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Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) aims to segment the novel target objects with the guidance of minimal annotated reference examples. 
The affinity-based method has great advantages in the FSS inference stage for both specialist model and foundation model. However, current affinity calculation merely relies on only support-query matching, without considering the query-specific semantic or the semantic correlation among inter-support samples, which limits the representation ability of affinity map. In this paper, we propose the Generalizing Semantic Mining (GSM) that focuses on exploiting generalizing semantic to improve the affinity calculation. Concretely, we first organize the affinity-based inference into three main steps to reveal the crucial role of affinity map. To address the low-data problem, Target Semantic Reusing module considers the query sample as a proxy reference and assigns it with proxy mask identifying its most generalizing semantic regions. Then, to generate the high-fidelity proxy mask, Query-specific Semantic Modeling module pinpoints the most generalizing regions through prior semantic analysis. Finally, Representative Re-weighting module explicitly modulates affinity calculation via generalization-aware weighting. Experiments on FSS benchmarks demonstrate that our GSM can serve as a plug-and-play free lunch for both specialist models and foundation models.

AAAI 2026

Training-free Boosting for Few-shot Segmentation via Generalizing Semantic Mining

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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.

Structured mesh generation serves as a crucial preprocessing step in numerical simulations and can be formulated as a mapping problem from geometry to structured mesh. Existing approaches typically establish an isolated mapping for each geometry. This geometry-specific paradigm fails to capture and leverage commonalities across geometries, inevitably requiring recomputation or costly retraining for new geometries. To overcome this limitation, we propose ICL-Mesh, a meta-learning framework based on in-context learning (ICL) for structured mesh generation. It treats learning one mapping as one task and trains a single neural network to extract commonalities across tasks and learn from in-context examples within each task, enabling rapid generalization to unseen tasks without parameter updates. Experimental results demonstrate that ICL-Mesh effectively generalizes to diverse geometries with only a few context examples, and even without examples. It also exhibits robustness to in-context example order sensitivity and can be extended to various mesh generation scenarios, including mesh refinement and coarsening.

Learning to Generate Structured Meshes with In-Context: Toward Generalization in Mesh Generation

Event cameras offer unparalleled advantages such as high temporal resolution, low latency, and high dynamic range. However, their limited spatial resolution poses challenges for fine-grained perception tasks. In this work, we propose an ultra-lightweight, stream-based event-to-event super-resolution method based on Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), designed for real-time deployment on resource-constrained devices. To further reduce model size, we introduce a novel Dual-Forward Polarity-Split Event Encoding strategy that decouples positive and negative events into separate forward paths through a shared SNN. Furthermore, we propose a Learnable Spatio-temporal Polarity-aware Loss (LearnSTPLoss) that adaptively balances temporal, spatial, and polarity consistency using learnable uncertainty-based weights. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive super-resolution performance on multiple datasets while significantly reducing model size and inference time. The lightweight design enables embedding the module into event cameras or using it as an efficient front-end preprocessing for downstream vision tasks.

Ultralight Polarity-Split Neuromorphic SNN for Event-Stream Super-Resolution

Guidance is an emerging concept that improves the empirical performance of real-time, sub-optimal multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) methods. It offers additional information to MAPF algorithms to mitigate congestion on a global scale by considering the collective behavior of all agents across the entire workspace. This global perspective helps reduce agents' waiting times, thereby improving overall coordination efficiency. In contrast, this study explores an alternative approach: providing local guidance in the vicinity of each agent. While such localized methods involve recomputation as agents move and may appear computationally demanding, we empirically demonstrate that supplying informative spatiotemporal cues to the planner can significantly improve solution quality without exceeding a moderate time budget. When applied to LaCAM, a leading configuration-based solver, this form of guidance establishes a new performance frontier for MAPF.

Local Guidance for Configuration-Based Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Quantization is a pivotal technique for enhancing communication efficiency in Federated Learning (FL). Traditional quantization methods often set uniform intervals, may fail to adequately characterize non-uniform data distributions, thus leading to substantial estimation errors and degrated model performance. Non-uniform quantization can better solve the problem. However, when applied to FL, it would bring additional communication overheads for the alignment of parameter distributions among distributed models. To address this issue, we propose Bisection Interval Quantization (BIQ), a novel non-uniform quantization framework for FL with great communication efficiency. In particular, BIQ works by optimizing the interval selection through recursive bisection among distributed clients without extra parameter communication. For scenarios involving amounts of boundary inputs, we further design Weighted Bisection Interval Quantization (WBIQ), which incorporates maximum likelihood estimation to refine boundary value reconstruction to enhance the estimation quality of boundary inputs. Our theoretical analysis rigorously establishes, for the first time under biased quantization conditions, that both BIQ and WBIQ achieve tighter error bounds and enhanced stability. Extensive experiments validate that both BIQ and WBIQ significantly accelerate the convergence of FL model training when compared to the state-of-the-art quantizers under both convex and non-convex settings.

BIQ: Bisection Interval Quantization for Communication-efficient Federated Learning

Accurate prediction of compound protein interactions (CPIs) is crucial for drug discovery. 
However, existing deep learning-based methods suffer from hidden biases and poor cross-domain generalization, leading to spurious correlations and inadequate representation of unseen compound-protein pairs. 
To address these limitations, we propose FuseMine, a multimodal deep learning framework that jointly leverages molecular structures and biological sequences for reliable CPI prediction.
Specifically, FuseMine adopting a dual-representation strategy for each molecule. It employs a convolutional encoder to capture structural features, combined with pretrained large language models for extracting semantic information from sequences. We propose a novel Multi-modal Feature Orchestration Aggregation (MFOA) module that enables deep and synergistic fusion between the structural features and the sequential semantics of molecules, effectively capturing the complementary patterns across modalities. Additionally, we design a Reduction Differential Feature Mining (RDFM) module to further enhance the representation of discriminative features, thereby improving the model’s generalization capability. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both intra-domain and cross-domain scenarios. These results highlight the synergistic value of combining structural and sequential data for CPIs. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FuseMine.

FuseMine: Robust Multi-Modal Compound-Protein Interaction Prediction via Differential Attention Feature Mining

Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars can measure subtle chest wall oscillations to enable non-contact heartbeat sensing. However, traditional radar-based heartbeat sensing methods face performance degradation due to noise. Learning-based radar methods achieve better noise robustness but require costly labeled signals for supervised training. To overcome these limitations, we propose the first unsupervised framework for radar-based heartbeat sensing via Augmented Pseudo-Label and Noise Contrast (Radar-APLANC). We propose to use both the heartbeat range and noise range within the radar range matrix to construct the positive and negative samples, respectively, for improved noise robustness. Our Noise-Contrastive Triplet (NCT) loss only utilizes positive samples, negative samples, and pseudo-label signals generated by the traditional radar method, thereby avoiding dependence on expensive ground-truth physiological signals. We further design a pseudo-label augmentation approach featuring adaptive noise-aware label selection to improve pseudo-label signal quality. Extensive experiments on the Equipleth dataset and our collected radar dataset demonstrate that our unsupervised method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods.

Radar-APLANC: Unsupervised Radar-based Heartbeat Sensing via Augmented Pseudo-Label and Noise Contrast

User interface (UI) design is an iterative process in which designers progressively refine their work with design software such as Figma or Sketch. Recent advances in vision–language models (VLMs) with tool invocation suggest these models can operate the design software to edit a UI design through iteration. Understanding and enhancing this capacity is important, as it highlights VLMs’ potential to collaborate with designers within conventional software. However, as no existing benchmark evaluates the tool-based design performance, the capacity remains unknown. To address this, we introduce CANVAS, a benchmark for VLMs on tool-based user interface design. Our benchmark contains 598 tool-based design tasks paired with ground-truth references sampled from 3.3K mobile UI designs across 30 function-based categories (e.g., onboarding, messaging). In each task, a VLM updates the design step-by-step, through context-based tool invocations (e.g., create a rectangle as a button background), linked to design software. Specifically, CANVAS incorporates two task types: (i) design replication evaluates the ability to reproduce a whole UI screen; (ii) design modification evaluates the ability to modify a specific part of an existing screen. Results suggest that leading models exhibit more strategic tool invocations, improving design quality. Furthermore, we identify common error patterns models exhibit, guiding future work in enhancing tool-based design capabilities.

CANVAS: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Models on Tool-Based User Interface Design

Text-attributed graphs, where nodes are enriched with textual attributes, have become a powerful tool for modeling real-world networks such as citation, social, and transaction networks. However, existing methods for learning from these graphs often assume that the distributions of training and testing data are consistent. This assumption leads to significant performance degradation when faced with out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this paper, we address the challenge of node-level OOD detection in text-attributed graphs, with the goal of maintaining accurate node classification while simultaneously identifying OOD nodes. We propose a novel approach, LLM-Enhanced Energy Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text-Attributed Graphs (LECT), which integrates large language models (LLMs) and energy-based contrastive learning. The proposed method involves generating high-quality OOD samples by leveraging the semantic understanding and contextual knowledge of LLMs to create dependency-aware pseudo-OOD nodes, and applying contrastive learning based on energy functions to distinguish between in-distribution (IND) and OOD nodes. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets, where our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving both high classification accuracy and robust OOD detection capabilities.

LLM-Enhanced Energy Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text-Attributed Graphs

Recent unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have shown great success in addressing classical domain shifts (e.g., synthetic-to-real), but they still suffer under complex shifts (e.g. geographical shift), where both the background and object appearances differ significantly across domains. Prior works showed that the language modality can help in the adaptation process, exhibiting more robustness to such complex shifts. In this paper, we introduce TRUST, a novel UDA approach that exploits the robustness of the language modality to guide the adaptation of a vision model. TRUST generates pseudo-labels for target samples from their captions and introduces a novel uncertainty estimation strategy that uses normalised CLIP similarity scores to estimate the uncertainty of the generated pseudo-labels. Such estimated uncertainty is then used to reweight the classification loss, mitigating the adverse effects of wrong pseudo-labels obtained from low-quality captions. To further increase the robustness of the vision model, we propose a multimodal soft-contrastive learning loss that aligns the vision and language feature spaces, by leveraging captions to guide the contrastive training of the vision model on target images. In our contrastive loss, each pair of images acts as both a positive and a negative pair and their feature representations are attracted and repulsed with a strength proportional to the similarity of their captions. This solution avoids the need for hardly determining positive and negative pairs, which is critical in the UDA setting. Our approach outperforms previous methods, setting the new state-of-the-art on classical (DomainNet) and complex (GeoNet) domain shifts.

TRUST: Leveraging Text Robustness for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In multi-view clustering (MVC), complementary and consistent information from multiple views is integrated to improve clustering performance. However, inter-view sample correspondences may be partially missing in practice, making it difficult to learn cross-view consistency, which leads to the partially view-aligned problem (PVP). Most existing partially view-aligned clustering (PVC) methods first learn cross-view consistent representations based on known alignments, and then recover missing correspondences by measuring cross-view similarity between samples. However, such an indirect alignment recovery process depends on high-quality consistent representations and lacks effective utilization of known alignments, often resulting in sub-optimal outcomes. To address this, we propose a novel direct alignment recovery perspective, instantiated as K-Nearest Neighbors Direct Alignment (KNNDA). Specifically, we first construct an alignment domain by mapping the aligned neighbors of each unaligned sample into the aligned view. Then, we compute alignment confidence based on the similarity between known aligned pairs of neighbors. In particular, we use a dynamic threshold to filter out unreliable alignments. Finally, new alignments are generated within the high-confidence alignment domain. Contrastive loss is used to learn consistent representations for clustering. Comprehensive experiments on several real-world datasets show the effectiveness and superiority of our module in partially view-aligned clustering.

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