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Deep hash networks are widely used in tasks such as large-scale image retrieval due to high search efficiency and low storage costs through binary hash codes. With the growing demand for deploying deep hash networks on resource-constrained devices, it is crucial to perform network compression on them, in which automatic pruning constitutes a priority option owing to efficacy maintenance. However, most existing pruning methods are designed primarily for image classification tasks, which makes them suffer from efficacy degradation when transplanted to image retrieval tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Automatic Channel Pruning framework by Searching with Structure Embedding (ACP-SSE). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore pruning techniques for deep hash networks and the first automatic pruning method by searching based on network topology structure. Specifically, we first design a structure encoding model by Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) whose graph is constructed by hash network and nodes&#39; features are initialized by pruning strategies. The model is trained by contrastive learning loss efficiently without accuracy supervision by fine-tuning pruned models. In addition, we introduce a dynamic pruning search space in consideration of the resource constraints. By converting the automatic channel pruning task into searching the pruned structure with effect similar to the unpruned structure, it enables the method to adapt to various network architectures. Finally, the optimal networks are selected from the candidate set according to their performance in specific downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACP-SSE indeed works in the automatic channel pruning area, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in hashing-based image retrieval, while maintaining competitive accuracy in image classification. Our code is available in the supplementary material.

AAAI 2026

Automatic Channel Pruning by Searching with Structure Embedding for Hash Network

ml: deep neural architectures and foundation models

ml: unsupervised & self-supervised learning

ml: graph-based machine learning

Deep hash networks are widely used in tasks such as large-scale image retrieval due to high search efficiency and low storage costs through binary hash codes. With the growing demand for deploying deep hash networks on resource-constrained devices, it is crucial to perform network compression on them, in which automatic pruning constitutes a priority option owing to efficacy maintenance. However, most existing pruning methods are designed primarily for image classification tasks, which makes them suffer from efficacy degradation when transplanted to image retrieval tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Automatic Channel Pruning framework by Searching with Structure Embedding (ACP-SSE). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore pruning techniques for deep hash networks and the first automatic pruning method by searching based on network topology structure. Specifically, we first design a structure encoding model by Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) whose graph is constructed by hash network and nodes' features are initialized by pruning strategies. The model is trained by contrastive learning loss efficiently without accuracy supervision by fine-tuning pruned models. In addition, we introduce a dynamic pruning search space in consideration of the resource constraints. By converting the automatic channel pruning task into searching the pruned structure with effect similar to the unpruned structure, it enables the method to adapt to various network architectures. Finally, the optimal networks are selected from the candidate set according to their performance in specific downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACP-SSE indeed works in the automatic channel pruning area, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in hashing-based image retrieval, while maintaining competitive accuracy in image classification. Our code is available in the supplementary material.

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.

Current sparse autoencoder (SAE) approaches to neural network interpretability assume that activations can be decomposed through linear superposition into sparse, interpretable features. Despite high reconstruction fidelity, SAEs consistently fail to eliminate polysemanticity and exhibit pathological behavioral errors. We propose that neural networks encode information in two complementary spaces compressed into the same substrate: feature identity and feature integration. 
To test this dual encoding hypothesis, we develop sequential and joint-training architectures to capture identity and integration patterns simultaneously. Joint training achieves 41.3% reconstruction improvement and 51.6% reduction in KL divergence errors. This architecture spontaneously develops bimodal feature organization: orthogonal features contributing to integration pathways and the rest contributing directly to the residual. Small nonlinear components (3% of parameters) achieve 16.5% standalone improvements, demonstrating parameter-efficient capture of computational relationships crucial for behavior. Additionally, intervention experiments using 2×2 factorial stimulus designs demonstrated that integration features exhibit selective sensitivity to experimental manipulations and produce systematic behavioral effects on model outputs, including significant interaction effects across semantic dimensions. 
This work provides systematic evidence for (1) dual-encoding in neural representations, (2) meaningful nonlinearly encoded feature interactions, and (3) introduces an architectural paradigm shift from post-hoc feature analysis to integrated computational design, establishing foundations for next-generation SAEs.

Feature Integration Spaces: Joint Training Reveals Dual Encoding in Neural Network Representations

With the rapid growth of visual content in open-world environments, zero-shot hashing image retrieval (ZSHIR) has emerged to tackle the challenge of recognizing novel classes using attribute-level and semantic information. However, existing methods often rely on shallow fusion of multi-source cues (e.g., attributes, labels, and visual features) through external supervision or feature concatenation, failing to capture the underlying semantic structure in a generative way. Particularly, current bridging strategies between modalities suffer from information fragmentation and weak alignment, hindering the model's ability to fully understand complex attribute-visual relations. Moreover, subtle semantic gaps or “semantic drift” between seen and unseen classes further degrade inter-class separability and the scalability of hashing models. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Proxy Zero-Shot Hashing with Multimodal Fusion via Stable Diffusion (PZSH), which integrates generative modeling and contrastive learning. PZSH leverages a pre-trained Stable Diffusion (SD) model to synthesize multimodal content, and uses dual BLIP encoders to enhance semantic alignment across modalities. We further design a proxy hashing loss to enforce discriminative binary representations. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that PZSH achieves state-of-the-art performance with stronger generalization to unseen classes. Our code is available in the supplementary material.

Proxy Zero-Shot Hashing with Multimodal Fusion via Stable Diffusion

Gradient perturbation mechanisms, such as differential privacy (DP), aim to defend against gradient inversion attacks (GIA) by injecting noise into the shared gradients. Recent studies have shown that DP-based defenses lack robustness against advanced GIAs. However, existing gradient inversion methods typically rely on iterative refinement and assume static noise, resulting in low efficiency and limited reconstruction fidelity under high-noise conditions. In this paper, we propose Venom, a novel gradient inversion attack method based on a liquid diffusion mechanism. Venom reconstructs private data directly from DP-protected gradients without requiring any prior knowledge of the noise distribution. Specifically, we design a Structural Prior Extraction (SPE) module that analytically extracts deep feature representations from perturbed gradients through energy-based aggregation, enabling stable pre-reconstruction of users' latent data features. We further introduce a Diffusion-driven Liquid Recovery Network (Diff-LRN) for high-fidelity image reconstruction. Unlike traditional diffusion models that rely on iterative sampling with predefined noise schedules, Diff-LRN performs deterministic single-step reconstruction using adaptive liquid neural dynamics to handle spatially heterogeneous noise patterns. Experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that Venom achieves a speedup of up to 38,343× over state-of-the-art attacks while maintaining high reconstruction fidelity under strong DP settings. These results challenge prevailing assumptions about DP robustness and underscore the need for more resilient privacy-preserving mechanisms in federated learning.

Venom: Liquid Diffusion-Guided Gradient Inversion for Breaking Differential Privacy in Federated Learning

Physical adversarial attacks in driving scenario can expose critical vulnerabilities in visual perception models. However, developing such attacks remains non-trivial due to diverse real-world environmental influences. Existing approaches either struggle to generalize to dynamic environments or fail to achieve consistent physical attack performance. To address these challenges, we propose MAGIC (Mastering Physical Adversarial Generation In Context), a novel framework powered by multi-modal LLM agents to automatically understand the scene context during testing time and generates the adversarial patch through synergistic interaction of language and vision understanding. In specific, MAGIC orchestrates three specialized LLM agents: the adv-patch generation agent masters the creation of deceptive patches via strategic prompt manipulation for text-to-image models; the adv-patch deployment agent ensures contextual coherence by determining optimal deployment strategies based on scene understanding; the self-examination agent completes this trilogy by providing critical oversight and iterative refinement of both processes. We validate our approach with both digital and physical scenarios, i.e., nuImage and real-world scenes, where both statistical and visual results prove that our MAGIC is powerful and effective for attacking widely applied object detection systems, i.e., YOLO and DETR series.

MAGIC: Mastering Physical Adversarial Generation in Context Through Collaborative LLM Agents

Existing paradigms for remote sensing change detection are caught in a trade-off: CNNs excel at efficiency but lack global context, while Transformers capture long-range dependencies at a prohibitive computational cost. This paper introduces ChangeRWKV, a new architecture that reconciles this conflict. By building upon the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) framework, our ChangeRWKV uniquely combines the parallelizable training of Transformers with the linear-time inference of RNNs. Our approach core features two key innovations: a hierarchical RWKV encoder that builds multi-resolution feature representation, and a novel Spatial-Temporal Fusion Module (STFM) engineered to resolve spatial misalignments across scales while distilling fine-grained temporal discrepancies. ChangeRWKV not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LEVIR-CD benchmark, with an 85.46% IoU and 92.16% F1 score, but does so while drastically reducing parameters and FLOPs compared to previous leading methods. This work demonstrates a new, efficient, and powerful paradigm for operational-scale change detection.

Beyond Quadratic: Linear-Time Change Detection with RWKV

Dataset distillation has achieved remarkable progress as an effective approach for data compression. However, real-world data often comes from diverse domains, leading to potential mismatches between the domains of synthesized images and those of the evaluation set. Existing methods primarily assume domain alignment between them, which limits their generalization ability in the above cross-domain scenarios.
In this paper, we aim to ensure that images synthesized from known domains maintain robust performance on unseen domains and propose a novel framework called Channel-masked Asymmetric Distribution Matching (CADM). During asymmetric distribution matching, domain-sensitive channels of real data are selectively masked at different layers to extract domain-invariant features that guide synthetic data optimization.
To further improve synthetic data representation, we introduce a class-focused domain-agnostic regularization to capture class-relevant knowledge while ignoring domain-specific information. Experiments show that our method produces domain-robust synthetic data and substantially improves generalization performance on unseen domains.

Channel-masked Asymmetric Distribution Matching for Cross-Domain Generalized Dataset Distillation

Recent advances in Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various vision-language tasks by leveraging large-scale image-text pretraining and instruction tuning. However, the security vulnerabilities of LVLMs have become increasingly concerning, particularly their susceptibility to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks focus on single-target attacks, i.e., targeting a single malicious output associated with a specific trigger. In this work, we uncover multi-target backdoor attacks, where multiple independent triggers corresponding to different attack targets are added in a single pass of training, posing a greater threat to LVLMs in real-world applications. Executing such attacks in LVLMs is challenging since there can be many incorrect trigger-target mappings due to severe feature interference among different triggers. To address this challenge, we propose MTAttack, the first multi-target backdoor attack framework for enforcing accurate multiple trigger-target mappings in LVLMs. The core of MTAttack is a novel optimization method with two constraints, namely Proxy Space Partitioning constraint and Trigger Prototype Anchoring constraint. It jointly optimizes multiple triggers in the latent space, with each trigger independently mapping clean images to a unique proxy class while at the same time guaranteeing their separability. Experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate a high success rate of MTAttack for multi-target attacks, substantially outperforming existing attack methods. Furthermore, our attack exhibits strong generalizability across datasets and robustness against backdoor defense strategies. These findings highlight the vulnerability of LVLMs to multi-target backdoor attacks and underscore the urgent need for mitigating such threats.

MTAttack: Multi-Target Backdoor Attacks Against Large Vision-Language Models

Quantum chemical simulations are a vital area of modern scientific research, as they provide insights into the chemical properties of molecules by solving the Schrödinger equation. This field is crucial for the development of new materials, drug design, and understanding chemical reaction mechanisms. However, traditional classical computing methods face significant challenges when addressing complex quantum chemistry problems, with high computational costs and difficulties in achieving accurate results. The advent of quantum computing offers new hope for quantum chemical simulations, but current quantum computers still operate in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, where quantum bit noise severely affects the accuracy of computations. Therefore, effectively mitigating quantum noise and improving the precision of quantum chemical simulations in the NISQ era remains a critical challenge. This project aims to break through the noise bottleneck in quantum chemical simulations by optimizing quantum variational circuits and adopting advanced error mitigation techniques. The focus will be on designing shorter and more efficient quantum variational circuits to reduce the number of quantum gates, thereby minimizing noise's impact on quantum information.

Adaptive Fidelity Estimation for Quantum Programs with Graph-Guided Noise Awareness

This work focuses on multi-shot semi-supervised video object segmentation (MVOS), which aims at segmenting the target object indicated by an initial mask throughout a video with multiple shots. While existing VOS methods mainly focus on single-shot videos, they often fail to handle shot discontinuities, thereby limiting their real-world applicability. Furthermore, the lack of annotated multi-shot data poses a major challenge for MVOS research. To address these issues, we propose a transition mimicking data augmentation strategy (TMA) that enables cross-shot generalization using single-shot data, and a transition-aware method, Segment Anything Across Shots (SAAS), which detects and comprehends shot transitions during inference. To support evaluation and future study in MVOS, we introduce Cut-VOS, a new MVOS benchmark with dense mask annotations, diverse object categories, and high-frequency transitions. Extensive experiments on YouMVOS and Cut-VOS demonstrate that the proposed SAAS achieves state-of-the-art performance by effectively mimicking, understanding, and segmenting across complex transitions. The code and data samples are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AAAI2026-3280.

Segment Anything Across Shots: A Method and Benchmark

LVLMs have been shown to perform excellently in image-level tasks such as VQA and caption. However, in many instance-level tasks, such as visual grounding and object detection, LVLMs still show performance gaps compared to previous expert models. Meanwhile, although pedestrian tracking is a classical task, there have been a number of new topics in combining object tracking and natural language, such as Referring MOT, Cross-view Referring MOT, and Semantic MOT. These tasks emphasize that models should understand the tracked object at an advanced semantic level, which is exactly where LVLMs excel. In this paper, we propose a new unified Pedestrian Tracking framework, namely OmniPT, which can track, track based on reference and generate semantic understanding of tracked objects interactively. We address two issues: how to model the tracking task into a task that foundation models can perform, and how to make the model output formatted answers. To this end, we implement a training phase consisting of RL-Mid Training-SFT-RL. Based on the pre-trained weights of the LVLM, we first perform a simple RL phase to enable the model to output fixed and supervisable bounding box format. Subsequently, we conduct a mid-training phase using a large number of pedestrian-related datasets. Finally, we perform supervised fine-tuning on several pedestrian tracking datasets, and then carry out another RL phase to improve the model's tracking performance and enhance its ability to follow instructions. We conduct experiments on tracking benchmarks and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can perform better than the previous methods.

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