Based on this, we propose a novel Speculative Jacobi Decoding with Verification Prediction (SJD-VP). The key idea is to leverage the change in token probabilities across iterations to guide sampling, favoring tokens whose probabilities increase. This effectively predicts which tokens are likely to pass subsequent verification, boosting the acceptance rate. In particular, our SJD-VP is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly integrated into existing SJD methods. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our SJD-VP method consistently accelerates autoregressive decoding while improving image generation quality.

Cortical Policy: A Dual-Stream View Transformer for Robotic Manipulation

View transformers process multi-view observations to predict actions and have shown impressive performance in robotic manipulation. Existing methods typically extract static visual representations in a view-specific manner, leading to inadequate 3D spatial reasoning ability and a lack of dynamic adaptation. Taking inspiration from how the human brain integrates static and dynamic views to address these challenges, we propose Cortical Policy, a novel dual-stream view transformer for robotic manipulation that jointly reasons from static-view and dynamic-view streams. The static-view stream enhances spatial understanding by aligning features of geometrically consistent keypoints extracted from a pretrained 3D foundation model. The dynamic-view stream achieves adaptive adjustment through position-aware pretraining of an egocentric gaze estimation model, computationally replicating the human cortical dorsal pathway. Subsequently, the complementary view representations of both streams are integrated to determine the final actions, enabling the model to handle spatially-complex and dynamically-changing tasks under language conditions. Empirical evaluations on RLBench, the challenging COLOSSEUM benchmark, and real-world tasks demonstrate that Cortical Policy outperforms state-of-the-art baselines substantially, validating the superiority of dual-stream design for visuomotor control. Our cortex-inspired framework offers a fresh perspective for robotic manipulation and holds potential for broader application in vision-based robot control.

TINA: Text-Free Inversion Attack for Unlearned Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Although text-to-image diffusion models exhibit remarkable generative power, concept erasure techniques are essential for their safe deployment to prevent the creation of harmful content. This has fostered a dynamic interplay between the development of erasure defenses and the adversarial probes designed to bypass them, and this co-evolution has progressively enhanced the efficacy of erasure methods. However, this adversarial co-evolution has converged on a narrow, text-centric paradigm that equates erasure with severing the text-to-image mapping, ignoring that the underlying visual knowledge related to undesired concepts still persist. To substantiate this claim, we investigate from a visual perspective, leveraging DDIM inversion to probe whether a generative pathway for the erased concept can still be found. However, identifying such a visual generative pathway is challenging because standard text-guided DDIM inversion is actively resisted by text-centric defenses within the erased model. To address this, we introduce TINA, a novel Text-free INversion Attack, which enforces this visual-only probe by operating under a null-text condition, thereby avoiding existing text-centric defenses. Moreover, TINA integrates an optimization procedure to overcome the accumulating approximation errors that arise when standard inversion operates without its usual textual guidance. Our experiments demonstrate that TINA regenerates erased concepts from models treated with state-of-the-art unlearning. The success of TINA proves that current methods merely obscure concepts, highlighting an urgent need for paradigms that operate directly on internal visual knowledge.

Global Prior Meets Local Consistency: Dual-Memory Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model for Efficient Robotic Manipulation

Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have rapidly become a dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation. It typically comprising a Vision-Language backbone for perception and understanding, together with a generative policy for action generation. However, its performance is increasingly bottlenecked by the action generation proceess. (i) Low inference efficiency. A pronounced distributional gap between isotropic noise priors and target action distributions, which increases denoising steps and the incidence of infeasible samples. (ii) Poor robustness. Existing policies condition solely on the current observation, neglecting the constraint of history sequence and thus lacking awareness of task progress and temporal consistency. To address these issues, we introduce OptimusVLA, a dual-memory VLA framework with Global Prior Memory (GPM) and Local Consistency Memory (LCM). GPM replaces Gaussian noise with task-level priors retrieved from semantically similar trajectories, thereby shortening the generative path and reducing the umber of function evaluations (NFE). LCM dynamically models executed action sequence to infer task progress and injects a learned consistency constraint that enforces temporal coherence and smoothness of trajectory. Across three simulation benchmarks, OptimusVLA consistently outperforms strong baselines: it achieves 98.6% average success rate on LIBERO, improves over pi_0 by 13.5% on CALVIN, and attains 38% average success rate on RoboTwin 2.0 Hard. In Real-World evaluation, OptimusVLA ranks best on Generalization and Long-horizon suites, surpassing pi_0 by 42.9% and 52.4%, respectively, while delivering 2.9x inference speedup.

StructAlign: Structured Cross-Modal Alignment for Continual Text-to-Video Retrieval

Continual Text-to-Video Retrieval (CTVR) is a challenging multimodal continual learning setting, where models must incrementally learn new semantic categories while maintaining accurate text-video alignment for previously learned ones, thus making it particularly prone to catastrophic forgetting. A key challenge in CTVR is feature drift, which manifests in two forms: intra-modal feature drift caused by continual learning within each modality, and non-cooperative feature drift across modalities that leads to modality misalignment. To mitigate these issues, we propose StructAlign, a structured cross-modal alignment method for CTVR. First, StructAlign introduces a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) geometry as a unified geometric prior to mitigate modality misalignment. Building upon this geometric prior, we design a cross-modal ETF alignment loss that aligns text and video features with category-level ETF prototypes, encouraging the learned representations to form an approximate simplex ETF geometry. In addition, to suppress intra-modal feature drift, we design a Cross-modal Relation Preserving loss, which leverages complementary modalities to preserve cross-modal similarity relations, providing stable relational supervision for feature updates. By jointly addressing non-cooperative feature drift across modalities and intra-modal feature drift, StructAlign effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting in CTVR. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art continual retrieval approaches.