Singapore

Semi-supervised multi-label learning (SSMLL) aims to address the challenge of limited labeled data in multi-label learning (MLL) by leveraging unlabeled data to improve the model’s performance. While pseudo-labeling has become a dominant strategy in SSMLL, most existing methods assign **equal weights** to all pseudo-labels regardless of their quality, which can amplify the impact of noisy or uncertain predictions and degrade the overall performance. In this paper, we **theoretically** verify that the optimal weight for a pseudo-label should reflect its correctness likelihood. **Empirically**, we observe that on the same dataset, the correctness likelihood distribution of unlabeled data remains stable, even as the number of labeled training samples varies. Building on this insight, we propose **Di**stribution-**Ca**librated **P**seudo-labeling (**DiCaP**), a correctness-aware framework that estimates posterior precision to calibrate pseudo-label weights. We further introduce a dual-thresholding mechanism to separate confident and ambiguous regions: confident samples are pseudo-labeled and weighted accordingly, while ambiguous ones are explored by unsupervised contrastive learning. Experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets verify that our method achieves consistent improvements, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by up to **4.27%**. **Code is available in the supplementary material**.

AAAI 2026

DiCaP: Distribution-Calibrated Pseudo-labeling for Semi-Supervised Multi-Label Learning

ml: multi-class/multi-label learning & extreme classification ml: semi-supervised learning ml: deep learning algorithms

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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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.

With the advancement of vision-language models, image captioning has made significant progress, leading to the generation of more accurate and detailed descriptions.
Current image captioning primarily focuses on describing the apparent visual characteristics, which are easily observed by most humans, but less helpful in real-world scenarios.
When users seek a deeper understanding of visual content, they may be concerned with fine-grained categories, function properties, and other background knowledge, rather than merely appearances.
Additionally, as users' interests vary, there is a growing demand for customizable content generation.
To address these challenges, we propose the task of image narrative generation, which aims to produce knowledge-rich natural language responses for input images, customized to the user preference.
Furthermore, we propose $T^4$, an image narrative generation model progressing through cascade steps: Tailor, reTrieve, Think, and Tell.
Specifically, it takes the image and various types of prompts as input, and first refines or predicts potentially interesting queries that are tailored to the user expertise level.
Subsequently, the model enriches contextual knowledge through retrieval-augmentation and employs chain-of-thoughts to decompose the generation process step by step, thereby telling an accurate and logically coherent image narrative.
In addition, we construct the ImgNarr-23K dataset to support task training and evaluation.
Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach generates image narrative that better satisfy user requirements, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in knowledge-based VQA tasks without additional finetuning.
$T^4$ presents a promising solution for customized content generation in specialized domains.

Tell as You Want: Customizing Image Narrative with Knowledge and Thoughts

Recent advances in rotation-invariant (RI) learning for 3D point clouds typically replace raw coordinates with handcrafted RI features to ensure robustness under arbitrary rotations. However, these approaches often suffer from the loss of global pose information, making them incapable of distinguishing geometrically similar but spatially distinct structures. We identify that this limitation stems from the restricted receptive field in existing RI methods, leading to Wing–tip feature collapse, a failure to differentiate symmetric components (e.g., left and right airplane wings) due to indistinguishable local geometries. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the Shadow-informed Pose Feature (SiPF), which augments local RI descriptors with a globally consistent reference point (referred to as the “shadow”) derived from a learned shared rotation. This mechanism enables the model to preserve global pose awareness while maintaining rotation invariance. We further propose Rotation-invariant Attention Convolution (RIAttnConv), an attention-based operator that integrates SiPFs into the feature aggregation process, thereby enhancing the model’s capacity to distinguish structurally similar components. Additionally, we design a task-adaptive shadow locating module based on the Bingham distribution over unit quaternions, which dynamically learns the optimal global rotation for constructing consistent shadows. Extensive experiments on 3D classification and part segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms existing RI methods, particularly in tasks requiring fine-grained spatial discrimination under arbitrary rotations.

Enhancing Rotation-Invariant 3D Learning with Global Pose Awareness and Attention Mechanisms

Recent efforts have repurposed the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) by measuring the cosine similarity between the image embedding and textual prompts such as ``a good photo” or ``a bad photo.” However, this semantic similarity overlooks a critical yet underexplored cue: the magnitude of the CLIP image features, which we empirically find to exhibit a strong correlation with perceptual quality. In this work, we introduce a novel adaptive fusion framework that complements cosine similarity with a magnitude-aware quality cue. Specifically, we first extract the absolute CLIP image features and apply a Box-Cox transformation to statistically normalize the feature distribution and mitigate semantic sensitivity. The resulting scalar summary serves as a semantically-normalized auxiliary cue that complements cosine-based prompt matching. To integrate both cues effectively, we further design a confidence-guided fusion scheme that adaptively weighs each term according to its relative strength. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark IQA datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms standard CLIP-based IQA and state-of-the-art baselines, without any task-specific training. Moreover, the generalization capability of our enhancement scheme on image aesthetic assessment task further underscores the effectiveness of the proposed dual-source design. The code will be publicly available.

Beyond Cosine Similarity: Magnitude-Aware CLIP for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

The lack of large-scale, demographically diverse face images with precise Action Unit (AU) occurrence and intensity annotations has long been recognized as a fundamental bottleneck in developing generalizable facial AU recognition systems. In this paper, we propose MAUGen, a diffusion-based multi-modal framework that jointly generates a large collection of photorealistic facial expressions and anatomically consistent AU labels, including both occurrence and intensity, conditioned on a single descriptive text prompt. Our MAUGen involves two key modules: (1) a Multi-modal Representation Learning (MRL) module that captures the relationships among the paired facial textual description, facial identity, facial expression image, and AU activations within a unified latent space; and (2) a Diffusion-based Image-label Generator (DIG) that decodes the obtained joint representation into aligned facial image-label pairs across diverse identities. Under this framework, we introduce the Multi-Identity Facial Action (MIFA), a large-scale multi-modal (i.e., text descriptions, face images with labels) synthetic dataset that features comprehensive AU annotations and identity variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAUGen outperforms existing methods in synthesizing photorealistic, demographically diverse facial images, along with semantically aligned AU labels. Our code will be released upon acceptance.

MAUGen: A Unified Diffusion Approach for Multi-Identity Facial Expression and AU Label Generation

Recent image denoising methods have leveraged generative modeling for real noise synthesis to address the costly acquisition of real-world noisy data. However, these generative models typically require camera metadata and extensive target-specific noisy-clean image pairs, often showing limited generalization between settings. In this paper, to mitigate the prerequisites, we propose a Single-Pair Guided Diffusion for generalized noise synthesis(GuidNoise), which uses a single noisy/clean pair as the guidance, often easily obtained by itself within a training set. To train GuidNoise, which generates synthetic noisy images from the guidance, we introduce a guidance-aware affine feature modification (GAFM) and a noise-aware refine loss to leverage the inherent potential of diffusion models. This loss function refines the diffusion model’s backward process, making the model more adept at generating realistic noise distributions. The GuidNoise synthesizes high-quality noisy images under diverse noise environments without additional metadata during both training and inference. Additionally, GuidNoise enables the efficient generation of noisy-clean image pairs at inference time, making synthetic noise readily applicable for augmenting training data. This self-augmentation significantly improves denoising performance, especially in practical scenarios with lightweight models and limited training data.

GuidNoise: Single-Pair Guided Diffusion for Generalized Noise Synthesis

Multimodal data fusion involves integrating and analyzing information from multiple modalities to uncover latent correlations and complementary patterns, thereby enhancing data processing and decision-making. While existing methods for structured multimodal inputs are typically designed around specific tasks and assume fully observed modalities, realworld applications often suffer from uncertain or missing modality inputs due to various factors. Some traditional models overly emphasize local interactions within missing modalities, neglecting the global complementary cues embedded in multimodal representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Dynamic Multimodal Data Fusion Model Based on Contrastive Learning (CL-DMDF). CL-DMDF introduces a novel attention mechanism that operates across both feature and modality dimensions to compute reliable attention scores, effectively reflecting importance at each level. The CL-DMDF further incorporates an entity-centroid contrastive learning module that constructs centroid-based positive samples from entity features to enhance discriminative learning. Additionally, an adaptive fusion module is employed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of dynamic fusion strategies. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the CL-DMDF across diverse multimodal fusion tasks. All source code has been provided in supplementary material.

CL-DMDF: Dynamic Multimodal Data Fusion Model Based on Contrastive Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across many applications but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which elicit harmful or unintended content. While model fine-tuning is an option for safety alignment, it is costly and prone to catastrophic forgetting. Prompt optimization has emerged as a promising alternative, yet existing prompt-based defenses typically rely on static modifications (e.g., fixed prefixes or suffixes) that cannot adapt to diverse and evolving attacks.

We propose Dynamic Deep Prompt Optimization (DDPO), the first jailbreak defense based on deep prompt optimization. DDPO uses the target LLM's own intermediate layers as feature extractors to dynamically generate defensive embeddings via a lightweight multilayer perceptron. These tailored embeddings are then injected into a subsequent intermediate layer, enabling an input-dependent defense without modifying the LLM's weights. This design ensures high adaptability with minimal computational overhead.

Experiments on a diverse set of models and attacks demonstrate that DDPO significantly outperforms static prompt optimization methods, particularly on weakly aligned models and when handling semantically ambiguous benign prompts, successfully distinguishing them from genuinely harmful requests.

Dynamic Deep Prompt Optimization for Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the factual accuracy of large language models by grounding responses in external content. However, most RAG systems assume access to static and well-organized corpora with fixed retrieval logic. In practice, real-world sources are heterogeneous and unlabeled, including user-uploaded documents, manuals, and datasets. Effective access in such settings requires adaptive and self-directed retrieval behavior.
We present \textsc{SegMem‑RAG}, a memory-augmented RAG framework that learns to route queries across multiple unlabeled corpora based on experience. It incrementally updates a structured memory and uses self-reflection to guide retrieval over time without supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that \textsc{SegMem‑RAG} significantly outperforms recent baselines in generation quality on multi-corpus QA tasks.

SegMem-RAG: Adaptive Memory for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Open-Ended Knowledge Environments

The recent advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is transforming human-computer interaction (HCI) from surface-level exchanges into more nuanced and emotionally intelligent communication. To realize this shift, emotion understanding becomes essential allowing systems to capture subtle cues underlying user intent. Furthermore, providing faithful explanations for predicted emotions is crucial to ensure interpretability and build user trust. However, current MLLM-based methods often generate emotion explanations that diverge from the ground-truth (GT) labels and sometimes even contradict their own predicted emotions. This inconsistency poses a critical risk for misunderstanding and erodes reliability in interactive settings. To address this, we propose a novel approach: the Emotional Rationale Verifier (ERV) and an Explanation Reward. Our method guides the model to produce reasoning that is explicitly consistent with the GT emotion during multimodal emotion recognition without modifying the model architecture or requiring paired video–description annotations. Our method significantly improves faithful explanation–prediction consistency and explanation emotion accuracy on the MAFW and DFEW datasets. 
Through extensive experiments and human evaluations, we show that our approach not only enhances alignment between explanation and prediction but also empowers MLLMs to deliver emotionally coherent, trustworthy interactions, marking a key step toward truly human-like HCI systems.

Emotion-Coherent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs via Emotional Rationale Verifier

Knowledge editing (KE) has emerged as an effective approach for updating factual information in large language models (LLMs) without the need for full retraining. Most of the existing methods for addressing the "ripple effect" in KE adopt a chain-structured reasoning process, making them vulnerable to error accumulation from early incorrect steps. Moreover, their conflict detection mechanisms are often susceptible to the LLM's inherent confirmation bias, further undermining the reliability of the editing process. To overcome these challenges, we propose **Tree of Editing (ToE), a tree-structured, retrieval-enhanced knowledge editing framework** designed to support robust reasoning under factual updates. ToE expands reasoning paths using a breadth-first strategy combined with score-guided beam search, enabling diverse and error-tolerant inference. Besides, we introduce an observer to objectively update knowledge, avoiding the bias caused by LLMs' over-confidence. Experimental results on two benchmarks, namely **MQuAKE-CF** (targeting ripple-aware editing) and **DUNE** (free-form editing), demonstrate that ToE framework significantly outperforms existing methods.

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