Singapore

Facial expression captioning has found widespread application across various domains. Recently, the emergence of video Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has shown promise in general video understanding tasks. However, describing facial expressions within videos poses two major challenges for these models: (1) the lack of adequate datasets and benchmarks, and (2) the limited visual token capacity of video MLLMs. To address these issues, this paper introduces a new instruction-following dataset tailored for dynamic facial expression caption. The dataset comprises 5,033 high-quality video clips annotated manually, containing over 700,000 tokens. Its purpose is to improve the capability of video MLLMs to discern subtle facial nuances. Furthermore, we propose FaceTrack-MM, which leverages a limited number of tokens to encode the main character’s face. This model demonstrates superior performance in tracking faces and focusing on the facial expressions of the main characters, even in intricate multiperson scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a novel evaluation metric combining event extraction, relation classification, and the longest common subsequence (LCS) algorithm to assess the content consistency and temporal sequence consistency of generated text. Moreover, we present FECBench, a benchmark designed to assess the performance of existing video MLLMs in this specific task. All data and source code will be made publicly available.

AAAI 2026

Facial Dynamics in Video: Instruction Tuning for Improved Facial Expression Perception and Contextual Awareness

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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.

Medical vision-language pre-training (VLP) offers significant potential for advancing medical image understanding by leveraging paired image-report data. However, existing methods are limited by $\textbf{Fa}$lse $\textbf{Ne}$gatives (FaNe) induced by semantically similar texts and insufficient fine-grained cross-modal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose FaNe, a semantic-enhanced VLP framework. To mitigate false negatives, we introduce a semantic-aware positive pair mining strategy based on text-text similarity with adaptive normalization. Furthermore, we design a text-conditioned sparse attention pooling module to enable fine-grained image-text alignment through localized visual representations guided by textual cues. To strengthen intra-modal discrimination, we develop a hard-negative aware contrastive loss that adaptively reweights semantically similar negatives. Extensive experiments on five downstream medical imaging benchmarks demonstrate that FaNe achieves state-of-the-art performance across image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, validating the effectiveness of our framework.

FaNe: Towards Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Contrast with False-Negative Reduction and Text-Conditioned Sparse Attention

Large models such as Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable superiority over smaller architectures like ResNet in few-shot classification, owing to their powerful representational capacity. However, fine-tuning such large models demands extensive GPU memory and prolonged training time, making them impractical for many real-world low-resource scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose EfficientFSL, a query-only fine-tuning framework tailored specifically for few-shot classification with ViT, which achieves competitive performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. EfficientFSL fully leverages the knowledge embedded in the pre-trained model and its strong comprehension ability, achieving high classification accuracy with an extremely small number of tunable parameters. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight trainable Forward Block to synthesize task-specific queries that extract informative features from the intermediate representations of the pre-trained model in a query-only manner. We further propose a Combine Block to fuse multi-layer outputs, enhancing the depth and robustness of feature representations. Finally, a Support-Query Attention Block mitigates distribution shift by adjusting prototypes to align with the query set distribution. 
With minimal trainable parameters, EfficientFSL achieves state-of-the-art performance on four in-domain few-shot datasets and six cross-domain datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications. Code will be released after acceptance.

EfficientFSL: Enhancing Few-Shot Classification via Query-Only Tuning In Vision Transformers

Federated foundation models represent a new paradigm to jointly fine-tune pre-trained foundation models across clients. It is still a challenge to fine-tune foundation models for a small group of new users or specialized scenarios, which typically involve limited data compared to the large-scale data used in pre-training. In this context, the trade-off between personalization and federation becomes more sensitive. To tackle these, we proposed a bi-level personalization framework for federated fine-tuning on foundation models. Specifically, we conduct personalized fine-tuning on the client-level using its private data, and then conduct a personalized aggregation on the server-level using similar users measured by client-specific task vectors. Given the personalization information gained from client-level fine-tuning, the server-level personalized aggregation can gain group-wise personalization information while mitigating the disturbance of irrelevant or interest-conflict clients with non-IID data. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been demonstrated by extensive experimental analysis in benchmark datasets.

Bi-level Personalization for Federated Foundation Models: A Task-vector Aggregation Approach

We introduce Human Motion Unlearning and motivate it through the concrete task of preventing violent 3D motion synthesis, an important safety requirement given that popular text-to-motion datasets (HumanML3D and Motion-X) contain from 7% to 15% violent sequences spanning both atomic gestures (e.g., a single punch) and highly compositional actions (e.g., loading and swinging a leg to kick). By focusing on violence unlearning, we demonstrate how removing a challenging, multifaceted concept can serve as a proxy for the broader capability of motion "forgetting."
To enable systematic evaluation of Human Motion Unlearning, we establish the first motion unlearning benchmark by automatically filtering HumanML3D and Motion-X datasets to create distinct forget sets (violent motions) and retain sets (safe motions). We introduce evaluation metrics tailored to sequential unlearning, measuring both suppression efficacy and the preservation of realism and smooth transitions.
We adapt two state-of-the-art, training-free image unlearning methods (UCE and RECE) to leading text-to-motion architectures (MoMask and BAMM), and propose Latent Code Replacement (LCR), a novel, training-free approach that identifies violent codes in a discrete codebook representation and substitutes them with safe alternatives.
Our experiments show that unlearning violent motions is indeed feasible and that acting on latent codes strikes the best trade-off between violence suppression and preserving overall motion quality. This work establishes a foundation for advancing safe motion synthesis across diverse applications.

Human Motion Unlearning

Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has achieved remarkable success in text-to-3D content generation. However, SDS-based methods struggle to maintain semantic fidelity for user prompts, particularly when involving multiple objects with intricate interactions. 
While existing approaches often address 3D consistency through multiview diffusion model fine-tuning on 3D datasets, this strategy inadvertently exacerbates text-3D alignment degradation. 
The limitation stems from SDS's inherent accumulation of view-independent biases during optimization, which progressively diverges from the ideal text alignment direction.
To alleviate this limitation, we propose a novel SDS objective, dubbed as Textual Coherent Score Distillation (TCSD), which integrates alignment feedback from multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our TCSD leverages cross-modal understanding capabilities of MLLMs to assess and guide the text-3D correspondence during the optimization. We further develop 3DLLaVA-CRITIC - a fine-tuned MLLM specialized for evaluating multiview text alignment in 3D generations. Additionally, we introduce an LLM-layout initialization that significantly accelerates optimization convergence through semantic-aware spatial configuration.
Our framework, CoherenDream, achieves consistent improvement across multiple metrics on TIFA subset.As the first study to incorporate MLLMs into SDS optimization, we also conduct extensive ablation studies to explore optimal MLLM adaptations for 3D generation tasks.

CoherenDream: Boosting Holistic Text Coherence in 3D Generation via Multimodal Large Language Models Feedback

Accurate feature matching between image pairs is fundamental for various computer vision applications. In detector-base process, the feature matcher aims to find the optimal feature correspondences, and the match filter is used for further removing mismatches. However, their connection is rarely exploited since they are usually treated as two separate issues in previous method, which may lead to suboptimal results. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end collaborative feature matching (CFM) method, which contains a keypoint learning (KL) module and a correspondence learning (CL) module, to bridge the gap between two types of works. The former improves the discrimination of keypoints, and provides high-quality dynamic matches for CL module. The latter further captures the rich context of matches, and gives effective feedback to KL module. These two modules can reinforce each other in a progressive manner. Besides, we develop an efficient version of CFM, named ECFM, using an adaptive sampling strategy to avoid the negative influence of uninformative keypoints. Experimental results indicate that both methods outperform the state-of-the-art competitors in the tasks of relative pose estimation and visual localization. The code and a 1-minute video demo are provided in the supplementary materials.

Collaborative Feature Matching with Progressive Correspondence Learning

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting for scene rendering has attracted much attention in computer vision and graphics, but generally suffers from large burdens of both computation and storage when handling large-scale scenes. Some existing works in literature employ a divide-and-conquer strategy for alleviating this issue, where an input large scene is divided into lots of local blocks, and each block is handled separately. However, such a strategy generally leads to limited performance due to the inevitable inconsistency among the 3D Gaussians from different blocks. To address this problem, we propose a Consistent Anchor Guided Gaussian Splatting for large-scale scene rendering under the divide-and-conquer strategy, called CAG-GS. In CAG-GS, a set of learnable anchors for each local block is injected with the corresponding semantic features from a pre-trained semantic segmentation model SAM2 through an explored semantic mapping module, and then these anchors are used to predict the attributes of 3D Gaussians. Moreover, we explore a coarse-to-fine training strategy for CAG-GS, where each local block is optimized independently while being guided by globally consistent semantics. Extensive experimental results on five large-scale scenes demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over five state-of-the-art methods in most cases.

CAG-GS: Consistent Anchor Guided Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Scene Rendering

Model quantization is widely applied for compressing and accelerating deep neural networks (DNNs). However, conventional Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) focuses on training DNNs with uniform bit-width. The bit-width settings vary across different hardware and transmission demands, which induces considerable training and storage costs. Hence, the scheme of one-shot joint training multiple precisions is proposed to address this issue. Previous works either store a larger FP32 model to switch between different precision models for higher accuracy or store a smaller INT8 model but compromise accuracy due to using shared quantization parameters. In this paper, we introduce the Double Rounding quantization method, which fully utilizes the quantized representation range to accomplish nearly lossless bit-switching while reducing storage by using the highest integer precision instead of full precision. Furthermore, we observe a competitive interference among different precisions during one-shot joint training, primarily due to inconsistent gradients of quantization scales during backward propagation. To tackle this problem, we propose an Adaptive Learning Rate Scaling (AdaScale) technique that dynamically adapts learning rates for various precisions to optimize the training process. Additionally, we extend our Double Rounding to one-shot mixed precision training and develop a Hessian-Aware Stochastic Bit-switching (HessBit) strategy. Experimental results on the ImageNet-1K classification demonstrate that our methods have enough advantages to state-of-the-art one-shot joint QAT in both multi-precision and mixed-precision. We validate the feasibility of our method on detection and segmentation tasks, as well as on LLMs task.

Double Rounding: Nearly Lossless Adaptive Bit Switching for QAT

Current novel view synthesis methods are typically designed for high-quality and clean input images. However, in foggy scenes, scattering and attenuation can significantly degrade the quality of rendering. Although NeRF-based dehazing approaches have been developed, their reliance on deep fully connected neural networks and per-ray sampling strategies leads to high computational costs. Furthermore, NeRF's implicit representation limits its ability to recover fine-grained details from hazy scenes. To overcome these limitations, We propose learning an explicit Gaussian representation to explain the formation mechanism of foggy images through a physically forward rendering process. Our method, DehazeGS, reconstructs and renders fog-free scenes using only multi-view foggy images as input. Specifically, based on the atmospheric scattering model, we simulate the formation of fog by establishing the transmission function directly onto Gaussian primitives via depth-to-transmission mapping. During training, we jointly learn the atmospheric light and scattering coefficients while optimizing the Gaussian representation of foggy scenes. At inference time, we remove the effects of scattering and attenuation in Gaussian distributions and directly render the scene to obtain dehazed views. Experiments on both real-world and synthetic foggy datasets demonstrate that DehazeGS achieves state-of-the-art performance.

DehazeGS: Seeing Through Fog with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Diffusion-based or flow-based models have achieved significant progress in video synthesis but require multiple iterative sampling steps, which incurs substantial computational overhead. While many distillation methods that are solely based on trajectory-preserving or distribution-matching have been developed to accelerate video generation models, these approaches often suffer from performance breakdown or increased artifacts in few-step settings. To address these limitations, we propose SwiftVideo, a unified and stable distillation framework that combines the advantages of trajectory-preserving and distribution-matching strategies. Our approach introduces continuous-time consistency distillation to ensure precise preservation of ODE trajectories. Subsequently, We propose a dual-perspective alignment encompassing distribution alignment between synthetic and real data along with trajectory alignment across different inference steps. Our method maintains high-quality video generation while substantially reducing the number of inference steps. 
Quantitative evaluations on the OpenVid-1M benchmark demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in few-step video generation. Code will be available upon paper publication.

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