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Precise environmental perception is critical for the reliability of autonomous driving systems. While collaborative perception mitigates the limitations of single-agent perception through information sharing, it encounters a fundamental communication-performance trade-off. Existing communication-efficient approaches typically assume MB-level data transmission per collaboration, which may fail due to practical network constraints. To address these issues, we propose InfoCom, an information-aware framework establishing the pioneering theoretical foundation for communication-efficient collaborative perception via extended Information Bottleneck principles. Departing from mainstream feature manipulation, InfoCom introduces a novel information purification paradigm that theoretically optimizes the extraction of minimal sufficient task-critical information under Information Bottleneck constraints. Its core innovations include: i) An Information-Aware Encoding condensing features into minimal messages while preserving perception-relevant information; ii) A Sparse Mask Generation identifying spatial cues with negligible communication cost; and iii) A Multi-Scale Decoding that progressively recovers perceptual information through mask-guided mechanisms rather than simple feature reconstruction. Comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that InfoCom achieves near-lossless perception while reducing communication overhead from megabyte to kilobyte-scale, representing 440-fold and 90-fold reductions per agent compared to Where2comm and ERMVP, respectively. The code will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

AAAI 2026

InfoCom: Kilobyte-Scale Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception with Information Bottleneck

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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.

Scenes with water surfaces present a significant challenge for Gaussian Splatting due to the simultaneous presence of refraction and reflection, as well as the difficulty of accurately estimating the geometry of transparent water surfaces. To address this, we propose a novel framework for reconstructing scenes involving both reflection and refraction caused by water surfaces. The water surface is modeled as a trainable plane, and 2D Gaussian ray tracing is applied to account for refraction through the water. We extend 2D Gaussian Splatting by introducing a soft mask parameter and a dual set of Gaussian primitives, which handle both reflected and refracted effects. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on newly constructed water surface datasets, including both synthetic and real scenes, and significantly outperforms prior approaches in water-interacting regions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the editability of our model by manipulating the index of refraction to suppress or modify refractive effects, enabling scene transformations into different liquids.

Through the Water: Refractive Gaussian Splatting for Water Surface Scenes

Identification of fine-grained embryo developmental stages during In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is crucial for assessing embryo viability. Although recent deep learning methods have achieved promising accuracy, existing approaches based on discriminative models fail to utilize the distributional prior of embryonic development. Moreover, they suffer from incomplete embryonic representation due to their reliance on single-focal information, thereby making them susceptible to feature ambiguity caused by cell occlusions. To address these limitations, we propose EmbryoDiff, a two-stage diffusion-based framework that utilizes sequence features as condition signals for accurate stage recognition. Specifically, in the first stage, a frame-level encoder is trained and fixed to extract robust multi-focal visual features for training the diffusion model. In the second stage, we introduce a Multi-Focal Feature Fusion strategy that integrates information across focal planes to build a morphological representation with 3D contextual awareness, mitigating ambiguity caused by cell occlusions. Based on the fused features, we further extract complementary semantic and boundary condition features and design a Hybrid Semantic-Boundary Condition Block to effectively inject them into the denoising process for accurate stage classification. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our model attains optimal average test performance with only one denoising step, achieving 82.8% and 81.3% accuracy on the two datasets, respectively.

EmbryoDiff: A Conditional Diffusion Framework with Multi-Focal Feature Fusion for Fine-Grained Embryo Developmental Stage Recognition

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of natural language tasks, but often exhibit overconfidence and generate plausible yet incorrect answers. This overconfidence, especially in models undergone Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), poses significant challenges for reliable uncertainty estimation and safe deployment.
In this paper, we propose EAGLE (Expectation of AGgregated internaL bEief), a novel self-evaluation-based calibration method that leverages the internal hidden states of LLMs to derive more accurate confidence scores.
Instead of relying on the model's final output, our approach extracts internal beliefs from multiple intermediate layers during self-evaluation. By aggregating these layer-wise beliefs and calculating the expectation over the resulting confidence score distribution, EAGLE produces a refined confidence score that more faithfully reflects the model's internal certainty. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets and LLMs demonstrate that EAGLE significantly improves calibration performance over existing baselines.
We also provide an in-depth analysis of EAGLE, including a layer-wise examination of uncertainty patterns, a study of the impact of self-evaluation prompts, and an analysis of the effect of self-evaluation score range.

Enhancing Uncertainty Estimation in LLMs with Expectation of Aggregated Internal Belief

Branch-and-Bound (B\&B) is the dominant exact solution method for Mixed Integer Linear Programs (MILP), yet its exponential time complexity poses significant challenges for large-scale instances. The growing capabilities of machine learning have spurred efforts to enhance B\&B by learning data-driven branching policies. However, most existing approaches rely on imitation learning, which tends to overfit to expert demonstrations and struggles to generalize to structurally diverse or unseen instances. In this work, we propose TGPPO, a novel framework that employs Proximal Policy Optimization---a reinforcement learning algorithm---to train a branching policy aimed at improving generalization across heterogeneous MILP instances. Our approach builds on a parameterized state space representation that dynamically captures the evolving context of the search tree. Empirical evaluations show that TGPPO often outperforms existing learning-based policies in terms of reducing the number of nodes explored and improving primal-dual integrals, particularly on out-of-distribution instances. These results highlight the potential of reinforcement learning to develop robust and adaptable branching strategies for MILP solvers.

Learning Branching Policies for MILPs with Proximal Policy Optimization

Multi-modal salient object detection (MSOD), which integrates complementary modalities such as depth or thermal data, primarily faces two challenges: accurately preserving salient object details and effectively aligning cross-modal features. Recent advances in using Stable Diffusion to generate images with fine edge details have inspired researchers to reformulate MSOD as a conditional mask generation process guided by salient features, which has achieved excellent visual results. However, these approaches often overlook the high computational cost and large-scale architecture of Stable Diffusion, both of which render it unsuitable for real-world MSOD applications.
Therefore, we propose SimpleDiffusion, the first lightweight and efficient conditional diffusion model for MSOD that does not rely on Stable Diffusion. Specifically, we propose an Adaptive Cross-Modal Fusion Conditional Network and a Latent Denoising Network to reduce the complexity of diffusion models. Furthermore, we design a Multi-modal Feature Rectification and Fusion Module to enhance the representational capacity of cross-modal salient features. Customized training and sampling strategies are also developed to improve inference efficiency and reduce erroneous object segmentations. Experiments on multiple MSOD datasets demonstrate that SimpleDiffusion reduces model size by over tenfold and improves inference speed by more than fivefold compared to other diffusion-based methods, while maintaining comparable or superior performance.Codes and models are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/simple-diffusion.

SimpleDiffusion: A Lightweight and Efficient Conditional Diffusion Model for Multi-Modal Salient Object Detection

Point cloud processing has become a cornerstone technology in many 3D vision tasks. However, arbitrary rotations introduce variations in point cloud poses, posing a long-standing challenge for effective representation learning. The core of this issue is the disruption of the point cloud's intrinsic directional characteristics caused by rotational perturbations. Recent methods attempt to implicitly model rotational equivariance and invariance, preserving directional information and propagating it into deep semantic spaces. Yet, they often fall short of fully exploiting the multiscale directional nature of point clouds to enhance feature representations. To address this, we propose the Direction-Perceptive Vector Network (DiPVNet). At its core is an atomic dot-product operator that simultaneously encodes directional selectivity and rotation invariance—endowing the network with both rotational symmetry modeling and adaptive directional perception. At the local level, we introduce a Learnable Local Dot Product (L2DP) Operator, which enables interactions between a center point and its neighbors to adaptively capture the non-uniform local structures of point clouds. At the global level, we leverage generalized harmonic analysis to prove that the dot product between point clouds and spherical sampling vectors is equivalent to a direction-aware spherical Fourier transform (DASFT). This leads to the construction of a global directional response spectrum for modeling holistic directional structures. We rigorously prove the rotation invariance of both operators. Extensive experiments on challenging scenarios involving noise and large-angle rotations demonstrate that DiPVNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on point cloud classification and segmentation tasks. The code will be released publicly.

Hierarchical Direction Perception via Atomic Dot-Product Operators for Rotation-Invariant Point Clouds Learning

Representation learning is fundamental to modern machine learning, powering applications such as text retrieval and multimodal understanding. However, learning robust and generalizable representations remains challenging. While prior work has demonstrated that active noise injection, a form of data augmentation, can enhance encoding performance, most existing methods rely on heuristic or static noise, overlooking the dynamic nature of feature distributions during training. In this work, we systematically study the role of noise in representation learning from both gradient-based and feature distribution perspectives, using InfoNCE loss as a representative example. Focusing on multimodal representation learning, we propose FANoise, a novel feature-adaptive noise injection strategy. By leveraging the dynamics of contrastive learning, FANoise effectively mitigates the negative impacts of noise while preserving its benefits. Under this theoretically grounded framework, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FANoise consistently improves overall performance on multimodal tasks across various base VLM models.

FANoise: Singular Value-Adaptive Noise Modulation for Robust Multimodal Representation Learning

Current large language models (LLMs) exhibit significant deficiencies in episodic memory tasks including encoding, storing, and retrieving specific information from temporally dependent events over a long period of time. Recent approaches to handle memory tasks in LLMs, such as in-context learning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning, may resolve the long-term retention issues, but are still inadequate to handle tasks requiring chronological awareness of the stored information. We introduce Agentic Retrieval with Temporal-Episodic Memory (ARTEM), a hybrid LLM-based agent architecture integrating LLMs with a self-organizing neural network named Spatial-Temporal Episodic Memory (STEM), designed to handle episodic memory tasks. Our approach employs LLMs for event extraction from the inputs to represent temporal, spatial, entitative, and semantic information that may facilitate future retrieval, aside from generating outputs or direct responses. The extracted events can then be encoded vectorially and stored in a fast and stable manner in the episodic memory through an instance-based incremental learning in STEM. STEM supports precise episodes retrieval and helps reduce computational overhead in generating the appropriate responses by LLMs. Evaluation on standardized episodic memory benchmarks across four tasks—partial cue retrieval, epistemic uncertainty detection, recent event identification, and chronological recall—demonstrates superior performance of ARTEM compared to in-context learning, RAG, and fine-tuning in various popular LLMs. Code and appendices are available at \textit{https://github.com/cassthm/ARTEM}.

ARTEM: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents with Spatial-Temporal Episodic Memory

Developing Medical AI relies on large datasets and easily suffers from data scarcity. Generative data augmentation (GDA) using AI generative models offers a solution to synthesize realistic medical images. However, the bias in GDA is often underestimated in medical domains, with concerns about the risk of introducing detrimental features generated by AI and harming downstream tasks. This paper identifies the frequency misalignment between real and synthesized images as one of the key factors underlying unreliable GDA and proposes the Frequency Recalibration (FreRec) method to reduce the frequency distributional discrepancy and thus improve GDA. FreRec involves (1) Statistical High-frequency Replacement (SHR) to roughly align high-frequency components and (2) Reconstructive High-frequency Mapping (RHM) to enhance image quality and reconstruct high-frequency details. Extensive experiments were conducted in various medical datasets, including brain MRIs, chest X-rays, and fundus images. The results show that FreRec significantly improves downstream medical image classification performance compared to uncalibrated AI-synthesized samples. FreRec is a standalone post-processing step that is compatible with any generative model and can integrate seamlessly with common medical GDA pipelines.

Rethinking Bias in Generative Data Augmentation for Medical AI: A Frequency Recalibration Method

Temporal graphs are essential for modeling complex real-world systems, such as social interactions, financial transactions, and recommendation system, but the high computational cost and model complexity pose practical challenges for deploying dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs). Although various pruning and sampling techniques have proven effective in accelerating static GNNs, these approaches fall short in dynamic settings due to temporal dependencies in evolving graph structures. To address these challenges, we propose TrimDG, a general framework that accelerates DGNNs by eliminating both static and runtime redundancy. For static redundancy, we design a novel node influence metric, Temporal Personalized PageRank (TPP), to prune less informative nodes and apply temporal binning to remove redundant events. For runtime redundancy during training, we introduce an adaptive sampling strategy guided by graph bottlenecks and reduce sampling frequency by temporal batch selector and sampling cache. Theoretical analysis supports our design, and experiments on real-world datasets show that TrimDG reduces runtime by an average of 83.80\% across diverse DGNN backbones, while maintaining strong predictive performance, demonstrating both its efficiency and generalizability.

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