This workshop aims to create a forum to reflect on these bitter lessons: covering successes, failures, and cyclical trends. Our invited speakers and program will be structured around the following six critical themes:

• Lesson of Scale (Does Architecture Still Matter?)

• Lesson of Cyclicality (Why Do "Old" Ideas Keep Coming Back?)

• Lesson of Structure (When Does Elegance Beat Brute Force?)

• Lesson of Data (The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Uncuration?)

• Lesson of Metrology (Are We Chasing Benchmarks Off a Cliff?)

• Lesson of the Community (What is Academia's Role in the Age of Scale?)

This workshop fosters open dialogue about hard-won lessons. This dialogue encourages a more transparent, self-aware, and sustainable research culture. The workshop's broader impact is transforming individual experience into shared wisdom. This helps the community build a deeper understanding, not just bigger models. This transparency also promotes equity. It helps to democratize the "unwritten rules" of research. This makes the hard-won intuition of senior researchers more accessible to newcomers.

Our previous editions:

• How to Stand Out in the Crowd (CVPR 2025)

• CV 20/20: A Retrospective Vision  (CVPR 2024) 

• Scholars & Big Models (CVPR 2023)

Other community building workshops: QVCV, Good Citizen of CVPR, Computer Vision After 5 Years, ML retrospectives