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Domain generalization in semantic segmentation faces challenges from domain shifts, particularly under adverse conditions. While diffusion-based data generation methods show promise, they introduce inherent misalignment between generated images and semantic masks. This paper presents FLEX-Seg (FLexible Edge eXploitation for Segmentation), a framework that transforms this limitation into an opportunity for robust learning. FLEX-Seg comprises three key components: (1) Granular Adaptive Prototypes (GAP) that captures boundary characteristics across multiple scales, (2) Uncertainty Boundary Emphasis (UBE) that dynamically adjusts learning emphasis based on prediction entropy, and (3) Hardness-Aware Sampling (HAS) that progressively focuses on challenging examples. By leveraging inherent misalignment rather than enforcing strict alignment, FLEX-Seg learns robust representations while capturing rich stylistic variations. Experiments across five real-world datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving 2.44% and 2.63% mIoU gains on ACDC and Dark Zurich. Our findings validate that adaptive strategies for handling imperfect synthetic data lead to superior domain generalization.

AAAI 2026

Do We Need Perfect Data? Leveraging Noise for Domain Generalized Segmentation

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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.

All-in-one image restoration (AIR) aims to address diverse degradations within a unified model by leveraging informative degradation conditions to guide the restoration process. However, existing methods often rely on implicitly learned priors, which may entangle feature representations and hinder performance in complex or unseen scenarios. Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) as a classical gradient representation, we observe that it has strong discriminative capability across diverse degradations, making it a powerful and interpretable prior for AIR. Based on this insight, we propose HOGformer, a Transformer-based model that integrates learnable HOG features for degradation-aware restoration. The core of HOGformer is a Dynamic HOG-aware Self-Attention (DHOGSA) mechanism, which adaptively models long-range spatial dependencies conditioned on degradation-specific cues encoded by HOG descriptors. To further adapt the heterogeneity of degradations in AIR, we propose a Dynamic Interaction Feed-Forward (DIFF) module that facilitates channel–spatial interactions, enabling robust feature transformation under diverse degradations. Besides, we propose a HOG loss to explicitly enhance structural fidelity and edge sharpness. Extensive experiments on a variety of benchmarks, including adverse weather and natural degradations, demonstrate that HOGformer achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes well to complex real-world scenarios.

Gradient as Conditions: Rethinking HOG for All-in-one Image Restoration

Interactive 3D segmentation embodies an advanced human-in-the-loop paradigm, where a model iteratively refines the segmentation of interested objects within a 3D point cloud through user feedback. Existing methods have achieved notable advancements at the expense of substantial resource consumption. To address this challenge, we introduce E$^2$I3D, an efficient and effective model for interactive 3D segmentation. Specifically, we propose a two-stage efficiency-to-effectiveness framework to decouple efficiency and effectiveness, avoiding the high training cost of joint optimization. For efficiency in the first stage, we present heterogeneous pruning, which reliably compresses the model by ranking and pruning the constructed heterogeneous groups separately based on gradient compensation. For effectiveness in the second stage, we design hierarchical click-aware attention that integrates geometric details from high-resolution features with global context from low-resolution features to enhance click-guided interaction. Extensive experiments across public datasets demonstrate that E$^2$I3D exceeds state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, on the KITTI-360 dataset, E$^2$I3D boosts the IoU for interactive single-object segmentation from 44.4% to 49.0% with 5 user clicks, while simultaneously reducing parameters from 39.3M to 5.7M.

Towards Efficient and Effective Interactive 3D Segmentation

To facilitate the large-scale deployment of autonomous driving in real-world scenarios, developing low-cost and highperformance 3D object detection systems has become a critical technical challenge. Although high-beam LiDARs provide denser point cloud data, their prohibitive hardware cost and high power consumption limit their practicality. In contrast, low-beam LiDARs offer advantages in terms of affordability and energy ef-ficiency, but often suffer from inadequate perception accuracy due to their sparser point cloud data. This pa-per focuses on the task of multimodal 3D object detec-tion with low-beam LiDARs, and proposes a novel ap-proach that integrates temporal and spatial representa-tion learning to enhance detection accuracy under sparser sensor conditions. Specifically, our approach comprises: (1) a Temporal Feature Prediction Learning (TFPL) module, which predicts the current BEV repre-sentation based on a sequence of historical BEV fea-tures; (2) a Spatial Feature Observation Learning (SFOL) module, which aligns BEV (Bird’s-EyeView) features from high-beam and low-beam LiDAR to enforce the low-beam features to approximate high-beam represen-tations; (3) an Uncertainty-Aware Fusion (UAF) strate-gy, which performs feature-wise weighting between the predicted and observed BEV features by leveraging channelwise variances, effectively mitigating perturba-tions in the learned BEV representations. Extensive ex-periments on the KITTI and nuScenes 3D object detec-tion datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves detection performance under low-beam LiDAR configurations.

Temporal and Spatial Representation Learning for Multimodal Low-Beam 3D Object Detection

Laboratory mice, particularly the C57BL/6 strain, are essential animal models in biomedical research. However, accurate 3D surface motion reconstruction of mice remains a significant challenge due to their complex non-rigid deformations, textureless fur-covered surfaces, and the lack of realistic 3D mesh models. Moreover, existing visual datasets for mice reconstruction only contain sparse viewpoints without 3D geometries. To fill the gap, we introduce MoReMouse, the first monocular dense 3D reconstruction network specifically designed for C57BL/6 mice. To achieve high-fidelity 3D reconstructions, we present three key innovations. First, we create the first high-fidelity, dense-view synthetic dataset for C57BL/6 mice by rendering a realistic, anatomically accurate Gaussian mouse avatar. Second, MoReMouse leverages a transformer-based feedforward architecture combined with triplane representation, enabling high-quality 3D surface generation from a single image, optimized for the intricacies of small animal morphology. Third, we propose geodesic-based continuous correspondence embeddings on the mouse surface, which serve as strong semantic priors, improving surface consistency and reconstruction stability, especially in highly dynamic regions like limbs and tail.
Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that MoReMouse significantly outperforms existing open-source methods in both accuracy and robustness.

MoReMouse: Monocular Reconstruction of Laboratory Mouse

One of the primary challenges in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) object detection lies in the pervasive influence of coherent noise. As a common practice, most existing methods, whether handcrafted approaches or deep learning-based methods, employ the analysis or enhancement of object spatial-domain characteristics to achieve implicit denoising. In this paper, we propose DenoDet V2, which explores a completely novel and different perspective to deconstruct and modulate the features in the transform domain via a carefully designed attention architecture. Compared to DenoDet V1, DenoDet V2 is a major advancement that exploits the complementary nature of amplitude and phase information through a band-wise mutual modulation mechanism, which enables a reciprocal enhancement between phase and amplitude spectra. Extensive experiments on various SAR datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of DenoDet V2. Notably, DenoDet V2 achieves a significant 0.8% improvement on SARDet-100K dataset compared to DenoDet V1, while reducing the model complexity by half. The code will be available soon.

DenoDet V2: Phase-Amplitude Cross Denoising for SAR Object Detection

Zero-shot video moment retrieval (ZVMR) is the task of localizing a temporal moment within an untrimmed video using a natural language query without relying on task-specific training data. The primary challenge in this setting lies in the mismatch in semantic granularity between textual queries and visual content. Previous studies in ZVMR have attempted to achieve alignment by leveraging high-quality pre-trained knowledge that represents video and language in a joint space. However, these approaches failed to balance the semantic granularity between the pre-trained knowledge provided by each modality for a given scene. As a result, despite the high quality of each modality’s representations, the mismatch in granularity led to inaccurate retrieval. In this paper, we propose a training-free framework, called $\textit{\textbf{Gran}ularity-\textbf{A}ware A\textbf{lign}ment (GranAlign)}$, that bridges this gap between coarse and fine semantic representations. Our approach introduces two complementary techniques: granularity-based query rewriting to generate varied semantic granularities, and query-aware caption generation to embed query intent into video content. By pairing multi-level queries with both query-agnostic and our generated query-aware captions, we effectively resolve semantic mismatches. As a result, our method sets a new state-of-the-art across all three major benchmarks (QVHighlights, Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions), with a notable 3.23\% mAP@avg improvement on the challenging QVHighlights dataset. The code will be made available.

GranAlign: Granularity-Aware Alignment Framework for Zero-shot Video Moment Retrieval

Recent advances in deep learning-based 3D representation have achieved remarkable success, particularly in modeling static high-fidelity geometries. However, the extension of these techniques to dynamic 3D scenes introduces a critical challenge of effectively representing spatio-temporal dependencies, i.e., jointly modeling detailed spatial structures within frames and temporal dynamics across frames. To address this challenge, this paper proposes that the temporal evolution observed in dynamic 3D scenes is fundamentally attributable to the deformation of underlying spatial structures. To capture this relationship, we introduce a unified continuous 4D latent space representation incorporating a structure-equivalence prior, named SEP-4D. The core of SEP-4D is an efficient 4D tensor decomposition-fusion approach. This method fuses decomposed learnable 2D feature planes via a plane-wise spatio-temporal fusion mechanism of planar distributions, explicitly enforcing the principle that temporal evolution originates from geometric deformations of the 3D structure. To mitigate the associated computational demands, we sample the 3D probability volumes generated by VAE-based fusion into a spatio-temporally consistent 4D latent representation. The efficacy of our approach is validated through experiments on the fundamental task of 4D occupancy reconstruction. Extensive results demonstrate that, by leveraging the inherent equivalence of temporal dynamics and structural deformation, our method achieves high-quality reconstruction across various sequence lengths. Notably, for 4-frame scenes, we attain an impressive 91.68\% mIoU, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines on standard benchmarks. The code will be publicly available.

The Structure-Equivalent Prior: Unifying Temporal Dynamics and 3D Evolution in 4D Latent Space

Video diffusion models have achieved impressive results in natural scene generation, yet they struggle to generalize to scientific phenomena such as fluid simulations and meteorological processes, where underlying dynamics are governed by scientific laws. These tasks pose unique challenges, including severe domain gaps, limited training data, and the lack of descriptive language annotations. To handle this dilemma, we extracted the latent scientific phenomena knowledge and further proposed a fresh framework that teaches video diffusion models to generate scientific phenomena from a single initial frame. Particularly, static knowledge is extracted via pre-trained masked autoencoders, while dynamic knowledge is derived from pre-trained optical flow prediction. Subsequently, based on the aligned spatial relations between the CLIP vision and language encoders, the visual embeddings of scientific phenomena, guided by latent scientific phenomena knowledge, are projected to generate the pseudo-language prompt embeddings in both spatial and frequency domains. By incorporating these prompts and fine-tuning the video diffusion model, we enable the generation of videos that better adhere to scientific laws. Extensive experiments on both computational fluid dynamics simulations and real-world typhoon observations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving superior fidelity and consistency across diverse scientific scenarios.

Latent Knowledge-Guided Video Diffusion for Scientific Phenomena Generation from a Single Initial Frame

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved strong performance across a variety of multimodal tasks. However, they still suffer from various forms of hallucination, which hinder their practical deployment. Prior approaches often struggle to efficiently construct high-quality hallucination-related samples and to process them in a fine-grained manner, resulting in limited effectiveness in hallucination alleviation. To address this issue, we propose a data sampling strategy that selects samples better suited for hallucination-oriented training, thereby enhancing training effectiveness. In addition, we introduce a quantitative method for measuring hallucination severity and assign individualized weights to training samples accordingly. Building on this, we present Hallucination-Differentiated Direct Preference Optimization (HD-DPO), a novel preference optimization framework. During fine-tuning, HD-DPO incorporates these weights into both the formulation of customized loss functions and the modulation of localized visual attention, enabling fine-grained optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing fine-tuning strategies across multiple benchmarks and generalizes well to diverse MLLM architectures, effectively reducing hallucination rates and enhancing overall model performance.

Adaptive Hallucination Alleviation in Multimodal Large Language Models: From Strategic Data Selection to Severity-Guided Training

Reranking models are a crucial component in modern systems like Retrieval-Augmented Generation, tasked with selecting the most relevant documents prior to generation. However, current reranking approaches often face a fundamental trade-off. On one hand, Supervised Fine-Tuning methods that frame relevance as a binary classification task lack the necessary scoring discrimination, particularly for rerankers based on reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs). On the other hand, approaches designed for complex reasoning often employ powerful yet inefficient listwise formulations, rendering them impractical for low latency applications. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce ERank, a highly effective and efficient reranker built from a reasoning LLM that excels across diverse relevance scenarios. We propose a novel two-stage training pipeline that begins with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this stage, we move beyond binary labels and train the model generatively to output fine grained integer scores, which significantly enhances relevance discrimination. The model is then further refined using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel, listwise derived reward. This technique instills global ranking awareness into the efficient pointwise architecture. We evaluate the ERank-4B reranker on the BRIGHT, FollowIR, TREC DL, and BEIR benchmarks, demonstrating superior effectiveness and robustness compared to existing approaches. On the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, our 4B-parameter reranker achieves an nDCG@10 of $38.7$, while a larger 32B variant reaches a state of the art nDCG@10 of $40.2$.

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Gradient as Conditions: Rethinking HOG for All-in-one Image Restoration

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