Excited to share my work as a Student Researcher at Google Zurich: UniGeoCLIP! ππ
W/ Eduard Trulls, Jan Hosang, @loicland.bsky.social
& @pesarlin.bsky.social , we built a framework aligning 5 geospatial modalities in one space.
Presented at EarthVision @ #CVPR2026. π§΅π
Posts by Nicolas Dufour
New paper: Back into Platoβs Cave
Are vision and language models converging to the same representation of reality? The Platonic Representation Hypothesis says yes. BUT we find the evidence for this is more fragile than it looks.
Project page: akoepke.github.io/cave_umwelten/
1/9
Checkout our recent work, where we only need web images to learn a novel view generation model! We can navigate inside any image, without any video/multi view data or prior models!
Congrats to Adrien for this great first PhD paper!
(with @davidpicard.eurosky.social and @ptrkprz.bsky.social)
I thought I would do a thread, but honestly the post is so good: kyutai.org/blog/2026-04...
It explains "One View Is Enough! Monocular Training for In-the-Wild Novel View Generation" arxiv.org/abs/2603.23488 done in colab with the smart people at kyutai
π¨ arxiv.org/abs/2604.06129
PoM: A Linear-Time Replacement for Attention with the Polynomial Mixer
This paper is the result of doing a lab-wide hackathon on an idea I've had for some time. Probably the paper with the highest number of authors I've ever done.
It's a CVPR Findings 26.
Thread π§΅π
π¨ Happy to announce CVPR@Paris'26 which will take place on June 1st in Paris. The goal of the event is to share a little bit of the conference before it happens. We will have poster sessions as well as several plenary talks by world-class speakers.
info: cvprinparis.github.io/CVPR2026InPa...
I'm commenting that number on slack with @nicolasdufour.bsky.social and I just realized that if you add the 16k active submissions at CVPR, even considering a sizeable overlap between the 2, there are currently well over 30k active papers in review.
That's nuts
Sadly i don't think DroPE will work for images / videos.
Both NoPE and DroPE rely on the causal mask to leak absolute PE. The number of tokens in the attention gets leaked because you can encode a bias that grows with the number of tokens.
So not a fix for images yet =(
It was a big pleasure to be in Nicolas's committee. Congratulations to Nicolas for the great work, and congratulations to the advisors too!
Apparently some people reported knowing of the bug before 11th of november so even before the release of the reviews
Yesterday, @nicolasdufour.bsky.social defended is PhD. I really enjoyed the years of collaboration w/ @vickykalogeiton.bsky.social (& @loicland.bsky.social)
Video: youtube.com/live/DXQ7FZA...
Big thanks to the jury @dlarlus.bsky.social @ptrkprz.bsky.social @gtolias.bsky.social A. Efros & T. Karras
Congrats Nicolas ! On the PhD and on those beautifully crafted slides π€©
Nicolas ( @nicolasdufour.bsky.social ) is defending his PhD right now.
I was so in awe of the presentation that I even forgot to take pictures π
Yes it's latent space just because i had my setup that way. Might try in pixel space in the future.
Yes it's the raw prediction, we predict the velocity directly
It's also very domain dependent. I know that for example, x-pred works better than epsilon pred for human motion generation.
Epsilon loss was used for a while for image generation since DDPM.
Recently it was more flow matching (or v-loss) that is mostly used since SD3 basically.
From my experience, flow doesn't really improve quality, but sampling in fewer steps works better than epsilon prediction
Thanks for the pointer! We were doing something similar in "Don't drop your samples" (arxiv.org/abs/2405.20324)
MIRO is quite different in the sense we focus on improving pretraining (not finetuning). Also, we explore the advantages of having multiple rewards to push the Pareto frontier.
Yes, thanks for pointing it out, will try to clarify
Check out our new work: MIRO
No more post-training alignment!
We integrate human alignment right from the start, during pretraining!
Results:
β¨ 19x faster convergence β‘
β¨ 370x less compute π»
π Explore the project: nicolas-dufour.github.io/miro/
Image generation becomes much more energy efficient. π
I'm super happy about Nicolas' latest work, probably the magnum opus of his PhD.
Read the thread for all the great details.
The main conclusion I draw from this work is that better pretraining, in particular by conditioning on better data, allows us to train SOTA models at a fraction of the cost.
Work with @lucasdegeorge.bsky.social @arrijitghosh.bsky.social @vickykalogeiton.bsky.social and @davidpicard.bsky.social.
This will be the last work of my PhD as I will be defending the 26th of November!
MIRO demonstrates that aligning T2I models during pretraining is not only viable but superior: it's faster, more compute-efficient, and provides fine-grained, interpretable control.
Project page for all the details: nicolas-dufour.github.io/miro
The explicit reward conditioning allows for flexible trade-offs, like optimizing for GenEval by reducing the aesthetic weight in the prompt. We can also isolate the look of a specific reward or interpolate them via multi-reward classifier-free guidance
MIRO excels on challenging compositional tasks (Geneval here)
The multi-reward conditioning fosters better understanding of complex spatial relationships and object interactions.
Despite being a compact model (0.36B parameters), MIRO achieves state-of-the-art results:
GenEval score of 75, outperforming the 12B FLUX-dev (67) for 370x less inference cost.
Conditioning on rich reward signals is a highly effective way to achieve large model capabilities in a compact form!
MIRO dramatically improves sample efficiency for test-time scaling.
On PickScore, MIRO needs just 4 samples to match the baseline's 128 samples (a 32x efficiency gain).
For ImageReward, it's a 16x efficiency gain
This demonstrates superior inference-time efficiency for high-quality generation.
Traditional single-objective optimization often leads to reward hacking. MIRO's multi-dimensional conditioning naturally prevents this by requiring the model to balance multiple objectives simultaneously. This produces balanced, robust performance across all metrics contrary to single rewards.