Singapore

Recent works have evidenced how a sequential fine-tuning (SeqFT) phase of pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs) followed by a classifier refinement process through approximate distributions of class features, offers effective solutions to class incremental learning (CIL). However, this approach suffers from distribution drift due to the sequential optimization of shared backbone parameters, leading to a mismatch between the approximate distributions of previous classes and those of the updated model. This distribution mismatch generally leads to degraded performance in classifier refinement over time. To tackle this issue, we introduce the latent space transition operator, built on which we propose the Sequential Learning with Drift Compensation (SLDC) method. First, the linear SLDC method, which estimates a linear operator, is developed by solving a regularized least-squares problem between pre- and post-optimization features. Hereafter, the weak-nonlinear SLDC method, which assumes that appropriate transition operators are located at the intersection between linear and nonlinear regions, is developed by constructing learnable weak-nonlinear transformations. Finally, in both variants, knowledge distillation (KD) is applied to further mitigate the representation drift. Extensive experiments on CIL benchmarks demonstrate that SLDC significantly enhances the performance of SeqFT. Notably, by combining KD (to reduce representation drift) with SLDC (to counteract distribution drift), SeqFT achieves comparable performance to joint training across all evaluated datasets.

AAAI 2026

Compensating Distribution Drifts in Continual Learning with Pre-trained Vision Transformers

class-incremental learning

continual learning

pre-trained models

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.

Multi-modal dataset distillation (DD) condenses large datasets into compact ones that retain task efficacy by capturing correspondence patterns, i.e., shared semantics between paired modalities. However, such patterns rely on cross-modal similarity and cannot be faithfully captured by intra-modal similarity of current unimodal strategies. As a result, current multi-modal DD methods tend to over-concentrate, redundantly encoding similar correspondence patterns and thus limiting generalizability. To this end, we propose a novel multi-modal DD framework to systematically **Pro**mote **Co**rrespondence coverage, i.e., **ProCo**. Initially, we develop a correspondence consistency metric based on cross-modal retrieval distributions to cluster correspondence patterns. These clusters capture the underlying correspondence distribution, enabling ProCo to initialize distilled data with representative patterns while regularizing optimization to promote correspondence representativeness and diversity. Moreover, we employ conditional neural fields for efficient distilled data parameterization, enhancing fine-grained pattern capture while allowing more distilled data under a fixed budget to boost correspondence coverage. Extensive experiments verify that our ProCo achieves superior and elastic budget-efficacy trade-offs, surpassing prior methods by over 15% with 10$\times$ distillation budget reduction, highlighting its real-world practicality.

Correspondence Coverage Matters for Multi-Modal Dataset Distillation

Selecting a subset of promising candidates from a large pool is crucial across various scientific and real-world applications.
\textit{Conformal selection} offers a distribution-free and model-agnostic framework for candidate selection with uncertainty quantification.
While effective in offline settings, its application to online scenarios, where data arrives sequentially, poses challenges.
Notably, conformal selection permits the deselection of previously selected candidates, which is incompatible with applications requiring irreversible selection decisions.
This limitation is particularly evident in resource-intensive sequential processes, such as drug discovery, where advancing a compound to subsequent stages renders reversal impractical.
To address this issue, we extend conformal selection to an online \textit{Accept-to-Reject Changes} (ARC) procedure: non-selected data points can be reconsidered for selection later, and once a candidate is selected, the decision is irreversible.
Specifically, we propose a novel conformal selection method, \textit{Online Conformal Selection with Accept-to-Reject Changes} (dubbed \textbf{OCS-ARC}), which incorporates online Benjamini–Hochberg procedure into the candidate selection process.
We provide theoretical guarantees that OCS-ARC controls the false discovery rate (FDR) at or below the nominal level at any timestep under both i.i.d. and exchangeable data assumptions.
Additionally, we theoretically show that our approach naturally extends to multivariate response settings.
Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that OCS-ARC significantly improves selection power over the baseline while maintaining valid FDR control across all examined timesteps.

Online Conformal Selection with Accept-to-Reject Changes

Macro placement is a crucial subproblem of chip design, focusing on determining the locations of numerous macros while minimizing multiple metrics. In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained traction as a favorable technique to improve placement performance. However, existing RL-based placers ignore the orientation of macros, resulting in the state space constrained to two-dimensional discrete coordinates and greatly restricting the exploration opportunities. To address this issue, we propose a novel macro placement method, RSPlace, which guides the bidirectional expansion of the global search tree to offer the RL agent more exploration opportunities, incorporating rotation into the RL-based macro placement solution for the first time. RSPlace intelligently determines the optimal rotation angle to maximize placement benefits by leveraging rotation sensing and placement perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that taking the macro orientation into account substantially broadens the feasible locations and effectively reduces the half-perimeter wirelength (HPWL), thus ensuring that our approach significantly improves the optimization effect compared to the state-of-the-art method.

RSPlace: Rotation Sensing Macro Placement via Bidirectional Tree Expansion

Exemplar-Free Continual Learning (EFCL) restricts the storage of previous task data and is highly susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. While pre-trained models (PTMs) are increasingly leveraged for EFCL, existing methods often overlook the inherent imbalance of real-world data distributions. We discovered that real-world data streams commonly exhibit dual-level imbalances, dataset-level distributions combined with extreme or reversed skews within individual tasks, creating both intra-task and inter-task disparities that hinder effective learning and generalization.
To address these challenges, we propose PANDA, a Patch-and-Distribution-Aware Augmentation framework that integrates seamlessly with existing PTM-based EFCL methods. PANDA amplifies low-frequency classes by using a CLIP encoder to identify representative regions and transplanting those into frequent-class samples within each task. Furthermore, PANDA incorporates an adaptive balancing strategy that leverages prior task distributions to smooth inter-task imbalances, reducing the overall gap between average samples across tasks and enabling fairer learning with frozen PTMs. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate PANDA's capability to work with existing PTM-based CL methods, improving accuracy and reducing catastrophic forgetting.

PANDA – Patch and Distribution-Aware Augmentation for Long-Tailed Exemplar-Free Continual Learning

Extracellular recordings are transient voltage fluctuations in the vicinity of neurons, serving as a fundamental modality in neuroscience for decoding brain activity at single-neuron resolution. Spike sorting, the process of attributing each detected spike to its corresponding neuron, is a pivotal step in brain sensing pipelines. However, it remains challenging under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), electrode drift, and cross-session variability. In this paper, we propose HuiduRep, a robust self-supervised representation learning framework that extracts discriminative and generalizable features from extracellular recordings. By integrating contrastive learning with a denoising autoencoder, HuiduRep learns latent representations robust to noise and drift. With HuiduRep, we develop a spike sorting pipeline that clusters spike representations without ground truth labels. Experiments on hybrid and real-world datasets demonstrate that HuiduRep achieves strong robustness. Furthermore, the pipeline significantly outperforms state-of-the-art tools such as KiloSort4 and MountainSort5 on accuracy and precision on diverse datasets. These findings demonstrate the potential of self-supervised spike representation learning as a foundational tool for robust and generalizable processing of extracellular recordings.

HuiduRep: A Robust Self-Supervised Framework for Learning Neural Representations from Extracellular Recordings

Graph prompt learning (GPL) serves as a crucial framework for mitigating the knowledge transfer by reconciling the substantial mismatch between pre-training models and downstream tasks. However, prevalent GPL paradigm fail to accommodate graph data affected by privacy-induced noise. Specifically, 1) GPL typically relies on the stability of original graph structures for the design of effective prompt templates; 2) the construction of prompts lacks explicit guidance to suppress noise introduced by privacy perturbations; 3) prompt optimization on single disturbed graphs can easily lead to overfitting to noise patterns. To address these issues, we propose a novel privacy-aware graph prompt learning (PAGPL) scheme, which alleviates spurious clues caused by privacy noise injection. Initially, an adaptive structure-wise Bayesian estimation is applied to reconstruct the privacy-perturbed graphs. Subsequently, to suppress the impact of residual perturbation, a noise-resilient prompt generation is employed to filter unreliable structural and signals. Ultimately, we incorporate a multi-view-based progressive privacy consistency to promote the robustness of prompts against the semantic misalignment while improving the task-specific consistency. The experimental results reveal that our scheme outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) GPL approaches with a 10%–60% improvement in accuracy under various real-world privacy-perturbed scenarios.

PAGPL: Privacy-Aware Graph Prompt Learning Scheme via Adaptive Perturbation-Estimated Topology Recovery

Accurately localizing and segmenting relevant objects from optical remote sensing images (ORSIs) is critical for advancing remote sensing applications. Existing methods are typically built upon moderate-scale pre-trained models and employ diverse optimization strategies to achieve promising performance under full-parameter fine-tuning. In fact, deeper and larger-scale foundation models can provide stronger support for performance improvement. However, due to their massive number of parameters, directly adopting full-parameter fine-tuning leads to pronounced training difficulties, such as excessive GPU memory consumption and high computational costs, which result in extremely limited exploration of large-scale models in existing works. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic wavelet expert-guided fine-tuning paradigm with fewer trainable parameters, dubbed WEFT, which efficiently adapts large-scale foundation models to ORSIs segmentation tasks by leveraging the guidance of wavelet experts. Specifically, we introduce a task-specific wavelet expert extractor to model wavelet experts from different perspectives and dynamically regulate their outputs, thereby generating trainable features enriched with task-specific information for subsequent fine-tuning. Furthermore, we construct an expert-guided conditional adapter that first enhances the fine-grained perception of frozen features for specific tasks by injecting trainable features, and then iteratively updates the information of both types of feature, allowing for efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that our WEFT not only outperforms 21 state-of-the-art methods on three ORSIs datasets, but also achieves optimal results in camouflage, natural, and medical scenarios.

Small but Mighty: Dynamic Wavelet Expert-Guided Fine-Tuning of Large-Scale Models for Optical Remote Sensing Object Segmentation

Infrared unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) target images often suffer from motion blur degradation caused by rapid sensor movement, significantly reducing contrast between target and background. Generally, detection performance heavily depends on the discriminative feature representation between target and background. Existing methods typically treat deblurring as a preprocessing step focused on visual quality, while neglecting the enhancement of task-relevant features crucial for detection. Improving feature representation for detection under blur conditions remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel $\textbf{J}$oint $\textbf{F}$eature-$\textbf{D}$omain $\textbf{D}$eblurring and $\textbf{D}$etection end-to-end framework, dubbed $JFD^{3}$. We design a dual-branch architecture with shared weights, where the clear branch guides the blurred branch to enhance discriminative feature representation. Specifically, we first introduce a lightweight feature restoration network, where features from the clear branch serve as feature-level supervision to guide the blurred branch, thereby enhancing its distinctive capability for detection. We then propose a frequency structure guidance module that refines the structure prior from the restoration network and integrates it into shallow detection layers to enrich target structural information. Finally, a feature consistency self-supervised loss is imposed between the dual-branch detection backbones, driving the blurred branch to approximate the feature representations of the clear one. We also construct a benchmark, named IRBlurUAV, containing 30,000 simulated and 4,118 real infrared UAV target images with diverse motion blur. Extensive experiments on IRBlurUAV demonstrate that $JFD\^{3}$ achieves superior detection performance while maintaining real-time efficiency. Code and dataset are released at \textit{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JFD3-76C1}.

Blur-Robust Detection via Feature Restoration: An End-to-End Framework for Prior-Guided Infrared UAV Target Detection

Regional Adaptive Hierarchical Transform (RAHT) is an effective point cloud attribute compression (PCAC) method. However, its application in deep learning lacks research. This paper proposes an end-to-end RAHT framework for lossy PCAC based on the sparse tensor, called DeepRAHT. The RAHT transform is performed within the end-to-end reconstruction process, without requiring manual RAHT for pre-processing. We also introduce the predictive RAHT to reduce bitrates and design a learning-based prediction model to enhance the performance. Moreover, we devise a bitrate proxy that applies run-length coding to entropy coding, achieving seamless variable-rate coding and improving the robustness. DeepRAHT is a reversible and distortion-controllable framework, ensuring its lower bound performance and offering significant application potential. The experiments demonstrate that DeepRAHT is a high-performance, faster, and more robust framework than the baseline solutions.

DeepRAHT: Learning Predictive RAHT for Point Cloud Attribute Compression

Low-light object detection faces significant challenges due to the substantial domain shift between normal-light and low-light conditions. Prior works often enhance low-light images before detection, but this preprocessing can introduce artifacts that degrade detection performance since it focuses on human visual quality rather than task-specific features. Other methods incorporate illumination-aware modules for low-light feature learning, yet their scalability is limited by the scarcity of annotated low-light datasets. To overcome these limitations, we propose a unified Dual-Level Domain Adaptation (DLDA) framework that jointly addresses pixel-level and feature-level domain discrepancies for robust low-light object detection. Specifically, we introduce a luminance-aware contrastive translation module that synthesizes target-style low-light images while preserving structural details, enabling effective pixel-level adaptation. Building on this, we further design a multi-scale conditional adversarial alignment strategy that enforces semantic consistency across feature hierarchies to enhance domain-invariant feature extraction. Extensive experiments on multiple low-light detection benchmarks demonstrate that DLDA achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting strong robustness and generalization.

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Correspondence Coverage Matters for Multi-Modal Dataset Distillation

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