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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.

AAAI 2026

ACID-Style: An Adaptive Condition Injection Diffusion Model for Arbitrary Style Transfer

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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.

Recent advancements in Large Video Language Models (LVLMs) have highlighted their potential for multi-modal understanding, yet evaluating their factual grounding in videos remains a critical unsolved challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Video SimpleQA, the first comprehensive benchmark tailored for factuality evaluation in video contexts. Our work differs from existing video benchmarks through the following key features: 1) Knowledge required: demanding integration of external knowledge beyond the video’s explicit narrative; 2) Multi-hop fact-seeking question: Each question involves multiple explicit facts and requires strict factual grounding without hypothetical or subjective inferences. We include per-hop single-fact-based sub-QAs alongside final QAs to enable fine-grained, step-by-step evaluation; 3) Short-form definitive answer: Answers are crafted as unambiguous and definitively correct in a short format with minimal scoring variance; 4) Temporal grounded required: Requiring answers to rely on one or more temporal segments in videos, rather than single frames. We extensively evaluate 33 state-of-the-art LVLMs and summarize key findings as follows: 1) Current LVLMs exhibit notable deficiencies in factual adherence, with the best-performing model o3 merely achieving an F-score of 66.3%; 2) Most LVLMs are overconfident in what they generate, with self-stated confidence exceeding actual accuracy; 3) Retrieval-Augmented Generation demonstrates consistent improvements at the cost of additional inference time overhead; 4) Multi-hop QA demonstrates substantially degraded performance compared to single-hop sub-QAs, with first-hop object/event recognition emerging as the primary bottleneck. We position Video SimpleQA as the cornerstone benchmark for video factuality assessment, aiming to steer LVLM development toward verifiable grounding in real-world contexts.

Video SimpleQA: Towards Factuality Evaluation in Large Video Language Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential in complex scene understanding and action reasoning, leading to their increasing adoption in end-to-end autonomous driving systems. However, the long visual tokens of VLA models greatly increase computational costs. Current visual token pruning methods in Vision-Language Models (VLM) rely on either visual token similarity or visual-text attention, but both have shown poor performance in autonomous driving scenarios. Given that human drivers concentrate on relevant foreground areas while driving, we assert that retaining visual tokens containing this foreground information is essential for effective decision-making. Inspired by this, we propose FastDriveVLA, a novel reconstruction-based vision token pruning framework designed specifically for autonomous driving. FastDriveVLA includes a plug-and-play visual token pruner called ReconPruner, which prioritizes foreground information through MAE-style pixel reconstruction. A novel adversarial foreground-background reconstruction strategy is designed to train ReconPruner for the visual encoder of VLA models. Once trained, ReconPruner can be seamlessly applied to different VLA models with the same visual encoder without retraining. To train ReconPruner, we also introduce a large-scale dataset called nuScenes-FG, consisting of 241K image-mask pairs with annotated foreground regions. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the nuScenes open-loop planning benchmark across different pruning ratios. The code and dataset will be released soon.

FastDriveVLA: Efficient End-to-End Driving via Plug-and-Play Reconstruction-based Token Pruning

Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a critical method for empowering LLMs by leveraging candidate visual documents. However, current methods consider the entire document as the basic retrieval unit, introducing substantial irrelevant visual content in two ways: 1) Relevant documents often contain large regions unrelated to the query, diluting the focus on salient information; 2) Retrieving multiple documents to increase recall further introduces redundant and irrelevant documents. These redundant contexts distract the model's attention and further degrade the performance. To address this challenge, we propose RegionRAG, a novel framework that shifts the retrieval paradigm from the document level to the region level. During training, we design a hybrid supervision strategy from both labeled data and unlabeled data to pinpoint relevant patches. During inference, we propose a dynamic pipeline that intelligently groups salient patches into complete semantic regions. By delegating the task of identifying relevant regions to the retriever, RegionRAG enables the generator to focus solely on concise, query-relevant visual content, improving both efficiency and accuracy. Experiments on six visual document understanding benchmarks demonstrate that RegionRAG achieves state-of-the-art performance. It improves retrieval accuracy by 10.02\% in R@1 on average, and boosts question answering accuracy by 3.56\% while using only 71.42\% visual tokens compared with prior methods.

RegionRAG: Region-level Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Visual Document Understanding

In semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSSS), segmentation performance is heavily constrained by the quality of pseudo labels. However, prevalent pseudo-label optimization approaches rely on the model’s internal self-correction. When the model fails to recognize or adequately represent certain classes, this self-enhancement mechanism amplifies initial mistakes, ultimately leading to poor semantic or spatial consistency. To address this limitation, we propose ViLaDiff to enhance pseudo-label quality. Specifically, ViLaDiff first employs a prompt-guided image captioning task to generate descriptive text for each input image, providing high-level semantic context. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to introduce vision-language modeling into SSSS. We design a vision-language fusion module to enhance feature semantics and discriminative capability. It integrates cross-modal interactions with dual-path knowledge to ensure semantic consistency. Additionally, while language provides high-level semantic guidance, it is inherently limited in expressing fine-grained spatial structures. Therefore, we propose an edge-aware mixed-noise diffusion process. It simulates feature-level uncertainty through Gaussian perturbations and introduces class-flipping noise into the masks to model misclassification errors. To enhance boundary refinement, we apply a higher flipping probability along mask edges, enabling edge-aware modeling during denoising. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks validate that our method significantly improves pseudo-label quality and segmentation performance.

Learning Beyond Vision: Vision-Language Distillation and Edge-Aware Mix Diffusion in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Clustering with k-means is well-established and efficient, but often struggles with complex data distributions because the clustering performance hinges on how well the centroids capture the data distribution, and conventional k-means usually fails to produce representative centroids under such conditions. To address this limitation, we propose Pseudo Multi-view K-means Clustering (PMKC), a novel framework that simulates a multi-view learning paradigm within a single-view setting by generating multiple soft k-means decompositions. Each decomposition can be treated as an individual view and investigates a distinct perspective of the data. Specifically, to encourage complementary structure, we impose an independence constraint among cluster centers, and to integrate these diverse clusterings, we model the soft assignment matrices as a third-order tensor and apply low-rank regularization to extract a shared latent structure. This design not only enhances clustering robustness but also improves the stability and consistency of the final results. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that PMKC achieves superior clustering performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Pseudo Multi-view K-means Clustering

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) plays a vital role in engineering and manufacturing, yet current CAD workflows require extensive domain expertise and manual modeling effort. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made it possible to generate code from natural language, opening new opportunities for automating parametric 3D modeling. However, directly translating human design intent into executable CAD code remains highly challenging, due to the need for logical reasoning, syntactic correctness, and numerical precision. In this work, we propose CAD-RL, a multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) guided reinforcement learning post training framework for CAD modeling code generation. Our method combines CoT-based Cold Start with goal-driven reinforcement learning post training using three task-specific rewards: executability reward, geometric accuracy reward, and external evaluation reward. To ensure stable policy learning under sparse and high-variance reward conditions, we introduce three targeted optimization strategies: Trust Region Stretch for improved exploration, Precision Token Loss for enhanced dimensions parameter accuracy, and Overlong Filtering to reduce noisy supervision. To support training and benchmarking, we release ExeCAD, a noval dataset comprising 16,540 real-world CAD examples with paired natural language and structured design language descriptions, executable CADQuery scripts, and rendered 3D models. Experiments demonstrate that CAD-RL achieves significant improvements in reasoning quality, output precision, and code executability over existing VLMs.

From Intent to Execution: Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reinforcement Learning for Precise CAD Code Generation

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have spurred significant progress in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Building on the success of Deepseek-R1, researchers extended multimodal reasoning to post-training paradigms based on reinforcement learning (RL), focusing predominantly on mathematical datasets. However, existing post-training paradigms tend to neglect two critical aspects: (1) The lack of quantifiable difficulty metrics capable of strategically screening samples for post-training optimization. (2) Suboptimal post-training paradigms that fail to jointly optimize perception and reasoning capabilities. To address this gap, we propose two novel difficulty-aware sampling strategies: Progressive Image Semantic Masking (PISM) quantifies sample hardness through systematic image degradation, while Cross-Modality Attention Balance (CMAB) assesses cross-modal interaction complexity via attention distribution analysis. Leveraging these metrics, we design a hierarchical training framework that incorporates both GRPO-only and SFT+GRPO hybrid training paradigms, and evaluate them across six benchmark datasets. Experiments demonstrate consistent superiority of GRPO applied to difficulty-stratified samples compared to conventional SFT+GRPO pipelines, indicating that strategic data sampling can obviate the need for supervised fine-tuning while improving model accuracy.

Revisiting the Data Sampling in Multimodal Post-training from a Difficulty-Distinguish View

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) systems are increasingly used in safety-critical applications, yet their security remains severely underexplored. This work investigates backdoor attacks, which implant hidden triggers that cause malicious actions only when specific inputs appear in the observation space. Existing DRL backdoor research focuses solely on training-time attacks requiring full adversarial access to the training pipeline. In contrast, we reveal critical vulnerabilities across the DRL supply chain where backdoors can be embedded with significantly reduced adversarial privileges. We introduce two novel attacks: (1) TrojanentRL, which exploits component-level flaws to implant a persistent backdoor that survives full model retraining; and (2) InfrectroRL, a post-training backdoor attack which requires no access to training, validation, or test data. Empirical and analytical evaluations across six Atari environments show our attacks rival state-of-the-art training-time backdoor attacks while operating under much stricter adversarial constraints. We also demonstrate that InfrectroRL further evades two leading DRL backdoor defenses. These findings challenge the current research focus and highlight the urgent need for robust defenses.

Beyond Training-time Poisoning: Component-level and Post-training Backdoors in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Curvilinear structure segmentation (CSS) plays a vital role in industrial applications, including medical imaging and structural health monitoring. Recently, the strong capacity of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has inspired its downstream application in CSS tasks. To adapt SAM to CSS tasks, previous methods heavily rely on a certain number of samples and costly pixel-level annotation, which are hard to access for a new scenario. Considering this, the goal of our work is to adapt SAM in a very cost-effective setting where only a single unlabeled image is given. This is far more challenging than the typical supervised, unsupervised, or self-supervised learning manner that needs a large number of training samples. To tackle this problem, we propose a finetuning-free SAM for curvilinear structure segmentation, called \textbf{c}urvilinear-\textbf{a}ware \textbf{pro}mpt learning (\emph{CaPro}), which aims to automatically learn visual prompts via a single unlabeled image. In the first stage, we generate extensive curvilinear structures and oriented sub-curvilinear box annotations. To increase the realism of generated curvilinear structures, we adapt these structures into real image domains via the Fourier Transform using a single real-world unlabeled image. Now, these adapted images can be used to train our oriented sub-curvilinear detector. In the second stage, we propose the curvilinear-aware discrete representation matching to filter those unreliable detection results. Afterward, these reliable detection results can be converted into informative prompts, contributing to the cost-effective SAM adaptation to CSS tasks. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of \emph{CaPro} on medical image and crack segmentation tasks. Code and dataset will be publicly available.

CaPro: Curvilinear-aware Prompt Learning with Single Unlabeled Image for Cost-effective Curvilinear Structure Segmentation

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to precisely follow complex and fine-grained lexical instructions is a cornerstone of their utility and controllability. However, evaluating this capability remains a significant challenge. Current methods either rely on subjective and costly human evaluation or on automated ``LLM-as-a-judge'' systems, which suffer from inherent biases and unreliability. Existing programmatic benchmarks, while objective, often lack the expressiveness to test intricate, compositional constraints at a granular level. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{LexInstructEvaL}, a new benchmark and evaluation framework for fine-grained lexical instruction following. Our framework is built upon a formal, rule-based grammar that deconstructs complex instructions into a canonical $\langle \texttt{Procedure, Relation, Value} \rangle$ triplet. This grammar enables the systematic generation of a diverse dataset through a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop pipeline and facilitates objective verification via a transparent, programmatic engine. Crucially, our engine is not only low-cost and fast but also highly reliable, achieving \textbf{97\% agreement} with expert human judgment. We release our dataset and open-source evaluation tools to facilitate further research into the controllability and reliability of LLMs.

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