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Flow Matching has emerged as a powerful framework for learning continuous transformations between distributions, enabling high-fidelity generative modeling. This work introduces Symmetrical Flow Matching (SymmFlow), a new formulation that unifies semantic segmentation, classification, and image generation within a single model. Using a symmetric learning objective, SymmFlow models forward and reverse transformations jointly, ensuring bi-directional consistency, while preserving sufficient entropy for generative diversity. A new training objective is introduced to explicitly retain semantic information across flows, featuring efficient sampling while preserving semantic structure, allowing for one-step segmentation and classification without iterative refinement. Unlike previous approaches that impose strict one-to-one mapping between masks and images, SymmFlow generalizes to flexible conditioning, supporting both pixel-level and image-level class labels. Experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate that SymmFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance on semantic image synthesis, obtaining FID scores of 11.9 on CelebAMask-HQ and 7.0 on COCO-Stuff with only 25 inference steps. Additionally, it delivers competitive results on semantic segmentation and shows promising capabilities in classification tasks.

AAAI 2026

Symmetrical Flow Matching: Unified Image Generation, Segmentation, and Classification with Score-Based Generative Models

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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.

Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) aims to localize a spatio-temporal tube that corresponds to a given language query in an untrimmed video. This is a challenging task since it involves complex vision-language understanding and spatiotemporal reasoning. Recent works have explored weakly-supervised setting in STVG to eliminate reliance on fine-grained annotations like bounding boxes or temporal stamps. However, they typically 
follow a simple late-fusion manner, which generates tubes independent of the text description, often resulting in failed target identification and inconsistent target tracking. 
To address this limitation, we propose a Tube-conditioned Reconstruction with Mutual Constraints (\textbf{TubeRMC}) framework that generates text-conditioned candidate tubes with pre-trained visual grounding models and further refine them via tube-conditioned reconstruction with spatio-temporal constraints. Specifically, we design three reconstruction strategies from temporal, spatial, and spatio-temporal perspectives to comprehensively capture rich tube-text correspondences. Each strategy is equipped with a Tube-conditioned Reconstructor, utilizing spatio-temporal tubes as condition to reconstruct the key clues in the query. We further introduce mutual constraints between spatial and temporal proposals to enhance their quality for reconstruction. TubeRMC outperforms existing methods on two public benchmarks VidSTG and HCSTVG. Further visualization shows that TubeRMC effectively mitigates both target identification errors and inconsistent tracking. Code will be released.

TubeRMC: Tube-conditioned Reconstruction with Mutual Constraints for Weakly-supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

Multi-modal learning integrating medical images and tabular data has significantly advanced clinical decision-making in recent years. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for pretraining these models on large-scale unlabeled image-tabular data, aiming to learn discriminative representations. However, existing SSL methods for image-tabular representation learning are often confined to specific data cohorts, mainly due to their rigid tabular modeling mechanisms when modeling heterogeneous tabular data. This inter-tabular barrier hinders the multi-modal SSL methods from effectively learning transferrable medical knowledge shared across diverse cohorts. In this paper, we propose a novel SSL framework, namely CITab, designed to learn powerful multi-modal feature representations in a cross-tabular manner. We design the tabular modeling mechanism from a semantic-awareness perspective by integrating column headers as semantic cues, which facilitates transferrable knowledge learning and the scalability in utilizing multiple data sources for pretraining. Additionally, we propose a prototype-guided mixture-of-linear layer (P-MoLin) module for tabular feature specialization, empowering the model to effectively handle the heterogeneity of tabular data and explore the underlying medical concepts. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on Alzheimer's disease diagnosis task across three publicly available data cohorts containing 4,461 subjects. Experimental results demonstrate that CITab outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, paving the way for effective and scalable cross-tabular multi-modal learning.

Unleashing the Power of Image-Tabular Self-Supervised Learning via Breaking Cross-Tabular Barriers

Collaborative reasoning with multiple agents offers the potential for more robust and diverse problem-solving. However, existing approaches often suffer from homogeneous agent behaviors and lack of reflective and rethinking capabilities. We propose Multi-Agent Personality Shaping ((MAPS), a novel framework that enhances reasoning through agent diversity and internal critique. Inspired by the Big Five personality theory, MAPS assigns distinct personality traits to individual agents, shaping their reasoning styles and promoting heterogeneous collaboration. To enable deeper and more adaptive reasoning, MAPS introduces a Critic agent that reflects on intermediate outputs, revisits flawed steps, and guides iterative refinement. This integration of personality-driven agent design and structured collaboration improves both reasoning depth and flexibility. Empirical evaluations across three benchmarks demonstrate the strong performance of MAPS, with further analysis confirming its generalizability across different large language models and validating the benefits of multi-agent collaboration.

MAPS: Multi-Agent Personality Shaping for Collaborative Reasoning

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection remains a fundamental challenge for deep neural networks, particularly due to overconfident predictions on unseen OOD samples during testing. We reveal a key insight: OOD samples predicted as the same class, or given high probabilities for it, are visually more similar to each other than to the true in-distribution (ID) samples. Motivated by this class-specific observation, we propose DCAC (Dynamic Class-Aware Cache), a training-free, test-time calibration module that maintains separate caches for each ID class to collect high-entropy samples and calibrate the raw predictions of input samples. DCAC leverages cached visual features and predicted probabilities through a lightweight two-layer module to mitigate overconfident predictions on OOD samples. This module can be seamlessly integrated with various existing OOD detection methods across both unimodal and vision-language models while introducing minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple OOD benchmarks demonstrate that DCAC significantly enhances existing methods, achieving substantial improvements, i.e., reducing FPR95 by 6.55\% when integrated with ASH-S on ImageNet OOD benchmark.

DCAC: Dynamic Class-Aware Cache Creates Stronger Out-of-Distribution Detectors

Spatio-temporal graphs are powerful tools for modeling complex dependencies in traffic time series. However, the distributed nature of real-world traffic data across multiple stakeholders poses significant challenges in modeling and reconstructing inter-client spatial dependencies while adhering to data locality constraints. Existing methods primarily address static dependencies, overlooking their dynamic nature and resulting in suboptimal performance. In response, we propose Federated Spatio-Temporal Graph with Dynamic 
Inter-Client Dependencies (FedSTGD), a framework designed to model and reconstruct dynamic inter-client spatial dependencies in federated learning. FedSTGD incorporates a federated nonlinear computation decomposition module to approximate complex graph operations. This is complemented by a graph node embedding augmentation module, which alleviates performance degradation arising from the decomposition. These modules are coordinated through a client-server collective learning protocol, which decomposes dynamic inter-client spatial dependency learning tasks into lightweight, parallelizable subtasks. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that FedSTGD achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of RMSE, MAE, and MAPE, approaching that of centralized baselines. Ablation studies confirm the contribution of each module in addressing dynamic inter-client spatial dependencies, while sensitivity analysis highlights the robustness of FedSTGD to variations in hyperparameters.

Unlocking Dynamic Inter-Client Spatial Dependencies: A Federated Spatio-temporal Graph Learning Method for Traffic Flow Forecasting

High-Definition Maps (HD maps) are essential for the precise navigation and decision-making of autonomous vehicles, yet their creation and upkeep present significant cost and timeliness challenges. The online construction of HD maps using on-board sensors has emerged as a promising solution; however, these methods can be impeded by incomplete data due to occlusions and inclement weather, while their performance in distant regions remains unsatisfying. This paper proposes PriorDrive to address these limitations by directly harnessing the power of various vectorized prior maps, significantly enhancing the robustness and accuracy of online HD map construction.
Our approach integrates a variety of prior maps uniformly, such as OpenStreetMap's Standard Definition Maps (SD maps), outdated HD maps from vendors, and locally constructed maps from historical vehicle data. To effectively integrate such prior information into online mapping models, we introduce a Hybrid Prior Representation (HPQuery) that standardizes the representation of diverse map elements.
We further propose a Unified Vector Encoder (UVE), which employs fused prior embedding and a dual encoding mechanism to encode vector data. To improve the UVE's generalizability and performance, we propose a segment-level and point-level pre-training strategy that enables the UVE to learn the prior distribution of vector data.
Through extensive testing on the nuScenes, Argoverse 2 and OpenLane-V2, we demonstrate that PriorDrive is highly compatible with various online mapping models and substantially improves map prediction capabilities. The integration of prior maps through PriorDrive offers a robust solution to the challenges of single-perception data, paving the way for more reliable autonomous vehicle navigation.

PriorDrive: Enhancing Online HD Mapping with Unified Vector Priors

Music-induced painting is a unique artistic practice, where visual artworks are created under the influence of music. Evaluating whether a painting faithfully reflects the music that inspired it poses a challenging perceptual assessment task. Existing methods primarily rely on emotion recognition models to assess the similarity between music and painting, but such models introduce considerable noise and overlook broader perceptual cues beyond emotion. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework for music-induced painting assessment that directly models perceptual coherence between music and visual art. We introduce MPD, the first large-scale dataset of music–painting pairs annotated by domain experts based on perceptual coherence. To better handle ambiguous cases, we further collect pairwise preference annotations. Building on this dataset, we present MPJudge, a model that integrates music features into a visual encoder via a modulation-based fusion mechanism. To effectively learn from ambiguous cases, we adopt Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches. Qualitative results further show that our model more accurately identifies music-relevant regions in paintings, validating the effectiveness of our fusion design.

MPJudge: Towards Perceptual Assessment of Music-Induced Paintings

Purple fringing, a persistent artifact caused by Longitudinal Chromatic Aberration (LCA) in camera lenses, has long degraded the clarity and realism of digital imaging. Traditional solutions rely on complex and expensive apochromatic (APO) lens hardware and the extraction of handcrafted features, ignoring the data-driven approach. To fill this gap, we introduce DCA-LUT, the first deep learning framework for purple fringing removal. Inspired by the physical root of the problem-the spatial misalignment of RGB color channels due to lens dispersion, we introduce a novel Chromatic-Aware Coordinate Transformation (CA-CT) module, learning an image-adaptive color space to decouple and isolate fringing into a dedicated dimension. This targeted separation allows the network to learn a precise "purple fringe channel," which then guides the accurate restoration of the luminance channel. The final color correction is performed by a learned 5D Look-Up Table (5D LUT), enabling efficient and powerful non-linear color mapping. To enable robust training and fair evaluation, we constructed a large-scale synthetic purple fringing dataset (PF-Synth). Extensive experiments in synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in purple fringing removal.

DCA-LUT: Deep Chromatic Alignment with 5D LUT for Purple Fringing Removal

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have emerged as a promising approach in time series analysis. Due to the large-scale parameters of TSFMs and pretraining cost, how to adapt TDFMs in streaming data is always the key factor constraining their application effectiveness. Because streaming data often experiences data distribution and task drifts, which cannot be learnt by offline training. Existing methods typically address streaming data modeling with continuous learning through model fine-tuning or model editing. However, fine-tuning incurs significant computational costs, while editing methods can lead to shifts in the original feature space during streaming updates. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Orthogonal Rotation Transformation-based Continuous Learning method, called ORTCL, for TSFMs. Our key insight is to apply orthogonal matrix rotations to the input and output feature spaces of the TSFMs during model editing. This preserves the metric structure of the original feature space and enables new data to be directly mapped into the existing feature space of the TSFMs. Specifically, we obtain the orthogonal matrix for the input layer via singular value decomposition and derive the corresponding transformation matrix for the output layer through least squares optimization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ORTCL outperforms existing methods in both single-domain and cross-domain streaming time series forecasting tasks, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ORTCL-A440/.

ORTCL: Towards Continual Learning of Time Series Foundation Models on Streaming Data via Orthogonal Rotation

Arbitrary style transfer (AST), a popular AI-powered photo editing function, aims to strike an optimal balance between content and style injection from two images in order to generate a novel high-fidelity stylised image. Recently, diffusion models have been applied to AST due to their high generation quality as well as flexibility to embed conditions. However, these models are still not satisfactory and may exhibit inferior performance compared to non-diffusion based methods. This is due to the diffusion process not being purposely designed for AST, leading to suboptimal solutions to trade-off content preservation and style embedding. In this paper, we propose ACID-Style, a novel adaptive condition injection diffusion-based AST framework for improved content/style feature injection to address this research challenge. Using two lightweight adapters, a content and a style injection module, and an adaptive injection mechanism, our approach is able to fully exploit a pre-trained stable diffusion model for AST-specific adaptation and our diffusion model thus learns the most effective timing for content and style injection in the diffusion sampling process. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves superior style transfer performance, both quantitatively and qualitatively, compared to other state-of-the-art style transfer methods.

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TubeRMC: Tube-conditioned Reconstruction with Mutual Constraints for Weakly-supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

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