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Face super-resolution (FSR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) face images from low-resolution (LR) inputs. While recent methods have advanced this task through architectural innovations and generative modeling, but they often leads to semantically inconsistent structures and unrealistic textures, particularly under high magnification. To mitigate these limitations, we draw inspiration from the human artistic process of “structuring before detailing” and propose a progressive prior-guided restoration strategy. Specifically, we first introduce a Sketching Structure Prior (SSP) module that embeds global semantics and refines local geometry through implicit parsing guidance and explicit spatial modulation. Then, a Associative Texture Prior (ATP) module leverages a High-Quality Dictionary (HD) learned from high-quality reconstruction to guide fine-grained detail recovery. Finally, to unify structure and detail features, we design a Holistic Prior Fusion (HPF) module that adaptively integrates them within semantically consistent facial regions. Extensive evaluations on CelebA and Helen datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in both structural fidelity and texture realism compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

AAAI 2026

PortraitSR: Artist-Inspired Prior Learning for Progressive Face Super-Resolution

poster

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.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a popular way to adapt large pre-trained models to new tasks. Most PEFT methods update only a small subset of parameters while freezing the rest, avoiding redundant computation. As they maximize the absolute size of the updates without regard to the parameters’ original scale, the resulting changes in model behavior can be minimal. In contrast, we maximize updates relative to each parameter’s scale, yielding more meaningful downstream adaptation. We propose Gradient-to-Weight Ratio and Entropy-guided Masking (GEM), a parameter scale-aware, distribution-sensitive sparse fine-tuning framework. GEM prioritizes parameters whose updates are significant in proportion to their initial pre-trained values. It also adaptively determines how many parameters to tune at each layer based on the entropy of parameter values, thereby making the most effective use of the computational budget in PEFT. Our empirical study demonstrates the efficacy of GEM on both general-domain tasks (GLUE and SuperGLUE) and domain-specific tasks (GSM8k and MBPP), achieving up to a 1.6% improvement in fine-tuning accuracy over full fine-tuning while updating only 0.1% of model parameters.

GEM: A Scale-Aware and Distribution-Sensitive Sparse Fine-Tuning Framework for Effective Downstream Adaptation

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex mathematical reasoning tasks, but they inevitably generate errors throughout multi-step solutions. Process-level Reward Models (PRMs) have shown great promise by providing supervision and evaluation at each intermediate step, thereby effectively improving the models’ reasoning abilities. However, training effective PRMs requires high-quality process reward data, yet existing methods for constructing such data are often labour-intensive or inefficient. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-driven framework for automated process reward data construction, encompassing both data generation and annotation processes for PRMs. Additionally, we identify the limitations of both majority vote and PRMs, and introduce two generic uncertainty-aware output aggregation methods: Hybrid Majority Reward Vote and Weighted Reward Frequency Vote, which combine the strengths of majority vote with PRMs. Extensive experiments on ProcessBench, MATH, and GSMPlus show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed PRM data construction framework, and demonstrate that the two output aggregation methods further improve the mathematical reasoning abilities across diverse PRMs.

Uncertainty-Based Methods for Automated Process Reward Data Construction and Output Aggregation in Mathematical Reasoning

Previous studies leveraging artificial neural networks have been used to investigate the semantic coding within human visual cortex. However, building an interpretable label-free framework that can effectively map brain responses to multiple coexisting semantic concepts remains largely unexplored. Here, we propose BrainLMM, a label-free framework for multi-semantic mapping of voxel responses by combining diverse vision encoders with the Describe-and-Dissect strategy, enabling a hypothesis-free analysis of the human high-level visual cortex. First, we construct voxel-wise encoding models leveraging diverse vision encoders to predict visual cortical responses to natural scene images. Then, we use BrainLMM to map individual brain voxels to multiple semantics without requiring any predefined labels. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we compute Pearson correlation coefficients to compare the multi-semantic mappings produced by BrainLMM and CLIP-MSM with ground-truth voxel responses within selective cortical areas. Our findings indicate that BrainLMM achieves more accurate predictions of visual responses compared to CLIP-MSM. Finally, to demonstrate the multi-semantic mapping capability of our method, we project multiple representative semantic concepts onto the cortical surface for visualization. Our method enables the discovery of voxels that exhibit strong activation in response to previously undefined semantic concepts across two independent datasets: the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) and the Natural Object Dataset (NOD).

BrainLMM: A Label-Free Framework for Mapping Multi-Semantic Representation in the Human Visual Cortex

With the deepening trend of paperless workflows, signatures as a means of identity authentication are gradually shifting from traditional ink-on-paper to electronic formats. Despite the availability of dynamic pressure-sensitive and PKI-based digital signatures, static scanned signatures remain prevalent in practice due to their convenience. However, these static images, having almost lost their authentication attributes, cannot be reliably verified and are vulnerable to malicious copying and reuse. To address these issues, we propose $\textbf{AuthSig}$, a novel static electronic signature framework based on generative models and watermark, which binds authentication information to the signature image. Leveraging the human visual system’s insensitivity to subtle style variations, AuthSig finely modulates style embeddings during generation to implicitly encode watermark bits--enforcing a One Signature, One Use policy. To overcome the scarcity of handwritten signature data and the limitations of traditional augmentation methods, we introduce a keypoint-driven data augmentation strategy that effectively enhances style diversity to support robust watermark embedding. Experimental results show that AuthSig achieves over 98\% extraction accuracy under both digital--domain distortions and signature-specific degradations, and remains effective even in print-scan scenarios.

AuthSig: Safeguarding Scanned Signatures Against Unauthorized Reuse in Paperless Workflows

Dynamic recommendation systems aim to provide personalized suggestions by modeling temporal user-item interactions across time-series behavioral data. Recent studies have leveraged pre-trained dynamic graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn user-item representations over temporal snapshot graphs. However, fine-tuning GNNs on these graphs often results in generalization issues due to temporal discrepancies between pre-training and fine-tuning stages, limiting the model’s ability to capture evolving user preferences. To address this, we propose TarDGR, a task-aware retrieval-augmented framework designed to enhance generalization capability by incorporating task-aware model and retrieval-augmentation. Specifically, TarDGR introduces a Task-Aware Evaluation Mechanism to identify semantically relevant historical subgraphs, enabling the construction of task-specific datasets without manual labeling. It also presents a Graph Transformer-based Task-Aware Model that integrates semantic and structural encodings to assess subgraph relevance. During inference, TarDGR retrieves and fuses task-aware subgraphs with the query subgraph, enriching its representation and mitigating temporal generalization issues. Experiments on multiple large-scale dynamic graph datasets demonstrate that TarDGR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with extensive empirical evidence underscoring its superior accuracy and generalization capabilities.

Task-Aware Retrieval Augmentation for Dynamic Recommendation

Time series forecasting is critical for decision making across dynamic domains such as energy, finance, transportation, and cloud computing. However, real-world time series often exhibit non-stationarity, including temporal distribution shifts and spectral variability, which poses significant challenges for existing long-term time series forecasting methods. In this paper, we propose DTAF, a dual-branch framework that addresses non-stationarity in both the temporal and frequency domains. For the temporal domain, the Temporal Stabilizing Fusion (TFS) module employs a non-stationary mix of experts (MOE) filter to disentangle and suppress temporal non-stationary patterns while preserving long-term dependencies. For the frequency domain, the Frequency Wave Modeling (FWM) module applies frequency differencing to dynamically highlight components with significant spectral shifts. By fusing the complementary outputs of TFS and FWM, DTAF generates robust forecasts that adapt to both temporal and frequency domain non-stationarity. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world benchmarks demonstrate that DTAF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding significant improvements in forecasting accuracy under non-stationary conditions.

Towards Non-Stationary Time Series Forecasting with Temporal Stabilization and Frequency Differencing

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with unified architectures excel across a wide range of vision-language tasks, yet aligning them with personalized image generation remains a significant challenge. Existing methods for MLLMs are frequently subject-specific, demanding a data-intensive fine-tuning process for every new subject, which limits their scalability. In this paper, we introduce MM-R1, a framework that integrates a cross-modal Chain-of-Thought (X-CoT) reasoning strategy to unlock the inherent potential of unified MLLMs for personalized image generation. Specifically, we structure personalization as an integrated visual reasoning and generation process: (1) grounding subject concepts by interpreting and understanding user-provided images and contextual cues, and (2) generating personalized images conditioned on both the extracted subject representations and user prompts. To further enhance the reasoning capability, we adopt Grouped Reward Proximal Policy Optimization(GRPO) to explicitly align the generation. Experiments demonstrate that MM-R1 unleashes the personalization capability of unified MLLMs to generate images with high subject fidelity and strong text alignment in a zero-shot manner.

MM-R1: Unleashing the Power of Unified Multimodal Large Language Models for Personalized Image Generation

Multiple-choices question answering (MCQA) has emerged as one of the most popular task formats for large language models (LLMs) evaluation. Unfortunately, there exist substantial evidence that the evaluation of current MCQA benchmarks suffers from significant answer bias, which severely undermines the reliability of the evaluation conclusions. Specifically, many LLMs achieve performance significantly higher than random selection even when the questions are omitted from input information. To this end, we conduct a systematic investigation of the attribution of answer bias, and demonstrate a strong correlation between the degree of data contamination and the severity of answer bias, while the position of options and the popularity of answers have relatively minor effects. Building on these insights, we further propose OPD, a straightforward yet effective tool for contamination detection and dataset debiasing without requiring access to the model’s internal training data. Our findings and algorithms provide valuable insights for the design of future trustworthy LLM evaluation protocols.

Does Question Really Matter? The Attribution of Answer Bias in LLM Evaluation

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on high-level semantic tasks, they often struggle with fine-grained, token-level understanding and structural reasoning—capabilities that are essential for applications requiring precision and control. We introduce TASE, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to perceive and reason about token-level information across languages. TASE covers 10 tasks under two core categories: token awareness and structural understanding, spanning Chinese, English, and Korean, with a 35,927-instance evaluation set and a scalable synthetic data generation pipeline for training. Tasks include character counting, token alignment, syntactic structure parsing, and length constraint satisfaction. We evaluate over 30 leading commercial and open-source LLMs, including O3, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek-R1, and train a custom Qwen2.5-14B model using the GRPO training method. Results show that human performance significantly outpaces current LLMs, revealing persistent weaknesses in token-level reasoning. TASE sheds light on these limitations and provides a new diagnostic lens for future improvements in low-level language understanding and cross-lingual generalization.We will release our code and dataset.

TASE: Token Awareness and Structured Evaluation for Multilingual Language Models

We propose Knowledge Boundary Discovery (KBD), a reinforcement learning based framework to explore the knowledge boundaries of the Large Language Models (LLMs). We define the knowledge boundary by automatically generating two types of questions: (i) those the LLM can confidently answer within-knowledge boundary and (ii) those it cannot beyond-knowledge boundary. Iteratively exploring and exploiting the LLM's responses to find its knowledge boundaries is challenging because of the hallucination phenomenon. To find the knowledge boundaries of an LLM, the agent interacts with the LLM under the modeling of exploring a partially observable environment. The agent generates a progressive question as the action, adopts an entropy reduction as the reward, receives the LLM's response as the observation and updates its belief states. We demonstrate that the KBD detects knowledge boundaries of LLMs by automatically finding a set of non-trivial answerable and unanswerable questions. We validate the KBD by comparing its generated knowledge boundaries with manually crafted LLM benchmark datasets. Experiments show that our KBD-generated question set is comparable to the human-generated datasets. Our approach paves a new way to evaluate LLMs.

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