Humans do not just see attribute similarity -- we also see relational similarity. An apple is like a peach because both are reddish fruit, but the Earth is also like a peach: its crust, mantle, and core correspond to the peach's skin, flesh, and pit. This ability to perceive and recognize relational similarity, is arguable by cognitive scientist to be what distinguishes humans from other species. Yet, all widely used visual similarity metrics today (e.g., LPIPS, CLIP, DINO) focus solely on perceptual attribute similarity and fail to capture the rich, often surprising relational similarities that humans perceive. How can we go beyond the visible content of an image to capture its relational properties? How can we bring images with the same relational logic closer together in representation space? To answer these questions, we first formulate relational image similarity as a measurable problem: two images are relationally similar when their internal relations or functions among visual elements correspond, even if their visual attributes differ. We then curate 114k image-caption dataset in which the captions are anonymized -- describing the underlying relational logic of the scene rather than its surface content. Using this dataset, we finetune a Vision-Language model to measure the relational similarity between images. This model serves as the first step toward connecting images by their underlying relational structure rather than their visible appearance. Our study shows that while relational similarity has a lot of real-world applications, existing image similarity models fail to capture it -- revealing a critical gap in visual computing.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
We introduce the Self-Evaluating Model (Self-E), a novel, from-scratch training approach for text-to-image generation that supports any-step inference. Self-E learns from data similarly to a Flow Matching model, while simultaneously employing a novel self-evaluation mechanism: it evaluates its own generated samples using its current score estimates, effectively serving as a dynamic self-teacher. Unlike traditional diffusion or flow models, it does not rely solely on local supervision, which typically necessitates many inference steps. Unlike distillation-based approaches, it does not require a pretrained teacher. This combination of instantaneous local learning and self-driven global matching bridges the gap between the two paradigms, enabling the training of a high-quality text-to-image model from scratch that excels even at very low step counts. Extensive experiments on large-scale text-to-image benchmarks show that Self-E not only excels in few-step generation, but is also competitive with state-of-the-art Flow Matching models at 50 steps. We further find that its performance improves monotonically as inference steps increase, enabling both ultra-fast few-step generation and high-quality long-trajectory sampling within a single unified model. To our knowledge, Self-E is the first from-scratch, any-step text-to-image model, offering a unified framework for efficient and scalable generation.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
Causality--referring to temporal, uni-directional cause-effect relationships between components--underlies many complex generative processes, including videos, language, and robot trajectories.Current causal diffusion models entangle temporal reasoning with iterative denoising, applying causal attention across all layers, at every denoising step, and over the entire context.In this paper, we show that the causal computation in these models is separable from the multi-step denoising process.Through systematic probing of autoregressive video diffusers, we uncover two key regularities:(1) early blocks produce highly similar features across denoising steps, indicating redundant computation along the diffusion trajectory; and(2) deeper blocks exhibit sparse cross-frame attention and primarily perform intra-frame rendering.Motivated by these findings, we introduce Separable Causal Diffusion (SCD), a new architecture that explicitly decouples once-per-frame temporal reasoning, via a causal transformer encoder, from multi-step frame-wise rendering, via a lightweight diffusion decoder.Extensive experiments on both pretraining and post-training tasks across synthetic and real benchmarks show that CSD significantly improves throughput and latency while matching or surpassing the generation quality of strong causal diffusion baselines.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表