CVPR 2025 Insights #1: Setting the Stage for Innovation
The Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference continues to evolve, and 2025 marked a pivotal moment in shaping the future of peer review and scholarly contribution in our field. During the opening session, the organizers introduced reforms to improve review quality, community engagement, and fairness. Here’s a summary of what’s new and noteworthy.
Welcome to CVPR 2025
With over 13,008 valid submissions — a 13% increase from last year — CVPR continues to scale, drawing talent from across the globe. Held primarily in person with virtual components for accessibility, the event features keynotes, tutorials, posters, oral presentations, demos, workshops, and a curated AI Art Gallery.
From a reviewer pool of 12,593 experts, each paper received at least three independent reviews. Ultimately, 2,878 papers were accepted, resulting in a 22.1% acceptance rate, reflecting the community’s high bar for excellence.
Raising the Bar: Mandatory Author Reviewing
The conference instituted mandatory author reviewing for the first time in CVPR history. This policy was introduced to ensure that every contributor also participates in reviewing, fostering a culture of responsibility and reciprocity.
Key Criteria:
Authors had to either:
- Submit two papers,
- Submit a first-author paper, or
- Have had at least one paper accepted in a previous top-tier ML conference.
- Eligibility extended to current PhD students and those already earning their PhDs.
To support a smooth transition, CVPR allowed authors to opt out via a simple form or email to the program chairs; no justification was required. The initiative helped reclaim valuable reviewing time and led to a more balanced workload distribution.
Quality Over Quantity: Incentives and Enforcement
To further boost reviewing standards, CVPR 2025 introduced a dual approach combining incentives and compliance:
- Incentives: Reviewers of nominated or awarded papers were highlighted, and the percentage of reviewers receiving “Outstanding Reviewer” recognition increased from 2% to 6%.
- Compliance Measures: Reviewers who failed to submit or delivered poor-quality reviews risked having their submissions rejected by the desk. This accountability measure was applied judiciously, with final decisions vetted by both area and program chairs.
As a result, “below expectations” reviews dropped from 9% to 6%, and PhD students stood out as the highest quality reviewers, outperforming their academic and industry peers.
Desk Rejections and Policy Enforcement
Transparency was a recurring theme. Organizers shared that over 200 papers were desk rejected this year, for reasons including:
Irresponsible reviewing behavior (19 cases)
Incomplete author profiles (18 cases)
Policy violations such as:
- Duplicate submissions,
- Use of generative AI without proper verification,
- Reference fabrication,
- Anonymity breaches,
- Exceeding page limits.
Notably, a new policy capping authors to 25 submissions also saw full compliance. Despite some grumbling over filling out OpenReview metadata (e.g., country and institution), organizers stressed its importance for maintaining geographic diversity and reviewer fairness.
Celebrating Excellence: CVPR 2025 Paper Awards
A curated list of groundbreaking contributions emerged from rigorous peer review. The award segment of the opening session honored exceptional research across multiple categories:
🥇 Best Paper
🌟 Best Student Paper
🏅 Honorable Mentions
- MegaSaM: Accurate, Fast and Robust Structure and Motion from Casual Dynamic Videos — [Authors: Zhengqi Li, Richard Tucker, Forrester Cole, Qianqian Wang, Linyi Jin, Vickie Ye, Angjoo Kanazawa, Aleksander Holynski, Noah Snavely]
- Navigation World Models — [Authors: Amir Bar, Gaoyue Zhou, Danny Tran, Trevor Darrell, Yann LeCun]
- Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models — [Authors: Matt Deitke, Christopher Clark, Sangho Lee, Rohun Tripathi, Yue Yang, Jae Sung Park, Mohammadreza Salehi, Niklas Muennighoff, Kyle Lo, Luca Soldaini, Jiasen Lu, Taira Anderson, Erin Bransom, Kiana Ehsani, Huong Ngo, YenSung Chen, Ajay Patel, Mark Yatskar, Chris Callison-Burch, Andrew Head, Rose Hendrix, Favyen Bastani, Eli VanderBilt, Nathan Lambert, Yvonne Chou, Arnavi Chheda, Jenna Sparks, Sam Skjonsberg, Michael Schmitz, Aaron Sarnat, Byron Bischoff, Pete Walsh, Chris Newell, Piper Wolters, Tanmay Gupta, Kuo-Hao Zeng, Jon Borchardt, Dirk Groeneveld, Crystal Nam, Sophie Lebrecht, Caitlin Wittlif, Carissa Schoenick, Oscar Michel, Ranjay Krishna, Luca Weihs, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ross Girshick, Ali Farhadi, Aniruddha Kembhavi]
- 3D Student Splatting and Scooping — [Authors: Jialin Zhu, Jiangbei Yue, Feixiang He, He Wang]
🧑🎓Best Student Paper Honorable Mention
🎨 Art, Legacy, and Recognition
The CVPR Art Gallery Awards highlighted creative brilliance:
- “Green Diffusion” by Masaru Mizuochi: A poetic parallel between natural decomposition and AI diffusion models, emphasizing the dual forces of creation and destruction through microbial decay and generative noise processes.
- “Learning to Move, Learning to Play, Learning to Animate” by Mingyong Cheng, Sophia Sun, and Han Zhang: A multimedia performance integrating custom-built robots, real-time AI, motion tracking, and biofeedback-driven sound to explore movement and animation as an embodied experience.
- “Atlas of Perception” by Tom White: A sculptural exploration of how neural networks understand visual information, revealing the underlying “visual grammar” in the latent space of machine perception.
The Longuet-Higgins Prize, recognizing influential papers from CVPR 2015, was awarded to works that stood the test of time, reminding us that the impact of research often blossoms years after publication.
🤝 Community Collaboration
In closing, organizers emphasized that these changes were made in collaboration with other top-tier conferences, sharing policies and lessons to build a stronger reviewing ecosystem across the AI and CV communities. CVPR’s leadership is not just about innovation in research — it’s about cultivating a sustainable, responsible scholarly environment.
“We hope that these continuous efforts to improve reviewing quality will benefit not only the CVPR community but also our sister conferences and the broader field.”
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