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Infrared and visible image fusion generates all-weather perception-capable images by combining complementary modalities, enhancing environmental awareness for intelligent unmanned systems. Existing methods either focus on pixel-level fusion while overlooking downstream task adaptability or implicitly learn rigid semantics through cascaded detection/segmentation models, unable to interactively address diverse semantic target perception needs. We propose CtrlFuse, a controllable image fusion framework that enables interactive dynamic fusion guided by mask prompts. The model integrates a multi-modal feature extractor, a reference prompt encoder (RPE), and a prompt-semantic fusion module (PSFM). The RPE dynamically encodes task-specific semantic prompts by fine-tuning pre-trained segmentation models with input mask guidance, while the PSFM explicitly injects these semantics into fusion features. Through synergistic optimization of parallel segmentation and fusion branches, our method achieves mutual enhancement between task performance and fusion quality. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results in both fusion controllability and segmentation accuracy, with the adapted task branch even outperforming the original segmentation model.

AAAI 2026

CtrlFuse: Mask-Prompt Guided Controllable Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

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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.

In this paper, we investigate the {\em learning-augmented $k$-median clustering} problem, which aims to improve the performance of traditional clustering algorithms by preprocessing the point set with a predictor of error rate $\alpha \in [0,1)$. This preprocessing step assigns potential labels to the points before clustering. We introduce an algorithm for this problem based on a simple yet effective sampling method, which substantially improves upon the time complexities of existing algorithms. Moreover, we mitigate their exponential dependency on the dimensionality of the Euclidean space. Lastly, we conduct experiments to compare our method with several state-of-the-art learning-augmented $k$-median clustering methods. The experimental results suggest that our proposed approach can significantly reduce the computational complexity in practice, while achieving a lower clustering cost.

Sample-and-Search: An Effective Algorithm for Learning-Augmented k-Median Clustering in High Dimensions

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to identify anomalous events in videos and accurately determine their time intervals. Current VAD methods mainly fall into two categories: traditional DNN-based approaches that focus on temporal localization, and LLM-based approaches that emphasize semantic understanding. Both anomaly understanding and grounding are essential for comprehensive video anomaly detection and can complement each other. However, no existing model or dataset supports both tasks simultaneously. To address this, we introduce VAGU (Video Anomaly Grounding and Understanding), the first benchmark to integrate both tasks. Each VAGU instance includes annotations for anomaly category, semantic explanation, precise temporal grounding and Video QA. We also provide multiple-choice Video QA for objective evaluation. Based on this dataset, we propose Glance then Scrutinize (GtS), a training-free framework guided by textual prompts. The framework first enables coarse localization of high-probability anomalous regions, followed by detailed anomaly interpretation and temporal boundary refinement. Additionally, we propose the JeAUG metric, which jointly evaluates semantic interpretability and temporal precision, overcoming the limitations of traditional metrics. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our benchmark, framework, and evaluation metric.

VAGU & GtS: LLM-Based Benchmark and Framework for Joint Video Anomaly Grounding and Understanding

With the development of large language models (LLMs) in the field of programming, intelligent programming coaching systems have gained widespread attention. However, most research focuses on repairing the buggy code of programming learners without providing the underlying causes of the bugs. To address this gap, we introduce a novel task, namely LPR (Learner-Tailored Program Repair).
We then propose a novel and effective framework, LSGen (Learner-Tailored Solution Generator), to enhance program repair while offering the bug descriptions for the buggy code. In the first stage, we utilize a repair solution retrieval framework to construct a solution retrieval database and then employ an edit-driven code retrieval approach to retrieve valuable solutions, guiding LLMs in identifying and fixing the bugs in buggy code. In the second stage, we propose a solution-guided program repair method, which fixes the code and provides explanations under the guidance of retrieval solutions. Moreover, we propose an Iterative Retrieval Enhancement method that utilizes evaluation results of the generated code to iteratively optimize the retrieval direction and explore more suitable repair strategies, improving performance in practical programming coaching scenarios. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms a set of baselines by a large margin, validating the effectiveness of our framework for the newly proposed LPR task.

Learner-Tailored Program Repair: A Solution Generator with Iterative Edit-Driven Retrieval Enhancement

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect both known and novel categories in complex visual scenes, surpassing the limitations of conventional closed-set detectors. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled zero-shot recognition by aligning visual features with large-scale textual embeddings. However, current OVOD approaches often fall short by overlooking critical contextual background cues necessary for discovering broader novel objects. To address this, we propose BFDet, a scene-to-object reasoning framework that leverages the complementary capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and VLMs.
BFDet introduces a novel knowledge discovery mechanism that models the interaction between foreground and background context. High-confidence objects are first used to infer the background scene, which in turn guides an LLM to generate context-aware novel object candidates. Verified through cross-modal alignment, these candidates serve as reliable pseudo-labels to supervise detector training. Designed as a plug-and-play module, BFDet integrates seamlessly into existing detection pipelines and consistently improves performance on novel categories across COCO and LVIS benchmarks, leading to +3.1 AP gain in detecting novel categories while maintaining strong performance on known ones.

From Scene to Object: Enhancing Open-Vocabulary Object Detection via Foreground-Background Context Reasoning

Accurate interpretation of Notices To Airmen (NOTAMs) is critical for aviation safety, yet their condensed and cryptic language poses significant challenges to both manual and automated processing. Existing automated systems are typically limited to "Shallow Parsing," failing to extract the actionable intelligence needed for operational decisions. We formalize the complete interpretation task as "Deep Parsing," a dual-reasoning challenge requiring both dynamic knowledge grounding (linking the NOTAM to evolving real-world aeronautical data) and schema-based inference (applying static domain rules to deduce operational status). To tackle this challenge, we propose NOTAM-Evolve, a self-evolving framework that enables a Large Language Model (LLM) to autonomously master complex NOTAM interpretation. Leveraging a knowledge graph-enhanced retrieval module for data grounding, the framework introduces a crucial closed-loop learning process where the LLM progressively improves from its own outputs, minimizing the need for extensive human-annotated reasoning traces. In conjunction with this framework, we introduce a new benchmark dataset of 10,000 expert-annotated NOTAMs. Our experiments demonstrate that NOTAM-Evolve achieves a 30.4% absolute accuracy improvement over the base LLM, establishing a new state-of-the-art on the task of structured NOTAM interpretation. Our code and dataset are available in the supplementary material.

NOTAM-Evolve: A Knowledge-Guided Self-Evolving Optimization Framework with LLMs for NOTAM Interpretation

Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to the emergence of highly expressive models such as diffusion transformers (DiTs), exemplified by FLUX. However, their massive parameter sizes lead to slow inference, high memory usage, and poor deployability. Existing acceleration methods (e.g., single-step distillation and attention pruning) often suffer from significant performance degradation and incur substantial training costs. To address these limitations, we propose $\textbf{FastFLUX}$, an architecture-level pruning framework designed to enhance the inference efficiency of FLUX. At its core is the $\textbf{Block-wise Replacement with Linear Layers (BRLL)}$ method, which replaces structurally complex residual branches in ResBlocks with lightweight linear layers while preserving the original shortcut connections for stability. Furthermore, we introduce $\textbf{Sandwich Training (ST)}$, a localized fine-tuning strategy that leverages LoRA to supervise neighboring blocks, mitigating performance drops caused by structural replacement. Experiments show that our FastFLUX maintains high image quality under both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, while significantly improving inference speed, even with 20\% of the hierarchy pruned. Our code will be available soon.

FastFLUX: Pruning FLUX with Block-wise Replacement and Sandwich Training

Deep human action recognition models trained on real-world data are often challenged by long-tailed distributions, where performance on rare classes is severely degraded. Current solutions typically apply static or heuristic interventions that are disconnected from the model's evolving internal state. To overcome this limitation, we reconceptualize long-tailed human action recognition as a closed-loop, self-regulating system, inspired by ecological theory. We further introduce an Adaptive Ecological Entropy Dynamics (AEED) framework, which is built upon three synergistic components. First, AEED perceives the learning state through entropy flow, providing a robust and directional signal of learning progress. Second, this signal drives an adaptation mechanism, which dynamically adjusts class-specific loss weights to allocate more learning resources to underperforming classes. Finally, AEED facilitates intelligent knowledge transfer via Confidence-Guided Symbiosis (CS-Mix). Extensive experiments demonstrate that AEED achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks, including NTU-60-LT and Kinetics-400-LT. The code for our method is available at here.

Learning Dynamics as Feedback: An Adaptive Entropy Flow Dynamics Framework for Long-tailed Human Action Recognition

Comprehension of ancient texts plays an important role in archaeology and understanding of Chinese history and civilization. The rapid development of large language models needs benchmarks that can evaluate their comprehension of ancient characters. Existing Chinese benchmarks are mostly targeted at modern Chinese and transmitted documents in ancient Chinese, but the part of excavated documents in ancient Chinese is not covered. To meet this need, we propose the AncientBench, which aims to evaluate the comprehension of ancient characters, especially in the scenario of excavated documents. The AncientBench is divided into four dimensions, which correspond to the four competencies of ancient character comprehension: glyph comprehension, pronunciation comprehension, meaning comprehension, and contextual comprehension. The benchmark also contains ten tasks, including radical, phonetic radical, homophone, cloze, translation, and more, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluation. We convened archaeological researchers to conduct experimental evaluations, proposed an ancient model as baseline, and conducted extensive experiments on the currently best-performing large language models. The experimental results reveal the great potential of large language models in ancient textual scenarios as well as the gap with humans. Our research aims to promote the development and application of large language models in the field of archaeology and ancient Chinese language.

AncientBench: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation on Excavated and Transmitted Chinese Corpora

Supervised learning with tabular data presents unique challenges, including low data sizes, the absence of structural cues, and heterogeneous features spanning both categorical and continuous domains. Unlike vision and language tasks, where CNNs, ViTs, and sequential attention-based models can exploit structural inductive biases, tabular data lacks inherent positional structure, hindering the effectiveness of self-attention mechanisms. While recent transformer-based models like TabTransformer, SAINT, and FT-Transformer (which we refer to as 3T) have shown promise on tabular data, they typically operate without leveraging structural cues such as positional encodings (PEs), as no prior structural information is usually available. In this work, we explore whether structural cues, specifically PEs derived from feature associations, can be harnessed to enrich transformer-based models for tabular data. Building on this idea, we propose Tab-PET (PEs for Transformers), which is a graph-based framework for estimating PEs to inject structure into tabular representations for transformer-based architectures. Inspired by approaches that derive PEs from graph topology, we explore two paradigms for graph estimation: association-based and causality-based. We provide theoretical analysis of the effect of PEs on the effective rank of embeddings and empirically demonstrate that graph-derived PEs significantly improve performance across 50 classification and regression datasets for 3T. Notably, association-based graphs consistently yield more stable and pronounced gains compared to causality-driven ones. We conclude with a deeper look into the role of PEs in adapting self-attention architectures to tabular learning.

Tab-PET: Graph-Based Positional Encodings for Tabular Transformers

We introduce OSVBench, a new benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating complete specification code pertaining to operating system kernel verification tasks. The benchmark first defines the specification generation problem into a program synthesis problem within a confined scope of syntax and semantics by providing LLMs with the programming model. The LLMs are required to understand the provided verification assumption and the potential syntax and semantics space to search for, then generate the complete specification for the potentially buggy operating system code implementation under the guidance of the high-level functional description of the operating system. This benchmark is built upon a real-world operating system kernel, Hyperkernel, and consists of 245 complex specification generation tasks in total, each is a long context task of about 20k-30k tokens. Our comprehensive evaluation of 12 LLMs exhibits the limited performance of the current LLMs on the specification generation tasks for operating system verification. Significant disparities in their performance on the benchmark highlight differences in their ability to handle long-context code generation tasks. The evaluation toolkit and benchmark are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OSVBench.

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Sample-and-Search: An Effective Algorithm for Learning-Augmented k-Median Clustering in High Dimensions

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