Singapore

Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable zero-shot segmentation capability; however, its prohibitive computational costs make edge deployment challenging. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a promising compression solution, existing methods yield unsatisfactory results when applied to SAM, owing to its specialized model components and promptable workflow: 
(i) The mask decoder&#39;s attention exhibits extreme activation outliers, and we find that aggressive clipping (even 100$\times$), without smoothing or isolation, is effective in suppressing outliers while maintaining performance. Unfortunately, traditional distribution-based metrics (e.g., MSE) fail to provide such large-scale clipping. 
(ii) Existing quantization reconstruction methods neglect semantic interactivity of SAM, leading to misalignment between image feature and prompt intention.
To address the above issues, we propose SAQ-SAM in this paper, which boosts PTQ for SAM from the perspective of semantic alignment.
Specifically, we propose Perceptual-Consistency Clipping, which exploits attention focus overlap to promote aggressive clipping while preserving semantic capabilities. 
Furthermore, we propose Prompt-Aware Reconstruction, which incorporates image-prompt interactions by leveraging cross-attention in mask decoder, thus facilitating alignment in both distribution and semantic. 
Moreover, to ensure the interaction efficiency, we design a layer-skipping strategy for image tokens in encoder.
Extensive experiments are conducted on various SAM sizes and tasks, including instance segmentation, oriented object detection, and semantic segmentation, and the results show that our method consistently exhibits advantages.
For example, when quantizing SAM-B to 4-bit, SAQ-SAM achieves 11.7\% higher mAP than the baseline in instance segmentation task.

AAAI 2026

SAQ-SAM: Semantically-Aligned Quantization for Segment Anything Model

learning & optimization for cv

segmentation

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.

Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable zero-shot segmentation capability; however, its prohibitive computational costs make edge deployment challenging. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a promising compression solution, existing methods yield unsatisfactory results when applied to SAM, owing to its specialized model components and promptable workflow: 
(i) The mask decoder's attention exhibits extreme activation outliers, and we find that aggressive clipping (even 100$\times$), without smoothing or isolation, is effective in suppressing outliers while maintaining performance. Unfortunately, traditional distribution-based metrics (e.g., MSE) fail to provide such large-scale clipping. 
(ii) Existing quantization reconstruction methods neglect semantic interactivity of SAM, leading to misalignment between image feature and prompt intention.
To address the above issues, we propose SAQ-SAM in this paper, which boosts PTQ for SAM from the perspective of semantic alignment.
Specifically, we propose Perceptual-Consistency Clipping, which exploits attention focus overlap to promote aggressive clipping while preserving semantic capabilities. 
Furthermore, we propose Prompt-Aware Reconstruction, which incorporates image-prompt interactions by leveraging cross-attention in mask decoder, thus facilitating alignment in both distribution and semantic. 
Moreover, to ensure the interaction efficiency, we design a layer-skipping strategy for image tokens in encoder.
Extensive experiments are conducted on various SAM sizes and tasks, including instance segmentation, oriented object detection, and semantic segmentation, and the results show that our method consistently exhibits advantages.
For example, when quantizing SAM-B to 4-bit, SAQ-SAM achieves 11.7\% higher mAP than the baseline in instance segmentation task.

poster

Video Camouflaged Object Detection (VCOD) poses significant challenges due to the subtle appearance of camouflaged objects, especially under dynamic motion and occlusion. Existing methods predominantly rely on optical flow or black-box features for motion modeling, which often entail substantial computational costs and suffer from limited interpretability. Inspired by the human strategy of identifying abnormal movements between frames and the principle of event camera image formation, we propose an eventstream-inspired dual-branch framework for VCOD. Specifically, we design an eventstream-like data extraction module to capture pixel-level motion variations, effectively distinguishing object motion from background dynamics. This event-based representation is integrated into SAM2 through a dual-branch memory-augmented framework, consisting of Time Bridge Attention and Visual Bridge Attention, enabling joint modeling of motion and appearance cues. In addition, we introduce a Prompt Embedding Generator to eliminate the need for human-provided interactive prompts, facilitating fully automatic VCOD. Extensive experiments on MoCA-Mask and CAD2016 demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving both superior segmentation accuracy and interpretable motion modeling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to incorporate eventstream-inspired representations into the VCOD task. Code and related resources will be released.

Towards Explainable Video Camouflaged Object Detection: SAM2 with Eventstream-Inspired Data

In this paper, we propose new randomized algorithms for estimating the two-to-infinity and one-to-two norms in a matrix-free setting, using only matrix-vector multiplications. Our methods are based on appropriate modifications of Hutchinson's diagonal estimator and its Hutch++ version. We provide oracle complexity bounds for both modifications. We further illustrate the practical utility of our algorithms for Jacobian-based regularization in deep neural network training on image classification tasks. We also demonstrate that our methodology can be applied to mitigate the effect of adversarial attacks in the domain of recommender systems.

Matrix-Free Two-to-Infinity and One-to-Two Norms Estimation

Open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding (OV-3D) aims to localize and classify novel objects beyond the closed set of object classes. However, existing approaches and benchmarks primarily focus on the open vocabulary problem within the context of object classes, which is insufficient in providing a holistic evaluation to what extent a model understands the 3D scene. In this paper, we introduce a more challenging task called Generalized Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding (GOV-3D) to explore the open vocabulary problem beyond object classes. It encompasses an open and diverse set of generalized knowledge, expressed as linguistic queries of fine-grained and object-specific attributes. To this end, we contribute a new benchmark named OpenScan, which consists of 3D object attributes across eight representative linguistic aspects, including affordance, property, and material. We further evaluate state-of-the-art OV-3D methods on our OpenScan benchmark and discover that these methods struggle to comprehend the abstract vocabularies of the GOV-3D task, a challenge that cannot be addressed simply by scaling up object classes during training. We highlight the limitations of existing methodologies and explore promising directions to overcome the identified shortcomings.

OpenScan: A Benchmark for Generalized Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding

Currently, pretrained models are rapidly scaling in size, which substantially increases the cost of fine-tuning them for downstream tasks. To address this challenge, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have been developed to optimize a minimal set of parameters for adaptation. While current PEFT approaches predominantly employ an "additive'' strategy, introducing learnable modules into inputs or architectures, neglect the inherent knowledge embedded within pretrained models, which may be redundant or even conflict with downstream tasks. This limitation leads to increased inference latency and suboptimal transfer performance, particularly in scenarios with significant domain gaps. In this paper, we propose a Subtractive Fine-tuning Paradigm(SFP), which converts multiple redundant operations within the original module into a linear transformation to enhance inference speed and model performance. Specifically, we introduce a compact filter block to replace specific module with interference and redundancy in the original structure to reduce model conflicts. By using a pseudo inverse matrix to construct filter block, ensuring that it can inherit the knowledge of the replacement module, and then freezing the rest of the model, only fine-tuning the filter block is performed to eliminate interference and redundant knowledge, thereby enhancing the model’s adaptability to downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our SFP outperforms existing PEFT methods in accuracy while decreasing the overall model parameters by 12%. Compared to full fine-tuning, the accuracy has increased by 8.47%(74.04% vs. 65.57%, VTAB).

Less Is More: Rethinking Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning from a Subtractive Perspective

The discovery of symbolic solutions—mathematical expressions, logical rules, and algorithmic structures—is fundamental to advancing scientific and engineering progress.
However, traditional methods often struggle with search efficiency and fail to integrate knowledge effectively.
While recent large language model-based (LLM-based) approaches have demonstrated improvements in search efficiency, they lack the ability to continually refine and expand upon discovered solutions and their underlying knowledge, limiting their potential for \textit{open-ended innovation}.
To address these limitations, we introduce CoEvo, a novel framework that leverages large language models within an evolutionary search methodology to continually generate and refine symbolic solutions. CoEvo integrates a dynamic knowledge library, enabling open-ended innovation of solutions through effective knowledge management. Additionally, CoEvo leverages multiple representations of solutions—including natural language, mathematical expressions, and code—to further enhance search efficiency.
By combining the reasoning capabilities of LLMs with the exploratory power of evolutionary algorithms, CoEvo significantly improves the efficiency and scope of symbolic discovery.
Our experimental results demonstrate that this method not only enhances the efficiency of searching for symbolic solutions but also supports the ongoing discovery process, akin to human scientific endeavors. This study represents a first effort in conceptualizing the search for symbolic solutions as a lifelong, iterative
process, marking a significant step towards harnessing LLMs in the perpetual pursuit of scientific and engineering breakthroughs.

CoEvo: Continual Evolution of Symbolic Solutions Using Large Language Models

Multi-view learning aims to effectively integrate data from different sources by exploring the consistency and complementarity across views. Current multi-view methods based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) primarily focus on local information, making it difficult to capture global dependencies. Furthermore, multi-view data typically lack explicit structural representations, and the topologies constructed via node similarity in existing approaches are prone to noise, with simple fusion strategies are often inadequate for effectively suppressing this noise and for uncovering meaningful structural information. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes CoGFormer, a cooperative graph transformer with structural consensus learning. CoGFormer maps multi-view data into a unified space and jointly models local and global consensus: a denoising structural consensus graph convolutional network refines the consensus graph to enhance local consistency and robustness, while a structure-guided attention mechanism explicitly injects high-order cross-view structural biases to capture global consistency and improve semantic coherence. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that CoGFormer outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness.

Cooperative Graph Transformer with Structural Consensus for Multi-View Learning

Recently, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, highlighting the urgent need for further research to comprehensively identify and mitigate these threats.
Unfortunately, existing jailbreak studies primarily focus on coarse-grained input manipulation to elicit specific responses, overlooking the exploitation of internal representations, $\textit{i.e.}$, intermediate activations, which constrains their ability to penetrate alignment safeguards and generate harmful responses.
To tackle this issue, we propose the $\textbf{Act}$ivation $\textbf{Man}$ipulation (ActMan) Attack framework, which performs fine-grained activation manipulations inspired by the perception and cognition stages of human decision-making, enhancing both the penetration capability and harmfulness of attacks.
To improve penetration capability, we introduce a Deceptive Visual Camouflage module inspired by the masking effect in human perception. This module uses a benign activation-guided attention redirection strategy to conceal abnormal activation patterns, thereby suppressing LVLM's defense detection during early-stage decoding.
To enhance harmfulness, we design a Malicious Semantic Induction module drawing from the framing effect in human cognition, which reconstructs jailbreak instructions using malicious activation guidance to change LVLM’s risk assessment during late-stage decoding, thereby amplifying the harmfulness of model responses.
Extensive experiments on six mainstream LVLMs demonstrate that our method remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average relative ASR improvement of 12.06%.

Activation Manipulation Attack: Penetrating and Harmful Jailbreak Attack Against Large Vision-Language Models

Grassmannian manifolds offer a powerful carrier for geometric representation learning by modelling high-dimensional data as low-dimensional subspaces. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on static single-subspace representations, neglecting the dynamic interplay between multiple subspaces critical for capturing complex geometric structures. To address this limitation, we propose a topology-driven multi-subspace fusion framework that enables adaptive subspace collaboration on Grassmannian manifolds. Our solution introduces two key innovations: (1) an adaptive multi-subspace construction mechanism that dynamically selects and weights task-relevant subspaces via topological convergence analysis, and (2) a multi-subspace interaction block that fuses heterogeneous geometric representations through Fréchet mean optimisation on the manifold. Theoretically, we establish the convergence guarantees of adaptive subspaces under a projection metric topology, ensuring stable gradient-based optimisation. Practically, we integrate Riemannian batch normalisation and mutual information regularisation to enhance discriminability and robustness. Extensive experiments on 3D action recognition (HDM05, FPHA), EEG classification (MAMEM-SSVEPII), and graph tasks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Our work not only advances geometric deep learning but also successfully adapts the proven multi-channel interaction philosophy of Euclidean networks to non-Euclidean domains, achieving superior discriminability and interpretability.

Learning Topology-Driven Multi-Subspace Fusion for Grassmannian Deep Networks

Existing video-based automatic depression assessment (ADA) approaches frequently achieve video-level depression assessment by aggregating features or predictions of individual frames or equal-length segments within the given video. While their performances have been largely enhanced by recent advanced deep learning models, they typically fail to explicitly consider the varied importance of depression-related behavioural cues across different video segments, i.e., segments within one video may contain behaviours reflecting varying depression status. Underestimating segment-level variations can obscure the detection of facial behaviour cues associated with depression, thereby undermining the accuracy and interpretability of video-based depression detection systems. In this paper, we propose a novel video-based ADA approach that specifically identifies and differentiates video segments that exhibit depression-related facial behaviours across varying temporal durations, providing clear insights into how each segment contributes to the video-level depression prediction. To achieve this, a novel weakly supervised strategy is proposed to compare segment-level behaviours with video-level depression label, enabling the model to assign depression-relevant scores to multiple temporal scale video segments and attend selectively to those most indicative of depressive states. Extensive experiments on the AVEC 2013 and AVEC 2014 face video depression datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Our code is provided in the Supplementary Material.

Explainable Depression Assessment from Face Videos by Weakly Supervised Learning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising performance in complex tasks. However, the resource-consuming reasoning processes may be exploited by attackers to maliciously occupy the resources of the servers, leading to a crash, like the DDoS attack in cyber. To this end, we propose a novel attack method on LRMs termed ExtendAttack to maliciously occupy the resources of servers by stealthily extending the reasoning processes of LRMs. Concretely, we systematically obfuscate characters within a benign prompt, transforming them into a complex, poly-base ASCII representation. This compels the model to perform a series of computationally intensive decoding sub-tasks that are deeply embedded within the semantic structure of the query itself. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ExtendAttack. Remarkably, it significantly increases response length and latency, with the former increasing by over 2.7 times for the o3 model on the HumanEval benchmark. Besides, it preserves the original meaning of the query and achieves comparable answer accuracy, showing the stealthiness.

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Towards Explainable Video Camouflaged Object Detection: SAM2 with Eventstream-Inspired Data

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Next from AAAI 2026

Towards Explainable Video Camouflaged Object Detection: SAM2 with Eventstream-Inspired Data

Similar lecture

ST-SAM: Multimodal Scene Text Segmentation with Dense Visual and Sparse Textual Prompts via SAM

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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