Singapore

Recovering fine-grained details in extremely low-light images remains challenging due to severe structural information loss and noise corruption. Existing enhancement methods often fail to preserve intricate details and sharp edges, limiting their effectiveness in downstream applications like text and edge detection. To address these deficiencies, we propose an efficient dual-stage approach centered on detail recovery for low-light images. In the first stage, we introduce a Residual Fourier-Guided Module (RFGM) that effectively restores global illumination in the frequency domain. RFGM captures inter-stage and inter-channel dependencies through residual connections, providing robust priors for high-fidelity frequency processing while mitigating error accumulation risks from unreliable priors. The second stage employs complementary Mamba modules specifically designed for textural structure refinement: (1) Patch Mamba operates on channel-concatenated non-downsampled patches, meticulously modeling pixel-level correlations to enhance fine-grained details without resolution loss. (2) Grad Mamba explicitly focuses on high-gradient regions, alleviating state decay in state space models and prioritizing reconstruction of sharp edges and boundaries. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and downstream applications demonstrate that our method significantly improves detail recovery performance while maintaining efficiency. Crucially, the proposed modules are lightweight and can be seamlessly integrated into existing Fourier-based frameworks with minimal computational overhead.

AAAI 2026

Beyond Illumination: Fine-Grained Detail Preservation in Extreme Dark Image Restoration

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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.

Snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) captures multispectral images (MSIs) using a single coded two-dimensional (2-D) measurement, but reconstructing high-fidelity MSIs from these compressed inputs remains a fundamentally ill-posed challenge. While diffusion-based reconstruction methods have recently raised the bar for quality, they face critical limitations: a lack of large-scale MSI training data, adverse domain shifts from RGB-pretrained models, and inference inefficiencies due to multi-step sampling. These drawbacks restrict their practicality in real-world applications. In contrast to existing methods—which either follow costly iterative refinement or adapt subspace-based embeddings for diffusion models (e.g. DiffSCI, PSR‑SCI)—we introduce a fundamentally different paradigm: a self-supervised One-Step Diffusion (OSD) framework designed specifically for SCI. The key novelty lies in using a single-step diffusion refiner to correct an initial reconstruction, eliminating iterative denoising entirely while preserving generative quality. Moreover, we adopt a self-supervised equivariant learning strategy to train both the predictor and refiner directly from raw 2-D measurements, enabling generalization to unseen domains without ground-truth MSI. To further address limited MSI data, we design a band-selection–driven distillation strategy that transfers core generative priors from large-scale RGB datasets, effectively bridging the domain gap. Extensive experiments confirm that our approach sets a new standard—yielding PSNR gains of 3.44dB, 1.61dB, and 0.33dB on the Harvard, NTIRE, and ICVL datasets respectively—while cutting reconstruction time by 97.5\%, from 8.9s to just 0.22s per image. This leap in efficiency and adaptability makes our method a major advancement in SCI reconstruction—both accurate and practical for real-world deployment.

Self-Supervised One-Step Diffusion Refinement for Snapshot Compressive Imaging

Existing community search methods heavily rely on labeled data or predefined structures, thus fail to capture obscure and dynamic community boundaries in open-world heterogeneous networks, leading to poor adaptability. They also ignore modeling behavioral patterns, resulting in poor search performance. To solve the above issues, this work formally defines the unsupervised behavior-driven community search problem for heterogeneous graphs and designs dual-view Contrastive Learning-based Unsupervised framework for Heterogeneous graph Community Search (CLUHCS). From two perspectives, CLUHCS designs a relation view to encode local community cohesion, as well as a meta-path view to capture global behavior semantics. By using PathSim averaging strategy to generate positive samples and self-supervised signals, we can completely eliminate label dependency. Then, contrastive training is leveraged to automatically learn community representations and solve the open community boundary ambiguity challenge. Furthermore, by capturing behavior patterns, the meta-path behavior modeling flexibly characterizes the formation mechanism of heterogeneous communities. Experiments on three datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of CLUHCS. CLUHCS significantly improves F1-score by 52.7\% over the unsupervised baseline FCS-HGNN and by 41.5\% over the supervised method TransZero.

CLUHCS:Dual-View Contrastive Learning Enabled Unsupervised Heterogeneous Community Search with Meta-Path Behavior Modeling

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated impressive performance across a range of reasoning tasks by generating intermediate thoughts. However, these models can suffer from overthinking—generating excessive tokens that contribute little to final accuracy while increasing inference cost. To mitigate this, we propose TIV (Thought Injection via Vectors), an innovative framework that compresses token-level reasoning into compact vectors without sacrificing performance. Rather than generating explicit thoughts, TIV injects learnable vectors into the post-attention hidden states of the final token across Transformer layers, enabling implicit and lightweight reasoning. We further introduce a two-stage reinforcement learning strategy: the first stage calibrates the model's reasoning distribution, and the second distills it into a vector-based policy optimized for both accuracy and brevity. Experiments on three reasoning benchmarks show that TIV preserves over 99% of the original accuracy while reducing output length by more than 65% on average, reaching up to 80% in some cases. Moreover, TIV consistently achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods, distinguishing itself as a state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach for efficient reasoning in LRMs.

TIV: Thought Injection via Vectors for Efficient Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models

Collage is a powerful medium for visual expression, traditionally demanding significant artistic expertise and manual effort. Existing methods often struggle with a trade-off between semantic expression and the visual fidelity of the constituent images. To address this, we introduce SCORE (Semantic Collage by Optimizing Rendered Elements), a novel text-driven framework that automates the creation of semantically rich and structurally sound collages. Our key innovation is to shift the optimization process entirely into the image space. By employing a differentiable renderer, we can backpropagate gradients from a powerful, pre-trained text-to-image model directly to the spatial parameters, including position, rotation, and scale, of each image element. We leverage Variational Score Distillation (VSD) to provide robust semantic guidance from a text prompt, ensuring the final layout aligns with the desired concept. Crucially, our ''minimal editing'' principle preserves the integrity of the original elements by forgoing any content-level modifications. The layout is refined by a joint loss function that combines the VSD-based semantic loss with structural regularizers that penalize overlap and enforce boundary constraints. The output of SCORE is a parametric, structured representation that allows further editing and downstream use. Our work reduces the barrier to creative expression and provides a new, powerful paradigm for organizing visual contents. Code and models will be made publicly available upon publication.

SCORE: Semantic Collage by Optimizing Rendered Elements

Diffusion models have shown great promise in data generation, yet generating time series data remains challenging due to the need to capture complex temporal dependencies and structural patterns. In this paper, we present TSGDiff, a novel framework that rethinks time series generation from a graph-based perspective. Specifically, we represent time series as dynamic graphs, where edges are constructed based on Fourier spectrum characteristics and temporal dependencies. A graph neural network-based encoder-decoder architecture is employed to construct a latent space, enabling the diffusion process to model the structural representation distribution of time series effectively. Furthermore, we propose the Topological Structure Fidelity (Topo-FID) score, a graph-aware metric for assessing the structural similarity of time series graph representations. Topo-FID integrates two sub-metrics: Graph Edit Similarity, which quantifies differences in adjacency matrices, and Structural Entropy Similarity, which evaluates the entropy of node degree distributions. This comprehensive metric provides a more accurate assessment of structural fidelity in generated time series. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TSGDiff generates high-quality synthetic time series data generation, faithfully preserving temporal dependencies and structural integrity, thereby advancing the field of synthetic time series generation.

TSGDiff: Rethinking Synthetic Time Series Generation from a Pure Graph Perspective

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a leading framework for novel view synthesis, yet its core optimization challenges remain underexplored. We identify two key issues in 3DGS optimization: entrapment in suboptimal local optima and insufficient convergence quality. To address these, we propose Opt3DGS, a robust framework that enhances 3DGS through a two-stage optimization process of adaptive exploration and curvature-guided exploitation. In the exploration phase, an Adaptive Weighted Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) method enhances global search to escape local optima. In the exploitation phase, a Local Quasi-Newton Direction-guided Adam optimizer leverages curvature information for precise and efficient convergence. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that Opt3DGS achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality by refining the 3DGS optimization process without modifying its underlying representation.

Opt3DGS: Optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting with Adaptive Exploration and Curvature-Aware Exploitation

Open knowledge bases (e.g., websites) are widely adopted in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to provide supplementary knowledge (e.g., latest information). 
However, such sources inevitably contain biased or harmful content, and incorporating these untrusted contents into the RAG process introduces significant safety risks, including the degradation of LLM performance and the potential generation of harmful outputs.
Recent studies have shown that this vulnerability can be further amplified by adversarial poisoning attacks specifically targeting the knowledge sources.
Most existing methods primarily emphasize improving the accuracy and efficiency of RAG systems, usually overlooking these critical safety concerns.
In this paper, we propose a safety-aware retrieval framework (ShieldRAG) designed to augment language model generation by jointly optimizing for both relevance and safety in the retrieved knowledge content.
The core idea of ShieldRAGis to transfer the safety knowledge implicitly encoded in powerful LLMs into the retriever model through an adversarial knowledge alignment mechanism.
This can empower the retriever with the safety awareness, and adapt to the diverse and unknown distribution of unsafe content encountered in practical scenarios.
We evaluate ShieldRAG on seven real-world datasets using five widely-used LLMs and two state-of-the-art poisoning attack strategies. 
Experimental results show that our method substantially improves the robustness of RAG systems against unsafe knowledge sources, while maintaining competitive performance in terms of generation accuracy and efficiency.

ShieldRAG: Safeguarding Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Untrusted Knowledge Bases

Outlier detection (OD) aims to identify abnormal instances, known as outliers or anomalies, by learning typical patterns of normal data, or inliers. Performing OD under an unsupervised regime--without any information about anomalous instances in the training data--is challenging. A recently observed phenomenon, known as the $\textit{inlier-memorization (IM) effect}$, where deep generative models (DGMs) tend to memorize inlier patterns during early training, provides a promising signal for distinguishing outliers. However, existing unsupervised approaches that rely solely on the IM effect still struggle when inliers and outliers are not well-separated or when outliers form dense clusters. To address these limitations, we incorporate $\textit{active learning}$ to selectively acquire informative labels, and propose $\textit{IMBoost}$, a novel framework that explicitly reinforces the IM effect to improve outlier detection. Our method consists of two stages: 1) a $\textit{warm-up}$ phase that induces and promotes the IM effect, and 2) a $\textit{polarization}$ phase in which actively queried samples are used to maximize the discrepancy between inlier and outlier scores. In particular, we propose a novel query strategy and tailored loss function in the polarization phase to effectively identify informative samples and fully leverage the limited labeling budget. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that the IMBoost consistently decreases inlier risk while increasing outlier risk throughout training, thereby amplifying their separation. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that IMBoost not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art active OD methods but also requires substantially less computational cost.

Memorize Early, Then Query: Inlier-Memorization-Guided Active Outlier Detection

Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, serving as an important foundation for a variety of intellectual activities. While prior work has shown that LLMs can represent task patterns and surface-level concepts, it remains unclear whether these models can encode high-level relational concepts and apply them to novel situations through structured comparisons. In this work, we explore this fundamental aspect using proportional and story analogies, and identify three key findings. First, LLMs effectively encode the underlying relationships between analogous entities; both attributive and relational information propagate through mid-upper layers in correct cases, whereas reasoning failures reflect missing relational information within these layers. Second, unlike humans, LLMs often struggle not only when relational information is missing, but also when attempting to apply it to new entities. In such cases, strategically patching hidden representations at critical token positions can facilitate information transfer to a certain extent. Lastly, successful analogical reasoning in LLMs is marked by strong structural alignment between analogous situations, whereas failures often reflect degraded or misplaced alignment. Overall, our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit emerging but limited capabilities in encoding and applying high-level relational concepts, highlighting both parallels and gaps with human cognition.

The Curious Case of Analogies: Investigating Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved notable progress in computational pathology (CPath), the gigapixel scale and spatial heterogeneity of Whole Slide Images (WSIs) continue to pose challenges for multimodal understanding. Existing alignment methods struggle to capture fine-grained correspondences between textual descriptions and visual cues across thousands of patches from a slide, compromising their performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose PathFLIP ($\textbf{Path}$ology $\textbf{F}$ine-grained $\textbf{L}$anguage-$\textbf{I}$mage $\textbf{P}$retraining), a novel framework for holistic WSI interpretation. PathFLIP decomposes slide-level captions into region-level sub-captions and generates text-conditioned region embeddings to facilitate precise visual-language grounding. By harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs), PathFLIP can seamlessly follow diverse clinical instructions and adapt to varied diagnostic contexts. Furthermore, it exhibits versatile capabilities across multiple paradigms, efficiently handling slide-level classification and retrieval, fine-grained lesion localization, and instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PathFLIP outperforms existing large-scale pathological VLMs on four representative benchmarks while requiring significantly less training data, paving the way for fine-grained, instruction-aware WSI interpretation in research and clinical practice.

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