Singapore

Text-only training provides an attractive approach to address data scarcity challenges in zero-shot image captioning (ZIC), avoiding the expense of collecting paired image-text annotations. However, although these approaches perform well within training domains, they suffer from poor cross-domain generalization, often producing hallucinated content when encountering novel visual environments. Retrieval-based methods attempt to mitigate this limitation by leveraging external knowledge, but they can paradoxically exacerbate hallucination when retrieved captions contain entities irrelevant to the inputs. We introduce the concept of $\textbf{\emph{negative entities}}$—objects that appear in generated caption but are absent from the input—and propose Negative Entity Suppression (NES) to tackle this challenge. NES seamlessly integrates three stages: (1) it employs synthetic images to ensure consistent image-to-text retrieval across both training and inference; (2) it filters negative entities from retrieved content to enhance accuracy; and (3) it applies attention-level suppression using identified negative entities to further minimize the impact of hallucination-prone features. Evaluation across multiple benchmarks demonstrates that NES maintains competitive in-domain performance while improving cross-domain transfer and reducing hallucination rates, achieving new state-of-the-art results in ZIC. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NES-CB86

AAAI 2026

Negative Entity Suppression for Zero-Shot Captioning with Synthetic Images

nlp: generation

nlp: language grounding & multi-modal nlp

cv: language and vision

explainable ml

ml: transparent

interpretable

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

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-25 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.



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.

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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.

Distributed online convex optimization (D-OCO), where multiple agents within a network collaboratively learn optimal decisions in real-time, arises naturally in applications such as federated learning, sensor networks, and multi-agent control. In this paper, we study D-OCO under unknown, time- and agent-varying feedback delays. While recent work has addressed delayed feedback (Nguyen, Kim Thang,
and Trystram 2024), existing algorithms assume prior knowledge of the cumulative delay over agents and still suffer from suboptimal dependence on both the delay and network parameters. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel algorithm that achieves an improved regret bound of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\Big(\sqrt{N^3d_{\text{tot},T}} + \sqrt{\frac{N^{5/2}T}{\sqrt{1-\sigma_2}}}\Big)$, where $d_{\text{tot}}$ denotes the average total delay across agents, $N$ is the number of agents, and $1 - \sigma_2$ is the spectral gap of the network. We also show that the dependence on $T$, $d_{\text{tot}}$ and $\sigma_2$ is tight by providing a matching lower bound. Our approach builds upon recent advances in D-OCO (Wan et al. 2024), but crucially incorporates an adaptive learning rate mechanism via a decentralized communication protocol. This enables each agent to estimate delays locally using a gossip-based strategy without the prior knowledge of the total delay. We further extend our framework to the strongly convex setting and derive sharper regret bounds. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach, showing improvements over existing benchmark algorithms.

Decentralized Online Convex Optimization with Unknown Feedback Delays

We study GCS-TSP, a new variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) defined over a Graph of Convex Sets (GCS) — a powerful representation for trajectory planning that decomposes the configuration space into convex regions connected by a sparse graph. In this setting, edge costs are not fixed but depend on the specific trajectory selected through each convex region, making classical TSP methods inapplicable.
We introduce GHOST, a hierarchical framework that optimally solves the GCS-TSP by combining combinatorial tour search with convex trajectory optimization. GHOST systematically explores tours on a complete graph induced by the GCS, using a novel abstract-path-unfolding algorithm to compute admissible lower bounds that guide best-first search at both the high level (over tours) and the low level (over feasible GCS paths realizing the tour). These bounds provide strong pruning power, enabling efficient search while avoiding unnecessary convex optimization calls.
We prove that GHOST guarantees optimality and present a bounded-suboptimal variant for time-critical scenarios. Experiments show that GHOST is orders-of-magnitude faster than unified mixed-integer convex programming baselines for simple cases and uniquely handles complex trajectory planning problems involving high-order continuity constraints and an incomplete GCS.

GHOST: Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem on Graphs of Convex Sets

Establishing point-to-point correspondences across multiple 3D shapes is a fundamental problem in computer vision and graphics. In this paper, we introduce DcMatch, a novel unsupervised learning framework for non-rigid multi-shape matching. Unlike existing methods that learn a canonical embedding from a single shape, our approach leverages a shape graph attention network to capture the underlying manifold structure of the entire shape collection. This enables the construction of a more expressive and robust shared latent space, leading to more consistent shape-to-universe correspondences via a universe predictor. Simultaneously, we represent these correspondences in both the spatial and spectral domains and enforce their alignment in the shared universe space through a novel cycle consistency loss. This dual-level consistency fosters more accurate and coherent mappings. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches across diverse multi-shape matching scenarios.

DcMatch: Unsupervised Multi-Shape Matching with Dual-Level Consistency

Recent end-to-end robotic manipulation research increasingly adopts architectures inspired by large language models (LLMs) to enable robust manipulation. However, a critical challenge arises from severe distribution shifts in robotic action data, primarily due to substantial numerical variations in action commands across diverse robotic platforms and tasks, hindering the effective transfer of pretrained knowledge. To address this limitation, we utilize the language-modal action representation ``motion'' as the target for pretraining. Unlike conventional discretized action representations that are sensitive to numerical scales, the motion representation specifically disregards numeric scale effects, emphasizing directionality instead. This abstraction effectively reduces the impact of distribution shifts, providing a more generalizable representation suitable for pretraining. Moreover, using the motion representation narrows the feature distance between action tokens and standard vocabulary tokens, mitigating modality gaps. Multi-task experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that this method significantly improves generalization performance and transferability in robotic manipulation tasks.

Bridging Scale Discrepancies in Robotic Control via Language-Based Action Representations

The advanced reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models enable them to thoroughly understand and apply safety policies through deliberate thought processes, thereby improving the models' safety. Beyond safety, these models must also be able to reflect the diverse range of human values across various cultures. This paper presents the Cultural Norm-based Cultural Alignment (CNCA) framework, which enables models to leverage their powerful reasoning ability to align with cultural norms. Specifically, we propose three methods to automatically mine cultural norms from limited survey data and explore ways to effectively utilize these norms for improving cultural alignment. Two alignment paradigms are examined: an in-context alignment method, where cultural norms are explicitly integrated into the user context, and a fine-tuning-based method, which internalizes norms through enhanced Chain-of-Thought training data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods, highlighting that models with stronger reasoning capabilities benefit more from cultural norm mining and utilization. Our findings emphasize the potential for reasoning models to better reflect diverse human values through culturally informed alignment strategies.

Reasoning Shapes Alignment: Investigating Cultural Alignment in Large Reasoning Models with Cultural Norms

Regularized optimization has been a classical approach to solving imaging inverse problems, where the regularization term enforces desirable properties of the unknown image. Recently, the integration of flow matching generative models into image restoration has garnered significant attention, owing to their powerful prior modeling capabilities. In this work, we incorporate such generative priors into a Plug-and-Play (PnP) framework based on proximal splitting, where the proximal operator associated with the regularizer is replaced by a time-dependent denoiser derived from the generative model. While existing PnP methods have achieved notable success in inverse problems with smooth squared $\ell_2$ data fidelity—typically associated with Gaussian noise—their applicability to more general data fidelity terms remains underexplored. To address this, we propose a general and efficient PnP algorithm inspired by the primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method. Our approach is computationally efficient, memory-friendly, and accommodates a wide range of fidelity terms. In particular, it supports both $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ norm-based losses, enabling robustness to non-Gaussian noise types such as Poisson and impulse noise. We validate our method on several image restoration tasks, including denoising, super-resolution, deblurring, and inpainting, and demonstrate that $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ fidelity terms outperform the conventional squared $\ell_2$ loss in the presence of non-Gaussian noise.

Image Restoration via Primal Dual Hybrid Gradient and Flow Generative Model

Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) excel in video understanding, but their excessive visual tokens pose a significant computational challenge for real-world applications. Current methods aim to enhance inference efficiency by visual token pruning. However, they do not consider the dynamic characteristics and temporal dependencies of video frames, as they perceive video understanding as a multi-frame task. To address these challenges, we propose **MMG-Vid**, a novel training-free visual token pruning framework that removes redundancy by **M**aximizing **M**arginal **G**ains at both segment-level and token-level. Specifically, we first divide the video into segments based on frame similarity, and then dynamically allocate the token budget for each segment to maximize the marginal gain of each segment. Subsequently, we propose a temporal-guided DPC algorithm that jointly models inter-frame uniqueness and intra-frame diversity, thereby maximizing the marginal gain of each token. By combining both stages, MMG-Vid can maximize the utilization of the limited token budget, significantly improving efficiency while maintaining strong performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMG-Vid can maintain over **99.5\%** of the original performance, while effectively **reducing 75\%** visual tokens and accelerating the prefilling stage by **3.9x** on LLaVA-OneVision-7B. Code will be released soon.

MMG-Vid: Maximizing Marginal Gains at Segment-level and Token-level for Efficient Video LLMs

The multi-view clustering methods based on tensor regression can make full use of the potential structural information between views and achieve data-level fusion. However, existing tensor regression-based approaches for anchor graph often overlook the probabilistic nature of anchor graph, focusing solely on sample labels while ignoring the influence of anchor labels on clustering results. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Tensorized Label Learning via Balanced Tensor Regression (TLL-BTR). Our key idea is to exploit the probabilistic nature of the anchor graph by regarding the sample labels as a projection tensor that maps the anchor graph into the label space, thereby producing anchor labels. By enforcing constraints on these anchor labels, we guide the concurrent learning of sample labels and achieve co-label learning between anchors and samples. To prevent trivial solutions, we maximize the nuclear norm to promote an even distribution of samples across clusters. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TLL-BTR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Tensorized Label Learning via Balanced Tensor Regression

Retrieval Augmented Generation enhances the response accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating retrieval and generation modules with external knowledge, demonstrating particular strength in real-time queries and Visual Question Answering tasks. 
However, the effectiveness of RAG is frequently hindered by the precision of the retriever: many retrieved samples fed into the generation phase are irrelevant or misleading, posing a critical bottleneck to LLMs’ performance.
To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{VaccineRAG}, a novel Chain-of-Thought-based retrieval-augmented generation dataset. 
On one hand, VaccineRAG employs a benchmark to evaluate models using data with varying positive/negative sample ratios, systematically exposing inherent weaknesses in current LLMs. 
On the other hand, it enhances models’ sample-discrimination capabilities by prompting LLMs to generate explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) analysis for each sample before producing final answers.
Furthermore, to enhance the model’s ability to learn long-sequence complex CoT content, we propose \textbf{Partial-GRPO}. 
By modeling the outputs of LLMs as multiple components rather than a single whole, our model can make more informed preference selections for complex sequences, thereby enhancing its capacity to learn complex CoT.
Comprehensive evaluations and ablation studies on VaccineRAG validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The code and dataset will be publicly released soon.

VaccineRAG: Boosting Multimodal Large Language Models’ Immunity to Harmful RAG Samples

Robust Markov decision processes (r-MDPs) extend MDPs by explicitly modelling epistemic uncertainty about transition dynamics. Learning r-MDPs from interactions with an unknown environment enables the synthesis of robust policies with provable (PAC) guarantees on performance, but this can require a large number of sample interactions. We propose novel methods for solving and learning r-MDPs based on factored state-space representations that leverage the independence between model uncertainty across system components. Although policy synthesis for factored r-MDPs leads to hard, non-convex optimisation problems, we show how to reformulate these into tractable linear programs. Building on these, we also propose methods to learn factored model representations directly. Our experimental results show that exploiting factored structure can yield dimensional gains in sample efficiency, producing more effective robust policies with tighter performance guarantees than state-of-the-art methods.

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