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Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD) aims to adapt a source-pretrained object detector to a target domain without access to source data. However, existing SFOD methods predominantly rely on internal knowledge from the source model, which limits their capacity to generalize across domains and often results in biased pseudo-labels, thereby hindering both transferability and discriminability. In contrast, Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), pretrained on massive and diverse data, exhibit strong perception capabilities and broad generalization, yet their potential remains largely untapped in the SFOD setting. In this paper, we propose a novel SFOD framework that leverages VFMs as external knowledge sources to jointly enhance feature alignment and label quality. Specifically, we design three VFM-based modules: (1) Patch-weighted Global Feature Alignment (PGFA) distills global features from VFMs using patch-similarity–based weighting to enhance global feature transferability; (2) Prototype-based Instance Feature Alignment (PIFA) performs instance-level contrastive learning guided by momentum-updated VFM prototypes; and (3) Dual-source Enhanced Pseudo-label Fusion (DEPF) fuses predictions from detection VFMs and teacher models via an entropy-aware strategy to yield more reliable supervision. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art SFOD performance, validating the effectiveness of integrating VFMs to simultaneously improve transferability and discriminability.

AAAI 2026

Beyond Boundaries: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models for Source-Free Object Detection

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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.

Multiplex imaging is revolutionizing pathology by enabling the simultaneous visualization of multiple biomarkers within tissue samples, providing molecular-level insights that traditional hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining cannot provide. However, the complexity and cost of multiplex data acquisition have hindered its widespread adoption. Additionally, most existing large repositories of H&E images lack corresponding multiplex images, limiting opportunities for multi-modal analysis. To address these challenges, we leverage recent advances in latent diffusion models (LDMs), which excel at modeling complex data distributions utilizing their powerful priors for fine-tuning to a target domain. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for virtual multiplex staining that utilizes pretrained LDM parameters to generate multiplex images from H&E images using a conditional diffusion model. Our approach enables marker-by-marker generation by conditioning the diffusion model on each marker, while sharing the same architecture across all markers. To tackle the challenge of varying pixel value distributions across different marker stains and to improve inference speed, we fine-tune the model for single-step sampling, enhancing both color contrast fidelity and inference efficiency through pixel-level loss functions. We validate our framework on two publicly available datasets, notably demonstrating its effectiveness in generating up to 18 different marker types with improved accuracy, a substantial increase over the 2-3 marker types achieved in previous approaches. This validation highlights
the potential of our framework, pioneering virtual multiplex staining. Finally, this paper bridges the gap between H&E and multiplex imaging, potentially enabling retrospective studies and large-scale analyses of existing H&E image repositories.

Virtual Multiplex Staining for Histological Images Using a Marker-Wise Conditioned Diffusion Model

Dense video captioning jointly localizes and captions salient events in untrimmed videos. Recent methods primarily focus on leveraging additional prior knowledge and advanced multi-task architectures to achieve competitive performance.
However, these pipelines rely on implicit modeling that uses frame-level or fragmented video features, failing to capture the temporal coherence across event sequences and comprehensive semantics within visual contexts. To address this, we propose an explicit temporal-semantic modeling framework called Context-Aware Cross-Modal Interaction (CACMI), which leverages both latent temporal characteristics within videos and linguistic semantics from text corpus. Specifically, our model consists of two core components: Cross-modal Frame Aggregation aggregates relevant frames to extract temporally coherent, event-aligned textual features through cross-modal retrieval; and Context-aware Feature Enhancement utilizes query-guided attention to integrate visual dynamics with pseudo-event semantics. Extensive experiments on the ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 datasets demonstrate that CACMI achieves the state-of-the-art performance on dense video captioning task.

Explicit Temporal-Semantic Modeling for Dense Video Captioning via Context-Aware Cross-Modal Interaction

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning and generation across domains, but still struggle with identifying and diagnosing complex errors. This stems mainly from training objectives that prioritize correct answers, limiting exposure to and learning from errors. While recent studies have begun to address this by introducing error signals, most rely on shallow, static errors, restricting improvement in deep diagnostic ability. To overcome this, we propose Hide and Seek Game (HSG), a dynamic adversarial framework for error generation and diagnosis, and evaluate it on mathematical problem-solving. HSG involves two adversarial roles: Sneaky, which hides by generating subtle, deceptive reasoning errors, and Diagnosis, which seeks to accurately detect them. Through adversarial co-evolution, both error stealth and diagnostic precision are enhanced. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning datasets demonstrate that HSG significantly boosts error diagnosis, achieving 16.8\%--31.4\% higher accuracy than baselines like GPT-4o. We also release a challenging dataset of deceptive errors and diagnostic annotations as a benchmark for future research.

Hide and Seek with LLMs: An Adversarial Game for Sneaky Error Generation and Self-Improving Diagnosis

Large Language Models (LLMs) with long chain-of-thought (CoT) capability, termed Reasoning Models, demonstrate superior intricate problem-solving abilities through multi-step long CoT reasoning.
To create a dual-capability model with long CoT capability and domain-specific knowledge without substantial computational and data costs, model merging emerges as a highly resource-efficient method. 
However, significant challenges lie in merging domain-specific LLMs with long CoT ones since nowadays merging methods suffer from reasoning capability degradation, even gibberish output and output collapse. 
To overcome this, we introduce \textbf{RCP-Merging}: Merging Long Chain-of-Thought Models with Domain-Specific Models by Considering \textbf{R}easoning \textbf{C}apability as \textbf{P}rior, 
a novel merging framework designed to integrate domain-specific LLMs with long CoT capability, meanwhile maintaining model performance in the original domain.
Treating reasoning model weights as foundational prior, our method utilizes a reasoning capability indicator to preserve core long CoT capability model weights while selectively merging essential domain-specific weights. 
We conducted extensive experiments on Qwen2.5-7B, Llama3.1-8B, and Qwen2.5-1.5B models in BioMedicine and Finance domains.
Our results show that RCP-Merging successfully merges a reasoning model with domain-specific ones, improving domain task performance by 9.5\% and 9.2\% over state-of-the-art methods, without significantly harming the original long CoT reasoning capability.

RCP-Merging: Merging Long Chain-of-Thought Models with Domain-Specific Models by Considering Reasoning Capability as Prior

Near surface temperature inversions are periods in which a low layer of warm air is trapped between cooler air higher up in the atmosphere and dense cooler air below it near the surface level. By causing cooler air to pool near the surface level, inversions can have detrimental effects for crop growers, including frost, increased moisture, and pesticide drift. As a result, predicting the occurrence and magnitude of these inversions yields substantial benefits for growers. We introduce a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for temperature inversion forecasting that is able to effectively predict localized, near surface temperature inversions in advance such that growers can take actions to mitigate the detrimental effects. We show a substantial performance gain over a deployed temperature inversion forecasting system, and include a series of ablations that show the benefit of using publicly available terrain-specific feature information when modeling inversions at this scale.

Localized Near Surface Temperature Inversion Forecasting Using Long Short-Term Memory

Through reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome correctness rewards, large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated substantial success on complex reasoning tasks, leveraging scaled inference computation. However, the sparse and one-sided reward, focused solely on final correctness, limit its ability to provide detailed supervision over internal reasoning process. This deficiency leads to suboptimal reasoning quality, manifesting as issues like over-thinking, under-thinking, redundant-thinking, and disordered-thinking. Inspired by the recent progress in LRM self-rewarding, we introduce a self-rewriting framework, where a model rewrites its own reasoning texts, and subsequently learns from the rewritten reasoning to improve the internal thought process quality. For algorithm design, we propose a selective rewriting approach wherein only "simple" samples, defined by the model's consistent correctness, are rewritten, thereby preserving all original loss of GRPO. For practical implementation, we compile rewriting and vanilla generating within one single batch, maintaining the scalability of the RL algorithm and introducing only 10\% overhead. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks with different model sizes validate the effectiveness of self-rewriting. In terms of the accuracy-length tradeoff, the self-rewriting approach achieves improved accuracy (+0.6) with substantially shorter reasoning (-46\%) even without explicit instructions to truncate reasoning, outperforming exsiting strong baselines. In terms of internal quality, self-rewriting achieves significantly higher scores (+7.2) under the LLM-as-a-judge metric. All relevant code and data will be released.

Incorporating Self-Rewriting into Large Language Model Reasoning Reinforcement

Large Language Models (LLMs) surprised the world with their ability to mimic humans in writing and are starting to be used as simulations of human writers for various kinds of linguistic analysis. However, these analyses rest on the belief that LLMs are good density models, that accurately capture the underlying probability distribution of the language. In this paper, we question this basic assumption and try to evaluate language models on their density modelling capabilities. Since a ground truth does not exist for the probability distribution of any natural language, we come up with a synthetic language made up of decimal numbers written in words in English. We train language models from scratch on various probability distributions over this synthetic language and compare the distributions learned by the models with the original ones. Experiments show that language models can learn underlying probability distributions across a wide range of cases, but they fail when those distributions depend on deep semantic properties of numbers that cannot be inferred from syntactic patterns. Additionally, we observed a strong bias in the models toward numbers that frequently occur as substrings within other numbers. In natural language models, this bias can impact downstream tasks that rely on model-generated probabilities.

Are Language Models Any Good at Density Modeling?

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown significant promise in automated portfolio management; however, effectively balancing risk and return remains a central challenge, as many models fail to adapt to dynamically changing market conditions. In this paper, we propose MARS, a novel hierarchical deep RL framework designed to explicitly address this limitation through a multi-agent, risk-aware approach. Instead of a single monolithic model, MARS employs a Heterogeneous Agent Ensemble where each agent possesses a unique, intrinsic risk profile. This profile is enforced by a dedicated Safety-Critic network and a specific risk-tolerance threshold, allowing agents to specialize in behaviors ranging from capital preservation to aggressive growth. To navigate different market regimes, a high-level Meta-Adaptive Controller (MAC) learns to dynamically orchestrate the ensemble. By adjusting its reliance on conservative versus aggressive agents, the MAC effectively lowers portfolio volatility during downturns and seeks higher returns in bull markets, thus minimizing maximum drawdown and enhancing overall stability. This two-tiered structure allows MARS to generate a disciplined and adaptive portfolio that is robust to market fluctuations. The framework achieves a superior balance between risk and return by leveraging behavioral diversity rather than explicit market-feature engineering. Experiments on major international stock indexes, including periods of significant market volatility and downturns, demonstrate the efficacy of our framework on risk-adjusted criteria, significantly reducing maximum drawdown and volatility while maintaining competitive returns.

MARS: A Meta-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning Framework for Risk-Aware Multi-Agent Portfolio Management

Large Language Models excel at semantic reasoning through high-dimensional geometry but systematically struggle with numerical reasoning due to the destruction of geometric continuity during tokenization. Traditional tokenization methods fragment numerical values into arbitrary tokens, undermining their inherent geometric and topological relationships. We introduce GeoNum, a geometrically coherent numerical embedding that addresses this fundamental challenge through polar coordinate representation. GeoNum employs polar decomposition to naturally decouple discrete ordinality for classification from continuous periodicity for regression, enabling unified discrete-continuous learning that preserves numerical cognition's dual nature. Through three-stage progressive training, GeoNum first learns continuous numerical representations via self-supervised reconstruction, then aligns these embeddings with textual representations through projection learning, and finally integrates into pre-trained LLMs via parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate GeoNum consistently surpasses baseline and state-of-the-art numerical encoding methods across multiple datasets, achieving substantial performance gains particularly in high-precision arithmetic tasks (e.g., ACC@0.1 improvements up to 48.6\%). GeoNum transforms numerical processing from fragmented tokenization to coherent geometric representation, enabling principled numerical understanding in language models.

GeoNum: Bridging Numerical Continuity and Language Semantics via Geometric Embedding

Recent advancements in Audio-Video Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) have enhanced its capabilities in tasks like audio-visual question answering, and multimodal dialogue systems. 
Video and audio introduce an extended temporal dimension, resulting in a larger key-value (KV) cache compared to static image embedding. 
A naive optimization strategy is to selectively focus on and retain KV caches of audio or video based on task. However, in the experiment, we observed that the attention of AV-LLMs to various modalities in the high layers is not strictly dependent on the task. At a deeper level, the attention of AV-LLMs shifts more towards the video modality. In addition, we also found that directly integrating temporal KV of audio and spatial-temporal KV of video may lead to information confusion and significant performance degradation of AV-LLMs. If audio and video are processed indiscriminately, it may also lead to excessive compression or reservation of a certain modality, thereby disrupting the alignment between modalities. 
To address these challenges, we propose AccKV, an Adaptive-Focusing and Cross-Calibration KV cache optimization framework designed specifically for efficient AV-LLMs inference. Our method is based on layer adaptive focusing technology, selectively focusing on key modalities according to the characteristics of different layers, and enhances the recognition of heavy hitter tokens through attention redistribution. In addition, we propose a Cross-Calibration technique that first integrates inefficient KV caches within the audio and video modalities, and then aligns low-priority modalities with high-priority modalities to selectively evict KV cache of low-priority modalities. 
The experimental results show that AccKV can significantly improve the computational efficiency of AV-LLMs while maintaining accuracy.

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