What is the role of academic computer vision research in the age of increasingly powerful large models? Is GPT-6 Astra a step change? How can a researcher have an impact today in academia? These are the questions I ask myself as I head off to ECCV 2026, a conference I’ve attended since 1992. One of my papers this year is VIGA, a method that takes an image as input and outputs a 3D Blender scene that represents that image. This is a classical inverse-graphics task and VIGA was the first method to solve it using an agentic approach. The idea is now several years old and the first version of the paper was rejected. This delayed publication significantly. After it was accepted at ECCV, it was quickly surpassed by people using Claude Code for the same purpose. Today GPT-6 Astra blows away all previous results. But we still head off to ECCV to tell the community about our invention that is now fully out of date. The way academic work often progresses is that one reads recent papers, notices that they have limitations, comes up with a new idea, explores this, publishes it, etc. Any published paper I read today is based on ideas that are at least a year old. And those ideas were based on the literature of the time, which was also a year old. That means that any paper I see at ECCV is likely two years out of date. In AI today, two years means your work is likely irrelevant. At CVPR this summer I noticed that many authors have not gotten the message. They continue to work on “old” problems that have a long history. This history is based on assumptions about how the “vision problem” will be “solved”. The truth is that it is being solved in a very different way and many of these problems are no longer relevant. Another group of papers focuses on very niche problems where large models likely fail because of insufficient data or lack of business interest. The impactful papers were largely from industry and had long author lists and massive data+compute behind them. These papers were also out of data, describing systems that had been released months before, but at least they served to provide the community with more complete documentation and analysis of commercial systems. So what should academics do? First, we need to put aside the tools we’ve used for years and start from scratch. Every project should start by trying really hard to solve the problem with existing tools. I would like to see every paper begin with a detailed experimental analysis of how existing models perform and why they fail (if they do). This gives the kind of insight we need today. Then, assuming current models fail, the solution should provide some fundamental insight that will outlive the next release of such models. Reviewers today still focus on technical novelty. This pushes people to focus on tweaking architectures rather than clearly moving the field forward. Papers need to be judged based on their novel insight and not their novel technical contribution. This is a real shift in thinking but it focuses us on what matters - progress of the field. If we want there to be a “field” of computer vision, then it can’t become a marginal backwater, focusing on esoteric problems. If you haven’t tried using Astra (or whatever comes next) to solve your problem, then you have not done your homework. This omission should be seen as negatively as not having a previous work section. Concretely, I think papers should include a new section analogous to “Related Work” where that related work is current models and how they perform on the task. Reviewers should start asking for this and expecting authors to be able to articulate their insights about the limitations of existing large models. I'm interested in your thoughts.

You can just RL a coding model to paint with javascript btw

Frontier Labs are incented to be fearful as it provides a moral justification for staying closed. Chinese Labs take the consistent position of doing what’s good for all and being open. So the little guys find themselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the Chinese…

Introducing InfiniteDiffusion, my independent paper accepted to #SIGGRAPH2026! I have one RTX 3090 Ti. No funding, advisors, or team. By day I'm a new grad SWE at Walmart. The paper has two main contributions: - InfiniteDiffusion: a new approach to infinite generation with diffusion models. - Terrain Diffusion: the world’s first learned procedural terrain generator. Here’s why this matters, and how they are connected. 🧵

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…