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Synthesizing amyloid PET scans from the more widely available and accessible structural MRI modality offers a promising, cost-effective approach for large-scale Alzheimer&#39;s Disease (AD) screening. This is motivated by evidence that, while MRI does not directly detect amyloid pathology, it may nonetheless encode information correlated with amyloid deposition that can be uncovered through advanced modeling. However, the high dimensionality and structural complexity of 3D neuroimaging data pose significant challenges for existing MRI-to-PET translation methods. Modeling the cross-modality relationship in a lower-dimensional latent space can simplify the learning task and enable more effective translation. As such, we present CoCoLIT (ControlNet-Conditioned Latent Image Translation), a diffusion-based latent generative framework that incorporates three main innovations: (1) a novel Weighted Image Space Loss (WISL) that improves latent representation learning and synthesis quality; (2) a theoretical and empirical analysis of Latent Average Stabilization (LAS), an existing technique used in similar generative models to enhance inference consistency; and (3) the introduction of ControlNet-based conditioning for MRI-to-PET translation. We evaluate CoCoLIT&#39;s performance on publicly available datasets and find that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both image-based and amyloid-related metrics. Notably, in amyloid-positivity classification, CoCoLIT outperforms the second-best method with improvements of +10.5% on the internal dataset and +23.7% on the external dataset. The code and models of our approach are available at https://github.com/anon4access/CoCoLIT.

AAAI 2026

CoCoLIT: ControlNet-Conditioned Latent Image Translation for MRI to Amyloid PET Synthesis

image to image translation

diffusion models for vision

medical and biological imaging

image & video synthesis

applications

computational photography

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AMA Research Challenge 2023

Join the AMA Research Challenge poster symposium and semifinals to explore top research posters, score posters in the semifinals (an AMA member exclusive opportunity) and attend education sessions with experienced physicians to learn tips to advance your research and career. 

Synthesizing amyloid PET scans from the more widely available and accessible structural MRI modality offers a promising, cost-effective approach for large-scale Alzheimer's Disease (AD) screening. This is motivated by evidence that, while MRI does not directly detect amyloid pathology, it may nonetheless encode information correlated with amyloid deposition that can be uncovered through advanced modeling. However, the high dimensionality and structural complexity of 3D neuroimaging data pose significant challenges for existing MRI-to-PET translation methods. Modeling the cross-modality relationship in a lower-dimensional latent space can simplify the learning task and enable more effective translation. As such, we present CoCoLIT (ControlNet-Conditioned Latent Image Translation), a diffusion-based latent generative framework that incorporates three main innovations: (1) a novel Weighted Image Space Loss (WISL) that improves latent representation learning and synthesis quality; (2) a theoretical and empirical analysis of Latent Average Stabilization (LAS), an existing technique used in similar generative models to enhance inference consistency; and (3) the introduction of ControlNet-based conditioning for MRI-to-PET translation. We evaluate CoCoLIT's performance on publicly available datasets and find that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both image-based and amyloid-related metrics. Notably, in amyloid-positivity classification, CoCoLIT outperforms the second-best method with improvements of +10.5% on the internal dataset and +23.7% on the external dataset. The code and models of our approach are available at https://github.com/anon4access/CoCoLIT.

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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.

Existing diffusion-based 3D shape completion methods typically use a conditional paradigm, injecting incomplete shape information into the denoising network via deep feature interactions (e.g., concatenation, cross-attention) to guide sampling toward complete shapes, often represented by voxel-based distance functions. However, these approaches fail to explicitly model the optimal global transport path, leading to suboptimal completions. Moreover, performing diffusion directly in voxel space imposes resolution constraints, limiting the generation of fine-grained geometric details.
To address these challenges, we propose BridgeShape, a novel framework for 3D shape completion via latent diffusion Schrödinger bridge. The key innovations lie in two aspects:
(i) BridgeShape formulates shape completion as an optimal transport problem, explicitly modeling the transition between incomplete and complete shapes to ensure a globally coherent transformation.
(ii) We introduce a Depth-Enhanced Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) to encode 3D shapes into a compact latent space, leveraging self-projected multi-view depth information enriched with strong DINOv2 features to enhance geometric structural perception.
By operating in a compact yet structurally informative latent space, BridgeShape effectively mitigates resolution constraints and enables more efficient and high-fidelity 3D shape completion.
BridgeShape achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3D shape completion benchmarks, demonstrating superior fidelity at higher resolutions and for unseen object classes.

BridgeShape: Latent Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge for 3D Shape Completion

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong potential in complex, interactive decision-making tasks. However, when training LLM agents end-to-end with reinforcement learning (RL), efficiently optimizing agent policies in dynamic environments remains a significant challenge. Existing RL-based LLM agent paradigms commonly organize interactions in a cycle where reasoning is followed by action. In our work, we observe a phenomenon we call Exploration Contraction, where the explicit introduction of a reasoning stage reduces the diversity of actions—quantified by lower action entropy—which in turn limits exploration and leads to premature policy convergence. To address this limitation, we propose Act-before-Reasoning (ActRe), a two-stage RL training framework. In the first stage, we reverse the typical rollout order, prompting the agent to generate actions prior to reasoning, which encourages exploration driven by model intuition. In the second stage, we restore the standard reasoning-then-action order for training and evaluation, ensuring robust and interpretable decision-making. Experiments on the ALFWorld and WebShop benchmarks show that ActRe effectively mitigates exploration contraction, yielding consistently higher task success rates and improved training robustness compared to strong RL baselines. Our analysis underscores the importance of action entropy in the exploration-exploitation trade-off during LLM agent training and provides a practical approach to maintain the benefits of explicit reasoning while promoting sufficient exploration.

When Instinct Guides and Insight Grounds: Staged RL Training for LLM Agents

One-shot pruning efficiently compresses Large Language Models but produces coarse sparse weights, causing significant performance degradation. Traditional fine-tuning approaches to refine these weights are prohibitively expensive for large models. This highlights the need for a training-free weight refinement method that works seamlessly with one-shot pruning and can efficiently recover the lost performance.
To tackle this problem, we propose Efficient Iterative Weight Refinement (EIWR), a lightweight, plug-and-play, and training-free method that refines pruned weights through layer-wise iterative optimization. 
EIWR achieves efficient weight refinement via three key components: a Global Soft Constraint that eliminates costly row-wise Hessian inversions and expands the solution space; a Historical Momentum Strategy that leverages one-shot pruning priors to accelerate convergence and enhance final performance; and Neumann Series Extrapolation that significantly speeds up per-iteration computation.
As a result, EIWR enables effective weight refinement with minimal time and memory overhead. Extensive experiments on LLaMA2/3 and Qwen under different pruning strategies and sparsity levels demonstrate that our method can efficiently refine sparse weights and mitigate performance degradation. For example, on LLaMA2-7B under 70\% sparsity, EIWR reduces perplexity by 15\% compared with SparseGPT on the WikiText2 benchmark, with only 1.81 additional minutes of computation and 1GB of additional memory.

Efficient Plug-and-Play Weight Refinement for Sparse Large Models

Out-of-context misinformation (OOC) is a low-cost form of misinformation in news reports, which refers to place authentic images into out-of-context or fabricated image-text pairings. This problem has attracted significant attention from researchers in recent years. Current methods focus on assessing image-text consistency or generating explanations. However, these approaches assume that the training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. When encountering novel news domains, models tend to perform poorly due to the lack of prior knowledge. To address this challenge, we propose Variational Domain-Invariant Learning with Test-Time Training (VDT) framework to enhance the domain adaptation capability for OOC misinformation detection. Domain-Invariant Variational Align module is employed to jointly encodes source and target domain data to learn a separable distributional space and domain-invariant features. For preserving semantic integrity, we utilize domain consistency constraint module to reconstruct the source and target domain latent distribution. During testing phase, we adopt the test-time training strategy and confidence-variance filtering module to dynamically updating the VAE encoder and classifier, facilitating the model's adaptation to the target domain distribution. Extensive experiments conducted on the benchmark dataset NewsCLIPpings demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under most domain adaptation settings.

Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection via Variational Domain-Invariant Learning with Test-Time Training

Modern deep neural networks rely heavily on massive model weights and training samples, incurring substantial computational costs. Weight pruning and coreset selection are two emerging paradigms proposed to improve computational efficiency. In this paper, we first explore the interplay between redundant weights and training samples through a transparent analysis: redundant samples, particularly noisy ones, cause model weights to become unnecessarily overtuned to fit them, complicating the identification of irrelevant weights during pruning; conversely, irrelevant weights tend to overfit noisy data, undermining coreset selection effectiveness. To further investigate and harness this interplay in deep learning, we develop a **S**imultaneous **W**eight **a**nd **S**ample **T**ailoring mechanism (**SWaST**) that alternately performs weight pruning and coreset selection to establish a synergistic effect in training. During this investigation, we observe that when simultaneously removing a large number of weights and samples, a phenomenon we term critical double-loss can occur, where important weights and their supportive samples are mistakenly eliminated at the same time, leading to model instability and nearly irreversible degradation that cannot be recovered in subsequent training. Unlike classic machine learning models, this issue can arise in deep learning due to the lack of theoretical guarantees on the correctness of weight pruning and coreset selection, which explains why these paradigms are often developed independently. We mitigate this by integrating a state preservation mechanism into SWaST, enabling stable joint optimization. Extensive experiments reveal a strong synergy between pruning and coreset selection across varying prune rates and coreset sizes, delivering accuracy boosts of up to 17.83\% alongside 10\% to 90\% FLOPs reductions.

Explore and Establish Synergistic Effects Between Weight Pruning and Coreset Selection in Neural Network Training

The widespread and inconsistent compression applied by Online Social Networks severely degrades the performance of synthetic image detectors. We attribute this degradation to two main issues: 1) the model confuses forgery artifacts with compression artifacts, and 2) compression erodes crucial discriminative high-frequency details. Existing methods suppress compression features during training but overlook the overlap between compression features and forgery-related features, leading to the unintended removal of forgery traces. To address artifact confusion, we introduce a Decision-Driven Orthogonal Constraint, which defines a classification decision axis pointing from the real class centroid to the forged class centroid. This constraint enforces compression artifacts to be orthogonal to the decision axis, mitigating their interference with forgery detection without entirely removing them, thus preventing the suppression of forgery-related features. To mitigate the erosion of high-frequency details, we propose to mine complementary forgery cues from both low-frequency information and compressed high-frequency components. A bidirectional update strategy and an adaptive global-local modulator are proposed to facilitate the utilization of forgery cues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art generalization performance in challenging open-world detection scenarios.

Decision-Driven Orthogonal Learning with Complementary Feature Mining for Robust Synthetic Image Detection

This paper addresses cross-view geo-localization in real-world scenarios, where the field-of-view (FoV) is restricted and the orientation is unknown for ground-view images. This task is extremely challenging due to the huge domain gap. Existing methods typically treat tasks with different FoVs as independent tasks. These approaches not only require separate retraining for each FoV, but also neglect the strong correlations between different FoVs, leading to poor performance under extremely limited FoV. To overcome these limitations, we propose HCL-Geo, a framework follows human-like continual learning paradigm of "first learn, then review" for geo-localization: in the first "learn" stage, tasks are presented to the model in an easy-to-hard sequence to enable gradual learning and knowledge retention, so that their natural correlations could be exploited to facilitate knowledge transfer. In the second "review" stage, expert modules are incorporated to efficiently handle tasks with varying FoVs. This approach eliminates the need for retraining separate models and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across different FoVs with strong generalization capabilities. Remarkably, the recall rate@top-1 improves from 49.1% to 68.3% and from 24.6% to 34.3% respectively on CVUSA and CVACT benchmarks with 70° FoV.

First Learn, Then Review: Human-Like Continual Learning for Cross-View Geo-Localization with Limited Field of View

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a crucial tool in Visual Question Answering (VQA) for handling knowledge-intensive questions in few/zero-shot scenarios. However, their reliance on massive training datasets often causes them to inherit language biases during knowledge acquisition. This limitation imposes two key constraints on existing methods: (1) LLM predictions become less reliable due to bias exploitation, and (2) despite strong knowledge reasoning capabilities, LLMs still struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. To address these issues, we propose Object Attribute Description Promoter (OAD-Promoter), a novel approach for enhancing LLM-based VQA by mitigating language bias and improving domain-shift robustness. OAD-Promoter comprises three components: the Object-concentrated Example Generation (OEG) module, the Memory Knowledge Assistance (MKA) module, and the OAD Prompt. The OEG module generates global captions and object-concentrated samples, jointly enhancing visual information input to the LLM and mitigating bias through complementary global and regional visual cues. The MKA module assists the LLM in handling OOD samples by retrieving relevant knowledge from stored examples to support questions from unseen domains. Finally, the OAD Prompt integrates the outputs of the preceding modules to optimize LLM inference. Experiments demonstrate that OAD-Promoter significantly improves the performance of LLM-based VQA methods in few/zero-shot settings, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Our code will be made available upon acceptance.

OAD-Promoter: Enhancing Zero-Shot VQA Using Large Language Models with Object Attribute Description

The task of video-to-video human motion editing aims to transfer motion from a specific video to a reference video while preserving the background dynamics and the original protagonist's appearance. From analysis, we identify critical limitations in existing models that fail to capture the full complexity of human motions, particularly regarding 1) location changes, 2) orientation variations, and 3) complicated non-upright poses. To address these challenges, we propose a framework that selectively "copies and pastes" 2D and 3D features across spatio-temporal dimensions into a shared representation space for motion guidance. This is achieved through: 1) a mutual distillation mechanism that enhances the robustness and capability of individual encoders, and 2) a selective fusion module that adaptively weights and combines complementary information from spatio-temporal representations. To push the limits of motion editing algorithms with challenging scenarios, we introduce an evaluation dataset comprising real-world video clips from artistic gymnastics and figure skating competitions. These sports disciplines naturally encompass the aforementioned three aspects of motion complexity. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in handling intricate human motions.

Collaboratively “Copy & Paste” 2D-3D Features for Complex Video-to-Video Motion Editing

Reconstructing a faithful geometric surface from sparse images remains a fundamental challenge in 3D computer vision. While recent methods have achieved remarkable progress, they still struggle to recover reliable geometry due to the lack of multi-view geometric cues, particularly in non-overlapping regions. To address this issue, we introduce VGGS, a Gaussian Splatting (GS) method that exploits multi-view geometric priors from VGGT for efficient and high-fidelity sparse-view surface reconstruction. Our primary contribution is an anchor-calibrated depth estimation scheme, which yields accurate depth maps. The insight is to align the VGGT depth prior to the underlying surface with a sparse set of multi-view consistent anchors, then infer depth for unreliable regions by relative depth estimation. Furthermore, to mitigate misalignment in complex scenes, we propose a relative depth consistency loss that penalizes the rendered depth if its relative depth relationship in local regions is inconsistent to the multi-view prior. Extensive experiments on widely-used benchmarks show that VGGS surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency, delivering 4–7× faster optimization while reducing memory consumption compared to previous GS-based approaches.

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BridgeShape: Latent Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge for 3D Shape Completion

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BridgeShape: Latent Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge for 3D Shape Completion

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Correlation Between Timed Up and Go Test and Neuroimaging in Mexican American and Non-Hispanic Americans with Alzheimer’s Disease

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

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