Singapore

Vision-language-action models have emerged as a crucial paradigm in robotic manipulation. However, existing VLA models exhibit notable limitations in handling ambiguous language instructions and unknown environmental states. Furthermore, their perception is largely constrained to static two-dimensional observations, lacking the capability to model three-dimensional interactions between the robot and its environment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes GraphCoT-VLA, an efficient end-to-end model. To enhance the model&#39;s ability to interpret ambiguous instructions and improve task planning, we design a structured Chain-of-Thought reasoning module that integrates high-level task understanding and planning, failed task feedback, and low-level imaginative reasoning about future object positions and robot actions. Additionally, we construct a real-time updatable 3D Pose-Object graph, which captures the spatial configuration of robot joints and the topological relationships between objects in 3D space, enabling the model to better understand and manipulate their interactions. We further integrates a dropout hybrid reasoning strategy to achieve efficient control outputs. Experimental results across multiple real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that GraphCoT-VLA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of task success rate and response speed, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness in open environments and under uncertain instructions.

AAAI 2026

GraphCoT-VLA: A 3D Spatial-Aware Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation with Ambiguous Instructions

rob: manipulation

cv: vision for robotics & autonomous driving

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.

Vision-language-action models have emerged as a crucial paradigm in robotic manipulation. However, existing VLA models exhibit notable limitations in handling ambiguous language instructions and unknown environmental states. Furthermore, their perception is largely constrained to static two-dimensional observations, lacking the capability to model three-dimensional interactions between the robot and its environment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes GraphCoT-VLA, an efficient end-to-end model. To enhance the model's ability to interpret ambiguous instructions and improve task planning, we design a structured Chain-of-Thought reasoning module that integrates high-level task understanding and planning, failed task feedback, and low-level imaginative reasoning about future object positions and robot actions. Additionally, we construct a real-time updatable 3D Pose-Object graph, which captures the spatial configuration of robot joints and the topological relationships between objects in 3D space, enabling the model to better understand and manipulate their interactions. We further integrates a dropout hybrid reasoning strategy to achieve efficient control outputs. Experimental results across multiple real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that GraphCoT-VLA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of task success rate and response speed, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness in open environments and under uncertain instructions.

poster

Metalenses offer compelling advantages such as lightweight and ultra-thin design, making them promising alternatives to conventional lenses. However, their widespread adoption is hindered by image quality degradation caused by chromatic and angular aberrations. To mitigate this, restoration processes are often necessary to recover high-quality RGB images from metalens-captured inputs. While recent deep learning-based restoration methods show promise, they typically (1) blur or distort peripheral regions, or (2) fail entirely under unseen illumination conditions.
To advance metalens image restoration, we introduce IlluMeta---the first and largest real-world, illumination-aware metalens image dataset—captured across diverse lighting environments. In addition, we propose a novel end-to-end restoration framework that directs attention to challenging regions and adaptively adjusts to varying illuminations via reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our method can be applied in a plug-and-play manner to enhance existing models, significantly improving image restoration quality, especially under unseen lighting conditions, paving the way for broader real-world deployment of metalens technologies.
The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

Towards Illumination-Aware Restoration of Metalens-Captured Images: A New Dataset and a Strong Baseline

The federated domain generalization task in person re-identification (FedDG-ReID) aims to learn a privacy-preserving server model from decentralized client source domains that generalizes to unseen domains. Existing approaches enhance the generalizability of the server model by increasing the diversity of client person data. However, these methods overlook that ReID model parameters are easily biased by client-specific data distributions, leading to the capture of excessive domain-specific identity information. Such identity information (e.g., clothing style) struggles with identity information in unseen domains, thereby hindering the generalization ability of the server model. To address this, we propose a novel FedDG-ReID framework, which mainly consists of Domain-aware Parameter Suppression (DPS) and Domain-invariant Weighted Aggregation (DWA), called FedSupWA. Specifically, DPS adaptively attenuates the update magnitude of the parameters based on the fit of the parameters to the client's domain, encouraging the model to focus on more generalized domain-independent identity information, such as pedestrian contours, and other consistent information across domains. DWA enhances the server model’s generalization by evaluating the effectiveness of the client model in maintaining the consistency of pedestrian identities to measure the importance of the learned domain-independent identity information and assigning greater aggregation weights to clients that contribute more generalized information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FedSupWA, showing that it achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code will be made publicly available.

Domain-Aware Suppression and Aggregation for Federated DG ReID

Class imbalance remains a critical challenge in semi-supervised learning (SSL), especially when distributional mismatches between labeled and unlabeled data lead to biased classification. Although existing methods address this issue by adjusting logits based on the estimated class distribution of unlabeled data, they often handle model imbalance in a coarse-grained manner, conflating data imbalance with bias arising from varying class-specific learning difficulties. To address this issue, we propose a unified framework, SC-SSL, which suppresses model bias through decoupled sampling control. During training, we identify the key variables for sampling control under ideal conditions. By introducing a classifier with explicit expansion capability and adaptively adjusting sampling probabilities across different data distributions, SC-SSL mitigates feature-level imbalance for minority classes. In the inference phase, we further analyze the weight imbalance of the linear classifier and apply post-hoc sampling control with an optimization bias vector to directly calibrate the logits. Extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets and distribution settings validate the consistency and state-of-the-art performance of SC-SSL.

Sampling Control for Imbalanced Calibration in Semi-Supervised Learning

As graph-structured data grow increasingly large, evaluating their robustness under adversarial attacks becomes computationally expensive and difficult to scale. To address this challenge, we propose to compress graphs into compact representations that preserve both topological structure and robustness behavior, enabling efficient and reliable evaluation. We introduce Cutter, a dual-agent reinforcement learning framework composed of a Vital Detection Agent (VDA) and a Redundancy Detection Agent (RDA), which collaboratively identify structurally critical and redundant nodes for guided compression. Cutter incorporates three key strategies to enhance learning efficiency and compression quality: trajectory-level reward shaping to transform sparse trajectory returns into dense, policy-equivalent learning signals, prototype-based shaping to guide decisions using behavioral patterns from both high- and low-return trajectories, and cross-agent imitation to enable safer and more transferable exploration. Experiments on multiple real-world graphs demonstrate that Cutter generates compressed graphs that retain essential static topological properties and exhibit robustness degradation trends highly consistent with the original graphs under various attack scenarios, thereby significantly improving evaluation efficiency without compromising assessment fidelity.

Learning to Compress Graphs via Dual Agents for Consistent Topological Robustness Evaluation

Spatio-temporal alignment is crucial for temporal modeling of end-to-end (E2E) perception in autonomous driving (AD), providing valuable structural and textural prior information.
Existing methods typically rely on the attention mechanism to align objects across frames, simplifying the motion model with a unified explicit physical model (constant velocity, etc.). 
These approaches prefer semantic features for implicit alignment, challenging the importance of explicit motion modeling in the traditional perception paradigm. 
However, variations in motion states and object features across categories and frames render this alignment suboptimal.
To address this, we propose HAT, a spatio-temporal alignment module that allows each object to adaptively decode the optimal alignment proposal from multiple hypotheses without direct supervision.
Specifically, HAT first utilizes multiple explicit motion models to generate spatial anchors and motion-aware feature proposals for historical instances. 
It then performs multi-hypothesis decoding by incorporating semantic and motion cues embedded in cached object queries, ultimately providing the optimal alignment proposal for the target frame.
On nuScenes, HAT consistently improves 3D temporal detection and tracking performance across diverse baselines.
It achieves state-of-the-art tracking results with 46.0\% AMOTA on the test set when paired with DETR3D detector.
In an object-centric E2E AD method, HAT enhances perception accuracy (+1.3\% mAP, +3.1\% AMOTA) and reduces the collision rate by 32\%.
When semantics are corrupted (nuScenes-C), the enhancement of motion modeling by HAT enables more robust perception in the E2E AD framework.

Rethinking the Spatio-Temporal Alignment of End-to-End 3D Perception

The well-known Condorcet Jury Theorem states that, under majority rule, the better of two alternatives is chosen with probability approaching one as the population grows. We study an asymmetric setting where voters face varying participation costs and share a (possibly heuristic) belief about their ability to influence the outcome, aka, pivotality.

In a costly voting setup where voters abstain if their participation cost is more than their pivotality estimate, we identify a single property of the heuristic belief---weakly vanishing pivotality---that gives rise to multiple stable equilibria in which elections are nearly tied. In contrast, strongly vanishing pivotality (as in the standard Calculus of Voting model) yields a unique, trivial equilibrium where only zero-cost voters participate as the population grows. We then characterise when nontrivial equilibria satisfy a version of the Jury Theorem: below a sharp threshold, the majority-preferred candidate wins with probability approaching one; above it, both candidates either win with equal probability or maintain a constant winning chance, independent of population size or participation cost distribution.

On Condorcet’s Jury Theorem with Abstention

Training and deploying multiple vision transformer (ViT) models for different resource constraints is costly and inefficient. To address this, we propose transforming a pre-trained ViT into a stratified knowledge-density super-network, where knowledge is hierarchically organized across weights. This enables flexible extraction of sub-networks that retain maximal knowledge for varying model sizes. We introduce Weighted PCA for Attention Contraction (WPAC), which concentrates knowledge into a compact set of critical weights. WPAC applies token-wise weighted principal component analysis to intermediate features and injects the resulting transformation and inverse matrices into adjacent layers, preserving the original network function while enhancing knowledge compactness. To further promote stratified knowledge organization, we propose Progressive Importance-Aware Dropout (PIAD). PIAD progressively evaluates the importance of weight groups, updates an importance-aware dropout list, and trains the super-network under this dropout regime to promote knowledge stratification. Experiments demonstrate that WPAC outperforms existing pruning criteria in knowledge concentration, and the combination with PIAD offers a strong alternative to state-of-the-art model compression and model expansion methods.

Stratified Knowledge-Density Super-Network for Scalable Vision Transformers

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted technique for transferring the capabilities of large teacher models to smaller student models, thereby significantly reducing inference costs and memory consumption. However, existing KD methods are all constrained by an inherent greedy optimization objective, rooted in the assumption of teacher superiority: "Trust all teacher-generated outputs (TGOs)" and "Distrust any student-generated outputs (SGOs) unsupported by the teacher". We propose ASKD, a novel KD method with adaptive skewness determined by sample quality, refining this objective to: "Learn TGOs proportionally to their quality, and distrust only low-quality unsupported SGOs". ASKD comprises three key components: (1) A reinforcement learning-style optimization formulation to mitigate the inherent approximation bias in sample-based Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence approximations used by previous KD methods; (2) Well-designed quality supervision signals to map and achieve adaptive skewness in skewed KL loss, pioneering the usage of sample quality to adjust learning magnitudes; (3) A gradient-clip function on high-quality SGOs for findings that high-quality SGOs in KL loss fail to yield positive updates and even cause adverse effects on some samples. Extensive experiments indicate that ASKD builds high-performance student models across various tasks, including instruction following, mathematical reasoning, and code generation, outperforming state-of-the-art methods comprehensively and surpassing GRPO-like approaches that use advantages as multiplicative factors. We also provide detailed mathematical proofs demonstrating properties such as Lipschitz continuity of the update coefficient and uniform convergence of the loss function, ensuring theoretical rigor for key components of ASKD.

ASKD: Reinforcement Learning-Style Knowledge Distillation with Quality-Adaptive Skewness

Defending large language models (LLMs) against jailbreak attacks is crucial for ensuring their safe deployment. Existing defense strategies typically rely on predefined static criteria to differentiate between harmful and benign prompts. However, such rigid rules fail to accommodate the inherent complexity and dynamic nature of real-world jailbreak attacks. In this paper, we focus on the novel challenge of adaptive defense against diverse jailbreaks. We propose a new concept "mirror'', which is a dynamically generated prompt that reflects the syntactic structure of the input while ensuring semantic safety. The discrepancies between input prompts and their corresponding mirrors serve as guiding principles for defense. A novel defense model, MirrorShield, is further proposed to detect and calibrate risky inputs based on the crafted mirrors. Evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets and compared against ten state-of-the-art attack methods, MirrorShield demonstrates superior defense performance and promising generalization capabilities.

MirrorShield: Towards Dynamic Adaptive Defense Against Jailbreaks via Entropy-Guided Mirror Crafting

Reconstructing dynamic scenes has long been a challenging task in 3D vision. Previous mainstream methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting typically employ a single deformation field to directly model spatiotemporal changes. However, such one-step deformation struggles to capture diverse and complex motion patterns. To address this limitation, we propose decomposing the one-step deformation into a multi-step process, where each step is represented by a deformation layer. Additionally, we introduce a weight prediction mechanism for each layer to control the extent of deformation at every step. We provide two types of deformation layers based on implicit and explicit approaches. Moreover, while the deformation layer is time-conditioned, the Gaussians' behavior may still be influenced by their time-invariant properties. Therefore, we propose a fully time-agnostic scale modulation block to modulate the scaling changes of Gaussians. Extensive experiments on D-NeRF, Neu3D, and HyperNeRF demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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Next from AAAI 2026

Towards Illumination-Aware Restoration of Metalens-Captured Images: A New Dataset and a Strong Baseline

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VLA-Adapter: An Effective Paradigm for Tiny-Scale Vision-Language-Action Model

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