Singapore

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.

AAAI 2026

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

plug-and-play weight refinement

sparse llm

efficient llm

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.

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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.

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.

VGGS: VGGT-guided Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and Faithful Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks often leverage panoramic RGB and depth inputs to provide rich spatial cues for action planning, but these sensors can be costly or less accessible in real-world deployments. Recent approaches based on Vision-Language Action (VLA) models achieve strong results with monocular input, yet they still lag behind methods using panoramic RGB-D information. We present MonoDream, a lightweight VLA framework that enables monocular agents to learn a Unified Navigation Representation (UNR). This shared feature representation jointly aligns navigation-relevant visual semantics (e.g., global layout, depth, and future cues) and language-grounded action intent, enabling more reliable action prediction. MonoDream further introduces Latent Panoramic Dreaming (LPD) tasks to supervise the UNR, which train the model to predict latent features of panoramic RGB and depth observations at both current and future steps based on only monocular input. Experiments on multiple VLN benchmarks show that MonoDream consistently improves monocular navigation performance and significantly narrows the gap with panoramic-based agents.

MonoDream: Monocular Vision-Language Navigation with Panoramic Dreaming

Large neural networks excel at prediction tasks, but their application to design problems, such as protein engineering or materials discovery, requires solving offline model-based optimization (MBO) problems. While predictive models may not directly translate to effective design, recent MBO algorithms incorporate reinforcement learning and generative modeling approaches. Meanwhile, theoretical work suggests that exploiting the target function’s structure can enhance MBO performance. We present Cliqueformer, a transformer- based architecture that learns the black-box function’s structure through functional graphical models (FGM), addressing distribution shift without relying on explicit conservative approaches. Across various domains, including chemical and genetic design tasks, Cliqueformer demonstrates superior performance compared to existing methods.

Cliqueformer: Model-Based Optimization with Structured Transformers

Despite Video Large Language Models~(Video-LLMs) have rapidly advanced in recent years, the perception hallucination issue has emerged as a significant bottleneck, hindering their real-world applicability.
While several methods for hallucination mitigation have been proposed, they often compromise the model’s capacity for video understanding and reasoning. In this work, we propose SmartSight, a pioneering step to address this issue in a training-free manner by leveraging the model’s own introspective capabilities. Specifically, SmartSight generates multiple candidate responses to uncover low-hallucinated outputs that are often obscured by standard greedy decoding. It assesses the hallucination of each response using the Temporal Attention Collapse score, which measures whether the model over-focuses on trivial temporal regions of the input video when generating the response. To improve efficiency, SmartSight identifies the Visual Attention Vanishing point, enabling more accurate hallucination estimation and early termination of hallucinated responses, reducing decoding cost by up to 79.6%. Experiments show that SmartSight substantially lowers hallucinations for QwenVL-2.5-7B by 10.59% on VRIPT-HAL, while simultaneously enhancing video understanding and reasoning, boosting performance on VideoMMMU by 8.86% and surpassing the proprietary model Gemini 1.5 Pro. Consistent improvements are observed across 10 diverse Video-LLMs. These results highlight SmartSight’s effectiveness as a general solution for improving the reliability of state-of-the-art open-source Video-LLMs.

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

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