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Clean-image backdoor attacks, which use only label manipulation in training datasets to compromise deep neural networks, pose a significant threat to security-critical applications. A critical flaw in existing methods is that the poison rate required for a successful attack induces a proportional, and thus noticeable, drop in Clean Accuracy (CA), undermining their stealthiness. This paper presents a new paradigm for clean-image attacks that minimizes this accuracy degradation by optimizing the trigger itself. We introduce Generative Clean-Image Backdoors (GCB), a framework that uses a conditional InfoGAN to identify naturally occurring image features that can serve as potent and stealthy triggers. By ensuring these triggers are easily separable from benign task-related features, GCB enables a victim model to learn the backdoor from an extremely small set of poisoned examples, resulting in a CA drop of less than 1\%. Our experiments demonstrate GCB&#39;s remarkable versatility, successfully adapting to six datasets, five architectures, and four tasks, including the first demonstration of clean-image backdoors in regression and segmentation. GCB also exhibits resilience against most of the existing backdoor defenses.

AAAI 2026 Main Conference

Breaking the Stealth-Potency Trade-off in Clean-Image Backdoors with Generative Trigger Optimization

Clean-image backdoor attacks, which use only label manipulation in training datasets to compromise deep neural networks, pose a significant threat to security-critical applications. A critical flaw in existing methods is that the poison rate required for a successful attack induces a proportional, and thus noticeable, drop in Clean Accuracy (CA), undermining their stealthiness. This paper presents a new paradigm for clean-image attacks that minimizes this accuracy degradation by optimizing the trigger itself. We introduce Generative Clean-Image Backdoors (GCB), a framework that uses a conditional InfoGAN to identify naturally occurring image features that can serve as potent and stealthy triggers. By ensuring these triggers are easily separable from benign task-related features, GCB enables a victim model to learn the backdoor from an extremely small set of poisoned examples, resulting in a CA drop of less than 1\%. Our experiments demonstrate GCB's remarkable versatility, successfully adapting to six datasets, five architectures, and four tasks, including the first demonstration of clean-image backdoors in regression and segmentation. GCB also exhibits resilience against most of the existing backdoor defenses.

technical paper

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.

Graph-based methods have proven to be effective in capturing relationships among points for 3D point cloud analysis. However, these methods often suffer from suboptimal graph structures, particularly due to sparse connections at boundary points and noisy connections in junction areas. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that integrates a graph smoothing module with an enhanced local geometry learning module. Specifically, we identify the limitations of conventional graph structures, particularly in handling boundary points and junction areas. In response, we introduce a graph smoothing module designed to optimize the graph structure and minimize the negative impact of unreliable sparse and noisy connections. Based on the optimized graph structure, we improve the feature extract function with local geometry information. These include shape features derived from adaptive geometric descriptors based on eigenvectors and distribution features obtained through cylindrical coordinate transformation. Experimental results on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our method in various point cloud learning tasks, i.e., classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation.

Graph Smoothing for Enhanced Local Geometry Learning in Point Cloud Analysis

With the rapid and continuous increase in academic publications, identifying high-quality research has become an increasingly pressing challenge. While recent methods leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated paper evaluation have shown great promise, they are often constrained by outdated domain knowledge and limited reasoning capabilities. In this work, we present \textbf{\textit{PaperEval}}, a novel LLM-based framework for automated paper evaluation that addresses these limitations through two key components: 1) a domain-aware paper retrieval module that retrieves relevant concurrent work to support contextualized assessments of novelty and contributions, and 2) a latent reasoning mechanism that enables deep understanding of complex motivations and methodologies, along with comprehensive comparison against concurrently related work, to support more accurate and reliable evaluation. 
To guide the reasoning process, we introduce a progressive ranking optimization strategy that encourages the LLM to iteratively refine its predictions with an emphasis on relative comparison. 
Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that PaperEval consistently outperforms existing methods in both academic impact and paper quality evaluation. In addition, we deploy PaperEval in a real-world paper recommendation system for filtering high-quality papers, which has gained strong engagement on social media---amassing over 8,000 subscribers and attracting over 10,000 views for many filtered high-quality papers---demonstrating the practical effectiveness of PaperEval.

Navigating Through Paper Flood: Advancing LLM-Based Paper Evaluation Through Domain-Aware Retrieval and Latent Reasoning

Region representation learning plays a pivotal role in urban computing by extracting meaningful features from unlabeled urban data. Analogous to how perceived facial age reflects an individual's health, the visual appearance of a city serves as its "portrait", encapsulating latent socio-economic and environmental characteristics. Recent studies have explored leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to incorporate textual knowledge into imagery-based urban region representation learning. However, two major challenges remain: i) difficulty in aligning fine-grained visual features with long captions, and ii) suboptimal knowledge incorporation due to noise in LLM-generated captions. To address these issues, we propose a novel pre-training framework called UrbanLN that improves Urban region representation learning through Long-text awareness and Noise suppression. Specifically, we introduce an information-preserved stretching interpolation strategy that aligns long captions with fine-grained visual semantics in complex urban scenes. To effectively mine knowledge from LLM-generated captions and filter out noise, we propose a dual-level optimization strategy. At the data level, a multi-model collaboration pipeline automatically generates diverse and reliable captions without human intervention. At the model level, we employ a momentum-based self-distillation mechanism to generate stable pseudo-targets, facilitating robust cross-modal learning under noisy conditions. Extensive experiments across four real-world cities and various downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our UrbanLN.

Improving Region Representation Learning from Urban Imagery with Noisy Long-Caption Supervision

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) marks a transformative era in artificial intelligence~(AI). However, systematically evaluating the capability of LLMs is challenging due to the necessity of a large number of labeled test data. To tackle this problem, in the conventional AI field, AutoEval has been proposed to estimate the capability of AI models without data labeling effort. Unfortunately, even though multiple AutoEval methods have been proposed, most are constructed for classification tasks and evaluated only on image datasets. As a result, their effectiveness for LLMs is unclear, as LLMs often target generation tasks. In this work, we introduce the first AutoEval benchmark specifically designed to estimate the capability of LLMs using unlabeled test data, AEBench. Besides existing AutoEval methods, AEBench also supports our designed method, which utilizes the correlation between data uncertainty and model ability for the capability estimation. In total, AEBench covers 12 AutoEval methods and 120 method combinations. Based on AEBench, we conducted a comprehensive study to explore the usefulness of AutoEval on LLMs. Experimental results on 10 datasets demonstrated that our designed uncertainty features-based methods perform the best in achieving the lowest estimation errors.

On the Evaluation of Capability Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

In recent years, face anti-spoofing (FAS) has made notable progress in multimodal fusion, cross-domain generalization, and interpretability. With the development of large language models and reinforcement learning (RL), strategy-based training paradigms offer new opportunities for jointly modeling multimodality, generalization, and interpretability. 
However, compared to unimodal reasoning, multimodal reasoning introduces more complex logic, such as accurate feature representation and cross-modal verification, which significantly increases inference complexity and labeling difficulty. Due to the lack of high-quality annotations in existing multimodal FAS datasets, directly applying RL strategies is sub-optimal, hindering robust multimodal reasoning. In this paper, we find two key issues of supervised fine-tuning combined with reinforcement learning (SFT+RL) paradigms in multimodal FAS inference: 1) limited multimodal reasoning paths not only hinder the full utilization of multimodal information but also constrain the model’s exploration space after SFT, thereby affecting the effectiveness of subsequent RL; and 2) the mismatch between single-task supervision and the diversity of multimodal reasoning paths leads to reasoning confusion, where models may exploit shortcuts by directly mapping input images to answers, bypassing the intended reasoning process. These issues further increase the complexity of multimodal reasoning and hinder the effective application of RL strategies.
To address these challenges, we propose the PA-FAS framework with a reasoning path enhancement strategy for high-quality extended reasoning sequences construction based on limited annotated data to enrich the reasoning paths and alleviate exploration constraints. Additionally, we introduce an answer shuffling mechanism during SFT for comprehensive multimodal analysis rather than mining superficial cues, thus encouraging deeper reasoning and avoiding shortcut learning. 
Our method significantly improves multimodal reasoning accuracy and generalization, and successfully unifies multimodal fusion, cross-domain generalization, and interpretability towards trustworthy multimodal FAS.

PA-FAS: Towards Interpretable and Generalizable Multimodal Face Anti-Spoofing via Path-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate immense potential for automating integrated circuit (IC) development, their practical deployment is fundamentally limited by restricted context windows. Existing context-extension methods struggle to achieve effective semantic modeling and thorough multi-hop reasoning over extensive, intricate circuit specifications. To address this, we introduce \textbf{ChipMind}, a novel knowledge graph-augmented reasoning framework specifically designed for lengthy IC specifications. ChipMind first transforms circuit specifications into a domain-specific knowledge graph (\textit{ChipKG}) through the \textit{Circuit Semantic-Aware Knowledge Graph Construction} methodology. It then leverages the \textit{ChipKG-Augmented Reasoning} mechanism, combining information-theoretic adaptive retrieval to dynamically trace logical dependencies with intent-aware semantic filtering to prune irrelevant noise, effectively balancing retrieval completeness and precision. Evaluated on an industrial-scale specification reasoning benchmark, ChipMind significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average improvement of \textbf{34.59\%} (up to \textbf{72.73\%}). Our framework bridges a critical gap between academic research and practical industrial deployment of LLM-aided Hardware Design (LAD).

ChipMind: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Long-Context Circuit Design Specifications

The goal of fair clustering is to find clusters such that the proportion of sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, etc) in each cluster is similar to the proportion of the entire data. Various fair clustering algorithms have been proposed, which modify standard $K$-means clustering to satisfy a given fairness constraint. A critical limitation of several existing fair clustering algorithms is that the number of parameters to be learned is proportional to the sample size because the cluster assignment of each datum should be optimized simultaneously with the cluster center, and thus scaling up the algorithms is difficult. In this paper, we propose a new fair clustering algorithm based on finite mixture model called Fair Model-based Clustering (FMC). A main advantage of FMC is that the number of learnable parameters is independent to the sample size and thus can be scaled up easily. In particular, a mini-batch learning is possible to obtain clusters that are approximately fair. Moreover, FMC can be applied to non-metric data (e.g., categorical data) as long as the likelihood is well-defined. Theoretical and empirical justifications of the superiority of the proposed algorithm are provided.

Fair Model-based Clustering

Vision–language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have unlocked powerful zero-shot transfer, yet efficient adaptation to downstream tasks remains challenging. Existing methods often depend on graph structures and dataset-specific tuning, making them sensitive to modality gaps and computationally costly at scale. In this paper, we propose IOTA (Inverse Optimal Transport Adaptation), a lightweight algorithm that reformulates VLMs inference from the perspective of inverse optimal transport (IOT), providing a unified view of training and inference. Under the IOT framework, IOTA enhances zero-shot alignment via a theory-guided unbalanced OT strategy and refines textual prototypes using OT-based pseudo-labels with a marginal-aware adaptive threshold, enabling reliable supervision without gradient updates. The framework naturally extends to few-shot scenarios through a label-guided masking mechanism. By decoupling image–text interactions from other inter-modal dependencies, IOTA avoids task-specific tuning and expensive affinity construction. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that IOTA consistently improves zero-shot and few-shot performance while reducing memory and computation overhead, validating both its theoretical insight and plug-and-play practicality.

Inverse Optimal Transport for Efficient Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

We propose GARD, a domain-specific “guardrail” framework designed to detect and block sensitive financial information (SFI) in both inputs and outputs of large language models (LLMs). Unlike general-purpose content filters, GARD is built upon a comprehensive, taxonomy of SFI distilled from financial-services regulations (GLBA, PCI-DSS, FFIEC), information-security standards (ISO 27001, NIST SP 800-53/122/171), and enterprise policies. Leveraging this taxonomy, we synthesized a 17,495-sample dataset of risky and non-risky financial texts using multiple LLMs (Gemini 1.5, Mixtral-8x7B, GPT-4o, Llama 3.1) and real-world prompts. Each sample was embedded via OpenAI’s text-embedding-ada-002 and used to train a generative-adversarial network (GARD), where the discriminator learns to distinguish SFI-laden vectors.

On a held-out test set of 3,552 samples, GARD achieved 0.98 recall and 0.92 F1, markedly outperforming the OpenAI Moderation API (recall 0.30) and Azure Content Safety (recall 0.37) while sustaining over 50 prompts/sec throughput. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a grounded, granular taxonomy of SFI for GenAI guardrails; (2) an extensible, synthetic SFI dataset; and (3) GARD, a high-performance risk detector that can augment or replace existing commercial solutions. This taxonomy-driven approach advances AI safety, regulatory compliance, and responsible GenAI adoption in financial services.

A Guardrail Framework for Sensitive Financial Information Protection: A Taxonomy-Driven Approach

Text-to-image diffusion models are capable of generating high-quality images, but suboptimal pre-trained text representations often result in these images failing to align closely with the given text prompts. Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a popular and effective technique for improving text-image alignment in the generative process. However, CFG introduces significant computational overhead.
In this paper, we present **DI**stilling **C**FG by sharpening text **E**mbeddings (DICE) that replaces CFG in the sampling process with half the computational complexity while maintaining similar generation quality. 
DICE distills a CFG-based text-to-image diffusion model into a CFG-free version by refining text embeddings to replicate CFG-based directions. 
In this way, we avoid the computational drawbacks of CFG, enabling high-quality, well-aligned image generation at a fast sampling speed.
Furthermore, examining the enhancement pattern, we identify the underlying mechanism of DICE that sharpens specific components of text embeddings to preserve semantic information while enhancing fine-grained details. 
Extensive experiments on multiple Stable Diffusion v1.5 variants, SDXL, and PixArt-$\alpha$ demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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