Singapore

In the field of multi-spectral object re-identification (ReID), 
multi-modal knowledge and modal-specific knowledge exhibit complementary advantages when handling hard samples, but existing methods rarely integrate this collaborative information.
Knowledge distillation is a direct approach for transferring information, however, heterogeneity in model architectures and variations in sample hardness can undermine the stability and controllability of knowledge transfer.
To alleviate these limitations, we propose the novel Progressive Multi-modal Knowledge Distillation (PMKD) framework that enables multi-stage knowledge transfer guided by hard sample awareness. 
In the multi-modal knowledge transfer stage, the source model (pre-trained on multi-modal data) disseminates its learned multi-modal collaborative knowledge to multiple independently modal-specific target models, guiding their adaptation to hard samples within training batches. 
In the modal-specific knowledge retention stage, the independent models enriched with multi-modal knowledge guide the training phase. The architectural consistency between source-target models ensures more lossless knowledge transfer, effectively mitigating the risk of capability drift, and preserving inherent competence.
Moreover, the entire progressive multi-modal knowledge distillation is regulated by the proposed hardness-aware distillation loss, which automatically adapts distillation intensity through hard sample mining, thereby ensuring stable transfer of hard sample handling capabilities.
Extensive experiments on benchmark multi-spectral ReID datasets validate the effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed method.

AAAI 2026

Progressive Multi-modal Knowledge Distillation for Multi-spectral Object Re-identification

ml: multimodal learning

cv: image and video retrieval

cv: multi-modal vision

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.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with their powerful content generation capabilities, have been successfully applied to data annotation processes. However, the VLM-generated labels exhibit dual limitations: low quality (i.e., label noise) and absence of error correction mechanisms. To enhance label quality, we propose Human-Corrected Labels (HCLs), a novel setting that efficient human correction for VLM-generated noisy labels. As shown in Figure 1(b), HCL strategically deploys human correction only for instances with VLM discrepancies, achieving both higher-quality annotations and reduced labor costs. Specifically, we theoretically derive a risk-consistent estimator that incorporates both human-corrected labels and VLM predictions to train classifiers. Besides, we further propose a conditional probability method to estimate the label distribution using a combination of VLM outputs and model predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior classification performance and is robust to label noise, validating the effectiveness of HCL in practical weak supervision scenarios.

Human-Corrected Labels Learning: Enhancing Labels Quality via Human Correction of VLMs Discrepancies

Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) seeks to generate realistic human behaviors within complex environments, yet it faces significant challenges in handling long-horizon, high-level tasks and generalizing to unseen scenes. To address these limitations, we introduce FantasyHSI, a novel HSI framework centered on video generation and multi-agent systems that operates without paired data. We model the complex interaction process as a dynamic directed graph, upon which we build a collaborative multi-agent system. This system comprises a Scene Navigator Agent for environmental perception and high-level path planning, and a Planning Agent that decomposes long-horizon goals into atomic actions. Critically, we introduce a Critic Agent that establishes a closed-loop feedback mechanism by evaluating the deviation between generated actions and the planned path. This allows for the dynamic correction of trajectory drifts caused by the stochasticity of the generative model, thereby ensuring long-term logical consistency. To enhance the physical realism of the generated motions, we leverage Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to train the action generator, significantly reducing artifacts such as limb distortion and foot-sliding. Extensive experiments on our custom SceneBench benchmark demonstrate that FantasyHSI significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of generalization, long-horizon task completion, and physical realism.

FantasyHSI: Video-Generation-Centric 4D Human Synthesis in Any Scene Through a Graph-Based Multi-Agent Framework

Retrieving molecular structures from tandem mass spectra is a crucial step in rapid compound identification. Existing retrieval methods, such as traditional mass spectral library matching, suffer from limited spectral library coverage, while recent cross-modal representation learning frameworks often encounter modality misalignment, resulting in suboptimal retrieval accuracy and generalization. To address these limitations, we propose GLMR, a Generative Language Model-based Retrieval framework that mitigates the cross-modal misalignment through a two-stage process. In the pre-retrieval stage, a contrastive learning-based model identifies top candidate molecules as contextual priors for the input mass spectrum. In the generative retrieval stage, these candidate molecules are integrated with the input mass spectrum to guide a generative model in producing refined molecular structures, which are then used to re-rank the candidates based on molecular similarity. Experiments on both MassSpecGym and the proposed MassRET-20k dataset demonstrate that GLMR significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving over 40\% improvement in top-1 accuracy and exhibiting strong generalizability.

Breaking the Modality Barrier: Generative Modeling for Accurate Molecule Retrieval from Mass Spectra

Image correction and rectangling are valuable tasks in practical photography systems such as smartphones. Recent remarkable advancements in deep learning have undeniably brought about substantial performance improvements in these fields. Nevertheless, existing methods mainly rely on task-specific architectures. This significantly restricts their generalization ability and effective application across a wide range of different tasks. In this paper, we introduce the Unified Rectification Framework (UniRect), a comprehensive approach that addresses these practical tasks from a consistent distortion rectification perspective. Our approach incorporates various task-specific inverse problems into a general distortion model by simulating different types of lenses. To handle diverse distortions, UniRect adopts one task-agnostic rectification framework with a dual-component structure: a Deformation Module, which utilizes a novel Residual Progressive Thin-Plate Spline (RP-TPS) model to address complex geometric deformations, and a subsequent Restoration Module, which employs Residual Mamba Blocks (RMBs) to counteract the degradation caused by the deformation process and enhance the fidelity of the output image.
Moreover, a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoEs) structure is designed to circumvent heavy task competition in multi-task learning due to varying distortions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our models have achieved state-of-the-art performance compared with other up-to-date methods.

Rectification Reimagined: A Unified Mamba Model for Image Correction and Rectangling with Prompts

Modern autonomous driving (AD) systems leverage 3D object detection to perceive foreground objects in 3D environments for subsequent prediction and planning. Visual 3D detection based on RGB cameras provides a cost-effective solution compared to the LiDAR paradigm. While achieving promising detection accuracy, current deep neural network-based models remain highly susceptible to adversarial examples. The underlying safety concerns motivate us to investigate realistic adversarial attacks in AD scenarios. Previous work has demonstrated the feasibility of placing adversarial posters on the road surface to induce hallucinations in the detector. However, the unnatural appearance of the posters makes them easily noticeable by humans, and their fixed content can be readily targeted and defended. To address these limitations, we propose the AdvRoad to generate diverse road-style adversarial posters. The adversaries have naturalistic appearances resembling the road surface while compromising the detector to perceive non-existent objects at the attack locations. We employ a two-stage approach, termed Road-Style Adversary Generation and Scenario-Associated Adaptation, to maximize the attack effectiveness on the input scene while ensuring the natural appearance of the poster, allowing the attack to be carried out stealthily without drawing human attention. Extensive experiments show that AdvRoad generalizes well to different detectors, scenes, and spoofing locations. Moreover, physical attacks further demonstrate the practical threats in real-world environments.

Invisible Triggers, Visible Threats! Road-Style Adversarial Creation Attack for Visual 3D Detection in Autonomous Driving

Developing a universal graph model capable of generalizing across diverse graph domains has consistently been a key objective in graph learning. Recently, many studies have focused on achieving in-context learning (ICL) on graphs, which can generalize to novel tasks without the need for fine-tuning, similar to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3. These researches can be primarily divided into graph-based methods and LLM-based methods. However, the generalization performance of the former is limited by the representation capability of GNNs, while the latter faces the challenge of LLMs understanding graph structures. Therefore, we propose CAGML, a context-aware graph meta-learning model, which learns to generalize to cross-domain and cross-granularity graph tasks using a meta-trained Transformer. Firstly, we formulate graph few-shot learning tasks as a structure-aware sequence modeling problem to unify cross-domain and cross-granularity tasks. Then, a structure-aware Transformer (SAT) is introduced as a graph in-context learner to make predictions with a few labels and the task-specific structural context. Finally, we pre-train SAT in a meta-optimization manner on large-scale citation network and knowledge graph. Experiments on 6 cross-domain graph datasets show that, without fine-tuning, CAGML can achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of average performance across cross-granularity tasks on adopted datasets.

Context-aware Graph Meta-learning

Recently, structure–text contrastive learning has shown promising performance in text-attributed graph representation by leveraging complementary strengths of graph neural networks and language models. However, existing methods typically rely on homophily assumptions in similarity estimation and hard optimization objectives, leading to inherent limitations when applied to heterophilic graphs. Although some works attempt to mitigate heterophily through structural adjustments or neighbor aggregation, they usually treat textual embeddings as static alignment targets, resulting in suboptimal integration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called GCL-OT: Graph Contrastive Learning with Optimal Transport for Heterophilic Text-Attributed Graphs, enabling flexible and bidirectional alignment between structural and textual signals. Specifically, GCL-OT decomposes heterophily into complete heterophily, partial homophily, and latent homophily, each addressed with tailored optimization mechanisms. For partial heterophily, we design a RealSoftMax-based similarity estimation mechanism to selectively emphasize key neighbor-word interactions while suppressing background noise. For complete heterophily, we introduce a prompt filtering mechanism that adaptively excludes irrelevant noise during optimal transport alignment. Furthermore, we incorporate OT-guided soft supervision to uncover latent neighbors with similarity semantic, enhancing the learning of latent homophily. Extensive experiments on 9 benchmark datasets show that GCL-OT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, verifying its effectiveness and robustness.

GCL-OT: Graph Contrastive Learning with Optimal Transport for Heterophilic Text-Attributed Graphs

The evolving worldly dynamics necessitate continuous revision and updating of knowledge within Large Language Models (LLMs), driving the development of Knowledge Editing (KE) techniques. Recently, a novel paradigm of Temporal Knowledge Editing (TKE) has been proposed, emphasizing that models deployed in dynamic environments should integrate new information while retaining historical knowledge. However, we observe that current definitions and methods for TKE are insufficient, as they do not effectively capture or adapt to the fine-grained temporal dynamics inherent in real-world knowledge evolution. In this paper, we introduce the notion of multi-granularity TKE, encompassing temporal knowledge across yearly, monthly, and daily granularities, and propose a corresponding dataset, named MTKE. We argue that comprehending and retaining knowledge across different temporal granularities is crucial for LLMs to accurately reflect real-world changes. The key challenge lies in integrating new temporal knowledge at various granularities while also preserving relevant historical knowledge, thus ensuring LLMs maintain a consistent and accurate understanding over time. To achieve this, we propose a Sparse Parameter-Injected Knowledge Editing method, dubbed SPIKE, which anchors both temporal knowledge and subject positions within the model. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively preserves historical knowledge performance while accurately incorporating dynamic temporal knowledge across multi-granularity temporal scenarios.

Multi-granularity Temporal Knowledge Editing over Large Language Models

Recent deepfake detection studies often treat unseen sample detection as a "zero-shot" task, training on images generated by known models but generalizing to unknown ones. A key real-world challenge arises when a model performs poorly on unknown samples, yet these samples remain available for analysis. This highlights that it should be approached as a "few-shot" task, where effectively utilizing a small number of samples can lead to significant improvement. Unlike typical few-shot tasks focused on semantic understanding, deepfake detection prioritizes image realism, which closely mirrors real-world distributions. In this work, we propose the Few-shot Training-free Network (FTNet) for real-world few-shot deepfake detection. \textbf{Simple yet effective}, FTNet differs from traditional methods that rely on large-scale known data for training. Instead, FTNet uses \textbf{only one fake sample} from an evaluation set, mimicking the scenario where new samples emerge in the real world and can be gathered for use, without any training or parameter updates. During evaluation, each test sample is compared to the known fake and real samples, and it is classified based on the category of the nearest sample. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of \textbf{AI-generated images from 29 different generative models} and achieve a new SoTA performance, with an average \textbf{improvement of 8.7\%} compared to existing methods. This work introduces a fresh perspective on real-world deepfake detection: when the model struggles to generalize on a few-shot sample, leveraging the failed samples leads to better performance.

Leveraging Failed Samples: A Few-Shot and Training-Free Framework for Generalized Deepfake Detection

Chain-of-Thought prompting has remarkably advanced LLM reasoning by generating explicit step-by-step tokens, yet its discrete nature inherently limits expressiveness and efficiency—struggling with abstract, ambiguous, or semantically divergent cognition beyond linguistic tokens. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by operating in the model’s internal continuous space for richer cognitive representations. However, existing methods typically rely on finetuning or token interpolation to bridge latent and input spaces,
introducing training difficulty or semantic degradation. To this end, we propose Dynamic Latent Reasoning (DyLaR), a training-free framework that preserves semantic fidelity to latent space. DyLaR introduces a Semantic Residual Refinement module that progressively refines latent inputs by integrating semantic residuals from prior hidden states, thus capturing expressive semantic hierarchies that closely approximate continuous latent representations. To enhance flexibility, DyLaR further incorporates a dynamic switching policy
that allows LLMs to alternate between discrete and latent reasoning based on model uncertainty—favoring explicit reasoning when confident, and latent exploration under ambiguity. Empirical experiments across knowledge- and reasoning-intensive tasks demonstrate that DyLaR consistently outperforms strong baselines in both effectiveness and token efficiency. Qualitative analyses further illustrate its interpretability and flexibility in navigating complex reasoning scenarios.

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Human-Corrected Labels Learning: Enhancing Labels Quality via Human Correction of VLMs Discrepancies

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