2021 was the year Transformers decisively entered computer vision: Swin Transformer won the ICCV Best Paper award, DINO showed that a self-supervised ViT could learn object segmentation without labels, and NeRF grew from one paper into an entire subfield. CVPR and ICCV both moved fully online because of the pandemic, yet the work published that year shaped architectural choices across computer vision for years to come.
2022 marked computer vision’s turn from recognition toward generation. Latent Diffusion Models appeared at CVPR and led to Stable Diffusion; NeRF research jumped from 25 papers in 2021 to more than 50 at CVPR alone; ConvNeXt mounted a compelling counterattack for CNNs; and ECCV in Tel Aviv set a record with 157 oral papers.
In 2023, computer vision moved from seeing images to understanding, generating, and controlling them. Segment Anything turned segmentation into a general zero-shot capability, ControlNet made diffusion models precisely controllable, and 3D Gaussian Splatting challenged NeRF with real-time rendering. CVPR received more than 9,000 submissions and ICCV more than 8,000 as both conferences returned to in-person events.
In 2024, 3D Gaussian Splatting took over 3D reconstruction, video generation moved from research toward products, and vision-language models spread into specialized domains. CVPR received a record 11,500-plus submissions; its Best Papers were Google Research's Generative Image Dynamics and the UCSD/Google collaboration Rich Human Feedback for Text-to-Image Generation. ECCV gave its Best Paper award to Columbia's Minimalist Vision with Freeform Pixels, an unconventional return to the physics of optics.
2025 was a two-conference year for computer vision, with CVPR and ICCV both taking place. CVPR received a record 13,008 submissions; Best Paper VGGT turned 3D reconstruction from iterative optimization into feed-forward inference. ICCV's Marr Prize went to BrickGPT, which generates brick structures from text that can actually be assembled. 3D Gaussian Splatting displaced NeRF, video generation moved toward products, and flow models began replacing diffusion, completing several paradigm shifts in one year.