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3D human avatar animation aims at transforming a human avatar from an arbitrary initial pose to a specified target pose using deformation algorithms. Existing approaches typically divide this task into two stages: canonical template construction and target pose deformation. However, current template construction methods demand extensive skeletal rigging and often produce artifacts in contact regions. Moreover, target pose deformation suffers from structural distortions caused by Linear Blend Skinning (LBS), which significantly undermines animation realism. To address these problems, we propose a unified learning-based framework to address both challenges in two phases. For the former phase, to overcome the inefficiencies and artifacts during template construction, we leverage a U-Net architecture that decouples texture and pose information in a feed-forward process, enabling fast generation of a human template. For the latter phase, we propose a data-driven refinement technique that enhances structural integrity. Extensive experiments show that our model delivers consistent performance across diverse poses with an optimal balance between efficiency and quality, surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

AAAI 2026 Main Conference

FastAnimate: Towards Learnable Template Construction and Pose Deformation for Fast 3D Human Avatar Animation

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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.

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.

Gait recognition is an emerging biometric technology that enables non-intrusive and hard-to-spoof human identification. However, most existing methods are confined to short-range, unimodal settings and fail to generalize to long-range and cross-distance scenarios under real-world conditions. To address this gap, we present LRGait, the first LiDAR-Camera multimodal benchmark designed for robust long-range gait recognition across diverse outdoor distances and environments. We further propose EMGaitNet, an end-to-end framework tailored for long-range multimodal gait recognition. To bridge the modality gap between RGB images and point clouds, we introduce a semantic-guided fusion pipeline. A CLIP-based Semantic Mining (SeMi) module first extracts human body-part-aware semantic cues, which are then employed to align 2D and 3D features via a Semantic-Guided Alignment (SGA) module within a unified embedding space. A Symmetric Cross-Attention Fusion (SCAF) module hierarchically integrates visual contours and 3D geometric features, and a Spatio-Temporal (ST) module captures global gait dynamics. Extensive experiments on various gait datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.

Walking Further: Semantic-Aware Multimodal Gait Recognition Under Long-Range Conditions

Personalizing 3D scenes from a single reference image enables intuitive user-guided editing, which requires achieving both multi-view consistency across perspectives and referential consistency with the input image. However, these goals are particularly challenging due to the viewpoint bias caused by the limited perspective provided in a single image. Lacking the mechanisms to effectively expand reference information beyond the original view, existing methods of image-conditioned 3DGS personalization often suffer from this viewpoint bias and struggle to produce consistent results. Therefore, in this paper, we present Consistent Personalization for 3D Gaussian Splatting (CP-GS), a framework that progressively propagates the single-view reference appearance to novel perspectives. In particular, CP-GS integrates pre-trained image-to-3D generation and iterative LoRA fine-tuning to extract and extend the reference appearance, and finally produces faithful multi-view guidance images and the personalized 3DGS outputs through a view-consistent generation process guided by geometric cues. Extensive experiments on real-world scenes show that our CP-GS effectively mitigates the viewpoint bias, achieving high-quality personalization that significantly outperforms existing methods.

Personalize Your Gaussian: Consistent 3D Scene Personalization from a Single Image

Saliency maps have become a cornerstone of visual explanation in deep learning, yet there remains no consensus on their intended purpose and their alignment with specific user queries. This fundamental ambiguity undermines both the evaluation and practical utility of explanation methods. In this paper, we introduce the Reference-Frame x Granularity (RFxG) taxonomy—a principled framework that addresses this ambiguity by conceptualizing saliency explanations along two essential axes: the reference-frame axis (distinguishing between pointwise "Why Husky?" and contrastive "Why Husky and not Shih-tzu?" explanations) and the granularity axis (ranging from fine-grained class-level to coarse-grained group-level interpretations, e.g., “Why Husky?” vs. “Why Dog?”). Through this lens, we identify critical limitations in existing evaluation metrics, which predominantly focus on pointwise faithfulness while neglecting contrastive reasoning and semantic granularity. To address these gaps, we propose four novel faithfulness metrics that systematically assess explanation quality across both RFxG dimensions. Our comprehensive evaluation framework spans ten state-of-the-art methods, four model architectures, three datasets, and targeted user studies. By suggesting a shift from model-centric to user-intent-driven evaluation, our work provides both the conceptual foundation and practical tools necessary for developing explanations that are not only faithful to model behavior but also meaningfully aligned with human understanding.

Rethinking Saliency Maps: A Cognitive Human Aligned Taxonomy and Evaluation Framework for Explanations

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a central goal in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite recent advances in enhancing language model (LM) reasoning, most methods lean toward exploitation, and increasingly encounter performance plateaus. In this work, we revisit entropy -- a signal of exploration in RL -- and examine its relationship to exploratory reasoning in LMs. Through empirical analysis, we uncover positive correlations between high-entropy regions and three types of exploratory reasoning actions: (1) pivotal tokens that determine or connect logical steps, (2) reflective actions such as self-verification and correction, and (3) rare behaviors under-explored by the base LMs. Motivated by this, we introduce a minimal modification to standard RL with only one line of code: augmenting the advantage function with an entropy-based term. Unlike traditional maximum-entropy methods which encourage exploration by promoting uncertainty, we encourage exploration by promoting deeper and longer reasoning chains. Notably, our method achieves significant gains on the Pass@K metric -- an upper-bound estimator of LM reasoning capabilities -- even when evaluated with extremely large K values, pushing the boundaries of LM reasoning.

Reasoning with Exploration: An Entropy Perspective

Brain-assisted target speaker extraction (TSE) isolates a target speaker's voice from a mixture by leveraging task-specific representations in Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. However, existing methods rely on fixed interpolation for EEG-audio alignment, introducing redundant computations. They also employ single-path encoders that extract only target-relevant features while neglecting complementary, irrelevant ones, limiting discriminability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a $\textbf{T}$rainable EEG $\textbf{I}$nterpolation and Structure-sharing $\textbf{D}$ual-path $\textbf{E}$ncoders network (TIDENet). The proposed Trainable EEG Interpolation (TEI) uses a neural network module to leverage cross-sample EEG information during resampling by parameters updating, thereby overcoming the limitations of fixed interpolation. The Structure-sharing Dual-path Encoders (SSDPE) extend existing speech and EEG encoders by introducing dual paths that separately process features relevant and irrelevant to the target speaker and incorporates interactive fusion between them, which enhances the encoder's ability to capture task-relevant information. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that TIDENet achieves relative improvements of up to $\textbf{20.47}$%, $\textbf{22.22}$%, $\textbf{2.91}$%, $\textbf{6.20}$%, and $\textbf{15.84}$% in signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR), scale-invariant SDR (SI-SDR), short-time objective intelligibility (STOI), extended STOI (ESTOI), and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art. These significant gains validate the effectiveness of the proposed TEI method and SSDPE architecture.

Trainable EEG Interpolation and Structure-Sharing Dual-Path Encoders for Brain-Assisted Target Speaker Extraction

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP struggle to understand negation, often embedding affirmatives and negatives similarly (e.g., matching "no dog" with dog images). Existing methods refine negation understanding via fine-tuning CLIP’s text encoder, risking overfitting. In this work, we propose CLIPGlasses, a plug-and-play framework that enhances CLIP’s ability to comprehend negated visual descriptions. CLIPGlasses adapts a dual-stage design: a Lens module disentangles negated semantics from text embeddings, and a Frame module predicts context-aware repulsion strength, which is integrated into the modified similarity computation to penalize alignment with negated semantics, thereby reducing false positive matches. Experiments show that CLIP equipped with CLIPGlasses achieves competitive in-domain performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-domain generalization. Its superiority is especially evident under low-resource conditions, indicating stronger robustness across domains. Source code is included in the supplementary material.

Not Just What’s There: Enabling CLIP to Comprehend Negated Visual Descriptions Without Fine-Tuning

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples, which induce incorrect predictions through imperceptible perturbations.
Transfer-based attacks create adversarial examples for surrogate models and transfer these examples to target models under black-box scenarios. Recent studies have established a strong correlation between the geometric properties of loss landscapes and the transferability of adversarial examples, demonstrating that flatter loss surfaces consistently yield superior transferability. However, we identify that these methods fail to account for the loss landscape flatness along the path from the current point to local minima, resulting in poor transferability. 
To address this, this paper constructs a novel Path Flatness Attack (PFA) method to significantly enhance the transferability of adversarial examples. Specifically, this paper proposes a novel path flatness indicator that not only evaluates the flatness in local minima regions but also explicitly quantifies the loss surface geometry along the trajectory from the current point to the minimum. Furthermore, we incorporate the path flatness indicator into the attack process, integrating penalties over low-loss points along the path while maximizing the loss function, thereby explicitly flattening the loss landscape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PFA consistently achieves state-of-the-art attack performance across all experimental settings.

Prompting Adversarial Transferability via Path Flatness Attack

Federated learning (FL) has shown success in collaboratively training a model among decentralized data resources without directly sharing privacy-sensitive training data. Despite recent advances, non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) data poses an inevitable challenge that hinders the use of FL. In this work, we address the issue of non-IID histopathological images with feature distribution shifts from an intuitive perspective that has only received limited attention. Specifically, we address this issue from the perspective of data distribution by solely adjusting the data distributions of all clients. Building on the success of diffusion models in fitting data distributions and leveraging stain separation to extract the pivotal features that are closely related to the non-IID properties of histopathological images, we propose a Federated Stain Distribution Alignment (FedSDA) method. FedSDA aligns the stain distribution of each client with a target distribution in an FL framework to mitigate distribution shifts among clients. Furthermore, considering that training
diffusion models on raw data in FL has been shown to be susceptible to privacy leakage risks, we circumvent this problem while still effectively achieving alignment. Extensive experimental results show that FedSDA is not only effective in improving baselines that focus on mitigating disparities across clients’ model updates but also outperforms baselines that address the non-IID data issues from the perspective of data distribution. We show that FedSDA provides valuable and practical insights for the computational pathology community.

FedSDA: Federated Stain Distribution Alignment for Non-IID Histopathological Image Classification

Federated learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, many existing FL methods implicitly assume that clients have sufficient computational and storage resources, making them less applicable in real-world scenarios with severe system heterogeneity. To address this, submodel extraction has recently gained attention as a promising strategy to tailor the global model to resource-constrained clients. Despite this progress, existing methods often suffer from noticeable performance gaps across clients and structural inconsistency in the extracted models, leading to degraded global performance and increased communication overhead. In this work, we propose FedLAGC, a novel federated framework that jointly tackles performance imbalance and communication inefficiency through Layer-Adaptive submodel extraction and Gradient Correction. Specifically, FedLAGC constructs client-specific submodels by selecting structurally important parameters according to layer-wise importance scores, ensuring both resource adaptiveness and architectural consistency. Additionally, we propose a lightweight correction mechanism that captures historical optimization drift, helping to align local updates with the global direction and reduce redundant communication. The rigorous convergence analysis of FedLAGC for system-heterogeneous federated learning under non-convex objectives is given. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with ResNet-18 and ResNet-34 under various system and data heterogeneity settings demonstrate the significant superiority of FedLAGC (up to 24\% accuracy improvement and 3.66$\times$ communication efficiency) over state-of-the-art methods.

FedLAGC: Towards High Performance System-Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Layer-Adaptive Submodel Extraction and Gradient Correction

Federated learning synchronizes models through gradient transmission and aggregation. However, these gradients pose significant privacy risks, as sensitive training data is embedded within them. Existing gradient-based reconstruction attacks suffer from significantly degraded reconstruction quality when gradients are perturbed by noise-a common defense mechanism. In this paper, we introduce Gradient-Guided Conditional Diffusion Models (GG-CDMs) for reconstructing private images from leaked gradients without prior conditions. Our approach leverages the inherent denoising capabilities of diffusion models to circumvent the partial protection offered by noise perturbation, thereby enhancing attack efficacy under such defenses. Furthermore, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of reconstruction error bounds and the decrease rate of attack loss, characterizing the relationship between noise magnitude, model architectures, and reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method and confirm our theoretical findings, demonstrating our method's superior reconstruction quality from noise-perturbed gradients by leveraging GG-CDMs.

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