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Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled the creation of deceptively real images, posing significant security risks when misused. In this study, we empirically show that different timesteps of DDIM inversion reveal varying subtle distinctions between synthetic and real images that are extractable for detection, in the forms of such as Fourier power spectrum high-frequency discrepancies and inter-pixel variance distributions. Based on these observations, we propose a novel synthetic image detection method that directly utilizes features of intermediately noised images by training an ensemble on multiple noised timesteps, circumventing conventional reconstruction-based strategies. To enhance human comprehension, we introduce a metric-grounded explanation generation and refinement module to identify and explain AI-generated flaws. Additionally, we construct the GenHard and GenExplain benchmarks to provide detection samples of greater difficulty and high-quality rationales for fake images. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with 98.91% and 95.89% detection accuracy on regular and challenging samples respectively, and demonstrates generalizability and robustness. Our code and datasets will be made publicly available.

AAAI 2026

Explainable Synthetic Image Detection Through Diffusion Timestep Ensembling

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.

Vision-language models bridge visual and linguistic understanding and have proven to be powerful for video recognition tasks.Existing approaches primarily rely on parameter-efficient fine-tuning of image-text pre-trained models, yet they often suffer from limited interpretability and poor generalization due to inadequate temporal modeling. To address these, we propose a simple yet effective video-to-text discretization framework. Our method repurposes the frozen text encoder to construct a visual codebook from video class labels due to the many-to-one contrastive alignment between visual and textual embeddings in multimodal pretraining. This codebook effectively transforms temporal visual data into textual tokens via feature lookups and offers interpretable video representations through explicit video modeling. Then, to enhance robustness against irrelevant or noisy frames, we introduce a confidence-aware fusion module that dynamically weights keyframes by assessing their semantic relevance via the codebook. Furthermore, our method incorporates learnable text prompts to conduct adaptive codebook updates. Extensive experiments on HMDB-51, UCF-101, SSv2, and Kinetics-400 have validated the superiority of our approach, achieving more competitive improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

VTD-CLIP: Video-to-Text Discretization via Prompting CLIP

Semi-supervised singing melody extraction (SSME) is one of the key tasks in the field of music information retrieval (MIR). Recently, several SSME methods have been proposed and achieved remarkable successes. However, existing methods are still facing two critical issues: firstly, there is a lack of an effective data augmentation method for SSME, which results in insufficient utilization of unlabeled data. Secondly, existing SSME methods discards too much unlabeled data in the stage of consistency regularization, which hinders the further improvements of SSME task. In this paper, we present \emph{ELH-SME}, a novel framework that better utilizes the unlabeled musical data for SSME task. Specifically, our proposed ELH-SME framework consists of three modules: (1) we first propose a diffusion-based multi-bands augmentation (DMA) method to increase the amounts of training data. The proposed DMA methods employs a diffusion model to generate perturbation at the specific frequency bands in an end-to-end manner, thereby avoiding sharply perturbations to the spectrogram. (2) To improve the utilization rate of unlabeled data, we suggest a global-class confidence (GCC) module. During the phase of consistency regularization, we consider both the global-wise and class-wise confidence values, improving the utilization rate of unlabeled data. (3) To further improve the utilization of unlabeled data, we also propose to enhance the representation capability of unlabeled data by extracting channel-level features from labeled data via channel cross attention (CCA). We evaluate our proposed framework on several well-known public available datasets, and the conducted experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Every Little Bit Helps: Exploring Better Utilization of Unlabeled Data for Semi-supervised Singing Melody Extraction Using Multi-bands Diffusion Model

The aesthetic quality assessment task is crucial for developing a human-aligned quantitative evaluation system for AIGC. However, its inherently complex nature—spanning visual perception, cognition, and emotion—poses fundamental challenges. Although aesthetic descriptions offer a viable representation of this complexity, two critical challenges persist: (1) Data scarcity and imbalance: existing dataset overly focuses on visual perception and neglects deeper dimensions due to the expensive manual annotation; and (2) Model fragmentation: current visual networks isolate aesthetic attributes with multi-branch encoder, while multimodal methods represented by contrastive learning struggle to effectively process long-form textual descriptions. To resolve challenge (1), we first present the Refined Aesthetic Description (RAD) dataset, a large-scale (70k), multi-dimensional structured dataset, generated via an iterative pipeline without heavy annotation costs and easy to scale. To address challenge (2), we propose ArtQuant, an aesthetics assessment framework for artistic image which not only couple isolated aesthetic dimensions through joint description generation, but also better model long-text semantics with the help of LLM decoders. Besides, theoretical analysis confirms this symbiosis: RAD's semantic adequacy (data) and generation paradigm (model) collectively minimize prediction entropy, providing mathematical grounding for the framework. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several datasets while requiring only 33\% of conventional training epochs, narrowing the cognitive gap between artistic image and aesthetic judgment. We will release both code and dataset to support future research.

Bridging Cognitive Gap: Hierarchical Description Learning for Artistic Image Aesthetics Assessment

The growing scale of datasets in deep learning has introduced significant computational challenges. Dataset pruning addresses this challenge by constructing a compact but informative coreset from the full dataset with comparable performance. Previous approaches typically establish scoring metrics based on specific criteria to identify representative samples. However, these methods predominantly rely on sample scores obtained from the model's performance during the training (i.e., fitting) phase. As scoring models achieve near-optimal performance on training data, such fitting-centric approaches induce a dense distribution of sample scores within a narrow numerical range. This concentration reduces the distinction between samples and hinders effective selection. To address this challenge, we conduct dataset pruning from the perspective of generalization, i.e., scoring samples based on models not exposed to them during training. We propose a plug-and-play framework, UNSEEN, which can be integrated into existing dataset pruning methods. Additionally, conventional score-based methods are single-step and rely on models trained solely on the complete dataset, providing limited perspective on the importance of samples. To address this limitation, we scale UNSEEN to multi-step scenarios and propose an incremental selection technique through scoring models trained on varying coresets, and optimize the quality of the coreset dynamically. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K. Notably, on ImageNet-1K, UNSEEN achieves lossless performance while reducing training data by 30%. Our core code is available in the supplementary material.

UNSEEN: Enhancing Dataset Pruning from a Generalization Perspective

As large language models (LLMs) scale, their inference incurs substantial computational resources, exposing them to energy-latency attacks, where crafted prompts induce high energy and latency cost. Existing attack methods aim to prolong output by delaying the generation of termination symbols. However, as the output grows longer, controlling the termination symbols through input becomes difficult, making these methods less effective. Therefore, we propose LoopLLM, an energy-latency attack framework based on the observation that repetitive generation can trigger low-entropy decoding loops, reliably compelling LLMs to generate until their output limits. LoopLLM introduces (1) a repetition-inducing prompt optimization that exploits autoregressive vulnerabilities to induce repetitive generation, and (2) a token-aligned ensemble optimization that aggregates gradients to improve cross-model transferability. Extensive experiments on 12 open-source and 2 commercial LLMs show that LoopLLM significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving over 90% of the maximum output length, compared to 20% for baselines, and improving transferability by around 40% to DeepSeek-V3 and Gemini 2.5 Flash.

LoopLLM: Transferable Energy-Latency Attacks in LLMs via Repetitive Generation

To accelerate Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inference, the hybrid parallelism paradigm is first applying pipeline parallelism (PP) to vertically divide the model into stages, with each stage further divided horizontally using tensor or expert parallelism. On the algorithm side, dynamic Top-K routing reduces computation by activating fewer experts per token on average. 
In this paper, we explore the application of dynamic Top-K routing to PP-enabled MoE inference, aiming to fully unleash their combined potential. We identify key performance bottlenecks arising from Top-K value variation across layers, which conflicts with PP's typically uniform stage partitioning, as well as opportunities to optimize memory usage through their integration.

To address these challenges, we present SMIDT, an efficient MoE inference framework tailored for dynamic Top-K routing. 
SMIDT features: (1) an adaptive, module-level uneven partitioning strategy to balance computation across PP stages, (2) a memory-aware expert replication scheme (DPMoE) that reduces communication overhead, and (3) a lightweight search algorithm combining binary search and dynamic programming to generate efficient parallelism plans. 
We implement SMIDT on SGLang, a state-of-the-art LLM inference framework, evaluate it on 32 A40 GPUs and 16 A100 GPUs, and compare with manually tuned parallelism strategies. 
Experimental results show that, when co-locating prefill and decoding phases, SMIDT achieves 1.20–3.13$\times$ throughput improvements for prefill-only tasks and 1.05–1.89$\times$ for prefill-decoding tasks. 
When disaggregating prefill and decoding tasks, SMIDT improves average and P99 time-to-first-token (TTFT) by 1.10–1.17$\times$ and 1.21–1.26$\times$, respectively.

SMIDT: High-Performance Inference Framework for MoE Models with Dynamic Top-K Routing

Multimodal learning often relies on aligning representations across modalities to enable effective information integration—an approach traditionally assumed to be universally beneficial. However, prior research has primarily taken an observational approach, examining naturally occurring alignment in multimodal data and exploring its correlation with model performance, without systematically studying the direct effects of explicitly enforced alignment between representations of different modalities. In this work, we investigate how explicit alignment influences both model performance and representation alignment under different modality-specific information structures. Specifically, we introduce a controllable contrastive learning module that enables precise manipulation of alignment strength during training, allowing us to explore when explicit alignment improves or hinders performance. Our results on synthetic and real datasets under different data characteristics show that the impact of explicit alignment on the performance of unimodal models is related to the characteristics of the data: the optimal level of alignment depends on the amount of redundancy between the different modalities. We can find an optimal alignment strength that balances modality-specific signals and shared redundancy in the mixed information distributions. This work can help practitioners on when and how to enforce alignment for optimal unimodal encoder performance.

To Align or Not to Align: Strategic Multimodal Representation Alignment for Optimal Performance

Text-to-video generation models have shown significant progress in recent years. However, they still struggle with compositional text prompts, such as attribute binding for multiple objects, temporal dynamics associated with differ- ent objects, and interactions between objects. Inspired by ef- fective human creative workflow, we propose GENMAC, a multi-agent collaboration framework that enables composi- tional text-to-video generation. The framework incorporates a three-stage collaborative workflow: DESIGN, GENERATION, and REDESIGN, with an iterative loop between the latter two stages to progressively verify and refine the generated videos. In the DESIGN stage, a large language model (Design Agent) plans objects with layouts, and then a video gener- ation model synthesizes videos in the GENERATION stage. The REDESIGN stage is the most challenging stage that aims to verify the generated videos, suggest corrections, and re- design the text prompts, frame-wise layouts, and guidance scales for the next iteration of generation. To avoid halluci- nation of single-agent and naive multi-agent frameworks, we apply a division-of-labor strategy in this stage by introducing a sequence of specialized agents, executed by MLLMs (mul- timodal large language models): Verification Agent, Sugges- tion Agent, Correction Agent, and Output Structuring Agent. Furthermore, to tackle diverse scenarios of compositional text-to-video generation, we design a self-routing mechanism to adaptively select the proper correction agent from a suite of correction agents, each specialized for one scenario. Ex- tensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GEN- MAC by generating videos based on long compositional text prompts and achieving state-of-the-art in the compositional text-to-video generation benchmark.

GENMAC: Compositional Text-to-Video Generation with Multi-Agent Collaboration

Gaze redirection methods aim to generate realistic human face images with controllable eye movement. However, recent methods often struggle with 3D consistency, efficiency, or quality, limiting their practical applications. In this work, we propose RTGaze, a real-time and high-quality gaze redirection method. Our approach learns a gaze-controllable facial representation from face images and gaze prompts, then decodes this representation via neural rendering for gaze redirection. Additionally, we distill face geometric priors from a pretrained 3D portrait generator to enhance generation quality. We evaluate RTGaze both qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in efficiency, redirection accuracy, and image quality across multiple datasets. Our system achieves real-time, 3D-aware gaze redirection with a feedforward network (~0.06 sec/image), making it 800× faster than the previous state-of-the-art 3D-aware methods. We will release the code to facilitate future research.

RTGaze: Real-Time 3D-Aware Gaze Redirection from a Single Image

Long-tail motion forecasting is a core challenge for autonomous driving, where rare yet safety-critical events-such as abrupt maneuvers and dense multi-agent interactions-dominate real-world risk. Existing approaches struggle in these scenarios because they rely on either non-interpretable clustering or model-dependent error heuristics, providing neither a differentiable notion of “tailness” nor a mechanism for rapid adaptation. We propose SAML, a Semantic-Aware Meta-Learning framework that introduces the first differentiable definition of tailness for motion forecasting. SAML quantifies motion rarity via semantically meaningful intrinsic (kinematic, geometric, temporal) and interactive (local and global risk) properties, which are fused by a Bayesian Tail Perceiver into a continuous, uncertainty-aware Tail Index. This Tail Index drives a meta-memory adaptation module that couples a dynamic prototype memory with an MAML-based cognitive set mechanism, enabling fast adaptation to rare or evolving patterns. Experiments on nuScenes, NGSIM, and HighD show that SAML achieves state-of-the-art overall accuracy and substantial gains on top 1-5% worst-case events, while maintaining high efficiency. Our findings highlight semantic meta-learning as a pathway toward robust and safety-critical motion forecasting.

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