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Recent advancements in diffusion-based generative priors have enabled visually plausible image compression at extremely low bit rates. However, existing approaches suffer from slow sampling processes and suboptimal bit allocation due to fragmented training paradigms. In this work, we propose Accelerate \textbf{Diff}usion-based Image Compression via \textbf{C}onsistency Prior \textbf{R}efinement (DiffCR), a novel compression framework for efficient and high-fidelity image reconstruction. At the heart of DiffCR is a Frequency-aware Skip Estimation (FaSE) module that refines the $\epsilon$-prediction prior from a pre-trained latent diffusion model and aligns it with compressed latents at different timesteps via Frequency Decoupling Attention (FDA). Furthermore, a lightweight consistency estimator enables fast two-step decoding by preserving the semantic trajectory of diffusion sampling. Without updating the backbone diffusion model, DiffCR achieves substantial bitrate savings (27.2\% BD-rate(LPIPS) and 65.1\% BD-rate(PSNR)) and over $10\times$ speed-up compared to SOTA diffusion-based compression baselines.

AAAI 2026

Towards Efficient Low-rate Image Compression with Frequency-aware Diffusion Prior Refinement

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.<br><br>

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Multi-view graph clustering (MVGC) for remote sensing data has gained increasing attention due to its ability to integrate complementary information across modalities while capturing spatial dependencies in heterogeneous data. Although current methods based on graph contrastive learning achieve strong performance, they often misidentify intra-cluster samples as negatives, leading to class conflicts and reduced clustering accuracy. Graph masked autoencoders have recently shown promising potential in learning robust representations through masked reconstruction, but their application to remote sensing data remains underexplored. This challenge is especially notable in the multi-view remote sensing setting, where high heterogeneity and complex spatial structures increase the difficulty of effective representation learning. To address these issues, we propose Clustering-Guided graph Mask AutoEncoder (CG-MAE), the first framework to extend graph masked autoencoders to multi-view remote sensing clustering. We introduce a clustering-guided masking strategy that selectively masks nodes near cluster centers and intra-cluster edges, which are crucial for capturing key structural information. By reconstructing these masked components, the model is encouraged to focus on learning features that are highly relevant to clustering. To further improve training stability and efficiency, we design an easy-to-hard node masking strategy that enables the model to gradually learn from increasingly challenging patterns. Additionally, we propose a dual self-adaptive learning mechanism that encourages the model to align more closely with the underlying semantic distributions. Extensive experiments on four widely used multi-view remote sensing datasets demonstrate that CG-MAE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both clustering accuracy and representation quality.

Graph Masked Autoencoder for Multi-view Remote Sensing Data Clustering

Text-driven motion generation has attracted increasing attention due to its broad applications in virtual reality, animation, and robotics. While existing methods typically model human and animal motion separately, a joint cross-species approach offers key advantages, such as a unified representation and improved generalization. However, morphological differences across species remain a key challenge, often compromising motion plausibility. To address this, we propose \textbf{X-MoGen}, the first unified framework for cross-species text-driven motion generation covering both humans and animals. X-MoGen adopts a two-stage architecture. First, a conditional graph variational autoencoder learns canonical T-pose priors, while an autoencoder encodes motion into a shared latent space regularized by morphological loss. In the second stage, we perform masked motion modeling to generate motion embeddings conditioned on textual descriptions. During training, a morphological consistency module is employed to promote skeletal plausibility across species. To support unified modeling, we construct \textbf{UniMo4D}, a large-scale dataset of 115 species and 119k motion sequences, which integrates human and animal motions under a shared skeletal topology for joint training. Extensive experiments on UniMo4D demonstrate that X-MoGen outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both seen and unseen species.

X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation Across Humans and Animals

The emergence of foundation models has substantially advanced zero-shot generalization in monocular depth estimation (MDE), as exemplified by the Depth Anything series. However, given access to some data from downstream tasks, a natural question arises: can the performance of these models be further improved? To this end, we propose a parameter-efficient and weakly supervised self-training adaptation framework designed to enhance the robustness and accuracy of MDE foundation models in unseen diverse domains. We first adopt a dense self-training objective as the primary source of structural self-supervision. To further improve robustness, we introduce semantically-aware hierarchical normalization, which exploits instance-level segmentation maps to perform more stable and multi-scale structural normalization. Beyond dense supervision, we introduce a cost-efficient weak supervision in the form of pairwise ordinal depth annotations to further guide the adaptation process, which enforces informative ordinal constraints to mitigate local topological errors. Finally, a weight regularization loss is employed to anchor the LoRA updates, ensuring training stability and preserving the model's generalizable knowledge. Extensive experiments on both realistic and corrupted out-of-distribution datasets under diverse and challenging scenarios demonstrate that our method consistently improves generalization and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks.

Enhancing Generalization of Depth Estimation Foundation Model via Weakly-Supervised Adaptation with Regularization

Image composition aims to seamlessly integrate a foreground object into a background, where generating realistic and geometrically accurate shadows remains a persistent challenge. While recent diffusion-based methods have outperformed GAN-based approaches, existing techniques, such as the diffusion-based relighting framework IC-Light, still fall short in producing shadows with both high appearance realism and geometric precision, especially in composite images. To address these limitations, we propose a novel shadow generation framework based on a Keypoints Linear Model (KPLM) and a Shadow Triangle Algorithm (STA). KPLM models articulated human bodies using nine keypoints and one bounding block, enabling physically plausible shadow projection and dynamic shading across joints, thereby enhancing visual realism. STA further improves geometric accuracy by computing shadow angles, lengths, and spatial positions through explicit geometric formulations. 
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on shadow realism benchmarks, particularly under complex human poses, and generalizes effectively to multi-directional relighting scenarios such as those supported by IC-Light.

KPLM-STA: Physically-Accurate Shadow Synthesis for Human Relighting via Keypoint-Based Light Modeling

Inter-agent communication serves as an effective mechanism for enhancing performance in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems. However, the inherent communication latency in practical systems induces both action decision delays and outdated information sharing, impeding MARL performance gains, particularly in time-critical applications like autonomous driving. In this work, we propose a $\textbf{Value-of-Information aware Low-latency Communication (VIL2C)}$ scheme that proactively adjusts the latency distribution to mitigate its effects in MARL systems. Specifically, we define a Value of Information (VoI) metric to quantify the importance of delayed messages on the recipient agent's decision. We then design a VoI aware resource allocation method that dynamically prioritizes message transmission based on each delayed message's importance. Moreover, we propose a progressive message reception mechanism to adaptively adjust the reception duration based on received messages. We derive the optimized VoI aware resource allocation and theoretically prove the performance advantage of the proposed VIL2C scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VIL2C outperforms existing approaches under various communication conditions. These gains are attributed to the low-latency transmission of high-VoI messages via resource allocation and the elimination of unnecessary waiting periods via adaptive reception duration.

VIL2C: Value-of-Information Aware Low-Latency Communication for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Controllable generation of realistic LiDAR scenes is crucial for applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. While recent diffusion-based models achieve high-fidelity LiDAR generation, they lack explicit control over foreground objects and spatial relationships, limiting their usefulness for scenario simulation and safety validation. To address these limitations, we propose Large-scale Layout-guided LiDAR generation model ("La La LiDAR"), a novel layout-guided generative framework that introduces semantic-enhanced scene graph diffusion with relation-aware contextual conditioning for structured LiDAR layout generation, followed by foreground-aware control injection for complete scene generation. This enables customizable control over object placement while ensuring spatial and semantic consistency. To support our structured LiDAR generation, we introduce Waymo-SG and nuScenes-SG, two large-scale LiDAR scene graph datasets, along with new evaluation metrics for layout synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that La La LiDAR achieves state-of-the-art performance in both LiDAR generation and downstream perception tasks, establishing a new benchmark for controllable 3D scene generation.

La La LiDAR: Large-Scale Layout Generation from LiDAR Data

Layout-to-Image generation has significantly advanced content creation by enabling the rendering of visual text under predefined spatial layouts. Current approaches achieve training-free layout guidance by constructing attention-based energy functions to derive correction gradients. In this paper, we demonstrate that vanilla energy functions suffer from two limitations, resulting in imprecise layout control and visually unrealistic artifacts. First, the normalizing factor of the Boltzmann distribution defined by the energy functions is non-negligible when calculating correction gradients, yet current energy functions cannot compute this factor exactly. Furthermore, while attention varies over time during the denoising process, existing approaches employ a fixed formulation. To address these challenges, we introduce FreLay, a novel training-free approach equipped with a frequency-aware energy function. Our method first reformulates the energy function to handle the normalization factor, enabling accurate computation of correction gradients. Simultaneously, leveraging the prior knowledge that low-frequency information deteriorates slower during noise addition, we design a time-specific energy function for each timestep from a frequency-domain perspective. Experimental results demonstrate that FreLay consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art training-free methods by a large margin both qualitatively and quantitatively across multiple datasets. Code will be released upon acceptance.

FreLay: Frequency-aware Energy Function for Training-free Layout-to-Image Generation

General-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly integral to modern AI systems for document understanding, yet their ability to perform fine-grained layout analysis remains severely underdeveloped. Overcoming this requires a large-scale, high-fidelity training dataset. However, current annotation methods, which rely on parsing rendered PDFs, are costly, error-prone, and fail to scale effectively. This work introduces a paradigm shift in data acquisition to resolve this bottleneck. We present LaTeX2Layout, a novel and generalizable procedural pipeline that obtains ground-truth layout information not from the final PDF, but directly from the LaTeX compilation process itself. By instrumenting the compiler, our method produces pixel-perfect bounding boxes and reading order, entirely bypassing the ambiguities of post-rendering parsers. This efficient and accurate pipeline enables us to generate a massive dataset of 140K pages, including 120K programmatically-generated variants that more than double the layout diversity of real-world datasets. This unique dataset allows us to fine-tune a highly efficient 3B parameter VLM, employing a curriculum learning strategy that re-ranks training examples from simple to complex layouts to optimize convergence. Our model establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving a Kendall's Tau of 0.95 for reading order and a mAP@0.5 of 0.91 for element grounding---a nearly 200\% relative improvement over formidable zero-shot baselines like GPT-4o and Claude-3.7. To foster reproducible research and future innovation, we make our data generation pipeline, dataset, and all models openly available.

LaTeX2Layout: High-Fidelity, Scalable Document Layout Annotation Pipeline for Layout Detection

Achieving pixel-level registration between SAR and optical images remains a challenging task due to their fundamentally different imaging mechanisms and visual characteristics. Although deep learning has achieved great success in many cross-modal tasks, its performance on SAR-Optical registration tasks is still unsatisfactory. Gradient-based information has traditionally played a crucial role in handcrafted descriptors by highlighting structural differences. However, such gradient cues have not been effectively leveraged in deep learning frameworks for SAR-Optical image matching. To address this gap, we propose SOMA, a dense registration framework that integrates structural gradient priors into deep features and refines alignment through a hybrid matching strategy. Specifically, we introduce the Feature Gradient Enhancer (FGE), which embeds multi-scale, multi-directional gradient filters into the feature space using attention and reconstruction mechanisms to boost feature distinctiveness. Furthermore, we propose the Global-Local Affine-Flow Matcher (GLAM), which combines affine transformation and flow-based refinement within a coarse-to-fine architecture to ensure both structural consistency and local accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that SOMA significantly improves registration precision, increasing the CMR@1px by 12.29% on the SEN1-2 dataset and 18.50% on the GFGE_SO dataset. In addition, SOMA exhibits strong robustness and generalizes well across diverse scenes and resolutions.

SOMA: Feature Gradient Enhanced Affine-Flow Matching for SAR-Optical Registration

Text-attributed graphs (TAGs), which associate rich textual descriptions with each node, are widely employed to represent complex relationships among real-world textual entities.
Currently, representation learning for TAGs leverages large language models (LLMs) to transform node-matched textual descriptions into node features or labels, followed by message passing in graph neural networks (GNNs) that further improves the expressiveness of graph representation learning.
Nevertheless, a simple experiment we conducted demontrates that not all LLMs are readily compatible with GNNs.
A salient finding indicates that architectural heterogeneity among LLMs manifests as substantial performance gap across diverse TAGs representation learning.
Moreover, the node semantics encoded by LLMs are often misaligned with the message passing in GNNs, causing $\textit{performance collapse}$. 
Motivated by this observation, we propose a noval self-supervised graph learning framework called $\underline{S}$tage-$\underline{A}$ware $\underline{G}$raph $\underline{C}$ontrastive $\underline{L}$earning (SAGCL).
In particular, we propose the node-oriented mixture of experts (NodeMoE) to assign suitable candidate experts for each node. 
It flexibly balances the strengths of different language experts by low-rank decomposition and reparameterization strategies. 
Subsequently, to align the inductive biases of graph structures with the semantic perception capabilities of LLMs, the message passing in GNNs is decoupled into the feature transformation and the feature propagation stage. 
Given the two stage views, stage-aware graph contrastive learning is proposed to match the node semantics encoded by the LLM with the locally aware topological patterns within the GNN via self-supervised contrastive learning.
Experiments on eight datasets and three diverse tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of SAGCL.

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Graph Masked Autoencoder for Multi-view Remote Sensing Data Clustering

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