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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.

AAAI 2026

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

poster

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.

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.

Stage-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning with Node-oriented Mixture of Experts

Open-set noisy label learning faces a critical challenge in maintaining robust DNN performance when training data contains both in-distribution noisy (IDN) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. These noisy samples induce overconfident but erroneous predictions due to their ambiguous positions relative to category boundaries. Current methods address this by filtering noisy samples based on visual features alone, they fail to resolve the semantic ambiguity near decision boundaries, where limited visual cues lead to unreliable sample purification. To this end, we propose Content Diversity-guided Ambiguity Mitigation (CDgAM), a novel framework that leverages diverse contents to mitigate visual ambiguity in open-set noisy label learning. CDgAM leverages textual descriptions of intra-class commonality and inter-class disparity to dynamically refine semantic boundaries, reducing bias in prototype learning. To further suppress early-stage uncertainty in visual representations, we design a region-sensitive distillation regularization that transfers boundary-aware knowledge from a multimodal large language model to the target DNN. Extensive experiments conducted on various datasets with different noise levels demonstrate the effectiveness of our CDgAM, outperforming state-of-the-art methods for open-set noisy label learning.

Content Diversity-guided Ambiguity Mitigation for Open-Set Noisy Label Learning

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved strong performance in video action recognition, but their high computational cost limits their practicality. Lightweight CNNs are more efficient but suffer from accuracy gaps. Cross-Architecture Knowledge Distillation (CAKD) addresses this by transferring knowledge from ViTs to CNNs, yet existing methods often struggle with architectural mismatch and overlook the value of stronger homogeneous CNN teachers. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Dual-Teacher Knowledge Distillation framework that leverages both a heterogeneous ViT teacher and a homogeneous CNN teacher to collaboratively guide a lightweight CNN student. We introduce two key components: (1) Discrepancy-Aware Teacher Weighting, which dynamically fuses the predictions from ViT and CNN teachers by assigning adaptive weights based on teacher confidence and prediction discrepancy with the student, enabling more informative and effective supervision; and (2) a Structure Discrepancy-Aware Distillation strategy, where the student learns the residual features between ViT and CNN teachers via a lightweight auxiliary branch, focusing on transferable architectural differences without mimicking all of ViT’s high-dimensional patterns. Extensive experiments on benchmarks including HMDB51, EPIC-KITCHENS-100, and Kinetics-400, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art distillation approaches, achieving notable performance improvements with a maximum accuracy gain of 5.95% on HMDB51.

Revisiting Cross-Architecture Distillation: Adaptive Dual-Teacher Transfer for Lightweight Video Models

Deep learning has shown strong potential in modeling complex spatiotemporal dynamics. However, most existing methods depend on densely and uniformly sampled data, which is often unavailable in practice due to sensor and cost limitations. In many real-world settings, such as mobile sensing and physical experiments, data are burst-sampled with short high-frequency segments followed by long gaps, making it difficult to learn accurate dynamics from sparse observations. To address this issue, we propose Physics-Informed Multi-Scale Recurrent Learning (PIMRL), a novel framework specifically designed for burst-sampled spatiotemporal data. PIMRL combines macro-scale latent dynamics inference with micro-scale adaptive refinement guided by incomplete prior information from partial differential equations (PDEs). It further introduces a temporal message-passing mechanism to effectively propagate information across burst intervals. This multi-scale architecture enables PIMRL to model complex systems accurately even under severe data scarcity. We evaluate our approach on five benchmark datasets involving 1D to 3D multi-scale PDEs. The results show that PIMRL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving substantial improvements and reducing errors by up to 80\% in the most challenging settings, which demonstrates the clear advantage of our model. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of physics-informed recurrent learning for accurate and efficient modeling of sparse spatiotemporal systems.

PIMRL: Physics-Informed Multi-Scale Recurrent Learning for Burst-Sampled Spatiotemporal Dynamics

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) seeks to classify affective states from facial images, which remains a challenging problem due to variations in real-world conditions. FER task becomes particularly complex when handling unconstrained environments characterized by partial occlusions, different head poses, and so on. To address the above problems, current approaches rely on extensive learnable parameters and complex model architectures, which inevitably lead to overfitting and cause the FER model to focus on non-discriminative facial regions. In this work, we propose an HKAFER model that can adaptively enhance visual expression representations through efficiently fine-tuning the image encoder in large Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Specifically, we establish Heterogeneous Kronecker Adaptation (HeKA), which consists of multi-scale adapters based on Kronecker product in a parallel manner, offering significantly diverse subspaces to learn the incremental matrices. Besides, we also propose Dual-Branch Interactive Router (DBIR) to dynamically assign the weights of adapters, which promotes collaboration and information flow among them. In this way, our HKAFER can effectively capture robust spatial features and the regional associations. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several FER benchmarks but also uses significantly fewer trainable parameters.

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

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