Singapore

Feature coding has recently emerged as a key technique for efficient transmission of intermediate representations in distributed AI systems. 
Existing approaches largely follow a *transform-quantization-entropy coding* pipeline inherited from image and video coding, where the transform module is used to remove spatial structural redundancies in visual signals. 
However, our analysis indicates that such redundancies have already been removed during feature extraction, which reduces the necessity of the transform module. Building on this insight, we propose a new *vector quantization-entropy coding* pipeline that directly encodes the extracted features via a vector quantization module and an entropy model.
The proposed transform‑free framework jointly learns the quantization codebook and entropy model, enabling end‑to‑end optimization tailored to the inherent feature characteristics. Furthermore, the proposed method inherently avoids the computational complexity of the transform module. Experiments on features from diverse architectures and tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior rate-distortion performance compared to transform-based baselines, while significantly reducing the encoding and decoding complexity.

AAAI 2026

Transform-Free Feature Coding via Entropy-Constrained Vector Quantization

data compression

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


ICPR 2020

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.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely recognized as an effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs). However, standard KD methods often falter when confronted with architectural or tokenization heterogeneity between teacher and student models, which creates a mismatch in their representations. While Optimal Transport (OT) provides a promising solution to align these representations, most OT-based methods rely on a single cost function, which isn’t enough to capture the multifaceted discrepancies between models with distinct designs. To address this limitation, we introduce Multi-Cost Wasserstein Knowledge Distillation (MCW-KD), a novel framework that enhances KD by simultaneously optimizing several cost functions within a unified OT formulation. MCW-KD employs specific cost matrices to effectively align both the final hidden states and the output distributions of the models. We also provide a rigorous theoretical foundation for the proposed Multi-Cost Wasserstein Distance, ensuring both mathematical validity and computational ability. Extensive experiments on instruction-following datasets demonstrate that MCW-KD significantly improves student model performance compared to state-of-the-art KD baselines, especially when teacher and student models have different tokenizers.

MCW-KD: Multi-Cost Wasserstein Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit diverse response behaviors, costs, and strengths, making it challenging to select the most suitable LLM for a given user query. We study the problem of adaptive multi-LLM selection in an online setting, where the learner interacts with users through multi-step query refinement and must choose LLMs sequentially without access to offline datasets or model internals. A key challenge arises from unstructured context evolution: the prompt dynamically changes in response to previous model outputs via a black-box process, which cannot be simulated, modeled, or learned. To address this, we propose the first contextual bandit framework for sequential LLM selection under unstructured prompt dynamics. We formalize a notion of myopic regret and develop a LinUCB-based algorithm that provably achieves sublinear regret without relying on future context prediction. We further introduce budget-aware and positionally-aware (favoring early-stage satisfaction) extensions to accommodate variable query costs and user preferences for early high-quality responses. Our algorithms are theoretically grounded and require no offline fine-tuning or dataset-specific training. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our methods outperform existing LLM routing strategies in both accuracy and cost-efficiency, validating the power of contextual bandits for real-time, adaptive LLM selection.

Online Multi-LLM Selection via Contextual Bandits Under Unstructured Context Evolution

Existing linguistic steganography methods primarily rely on content transformations to conceal secret messages. However, they often cause subtle yet looking-innocent deviations between normal and stego texts, posing potential security risks in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a content-preserving linguistic steganography paradigm for perfectly secure covert communication without modifying the cover text. Based on this paradigm, we introduce CLstega (Content-preserving Linguistic steganography), a novel method that embeds secret messages through controllable distribution transformation. CLstega first applies an augmented masking strategy to locate and mask embedding positions, where MLM (masked language model)-predicted probability distributions are easily adjustable for transformation. Subsequently, a dynamic distribution steganographic coding strategy is designed to encode secret messages by deriving target distributions from the original probability distributions. To achieve this transformation, CLstega elaborately selects target words for embedding positions as labels to construct a masked sentence dataset, which is used to fine-tune the original MLM, producing a target MLM capable of directly extracting secret messages from the cover text. This approach ensures perfect security of secret messages while fully preserving the integrity of the original cover text. Experimental results demonstrate that CLstega can achieve a 100% extraction success rate, and outperforms existing methods in security, effectively balancing embedding capacity and security.

A Content-Preserving Secure Linguistic Steganography

Autonomous vehicles must navigate safely in complex driving environments. Imitating a single expert trajectory, as in regression-based approaches, usually does not explicitly assess the safety of the predicted trajectory. Selection-based methods address this by generating and scoring multiple trajectory candidates and predicting the safety score for each. However, they face optimization challenges in precisely selecting the best option from thousands of candidates and distinguishing subtle but safety-critical differences, especially in rare and challenging scenarios. We propose DriveSuprim to overcome these challenges and advance the selection-based paradigm through a coarse-to-fine paradigm for progressive candidate filtering, a rotation-based augmentation method to improve robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios, and a self-distillation framework to stabilize training. DriveSuprim achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 93.5\% PDMS in NAVSIM v1 and 87.1\% EPDMS in NAVSIM v2 without extra data, with 83.02 Driving Score and 60.00 Success Rate on Bench2Drive, demonstrating superior planning capabilities in various driving scenarios.

DriveSuprim: Towards Precise Trajectory Selection for End-to-End Planning

The rapid evolution of generative technologies necessitates reliable methods for detecting AI-generated images. A critical limitation of current detectors is their failure to generalize to images from unseen generative models, as they often overfit to source-specific semantic cues rather than learning universal generative artifacts. To overcome this, we introduce a simple yet remarkably effective \emph{pixel-level mapping} pre-processing step to disrupt the images' pixel value distribution and break the fragile, non-essential semantic patterns that detectors commonly exploit as shortcuts. This forces the detector to focus on more fundamental and generalizable high-frequency traces inherent to the image generation process. Through comprehensive experiments on GAN and diffusion-based generators, we show that our approach significantly boosts the cross-generator performance of state-of-the-art detectors. Extensive analysis further verifies our opinion that the disruption of semantic cues is the key to generalization.

Beyond Semantic Features: Pixel-level Mapping for Generalized AI-Generated Image Detection

Existing core-set selection methods predominantly rely on heuristic scoring signals such as training dynamics or model uncertainty, lacking explicit modeling of data likelihood. This omission may hinder the constructed subset from capturing subtle yet critical distributional structures that underpin effective model training. In this work, we propose a novel, theoretically grounded approach that leverages diffusion models to estimate data likelihood via reconstruction deviation induced by partial reverse denoising. Specifically, we establish a formal connection between reconstruction error and data likelihood, grounded in the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of Markovian diffusion processes, thereby enabling a principled, distribution-aware scoring criterion for data selection. Complementarily, we introduce an efficient information-theoretic method to identify the optimal reconstruction timestep, ensuring that the deviation provides a reliable signal indicative of underlying data likelihood. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that reconstruction deviation offers an effective scoring criterion, consistently outperforming existing baselines across selection ratios, and closely matching full-data training using only 50% of the data. Further analysis shows that the likelihood-informed nature of our score reveals informative insights in data selection, shedding light on the interplay between data distributional characteristics and model learning preferences.

Diffusion Reconstruction-based Data Likelihood Estimation for Core-Set Selection

Tracking and segmentation play essential roles in video understanding, providing basic positional information and temporal association of objects within video sequences. Despite their shared objective, existing approaches often tackle these tasks using specialized architectures or modality-specific parameters, limiting their generalization and scalability. Recent efforts have attempted to unify multiple tracking and segmentation sub-tasks from the perspectives of any modality input or multi-task inference. However, these approaches tend to overlook two critical challenges: the distributional gap across different modalities and the feature representation gap across tasks. These issues hinder effective cross-task and cross-modal knowledge sharing, ultimately constraining the development of a true generalist model. To address these limitations, we propose a universal tracking and segmentation framework named SATA, which unifies a broad spectrum of tracking and segmentation subtasks with any modality input. Specifically, a Decoupled Mixture-of-Expert (DeMoE) mechanism is presented to decouple the unified representation learning task into the modeling process of cross-modal shared knowledge and specific information, thus enabling the model to maintain flexibility while enhancing generalization. Additionally, we introduce a Task-aware Multi-object Tracking (TaMOT) pipeline to unify all the task outputs as a unified set of instances with calibrated ID information, thereby alleviating the degradation of task-specific knowledge during multi-task training. SATA demonstrates superior performance on 18 challenging tracking and segmentation benchmarks, offering a novel perspective for more generalizable video understanding.

Tracking and Segmenting Anything in Any Modality

We introduce MAVERIX~(Multimodal audiovisual Evaluation and Recognition IndeX), a unified benchmark to probe the video understanding in multimodal LLMs, encompassing video, audio, text inputs with human performance baselines. 
Although recent advancements in models with vision and audio understanding capabilities have shown substantial progress, the field lacks a standardized evaluation framework to thoroughly assess their cross-modality comprehension performance. MAVERIX curates 2,556 questions from 700 videos, in the form of both multiple-choice and open-ended formats, explicitly designed to evaluate multimodal models through questions that necessitate tight integration of video and audio information, spanning a broad spectrum of agentic scenarios. MAVERIX uniquely provides models with audiovisual questions, closely mimicking the multimodal perceptual experiences available to humans during inference and decision-making processes. To our knowledge, MAVERIX is the first benchmark aimed explicitly at assessing comprehensive audiovisual integration in such granularity. Experiments with state-of-the-art models, including Qwen 2.5 Omni and Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, show performance around 64% accuracy, while human experts reach near-ceiling performance of 92.8%, exposing a substantial gap to human-level comprehension. With standardized evaluation protocols, a rigorously annotated pipeline, and a public toolkit, MAVERIX establishes a challenging testbed for advancing audiovisual multimodal intelligence.

MAVERIX: Multimodal Audio-Visual Evaluation and Recognition IndeX

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate as autonomous agents in social contexts, evaluating their capacity for prosocial behavior is both theoretically and practically critical. However, existing research has primarily relied on static, economically framed paradigms, lacking models that capture the dynamic evolution of prosociality and its sensitivity to structural inequities. To address these gaps, we introduce ProSim, a simulation framework for modeling the prosocial behavior in LLM agents across diverse social conditions. We conduct three progressive studies to assess prosocial alignment. First, we demonstrate that LLM agents can exhibit human-like prosocial behavior across a broad range of real-world scenarios and adapt to normative policy interventions. Second, we find that agents engage in fairness-based third-party punishment and respond systematically to variations in inequity magnitude and enforcement cost. Third, we show that policy-induced inequities suppress prosocial behavior, propagate norm erosion through social networks. These findings advance prosocial behavior theory by elucidating how institutional dynamics shape the emergence, decay, and diffusion of prosocial norms in agent-driven societies.

Investigating Prosocial Behavior Theory in LLM Agents Under Policy-Induced Inequities

Protein subcellular localization prediction is essential for understanding protein function and cellular organization. However, existing methods exhibit two major limitations: (1) they overlook the critical role of evolutionarily conserved protein domains, which are fundamental functional and structural units that significantly influence functions and subcellular localization, and (2) they rarely learn residue order and backbone coordinates simultaneously, neglecting the complementary information inherent in multi-modal representations. In this paper, we propose a novel Domain-Aware Multi-View Contrastive Representation Learning for Protein Subcellular Localization prediction, named DMVCL. Firstly, it devises domain-sequence/structure attention modules, which identify functionally significant regions in protein structures/sequences that critically determine subcellular localization. Secondly, it introduces a multi-view contrastive learning framework that unites inter-view and intra-view objectives. Inter-view contrastive learning aligns protein sequences with their corresponding structures by maximizing mutual information, thereby capturing the consistency of protein residue order and backbone coordinates. Intra-view contrastive learning enhances the model’s sensitivity to subtle sequence and structural differences by pushing apart the embeddings of proteins located in different cellular compartments while pulling closer those in the same compartment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DMVCL significantly outperforms existing baselines. Ablation studies and visualizations further highlight the contributions of domain-sequence/structure attention and multi-view contrastive learning in achieving superior predictive performance. Source code can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DMVCL-C6F0.

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