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Multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) aims to generate coherent textual summaries while selecting the most semantically relevant images to enhance expressiveness. Despite the advancements of large multimodal models like GPT-4o, LLaMA-3, and Grok-3, these models often exhibit hallucination and weak visual-text alignment when applied to MSMO tasks. To address these challenges, we propose ModalSyncSum, a unified framework that enhances semantic consistency and visual faithfulness. It incorporates image-aware information extraction to mitigate visual-text misalignment, QA-based description verification to detect and correct hallucinated image descriptions, and named entity-guided refinement to ensure factual accuracy and entity alignment across modalities. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation metric M$^3$AS, which jointly considers image content coverage, text-image alignment, and summary consistency, filling the gap in evaluating multimodal summary quality. Experimental results show that our model outperforms prompt-based baselines across multiple datasets, achieving significant gains on ROUGE, BLEU, and BERTScore, with BLEU improving by 21.95\%. In human evaluation, M$^3$AS exhibits stronger correlation with human judgments in consistency, image-summary relevance, and focus, surpassing existing automatic metrics.

AAAI 2026

ModalSyncSum: Synchronizing Image and Text for Reliable Summary Generation

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.

Uncertainty over model knowledge is a core challenge in planning and has been addressed through various approaches tailored to different scenarios. In this paper, we focus on scenarios where the agent does not initially know the exact outcome of its actions but gains knowledge upon execution, i.e., each action reveals its actual effect, removing uncertainty about future occurrences. We refer to this formulation as Planning with Uncertain Models of Actions (PUMA). We show that PUMA can be compiled in polynomial time in both Fully Observable Non-Deterministic planning and, perhaps more unexpectedly, classical planning, providing a constructive proof that PUMA remains PSPACE-complete despite its apparent exponential uncertainty. Finally, we experimentally evaluate both compilations with benchmark domains that capture the key aspects of the problem. The results show the practical feasibility of our approach and reveal a complementary behavior between the two compilations.

Planning with Uncertain Action Models

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective in mitigating hallucinations in large language models, yet its effectiveness remains limited in complex, multi-step reasoning scenarios.
Recent efforts have incorporated search-based interactions into RAG, enabling iterative reasoning with real-time retrieval. 
Most approaches rely on outcome-based supervision, offering no explicit guidance for intermediate steps. 
This often leads to reward hacking and degraded response quality. 
We propose Bi-RAR, a novel retrieval-augmented reasoning framework that evaluates each intermediate step jointly in both forward and backward directions.
To assess the information completeness of each step, we introduce a bidirectional information distance grounded in Kolmogorov complexity, approximated via language model generation probabilities. 
This quantification measures both how far the current reasoning is from the answer and how well it addresses the question. 
To optimize reasoning under these bidirectional signals, we adopt a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework with a cascading reward structure that emphasizes early trajectory alignment.
Empirical results on seven question answering benchmarks demonstrate that Bi-RAR surpasses previous methods and enables efficient interaction and reasoning with the search engine during training and inference.

Thinking Forward and Backward: Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

Depression is a prevalent mental health disorder characterized by persistent sadness and a diminished interest in daily activities, early detection of depression facilitates timely intervention, mitigating its adverse effects. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals and eye movements are emerging as promising biomarkers for depression detection due to their non-invasive nature and cost-effectiveness. Nevertheless, existing studies suffer from methodological constraints, including low specificity, insufficient sample sizes, limited generalizability, and difficulties in large-scale replication, which collectively undermine their clinical utility. To address these challenges, we collected a large-scale depression dataset comprising EEG and eye movements from 1,060 individuals diagnosed with depression and 1,308 healthy controls. To efficiently leverage multimodal data for automatic depression detection, we propose the EEG-Eye Movements Model (E2Mo). E2Mo employs modality-specific encoders to extract discriminative multi-view features from each modality and incorporates a mixture-of-modality-experts architecture with multi pretraining tasks to achieve efficient and robust modality alignment and fusion. Our approach achieves a 70.06% balanced accuracy by leveraging multi-modal data, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating EEG signals and eye movements for automatic depression detection.

A Multimodal EEG-Eye Movement Model for Automatic Depression Detection

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant attention and widespread adoption due to their impressive performance in various computer vision tasks. However, in practice, their substantial computational overhead often leads to high inference latency and increased overheads when deployed on resource-constrained edge devices like smartphones, autonomous vehicles, and robots.
To address these challenges, Early Exit (EE) has emerged as a promising approach for lightweight inference on edge devices. It accelerates inference and reduces computational overhead by adaptively producing predictions through early exits based on sample complexity. Existing EE methods typically suffer from substantial accuracy decreases in late exits while providing only marginal accuracy improvements to early exits. This paper presents EnViT, an exit-aware structured dropout-enabled self-distillation approach that enhances the performance of early exits without compromising late exits. EnViT leverages structured dropout to enable self-distillation, where the full model serves as the teacher and its own virtual sub-models generated by structured dropout as students. This mechanism effectively distills knowledge from the full model to early exits and avoids performance degradation in late exits by mitigating parameter conflicts across exits during training. Evaluation on five datasets shows that our EnViT achieves accuracy improvements ranging from 0.36\% to 7.92\% while maintaining competitive speed-up ratios of 1.72x to 2.23x.

EnViT: Enhancing the Performance of Early-Exit Vision Transformers via Exit-Aware Structured Dropout-Enabled Self-Distillation

Transparent models, which provide inherently interpretable predictions, are receiving significant attention in high-stakes domains. However, despite much real-world data being collected as time series, there is a lack of studies on transparent time series models. To address this gap, we propose a novel transparent neural network model for time series called Generalized Additive Time Series Model (GATSM). GATSM consists of two parts: 1) independent feature networks to learn feature representations, and 2) a transparent temporal module to learn temporal patterns across different time steps using the feature representations. This structure allows GATSM to effectively capture temporal patterns and handle varying-length time series while preserving transparency. Empirical experiments show that GATSM significantly outperforms existing generalized additive models and achieves comparable performance to black-box time series models, such as recurrent neural networks and Transformer. In addition, we demonstrate that GATSM finds interesting patterns in time series.

Transparent Networks for Multivariate Time Series

Recent advancements in 4D generation have demonstrated its remarkable capability in synthesizing photorealistic renderings of dynamic 3D scenes. However, despite achieving impressive visual performance, almost all existing methods overlook the generation of spatial audio aligned with the corresponding 4D scenes, posing a significant limitation to truly immersive audiovisual experiences. To mitigate this issue, we propose Sonic4D, a novel framework that enables spatial audio generation for immersive exploration of 4D scenes. Specifically, our method is composed of three stages: 1) To capture both the dynamic visual content and raw auditory information from a monocular video, we first employ pre-trained expert models to generate the 4D scene and its corresponding monaural audio. 2) Subsequently, to transform the monaural audio into spatial audio, we localize and track the sound sources within the 4D scene, where their 3D spatial coordinates at different timestamps are estimated via a pixel-level visual grounding strategy. 3) Based on the estimated sound source locations, we further synthesize plausible spatial audio that varies across different viewpoints and timestamps using physics-based simulation. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed method generates realistic spatial audio consistent with the synthesized 4D scene in a training-free manner, significantly enhancing the immersive experience for users.

Sonic4D: Spatial Audio Generation for Immersive 4D Scene Exploration

Graph Transformer shows remarkable potential in brain network analysis due to its ability to model graph structures and complex node relationships. Most existing methods typically model the brain as a flat network, ignoring its modular structure, and their attention mechanisms treat all brain region connections equally, ignoring distance-related node connection patterns. However, brain information processing is a hierarchical process that involves local and long-range interactions between brain regions, interactions between regions and sub-functional modules, and interactions among functional modules themselves. This hierarchical interaction mechanism enables the brain to efficiently integrate local computations and global information flow, supporting the execution of complex cognitive functions. To address this issue, we propose BrainHGT, a hierarchical Graph Transformer that simulates the brain’s natural information processing from local regions to global communities. Specifically, we design a novel long-short range attention encoder that utilizes parallel pathways to handle dense local interactions and sparse long-range connections, thereby effectively alleviating the over-globalizing issue. To further capture the brain’s modular architecture, we designe a prior-guided clustering module that utilizes a cross-attention mechanism to group brain regions into functional communities and leverage neuroanatomical prior to guide the clustering process, thereby improving the biological plausibility and interpretability. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method significantly improves performance of disease identification, and can reliably capture the sub-functional modules of the brain, demonstrating its interpretability.

BrainHGT: A Hierarchical Graph Transformer for Interpretable Brain Network Analysis

Quadrupedal robots with manipulators offer strong mobility and adaptability for grasping in unstructured, dynamic environments through coordinated whole-body control. However, existing research has predominantly focused on static-object grasping, neglecting the challenges posed by dynamic targets and thus limiting applicability in dynamic scenarios such as logistics sorting and human–robot collaboration. To address this, we introduce DQ-Bench, a new benchmark that systematically evaluates dynamic grasping across varying object motions, velocities, heights, object types, and terrain complexities, along with comprehensive evaluation metrics. Building upon this benchmark, we propose DQ-Net, a compact teacher–student framework designed to infer grasp configurations from limited perceptual cues. During training, the teacher network leverages privileged information to holistically model both the static geometric properties and dynamic motion characteristics of the target, and integrates a grasp fusion module to deliver robust guidance for motion planning. Concurrently, we design a lightweight student network that performs dual-viewpoint temporal modeling using only the target mask, depth map, and proprioceptive state, enabling closed-loop action outputs without reliance on privileged data. Extensive experiments on DQ-Bench demonstrate that DQ-Net achieves robust dynamic objects grasping across multiple task settings, substantially outperforming baseline methods in both success rate and responsiveness. We will release our codebase and benchmark publicly.

Whole-Body Coordination for Dynamic Object Grasping with Legged Manipulators

Although dynamic graph neural networks (DyGNNs) have demonstrated promising capabilities, most existing methods ignore out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts that commonly exist in dynamic graphs. Dynamic graph OOD generalization is non-trivial due to the following challenges: 1) Identifying invariant and variant patterns amid complex graph evolution, 2) Capturing the intrinsic evolution rationale from these patterns, and 3) Ensuring model generalization across diverse OOD shifts despite limited data distribution observations. Although several attempts have been made to tackle these challenges, none has successfully addressed all three simultaneously, and they face various limitations in complex OOD scenarios. To solve these issues, we propose a Dynamic graph Causal Invariant Learning (DyCIL) model for OOD generalization via exploiting invariant spatio-temporal patterns from a causal view. Specifically, we first develop a dynamic causal subgraph generator to identify causal dynamic subgraphs explicitly. Next, we design a causal-aware spatio-temporal attention module to extract the intrinsic evolution rationale behind invariant patterns. Finally, we further introduce an adaptive environment generator to capture the underlying dynamics of distributional shifts. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic dynamic graph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art baselines in handling OOD shifts.

Towards OOD Generalization in Dynamic Graphs via Causal Invariant Learning

Deep learning models such as MLP, Transformer, and TCN have achieved remarkable success in univariate time series forecasting, typically relying on sliding window samples from historical data for training. However, while these models implicitly compress historical information into their parameters during training, they are unable to explicitly and dynamically access this global knowledge during inference, relying only on the local context within the lookback window. This results in an underutilization of rich patterns from the global history. To bridge this gap, we propose Predicting the Future by Retrieving the Past (PFRP), a novel approach that explicitly integrates global historical data to enhance forecasting accuracy. Specifically, we construct a Global Memory Bank (GMB) to effectively store and manage global historical patterns. A retrieval mechanism is then employed to extract similar patterns from the GMB, enabling the generation of global predictions. By adaptively combining these global predictions with the outputs of any local prediction model, PFRP produces more accurate and interpretable forecasts. Extensive experiments conducted on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that PFRP enhances the average performance of advanced univariate forecasting models by 8.4%.

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