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We focus on the automatic evaluation of image captions in both reference-based and reference-free settings. Existing metrics based on large language models (LLMs) favor their own generations; therefore, the neutrality is in question. Most LLM-free metrics do not suffer from such an issue, whereas they do not always demonstrate high performance. To address these issues, we propose Pearl, an LLM-free supervised metric for image captioning, which is applicable to both reference-based and reference-free settings. We introduce a novel mechanism that learns the representations of image--caption and caption--caption similarities. 
Furthermore, we construct a human-annotated dataset for image captioning metrics that comprises approximately 333k human judgments collected from 2,360 annotators across over 75k images. 
Pearl outperformed other existing LLM-free metrics on the Composite, Flickr8K-Expert, Flickr8K-CF, Nebula, and FOIL datasets in both reference-based and reference-free settings.

AAAI 2026

LLM-Free Image Captioning Evaluation in Reference-Flexible Settings

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.

Fair clustering is crucial for mitigating bias in unsupervised learning, yet existing algorithms often suffer from quadratic or super-quadratic computational complexity, rendering them impractical for large-scale datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Anchor-based Fair Clustering Framework (AFCF), a novel, general, and plug-and-play framework that empowers arbitrary fair clustering algorithms with linear-time scalability. Our approach first selects a small but representative set of anchors using a novel fair sampling strategy. Then, any off-the-shelf fair clustering algorithm can be applied to this small anchor set. The core of our framework lies in a novel anchor graph construction module, where we formulate an optimization problem to propagate labels while preserving fairness. This is achieved through a carefully designed group-label joint constraint, which we prove theoretically ensures that the fairness of the final clustering on the entire dataset matches that of the anchor clustering. We solve this optimization efficiently using an ADMM-based algorithm. Extensive experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that AFCF drastically accelerates state-of-the-art methods, which reduces computational time by orders of magnitude while maintaining strong clustering performance and fairness guarantees.

A General Anchor-Based Framework for Scalable Fair Clustering

Despite recent advancements in font generation, practitioners still grapple with a laborious trial-and-error workflow. To streamline this, we propose OneFont, an end-to-end framework that interprets user intents via free-form dialogue, seamlessly integrating both glyph synthesis and refinement modules. We introduce the Font with Thought (FwT) paradigm, reframing font design as a reasoning task where the model plans actions and articulates design rationales. OneFont’s core planner is trained via a two-stage regimen to master this paradigm. First, we instill reasoning abilities via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a new, comprehensive benchmark of 1,500 font families we built. Second, we refine the model's policy with a novel reinforcement learning algorithm, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), guided by a hybrid reward that assesses visual fidelity, rationale coherence, and transformation correctness.
Extensive experiments show OneFont significantly surpasses existing methods in design quality and stroke precision across diverse scripts, validated on our new benchmark. We will release our dataset, code, and models.

OneFont: A Unified Agent for End-to-End Font Creation

Open-domain visual entity recognition aims to identify and link entities depicted in images to a vast and evolving set of real-world concepts, such as those found in Wikidata. Unlike conventional classification tasks with fixed label sets, it operates under open-set conditions, where most target entities are unseen during training and exhibit long-tail distributions. 
This makes the task inherently challenging due to limited supervision, high visual ambiguity, and the need for semantic disambiguation. In this work, we propose a **Know**ledge-guided **Co**ntrastive **L**earning (KnowCoL) framework that combines both images and text descriptions into a shared semantic space grounded by structured information from Wikidata. 
By abstracting visual and textual inputs to a conceptual level, the model leverages entity descriptions, type hierarchies, and relational context to support zero-shot entity recognition.
We evaluate our approach on the OVEN benchmark, a large-scale open-domain visual recognition dataset with Wikidata IDs as the label space. Our experiments show that using visual, textual, and structured knowledge greatly improves accuracy, especially for rare and unseen entities. 
Our smallest model improves the accuracy on unseen entities by 10.5% compared to the state-of-the-art, despite being 35$\times$ smaller.

Seeing and Knowing in the Wild: Open-domain Visual Entity Recognition with Large-scale Knowledge Graphs via Contrastive Learning

Despite the impressive performance of large multimodal models (LMMs) in high-level visual tasks, their capacity for image quality assessment (IQA) remains limited. One main reason is that LMMs are primarily trained for high-level tasks (e.g., image captioning), emphasizing unified image semantics extraction under varied quality. Such semantic-aware yet quality-insensitive perception bias inevitably leads to a heavy reliance on image semantics when those LMMs are forced for quality rating. In this paper, instead of retraining or tuning an LMM costly, we propose a training-free debiasing framework, in which the image quality prediction is rectified by mitigating the bias caused by image semantics. Specifically, we first explore several semantic-preserving distortions that can significantly degrade image quality while maintaining identifiable semantics. By applying these specific distortions to the query/test images, we ensure that the degraded images are recognized as poor quality while their semantics remain. During quality inference, both a query image and its corresponding degraded version are fed to the LMM along with a prompt indicating that the query image quality should be inferred under the condition that the degraded one is deemed poor quality. This prior condition effectively aligns the LMM’s quality perception, as all degraded images are consistently rated as poor quality, regardless of their semantic difference. Finally, the quality scores of the query image inferred under different prior conditions (degraded versions) are aggregated using a conditional probability model. Extensive experiments on various IQA datasets show that our debiasing framework could consistently enhance the LMM performance and the code will be publicly available.

Mitigating Perception Bias: A Training-Free Approach to Enhance LMM for Image Quality Assessment

The strong lottery ticket hypothesis (SLTH) conjectures that high-performing subnetworks, called strong lottery tickets (SLTs), are hidden in randomly initialized neural networks.
Although recent theoretical studies have established the SLTH across various neural architectures, the SLTH for transformer architectures still lacks theoretical understanding.
In particular, the current theory of the SLTH does not yet account for the multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism, a core component of transformers.
To address this gap, we introduce a theoretical analysis of the existence of SLTs within MHAs.
We prove that, if a randomly initialized MHA of $H$ heads and input dimension $d$ has the hidden dimension $O(d\log(Hd^{3/2}))$ for the key and value, it contains an SLT that approximates an arbitrary MHA with the same input dimension with high probability.
Furthermore, by leveraging this theory for MHAs, we extend the SLTH to transformers without normalization layers.
We empirically validate our theoretical findings, demonstrating that the approximation error between the SLT within a source model (MHA and transformer) and an approximate target counterpart decreases exponentially by increasing the hidden dimension of the source model.

The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Multi-Head Attention Mechanisms

Structured light (SL) 3D reconstruction captures the precise surface shape of objects, providing high-accuracy 3D data essential for industrial inspection and cultural heritage digitization. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations: reliance on scene-specific calibration with manual parameter tuning, and optimization frameworks tailored to specific SL patterns, limiting their generalizability across varied scenarios. We propose General and Unified Structured Light Optimization (GUSLO), a novel framework addressing these issues through two coordinated innovations: (1) single-shot calibration via 2D triangulation-based interpolation that converts sparse matches into dense correspondence fields, and (2) artifact-aware photometric adaptation via explicit transfer functions, balancing generalization and color fidelity. We conduct diverse experiments covering binary, speckle, and color-coded settings. Results show that GUSLO consistently improves accuracy and cross-encoding robustness over conventional methods in challenging industrial and cultural scenarios.

GUSLO: General and Unified Structured Light Optimization

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently hallucinate by over-committing to spurious visual cues. Prior remedies—Visual and Instruction Contrastive Decoding (VCD, ICD)—mitigate this issue, yet the mechanism remains opaque. We first empirically show that their improvements systematically coincide with redistributions of cross-modal attention. Building on this insight, we propose Attention-Steerable Contrastive Decoding (ASCD), which directly steers the attention scores during decoding. ASCD combines (i) positive steering, which amplifies automatically mined text-centric heads—stable within a model and robust across domains—with (ii) negative steering, which dampens on-the-fly identified critical visual tokens. The method incurs negligible runtime/memory overhead and requires no additional training. Across five MLLM backbones and three decoding schemes, ASCD reduces hallucination on POPE, CHAIR, and MMHal-Bench by up to 38.2% while improving accuracy on standard VQA benchmarks, including MMMU, MM-VET, ScienceQA, TextVQA, and GQA. These results position attention steering as a simple, model-agnostic, and principled route to safer, more faithful multimodal generation.

ASCD: Attention-Steerable Contrastive Decoding for Reducing Hallucination in MLLM

Few-shot Video Object Detection addresses the challenge of detecting novel objects in videos with limited labeled examples, overcoming the constraints of traditional detection methods that require extensive training data. This task presents key challenges, including maintaining temporal consistency across frames affected by occlusion and appearance variations, and achieving novel object generalization without relying on complex region proposals. Our novel object-aware temporal modeling approach addresses these challenges by incorporating a filtering mechanism that selectively propagates high-confidence object features across frames. This enables efficient feature progression, reduces noise accumulation, and enhances detection accuracy in few-shot scenarios. By utilizing few-shot trained detection and classification heads with focused feature propagation, we achieve robust temporal consistency without depending on explicit object tube proposals. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, with significant improvements of 4.3%, 5.9%, 4.0%, and 5.9% in AP on FSVOD-500, FSYTV-40, VidOR, and VidVRD datasets, respectively, in the 5-shot setup. Our approach maintains consistent performance gains across 1-shot, 3-shot, and 10-shot configurations, validating its effectiveness across diverse evaluation scenarios. We will make our code base public upon acceptance of the work.

Temporal Object-Aware Vision Transformer for Few-Shot Video Object Detection

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems are a cornerstone of modern threat detection and endpoint protection. However, conventional heuristic- and learning-based approaches often fail to address sophisticated and continuously evolving attack patterns. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for behavioral analysis in EDR logs, yet their effectiveness is hindered by the high volume of events and the interleaved nature of behavior sequences---posing significant challenges for long-context modeling and stealthy threat detection. To address these issues, we propose HyperGLLM, a novel detection framework that introduces hypergraph reasoning into LLMs. It first constructs an attribute-value level relation-aware graph to model low-order structural semantics while reducing textual redundancy. Then, it introduces a differential hypergraph module with multi-granularity clustering to capture high-order behavioral dependencies embedded in interleaved events and reinforce threat semantics. Finally, the hypergraph representations are aligned with an LLM for efficient contextual reasoning over potential malicious behaviors. To facilitate empirical evaluation, we curate EDR3.6B-63F, a large-scale EDR dataset containing 3.6 billion events across 63 distinct behavior families. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyperGLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by reducing the false alarm rate to 1.67\%, achieving 94.65\% accuracy across 63 behavior families, and improving the modeling efficiency of LLMs on long EDR logs. Our framework and dataset provide a solid foundation for future research and support the development of advanced detection solutions in endpoint security.

HyperGLLM: An Efficient Framework for Endpoint Threat Detection via Hypergraph-Enhanced Large Language Models

Specifying informative and dense reward functions remains a pivotal challenge in Reinforcement Learning, as it directly affects the efficiency of agent training. In this work, we harness the expressive power of quantitative Linear Temporal Logic on finite traces (($\text{LTL}_f[\mathcal{F}]$)) to synthesize reward monitors that generate a dense stream of rewards for runtime-observable state trajectories. By providing nuanced feedback during training, these monitors guide agents toward optimal behaviour and help mitigate the well-known issue of sparse rewards under long-horizon decision making, which arises under the Boolean semantics dominating the current literature. Our framework is algorithm-agnostic and only relies on a state labelling function, and naturally accommodates specifying non-Markovian properties. Empirical results show that our quantitative monitors consistently subsume and, depending on the environment, outperform Boolean monitors in maximizing a quantitative measure of task completion and in reducing convergence time.

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