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Generating responsive listener head dynamics with nuanced emotions and expressive reactions is crucial for dialogue modeling in various virtual avatar animations. Previous studies mainly focus on the direct short-term production of listener behavior. They overlook the fine-grained control over motion variations and emotional intensity, especially in long-sequence modeling. Moreover, the lack of long-term and large-scale paired speaker-listener corpora incorporating head dynamics and fine-grained multi-modality annotations limits the application of dialogue modeling. Therefore, we first newly collect a large-scale multi-turn dataset of 3D dyadic conversation containing more than 1.4M valid frames for multi-modal responsive interaction, dubbed ListenerX. Additionally, we propose VividListener, a novel framework enabling fine-grained, expressive, and controllable listener dynamics modeling. This framework leverages multi-modal conditions as guiding principles for fostering coherent interactions between speakers and listeners. Specifically, we design the Responsive Interaction Module (RIM) to adaptively represent the multi-modal interactive embeddings. RIM ensures the listener dynamics achieve fine-grained semantic coordination with textual descriptions and adjustments, while preserving expressive reaction with speaker behavior. Meanwhile, we propose the Emotional Intensity Tags (EIT) for emotion intensity editing with multi-modal information integration, applying to both text descriptions and listener motion amplitude. Extensive experiments conducted on our newly collected ListenerX dataset demonstrate that VividListener achieves state-of-the-art performance, realizing expressive and controllable listener dynamics.

AAAI 2026

VividListener: Expressive and Controllable Listener Dynamics Modeling for Multi-Modal Responsive Interaction

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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.

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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.

Masked autoencoders (MAE) have become a dominant paradigm in 3D representation learning, setting new performance benchmarks across various downstream tasks. Existing methods with fixed mask ratios neglect multi-level representational correlations and intrinsic geometric structures, while relying on point-wise reconstruction assumptions that conflict with the diversity of point cloud. To address these issues, we propose a 3D representation learning method, termed Point-SRA, which aligns representations through self-distillation and probabilistic modeling. Specifically, we assign different masking ratios to the MAE to capture complementary geometric and semantic information, while the MeanFlow Transformer (MFT) leverages cross-modal conditional embeddings to enable diverse probabilistic reconstruction. Our analysis further reveals that representations at different time steps in MFT also exhibit complementarity. Therefore, a Dual Self-Representation Alignment mechanism is proposed at both the MAE and MFT levels. Finally, we design a Flow-Conditioned Fine-Tuning Architecture to fully exploit the point cloud distribution learned via MeanFlow. Point-SRA outperforms Point-MAE by 5.37% on ScanObjectNN. On intracranial aneurysm segmentation, it reaches 96.07% mean IoU for arteries and 86.87% for aneurysms. For 3D object detection, Point-SRA achieves 47.3% AP@50, surpassing MaskPoint by 5.12%.

Point-SRA: Self-Representation Alignment for 3D Representation Learning

Accurate segmentation of ultra-high-resolution (UHR) images, which often exceed tens of millions of pixels, is critically important in domains such as remote sensing and biomedical imaging. However, acquiring pixel-level annotations for such high-resolution images is prohibitively expensive and labor-intensive. While semi-supervised semantic segmentation can significantly reduce the annotation burden, its extension to UHR images holds great potential for addressing the unique challenges posed by sparse supervision. To this end, we propose SSR-SAM, a retrieval-style semi-supervised segmentation framework tailored for UHR images. Leveraging the promptable paradigm of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), SSR-SAM treats locally annotated regions as prompts to retrieve semantically consistent pixels across the entire image. Building upon this retrieval-style segmentation paradigm, we further introduce prompt-level perturbation, a novel trail to deploy consistency regularization for semi-supervised segmentation. It encourages the model to learn consistency across predictions guided by diverse visual-semantic prompts, thereby enhancing generalization on unlabeled data. We evaluate SSR-SAM on three UHR datasets: Inria Aerial, BCSS, and URUR. Experimental results show that SSR-SAM achieves clear performance gains over the labeled-only supervision, with average mIoU improvements of 4.9%, 4.15%, and 2.5%, respectively. Additionally, SSR-SAM possesses zero-shot segmentation capability, exhibiting potential for general retrieval-style segmentation tasks.

SSR-SAM: Retrieval-Style Segment Anything Model for Semi-Supervised Ultra-High-Resolution Image Segmentation

Diffusion-based talking head models generate high-quality, photorealistic videos but suffer from slow inference, limiting practical applications. Existing acceleration methods for gen- eral diffusion models fail to exploit the temporal and spatial redundancies unique to talking head generation. In this paper, we propose a task-specific framework addressing these inef- ficiencies through two key innovations. First, we introduce Lightning-fast Caching-based Parallel denoising predic- tion (LightningCP), caching static features to bypass most model layers in inference time. We also enable parallel pre- diction using cached features and estimated noisy latents as inputs, efficiently bypassing sequential sampling. Second, we propose Decoupled Foreground Attention (DFA) to further accelerate attention computations, exploiting the spatial de- coupling in talking head videos to restrict attention to dynamic foreground regions. Additionally, we remove reference fea- tures in certain layers to bring extra speedup. Extensive exper- iments demonstrate that our framework significantly improves inference speed while preserving video quality.

Lightning Fast Caching-based Parallel Denoising Prediction for Accelerating Talking Head Generation

Predicting single-cell perturbation outcomes directly advances gene function analysis and facilitates drug candidate selection, making it a key driver of both basic and translational biomedical research. However, a major bottleneck in this task is the unpaired nature of single-cell data, as the same cell cannot be observed both before and after perturbation due to the destructive nature of sequencing. Although some neural generative transport models attempt to tackle unpaired single-cell perturbation data, they either lack explicit conditioning or depend on prior spaces for indirect distribution alignment, limiting precise perturbation modeling. In this work, we approximate Schrödinger Bridge (SB), which defines stochastic dynamic mappings recovering the entropy-regularized optimal transport (OT), to directly align the distributions of control and perturbed single-cell populations across different perturbation conditions. Unlike prior SB approximations that rely on bidirectional modeling to infer optimal node couplings, we leverage Minibatch-OT based node-level coupling to avoid such bidirectional inference and the associated ill-posedness of defining the reverse process. This coupling directly guides bridge learning, yielding a scalable approximation to the SB. We approximate two SBs, one modeling discrete gene activation states and the other continuous expression distributions. Joint training enables accurate perturbation modeling and captures single-cell heterogeneity. Experiments on public genetic and drug perturbation datasets show that our model effectively captures heterogeneous single-cell responses and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Departures: Distributional Transport for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction with Neural Schrödinger Bridges

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise significant energy efficiency by processing information via sparse, event-driven spikes. However, realizing this potential is hindered by the conventional use of a rigid, uniform timestep, $T$. This constraint imposes a challenging trade-off between accuracy and latency, while also incurring the prohibitive training costs of Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT). To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Pseudo-Spiking Neuron (PseudoSN), a novel training proxy that conceptualizes latency as an intrinsic, learnable parameter for each neuron. Building on the efficiency of rate-based methods, the PseudoSN models temporal dynamics in a single, BPTT-free pass. It employs a learnable probabilistic noise scheme to emulate the discretization effects of spike generation (e.g., clipping and quantization), making the neuron-specific timestep—and thus latency—directly optimizable via backpropagation. Integrated into a hardware-aware objective, our framework trains heterogeneous-latency SNNs that autonomously learn to optimize the trade-offs among accuracy, latency and energy, establishing a new state-of-the-art on major benchmarks.

Pseudo-Spiking Neurons: A Noise-Based Training Framework for Heterogeneous-Latency Spiking Neural Networks

Multi-modal object Re-Identification (ReID) aims to aggregate complementary information from different modalities to retrieve specific objects. Existing methods often rely on hard token filtering or simple fusion strategies, which can lead to the loss of discriminative cues and increased background interference. To address these challenges, we propose STMI, a novel learning framework composed of three key components: (1) Segmentation-Guided Feature Modulation (SFM) module leverages SAM-generated masks to enhance foreground representations and suppress background noise through learnable attention modulation; (2) Semantic Token Reallocation (STR) module employs learnable query tokens and an adaptive reallocation mechanism to extract compact and informative representations without discarding any tokens; (3) Cross-Modal Hypergraph Interaction (CHI) module constructs a unified hypergraph across modalities to capture high-order semantic relationships. Extensive experiments on public datasets (i.e., RGBNT201, RGBNT100, and MSVR310) demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed STMI framework in multi-modal ReID scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/young6man/STMI.

STMI: Segmentation-Guided Token Modulation with Cross-Modal Hypergraph Interaction for Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification

Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos containing relevant moments for a given text query. This task is extremely challenging, as untrimmed videos often include numerous actions and objects unrelated to the query. However, existing methods usually struggle with fine-grained action-object modeling, limiting their retrieval performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Action-and-object Aware Alignment for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (A$^3$PRVR), a dual-branch framework designed to enhance retrieval by improving the modeling of action-object relationships. Specifically, we propose a Query-specific Deformable Temporal Attention (Q-DTA) module to effectively capture action-relevant object information in video features, while filtering out irrelevant content. Additionally, we propose an action-and-object aware alignment module to enable fine-grained textual understanding and video-text alignment. It uses action- and object-aware contrastive losses to enhance the model's sensitivity to action-object distinctions in the text query. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, A$^3$PRVR achieves an average relative gain of 6.5% in SumR across the Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Caption, and TVR datasets.

Action-and-object Aware Alignment for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to localize the referent of natural language referring expressions through two core tasks: Referring Expression Comprehension (3DREC) and Segmentation (3DRES). While existing methods achieve high accuracy in simple, single-object scenes, they suffer from severe performance degradation in complex, multi-object scenes—common in real-world settings, hindering practical deployment. Existing methods face two key challenges in complex, multi-object scenes: inadequate parsing of implicit localization cues critical for disambiguating visually similar objects, and ineffective suppression of dynamic spatial interference from co-occurring objects, resulting in degraded grounding accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose PC-CrossDiff, a unified dual-task framework with a dual-level cross-modal differential attention architecture for 3DREC and 3DRES. Specifically, the framework introduces: (i) Point-Level Differential Attention (PLDA) modules that apply bidirectional differential attention between text and point clouds, adaptively extracting implicit localization cues via learnable weights to improve discriminative representation; (ii) Cluster-Level Differential Attention (CLDA) modules that establish a hierarchical attention mechanism to adaptively enhance localization-relevant spatial relationships while suppressing ambiguous or irrelevant spatial relations through a localization-aware differential attention block. To address the scale disparity and conflicting gradients in joint 3DREC–3DRES training, we propose $\mathcal{L}_{\text{DGTL}}$, a unified loss function that explicitly reduces multi-task crosstalk and enables effective parameter sharing across tasks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ScanRefer, NR3D, and SR3D benchmarks. Notably, on the Implicit subsets of ScanRefer, it improves the Overall@0.50 score by $\textbf{+10.16\%}$ for the 3DREC task, highlighting its strong ability to parse implicit spatial cues.

PC-CrossDiff: Point-Cluster Dual-Level Cross-Modal Differential Attention for Unified 3D Referring and Segmentation

Diffusion probabilistic models have set a new standard for generative fidelity but are hindered by a slow iterative sampling process. A powerful training-free strategy to accelerate this process is Schedule Optimization, which aims to find an optimal distribution of timesteps for a fixed and small Number of Function Evaluations (NFE) to maximize sample quality. To this end, a successful schedule optimization method must adhere to four core principles: effectiveness, adaptivity, practical robustness, and computational efficiency. However, existing paradigms struggle to satisfy these principles simultaneously, motivating the need for a more advanced solution. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Hierarchical-Schedule-Optimizer (HSO), a novel and efficient bi-level optimization framework. HSO reframes the search for a globally optimal schedule into a more tractable problem by iteratively alternating between two synergistic levels: an upper-level global search for an optimal initialization strategy and a lower-level local optimization for schedule refinement. This process is guided by two key innovations: the Midpoint Error Proxy (MEP), a solver-agnostic and numerically stable objective for effective local optimization, and the Spacing-Penalized Fitness (SPF) function, which ensures practical robustness by penalizing pathologically close timesteps. Extensive experiments show that HSO sets a new state-of-the-art for training-free sampling in the extremely low-NFE regime. For instance, with an NFE of just 5, HSO achieves a remarkable FID of 11.94 on LAION-Aesthetics with Stable Diffusion v2.1. Crucially, this level of performance is attained not through costly retraining, but with a one-time optimization cost of less than 8 seconds, presenting a highly practical and efficient paradigm for diffusion model acceleration.

Hierarchical Schedule Optimization for Fast and Robust Diffusion Model Sampling

User behavior sequences in modern recommendation systems exhibit significant length heterogeneity, ranging from sparse short-term interactions to rich long-term histories. While longer sequences provide more context, we observe that increasing the maximum input sequence length in existing CTR models paradoxically degrades performance for short-sequence users due to attention polarization and length imbalance in training data. To address this, we propose LAIN (Length-Aware Interest Network), a plug-and-play framework that explicitly incorporates sequence length as a conditioning signal to balance long- and short-sequence modeling. LAIN consists of three lightweight components: a Spectral Length Encoder that maps length into continuous representations, Length-Conditioned Prompting that injects global contextual cues into both long- and short-term behavior branches, and Length-Modulated Attention that adaptively adjusts attention sharpness based on sequence length. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks and five strong CTR backbones show that LAIN consistently improves overall performance, achieving up to +1.15% AUC gain and 1.63% log loss reduction. Notably, our method significantly improves accuracy for short-sequence users without sacrificing long-sequence effectiveness. Our contributions offer a general, efficient, and deployable solution to mitigate length-induced bias in sequential recommendation.

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