Singapore

Recent breakthroughs in reasoning models have markedly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, particularly via training on tasks with verifiable rewards. Yet, a significant gap persists in their adaptation to real-world multimodal scenarios, most notably, vision-language tasks, due to a heavy focus on single-modal language settings. While efforts to transplant reinforcement learning techniques from NLP to Visual Language Models (VLMs) have emerged, these approaches often remain confined to perception-centric tasks or reduce images to textual summaries, failing to fully exploit visual context and commonsense knowledge, ultimately constraining the generalization of reasoning capabilities across diverse multimodal environments. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel fine-tuning task, Masked Prediction via Context and Commonsense (MPCC), which forces models to integrate visual context and commonsense reasoning by reconstructing semantically meaningful content from occluded images, thereby laying the foundation for generalized reasoning. To systematically evaluate the model’s performance in generalized reasoning, we developed a specialized evaluation benchmark, MPCC-Eval, and employed various fine-tuning strategies to guide reasoning. Among these, we introduced an innovative training method, Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with Prior Sampling, which not only enhances model performance but also improves its generalized reasoning capabilities in out-of-distribution (OOD) and cross-task scenarios. Code and data are available in the supplementary materials.

AAAI 2026

Activating Visual Context and Commonsense Reasoning Through Masked Prediction in VLMs

ml: large multimodal models (lmms)

nlp: (large) language models

cv: language and vision

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.

poster

End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved remarkable advancements in recent years. Existing methods primarily follow a perception–planning paradigm, where perception and planning are executed sequentially within a fully differentiable framework for planning-oriented optimization. We further advance this paradigm through a "perception-in-plan'' framework design, which integrates perception into the planning process. This design facilitates targeted perception guided by evolving planning objectives over time, ultimately enhancing planning performance. Building on this insight, we introduce VeteranAD, a coupled perception and planning framework for end-to-end autonomous driving. By incorporating multi-mode anchored trajectories as planning priors, the perception module is specifically designed to gather traffic elements along these trajectories, enabling comprehensive and targeted perception. Planning trajectories are then generated based on both the perception results and the planning priors. To make perception fully serve planning, we adopt an autoregressive strategy that progressively predicts future trajectories while focusing on relevant regions for targeted perception at each step. With this simple yet effective design, VeteranAD fully unleashes the potential of planning-oriented end-to-end methods, leading to more accurate and reliable driving behavior. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM and Bench2Drive datasets demonstrate that our VeteranAD achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Perception in Plan: Coupled Perception and Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Existing Human Motion Prediction (HMP) methods based on RGB(D) cameras are sensitive to lighting conditions and raise privacy concerns, limiting their real-world applications such as firefighting and elderly care. Motivated by the robustness and privacy-preserving nature of millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar, this work introduces radar as a novel sensing modality for HMP for the first time. Nevertheless, radar signals often suffer from specular reflections and multipath effects, resulting in noisy and temporally inconsistent measurements, such as body-part miss-detection. To address these radar-specific artifacts, we propose mmPred, the first diffusion-based framework tailored for radar-based HMP. mmPred introduces a dual-domain historical motion representation to guide the generation process, combining a Time-domain Pose Refinement (TPR) branch for fine-grained details and a Frequency-domain Dominant Motion (FDM) branch for capturing global motion trends and suppressing frame-level inconsistency. Furthermore, we design a Global Skeleton-relational Transformer (GST) as the diffusion backbone to model global inter-joint cooperation, enabling corrupted joints to dynamically aggregate information from others. Extensive experiments show that mmPred achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods by 8.6% on mmBody and 22% on mm-Fi.

mmPred: Radar-based Human Motion Prediction in the Dark

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has emerged as an efficient 3D representation and a promising foundation for semantic tasks like segmentation. However, existing 3D-GS-based segmentation methods typically rely on high-dimensional category features, which introduce substantial memory overhead. Moreover, fine-grained segmentation remains challenging due to label space congestion and the lack of stable multi-granularity control mechanisms.
To address these limitations, we propose a coarse-to-fine binary encoding scheme for per-Gaussian category representation, which compresses each feature into a single integer via the binary-to-decimal mapping, drastically reducing memory usage. We further design a progressive training strategy that decomposes panoptic segmentation into a series of independent sub-tasks, reducing inter-class conflicts and thereby enhancing fine-grained segmentation capability.
Additionally, we fine-tune opacity during segmentation training to address the incompatibility between photometric rendering and semantic segmentation, which often leads to foreground-background confusion.
Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance while significantly reducing memory consumption and accelerating inference.

Binary-Gaussian: Compact and Progressive Representation for 3D Gaussian Segmentation

Modeling normal behavior in dynamic, high-dimensional temporal data is essential for effective anomaly detection. However, existing methods, such as nearest neighbor and clustering approaches, often rely on rigid assumptions, such as the presence of reliable neighbors or predefined cluster numbers, which often fail in complex scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce the Granular-ball One-Class Network (GBOC), a novel approach based on a data-adaptive representation called Granular-ball Vector Data Description (GVDD). Granular-balls naturally position themselves between individual instances and clusters, preserving the local topological structure of the sample set. GVDD partitions the latent space into compact, high-density regions represented by granular-balls, which are generated through a density-guided hierarchical splitting process and refined by removing noisy structures. Each granular-ball acts as a prototype for local normal behavior. During training, GBOC improves the compactness of representations by aligning samples with their nearest granular-ball centers. During inference, anomaly scores are computed based on the distance to the nearest granular-ball. By focusing on dense, high-quality regions and significantly reducing the number of prototypes, GBOC delivers both robustness and efficiency in anomaly detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Finding Time Series Anomalies Using Granular-Ball Vector Data Description

Multimodal fusion of color fundus photography (CFP) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) B-scan images has demonstrated superior diagnostic potential for retinal diseases compared to single-modality approaches. However, existing fusion paradigms - whether through naive concatenation or attention mechanisms - treat cross-modal interactions indiscriminately, lacking adaptive modulation of modality-specific contributions under varying clinical scenarios. We propose an adaptive fusion framework that dynamically routes and refines multimodal signals for enhancing disease recognition. The framework comprises two key components: 1) Dynamic Cross-Modal Expert Routing (CMER), which selectively activates convolutional neural network (CNN) experts from one modality based on contextual guidance from the other, ensuring only the most relevant feature extractors contribute to fusion; and 2) Top-K Expert-Guided Wavelet Fusion (TEWF), which performs discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to decompose selected features into low- and high-frequency subbands. Cross-modal attention is then applied specifically to high-frequency components, where lesion-specific microstructures reside, enabling frequency-aware fusion. Finally, inverse DWT (IDWT) reconstructs the fused representation, weighted by CMER-derived importance scores to amplify informative modality cues while suppressing redundancy. Experimental validation on two multimodal retinal datasets demonstrates that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing fusion strategies by significant margins in disease classification accuracy and robustness.

Frequency-Aligned Cross-Modal Learning with Top-K Wavelet Fusion and Dynamic Expert Routing for Enhanced Retinal Disease Diagnosis

In this work, we propose a disentangled latent optimization-based method for parameterizing grouped deforming 3D objects into shape and deformation factors in an unsupervised manner. Our approach involves the joint optimization of a generator network along with the shape and deformation factors, supported by specific regularization techniques. For efficient amortized inference of disentangled shape and deformation codes, we train two order-invariant PoinNet-based encoder networks in the second stage of our method. We demonstrate several significant downstream applications of our method, including unsupervised deformation transfer, deformation classification, and explainability analysis. Extensive experiments conducted on 3D human, animal, and facial expression datasets demonstrate that our simple approach is highly effective in these downstream tasks, comparable or superior to existing methods with much higher complexity.

DiLO: Disentangled Latent Optimization for Learning Shape and Deformation in Grouped Deforming 3D Objects

Minimizing inconsistencies across successive versions of an AI system is as crucial as reducing the overall error. In image classification, such inconsistencies manifest as negative flips, where an updated model misclassifies test samples that were previously classified correctly. This issue becomes increasingly pronounced as the number of training classes grows over time, since adding new categories reduces the margin of each class and may introduce conflicting patterns that undermine their learning process, thereby degrading performance on the original subset. To mitigate negative flips, we propose a novel approach that preserves the margins of the original model while learning an improved one. Our method encourages a larger relative margin between the previously learned and newly introduced classes by introducing an explicit margin-calibration term on the logits. However, overly constraining the logit margin for the new classes can significantly degrade their accuracy compared to a new independently trained model. To address this, we integrate a double-source focal distillation loss with the previous model and a new independently trained model, learning an appropriate decision margin from both old and new data, even under a logit margin calibration. Extensive experiments on image classification benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently reduces the negative flip rate with high overall accuracy.

Mitigating Negative Flips via Margin Preserving Training

Finding the optimal configuration of Sparse Mixture-of- Experts (SMoE) that maximizes semantic differentiation among experts is essential for exploiting the full potential of MoE architectures. However, existing SMoE frameworks either heavily rely on hyperparameter tuning or overlook the importance of diversifying semantic roles across experts when adapting the expert pool size. We propose Mixture-of-Experts for Adaptive Semantic Specialization (MASS), a semantic- aware MoE framework for adaptive expert expansion and dy- namic routing. MASS introduces two key advancements: (1) a gradient-based semantic drift detector that prompts targeted expert expansion when the existing expert pool lacks capacity to capture the full semantic diversity of the data, and (2) a novel routing strategy that dynamically adjusts expert usage based on token-level routing confidence mass. We first demon- strate that MASS reliably converges to the point of optimal balance between cost-performance trade-off with notably im- proved sematic specialization in a highly controlled synthetic setup. Further empirical results on real-world datasets across language and vision domains show that MASS consistently outperforms a range of strong MoE baselines, demonstrating its domain robustness and enhanced expert specialization.

How Many Experts Are Enough? Towards Optimal Semantic Specialization for Mixture-of-Experts

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excels at real-time rendering of standard scenes, it struggles to reconstruct underwater environments due to severe challenges such as light scattering, color attenuation, and sparse coverage of Gaussian kernels in far-field aqueous regions. To address this, we introduce \textit{AquaSplatting}, a hybrid framework that combines explicit and implicit modeling methods for robust underwater scene reconstruction. Our dual-branch architecture employs 3DGS in a geometry-guided branch to model solid surfaces like the seabed, while a medium-aware branch uses a compact, view-dependent MLP to represent volumetric water effects. Furthermore, a neural underwater hybrid rendering mechanism adaptively fuses these two representations based on accumulated opacity. Thanks to this dual-branch framework, our method can also synthesize restored images without water medium. To enhance efficiency, our proposed engagement-based pruning (EBP) strategy quantifies each Gaussian's contribution by accumulating its image-space gradients over multiple frames, enabling the principled removal of primitives with negligible impact. The entire framework is optimized using a comprehensive loss function that integrates photometric, exposure, semantic, and depth priors to maximize visual fidelity. Experiments on challenging underwater datasets demonstrate that AquaSplatting achieves the state-of-the-art in reconstruction quality surpassing prior methods while maintaining real-time performance.

AquaSplatting: A Hybrid 3D Representation for Robust Underwater Scene Reconstruction via Dual-Branch Rendering

Speech-to-Speech (S2S) Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational to natural human-computer interaction, enabling end-to-end spoken dialogue systems. 
However, evaluating these models remains a fundamental challenge. 
We propose *SageLM*, an end-to-end, multi-aspect, and explainable speech LLM for comprehensive S2S LLMs evaluation. 
First, unlike cascaded approaches that disregard acoustic features, SageLM jointly assesses both semantic and acoustic dimensions. 
Second, it leverages rationale-based supervision to enhance explainability and guide model learning, achieving superior alignment with evaluation outcomes compared to rule-based reinforcement learning methods. 
Third, we introduce *SpeechFeedback*, a synthetic preference dataset, and employ a two-stage training paradigm to mitigate the scarcity of speech preference data. 
Trained on both semantic and acoustic dimensions, SageLM achieves an 82.79\% agreement rate with human evaluators, outperforming cascaded and SLM-based baselines by at least 7.42\% and 26.20\%, respectively.

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Perception in Plan: Coupled Perception and Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

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Vision-G1: Towards General Reasoning Vision-Language Models via Reinforcement Learning

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Next from AAAI 2026

Perception in Plan: Coupled Perception and Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Similar lecture

Vision-G1: Towards General Reasoning Vision-Language Models via Reinforcement Learning

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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