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Model watermarking techniques can embed watermark information into the protected model for ownership declaration by constructing specific input-output pairs. However, existing watermarks are easily removed when facing model stealing attacks, and make it difficult for model owners to effectively verify the copyright of stolen models. In this paper, we analyze the root cause of the failure of current watermarking methods under model stealing scenarios and then explore potential solutions. Specifically, we introduce a robust watermarking framework, DeepTracer, which leverages a novel watermark samples construction method and a same-class coupling loss constraint. DeepTracer can incur a high-coupling model between watermark task and primary task that makes adversaries inevitably learn the hidden watermark task when stealing the primary task functionality. Furthermore, we propose an effective watermark samples filtering mechanism that elaborately select watermark key samples used in model ownership verification to enhance the reliability of watermarks. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and models demonstrate that our method surpasses existing approaches in defending against various model stealing attacks, as well as watermark attacks, and achieves new state-of-the-art effectiveness and robustness.

AAAI 2026

DeepTracer: Tracing Stolen Model via Deep Coupled Watermarks

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.

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 advances in optimizing Gaussian Splatting for scene geometry have enabled efficient reconstruction of detailed surfaces from images. However, when input views are sparse, such optimization is prone to overfitting, leading to suboptimal reconstruction quality. Existing approaches address this challenge by employing flattened Gaussian primitives to better fit surface geometry, combined with depth regularization to alleviate geometric ambiguities under limited viewpoints. Nevertheless, the increased anisotropy inherent in flattened Gaussians exacerbates overfitting in sparse-view scenarios, hindering accurate surface fitting and degrading novel view synthesis performance. In this paper, we propose SparseSurf, a method that reconstructs more accurate and detailed surfaces while preserving high-quality novel view rendering. Our key insight is to introduce Stereo Geometry-Texture Alignment, which bridges rendering quality and geometry estimation, thereby jointly enhancing both surface reconstruction and view synthesis. In addition, we present a Pseudo-Feature Enhanced Geometry Consistency that enforces multi-view geometric consistency by incorporating both training and unseen views, effectively mitigating overfitting caused by sparse supervision. Extensive experiments on the DTU, BlendedMVS, and Mip-NeRF360 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

SparseSurf: Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting for Surface Reconstruction

Automated auscultation advances the detection of respiratory diseases, especially in areas with limited resources where traditional diagnostic methods are unavailable. On the other hand, the scarcity of auscultation datasets limits the automation performance, prompting the needs for data augmentation methods. However, most of the existing methods neglect the difference in acoustic sounds that requires personalized augmentation strategies. To address this, we propose a Progressive-Adaptive Spectral Augmentation (PASA), which is one of the first paradigms to adaptively select the best augmentation strategy for each sample. The PASA innovatively treats augmentation selection problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), creating an alternating loop between the diagnostic model and the augmentation selection. The agent selects the optimal augmentation operations and magnitudes via a task-specific design, including state construction, action sampling, Hybrid Batch-Sample (HBS) strategy execution, and reward guidance. The HBS strategy initially applies uniform augmentation across mini-batches while collecting sample-specific performance statistics. When model performance stabilizes, it transits to sample-level augmentation based on accumulated difficulty assessments. This two-phase design balances computational complexity with personalization. Extensive experiments across three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the PASA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, pioneering a transformative paradigm for adaptive data augmentation in automated auscultation.

PASA: Progressive-Adaptive Spectral Augmentation for Automated Auscultation in Data-Scarce Environments

Scene-aware motion synthesis has been widely researched recently due to its numerous applications. Prevailing methods rely heavily on paired motion-scene data, while it is difficult to generalize to diverse scenes when trained only on a few specific ones. Thus, we propose a unified framework, termed Diffusion Implicit Policy (DIP), for scene-aware motion synthesis, where paired motion-scene data are no longer necessary. In this paper, we disentangle human-scene interaction from motion synthesis during training, and then introduce an interaction-based implicit policy into motion diffusion during inference. Synthesized motion can be derived through iterative diffusion denoising and implicit policy optimization, thus motion naturalness and interaction plausibility can be maintained simultaneously. For long-term motion synthesis, we introduce motion blending in joint rotation power space. The proposed method is evaluated on synthesized scenes with ShapeNet furniture, and real scenes from PROX and Replica. Results show that our framework presents better motion naturalness and interaction plausibility than cutting-edge methods. This also indicates the feasibility of utilizing the DIP for motion synthesis in more general tasks and versatile scenes.

Diffusion Implicit Policy for Unpaired Scene-aware Motion Synthesis

Label Distribution Learning (LDL) is a groundbreaking paradigm for addressing the task with label ambiguity. Subjectivity in annotating label description degrees often leads to imbalanced label distribution. Existing approaches either adopt representation alignment or decoupling strategies to solve the imbalanced label distribution learning (ILDL). However, representation alignment-based methods overlook the issue of gradient vanishing for non-dominant branches within imbalanced label distributions, while decoupling-based approaches fail to achieve adaptive weight optimization. To address these issues, we propose Adaptive Momentum and Exponential Moving Average weighted modeling (AMEMA). AMEMA combines EMA-based loss weighting with momentum allocation to mitigate gradient attenuation in non-dominant label learning and adaptively balance the optimization signals between dominant and non-dominant branches. Specifically, AMEMA decouples label distributions into two branches, dominant and non-dominant. It computes and updates Kullback-Leibler divergence losses for each branch using EMA. Different initial momenta are applied to each branch to facilitate branch-specific optimization dynamics. Dynamic weighting coefficients, derived from EMA-smoothed losses, allow the model to adjust its learning direction adaptively and improve the learning of non-dominant labels. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that AMEMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ILDL methods across various evaluation metrics.

Adaptive Momentum and EMA-weighted Modeling for Imbalanced Label Distribution Learning

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in high-fidelity image and video generation. To reduce their substantial computational costs, feature caching techniques have been proposed to accelerate inference by reusing hidden representations from previous timesteps. However, current methods often struggle to maintain generation quality at high acceleration ratios, where prediction errors increase sharply due to the inherent instability of long-step forecasting. In this work, we adopt an ordinary differential equation (ODE) perspective on the hidden-feature sequence, modeling layer representations along the trajectory as a feature-ODE. We attribute the degradation of existing caching strategies to their inability to robustly integrate historical features under large skipping intervals. To address this, we propose \textbf{FoCa} (Forecast-then-Calibrate), which treats feature caching as a feature-ODE solving problem. Extensive experiments across image synthesis, video generation, and super-resolution tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of FoCa, particularly under aggressive acceleration. Without additional training, FoCa achieves near-lossless speedups of 5.50$\times$ on FLUX, 6.45$\times$ on HunyuanVideo, 3.17$\times$ on Inf-DiT, and maintains high quality with a 4.53$\times$ speedup on DiT. Our code will be released upon acceptance.

Forecast Then Calibrate: Feature Caching as ODE for Efficient Diffusion Transformers

Parallel corpora, as the foundation of machine translation, remain crucial even in the era of large language models (LLMs) for pre-training and fine-tuning.
However, annotating parallel corpora is extremely costly, as it requires annotators to be proficient in multiple languages.
To reduce this cost, prior work has explored image-pivoted corpus synthesis, generating multilingual captions for the same image as pseudo-parallel data.
Unfortunately, these pseudo corpora suffer from the serious issue of multilingual focus divergence, i.e., the model attending to distinct aspects of the image when generating captions in different languages.
To address this problem, we propose a method called PRISMS (Parallel Refracting ImageS into Multilingual descriptions with Structured visual guidance), which leverages semantic graphs as structured visual guidance to unify the focus of multilingual captions. 
To ensure adherence to this guidance, we introduce two key techniques: supervised fine-tuning using self-generated instructional data, and reinforcement learning with a reward signal based on semantic graph consistency. 
Experimental results on five languages show that our PRISMS significantly improves the image-pivot parallel corpora synthesis, enabling LLMs to achieve translation performance comparable to that of models trained on manually annotated corpora.

The Visual Prism: Refracting Images into Parallel Multilingual Descriptions with Structured Visual Guidance

Multi-person eyeblink detection in untrimmed in-the-wild videos is an emerging and challenging task. Due to its significant spatio-temporal fine-grained characteristics compared to general actions, we empirically find that general action detectors, though effective in broader domains, struggle with this task (i.e.,Blink-AP$ < $2\%). Specialized eyeblink methods alleviate it through fine-grained spatio-temporal operations. SOTA method proposes a unified model combining instance-aware face localization and eyeblink detection through joint multi-task learning and feature sharing. While effectiveness, it exhibits two critical limitations that may contribute to its unsatisfactory performance (i.e.,Blink-AP$=$10.11\%): (1) Face localization and eyeblink detection require distinct spatio-temporal feature granularities, making joint modeling in a unified feature space suboptimal. (2) Eyeblink task training could be largely affected by unstable face-eye feature learning under the joint training paradigm. 
To address this, we propose DeFB, a decomposed feature learning paradigm with favorable effectiveness and efficiency: (1) We design to model face and eye in feature spaces of different granularities, which greatly enhances fine-grained perception while reducing computational costs compared with unified feature space;
(2) To address the instability in face-eye feature learning, an asynchronous learning mechanism for the face and eye feature spaces is adopted, with eye feature learning serving as a refinement process based on well-trained coarse face features, which also maintains efficient feature sharing as in the existing unified model.
Compared with SOTA method, DeFB doubles the performance (Blink-AP: 24.65\% v.s. 10.11\%) while boosting efficiency by nearly 35\%. DeFB can also be integrated as a plugin to substantially augment the eyeblink detection capabilities of general action detectors. Code will be released to facilitate relevant fields.

DeFB: Decomposed Feature Learning for Real-Time Multi-Person Eyeblink Detection in Untrimmed In-the-Wild Videos

Urban air pollution is a major health crisis causing millions of premature deaths annually, underscoring the urgent need for accurate and scalable monitoring of air quality (AQ). 
While low-cost sensors (LCS) offer a scalable alternative to expensive reference-grade stations, their readings are affected by drift, calibration errors, and environmental interference. 
To address these challenges, we introduce Veli (Reference-free Variational Estimation via Latent Inference), an unsupervised Bayesian model that leverages variational inference to correct LCS readings without requiring co-location with reference stations, eliminating a major deployment barrier.
Specifically, Veli constructs a disentangled representation of the LCS readings, effectively separating the true pollutant reading from the sensor noise. To build our model and address the lack of standardized benchmarks in AQ monitoring, we also introduce the Air Quality Sensor Data Repository (AQ-SDR).
AQ-SDR is the largest AQ sensor benchmark to date, with readings from 23,737 LCS and reference stations across multiple regions. Veli demonstrates strong generalization across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, effectively handling sensor drift and erratic sensor behavior. We will publicly release the model code and the dataset.

Veli: Unsupervised Method and Unified Benchmark for Low-Cost Air Quality Sensor Correction

We propose unsupervised multi-scenario (UMS) person re-identification (ReID) as a new task that expands ReID across diverse scenarios (cross-resolution, clothing change, etc.) within a single coherent framework. To tackle UMS-ReID, we introduce image-text knowledge modeling (ITKM) -- a three-stage framework that effectively exploits the representational power of vision-language models. We start with a pre-trained CLIP model with an image encoder and a text encoder. In Stage I, we introduce a scenario embedding in the image encoder and fine-tune the encoder to adaptively leverage knowledge from multiple scenarios. In Stage II, we optimize a set of learned text embeddings to associate with pseudo-labels from Stage I and introduce a multi-scenario separation loss to increase the divergence between inter-scenario text representations. In Stage III, we first introduce cluster-level and instance-level heterogeneous matching modules to obtain reliable heterogeneous positive pairs (e.g., a visible image and an infrared image of the same person) within each scenario. Next, we propose a dynamic text representation update strategy to maintain consistency between text and image supervision signals. Experimental results across multiple scenarios demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of ITKM; it not only outperforms existing scenario-specific methods but also enhances overall performance by integrating knowledge from multiple scenarios.

Image-Text Knowledge Modeling for Unsupervised Multi-Scenario Person Re-Identification

Building a unified target representation that simultaneously achieves short-term adaptability and long-term stability is crucial for robust visual tracking. 
However, existing trackers typically face an inherent trade-off. Methods primarily relying on short-term appearance and motion cues achieve rapid adaptation, but they often struggle with long-term identity consistency. Conversely, trackers that emphasize extensive temporal context provide strong robustness, yet this approach can compromise their short-term adaptability.
To bridge this gap, we propose a novel tracker, MUTrack, which comprehensively integrates both long-term and short-term memories into a unified target representation for more robust tracking. 
Specifically, we design a unified memory bank that stores and manages long-term memory for maintaining long-term identity consistency, and short-term memory for adapting to instantaneous appearance changes. 
To fully leverage the complementary nature of both long-term and short-term temporal information, we introduce a perception interaction module that dynamically fuses these memory types through deep and bidirectional interactions, enabling mutual refinement where one guides the other.
This ultimately generates a highly adaptive target representation, which effectively balances adaptability to instantaneous changes with robustness against long-term identity drift.
Extensive experiments on GOT10k, TrackingNet, LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, NfS, and OTB100 consistently demonstrate that MUTrack achieves SOTA performance.

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SparseSurf: Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting for Surface Reconstruction

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