Singapore

Multi-modal image matching is a fundamental task in multi-view and multi-modal image processing. Its key challenge lies in extracting features that remain consistent despite drastic appearance variations across modalities. However, the learning of the feature is hindered by the scarcity and the inaccurate alignment of existing multi-modal datasets. To address this, we propose a knowledge distillation framework that transfers rich prior knowledge from large-scale unimodal tasks to enhance multi-modal representation learning. Specifically, semantic priors from a vision foundation model guide the feature extractor to identify shared semantic structures across modalities, enabling better generalization under large appearance gaps. In parallel, geometric priors derived from accurately aligned visible-light datasets improve detection precision on noisy aligned multi-modal pairs. Furthermore, we introduce a Heterogeneous Feature Aggregation (HFA) module to facilitate effective distillation and feature representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, SGPFeat, enhanced by Semantic and Geometric Priors, achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse multi-modal image matching benchmarks.

AAAI 2026

SGPFeat: Semantic and Geometric Priors for Multi-modal Image Matching

cv: multi-modal vision

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.

technical paper

The success of deep learning is highly dependent on
large-scale labeled data. This presents a formidable
challenge in fields like molecular design and materials
science, where data annotation is prohibitively expensive.
Consequently, developing label-efficient learning methods
to maximize model performance under limited annotation
budgets has recently become more and more critical.

However, most of the current mainstream label-efficient
algorithms, like active learning and semi-supervised
learning, are primarily designed for Euclidean data, such
as images. They cannot effectively process the
non-Euclidean graph-structured data, thus overlooking the
rich topological information embedded within.

In this talk, we aim to bridge this gap through a
progressive research path that addresses three core
challenges in data annotation for graph-structured data.
First, to address the high cost of annotation, we adapt
active learning and semi-supervised learning from general
domains to explicit graph data, enabling the precise
labeling of high-value nodes. Second, to address label
scarcity, we pioneer methods to construct and leverage
implicit graph structures, propagating existing labels and
generating new information to boost the performance of
semi-supervised and self-supervised learning. Finally, to
address label noise, we perform the fusion of both explicit
and implicit graphs. By learning an implicit structure from
noisy explicit graph data, our methods will identify and
mitigate the impact of noise.

Graph-based Label-Efficient Learning: When Graph-Structured Data Meets Limited Labels

The internet has become the main source of data to train modern text-to-image or vision-language models, yet it is increasingly unclear whether web-scale data collection practices for training AI systems adequately respect data owners' wishes. Ignoring the owner's indication of consent around data usage not only raises ethical concerns but also has recently been elevated into lawsuits around copyright infringement cases. In this work, we aim to reveal information about data owners' consent to AI scraping and training, and study how it's expressed in DataComp, a popular dataset of 12.8 billion text-image pairs. We examine both the \textit{sample-level} information, including the copyright notice, watermarking, and metadata, and the \textit{web-domain-level} information, such as a site's Terms of Service (ToS) and Robots Exclusion Protocol. We estimate at least 122M of samples exhibit some indication of copyright notice in CommonPool, and find that 60\% of the samples in the top 50 domains come from websites with ToS that prohibit scraping. Furthermore, we estimate 9-13\% with 95\% confidence interval of samples from CommonPool to contain watermarks, where existing watermark detection methods fail to capture them in high fidelity. Our holistic methods and findings show that data owners rely on various channels to convey data consent, of which current AI data collection pipelines do not entirely respect. These findings highlight the limitations of the current dataset curation/release practice and the need for a unified data consent framework taking AI purposes into consideration.

How Do Data Owners Say No? A Case Study of Data Consent Mechanisms in Web-Scraped Vision-Language AI Training Datasets

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction from sparse, low-resolution (LR) images is a crucial capability for real-world applications, such as autonomous driving and embodied AI. However, existing methods often fail to recover fine texture details. This limitation stems from the inherent lack of high-frequency information in LR inputs. To address this, we propose SRSplat, a feed-forward framework that reconstructs high-resolution 3D scenes from only a few LR views. Our main insight is to compensate for the deficiency of texture information by jointly leveraging external high-quality reference images and internal texture cues. We first construct a scene-specific reference gallery, generated for each scene using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and diffusion models. To integrate this external information, we introduce the Reference-Guided Feature Enhancement (RGFE) module, which aligns and fuses features from the LR input images and their reference twin image. Subsequently, we train a decoder to predict the Gaussian primitives using the multi-view fused feature obtained from RGFE. To further refine predicted Gaussian primitives, we introduce Texture-Aware Density Control (TADC), which adaptively adjusts Gaussian density based on the internal texture richness of the LR inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SRSplat outperforms existing methods on various datasets, including RealEstate10K, ACID, and DTU, and exhibits strong cross-dataset and cross-resolution generalization capabilities. Our code and video demos can be found in the supplementary materials.

SRSplat: Feed-Forward Super-Resolution Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images

Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA) evaluates visual quality through user-centered perceptual analysis and can guide various applications. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have sparked interest in adapting them for IAA. However, two critical limitations persist in applying MLLMs to IAA: 1) the tokenization strategy leads to insensitivity to scores, and 2) the classification-based decoding mechanisms introduce score quantization errors. Current MLLM-based IAA methods treat the task as coarse rating classification followed by probability-to-score mapping, which loses fine-grained information. To address these challenges, we propose ROC4MLLM, offering complementary solutions from two perspectives:1) Representation: We separate scores from the word token space to avoid tokenizing scores as text. An independent position token bridges these spaces, improving the sensitivity of the model to score positions in text. 2) Computation: We apply distinct loss functions for text and score predictions to enhance the sensitivity of the model to score gradients. Decoupling scores from text ensures effective supervision while preventing interference between scores and text in the loss computation. Extensive experiments across five datasets demonstrate that ROC4MLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance without requiring additional training data. Additionally, its plug-and-play design ensures seamless integration with existing MLLMs, boosting their IAA performance. All resources are available in here.

Regression over Classification: Assessing Image Aesthetics via Multimodal Large Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in healthcare, their application for rare medical conditions is still hindered by scarce and unreliable datasets for fine-tuning. Hyperhidrosis, a disorder causing excessive sweating beyond physiological needs, is one such rare disorder, affecting 2–3\% of the population and significantly impacting both physical comfort and psychosocial well-being. To date, no work has tailored LLMs to advance the diagnosis or care of hyperhidrosis. To address this gap, we present LLM4Sweat, an open-source and domain-specific LLM framework for trustworthy and empathetic hyperhidrosis support. The system follows a three-stage pipeline. In the data augmentation stage, a frontier LLM generates medically plausible synthetic vignettes from curated open-source data to create a diverse and balanced question–answer dataset. In the fine-tuning stage, an open-source foundation model is fine-tuned on the dataset to provide diagnosis, personalized treatment recommendations, and empathetic psychological support. In the inference and expert evaluation stage, clinical and psychological specialists assess accuracy, appropriateness, and empathy, with validated responses iteratively enriching the dataset. Experiments show that LLM4Sweat outperforms baselines and delivers the first open-source LLM framework for hyperhidrosis, offering a generalizable approach for other rare diseases with similar data and trustworthiness challenges.

LLM4Sweat: A Trustworthy Large Language Model for Hyperhidrosis Support

Multi-view clustering aims to group data by integrating complementary information from multiple views. However, the inherent heterogeneity among views often leads to feature entanglement, severely limiting clustering performance. To address this challenge, we propose DC-SPAN—a Dual Contrastive Attention Network—grounded in a disentangle-then-fuse paradigm. DC-SPAN employs a dual-path variational architecture to explicitly decompose each view into shared and private latent subspaces. These representations are then robustly integrated via a Product-of-Experts (PoE) mechanism. At the heart of our model is a novel dual contrastive learning objective that simultaneously encourages alignment of shared components across views and enforces separation of private ones, enabling structured and disentangled representations. A cross-attention fusion module further adaptively aggregates these latent factors to yield a unified, discriminative embedding. The overall model is trained end-to-end using a composite loss function that incorporates reconstruction, orthogonality, and contrastive terms, along with a two-stage training scheme for improved stability. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that DC-SPAN consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in handling multi-view heterogeneity.

DC-SPAN: A Dual Contrastive Attention Network for Multi-View Clustering

Existing tool-augmented agentic systems are limited in the real world by (i) black-box reasoning steps that undermine trust of decision-making and pose safety risks, (ii) poor multimodal integration, which is inherently critical for healthcare tasks, and (iii) rigid and computationally inefficient agentic pipelines. We introduce **PASS** (**P**robabilistic **A**gentic **S**upernet **S**ampling), the *first* multimodal framework to address these challenges for Chest X-Ray (CXR) reasoning. PASS adaptively samples agentic workflows over a multi-tool graph, yielding decision paths annotated with interpretable probabilities. Given the complex CXR reasoning task with multimodal medical data, PASS leverages its learned task-conditioned distribution over the agentic supernet. Thus, it adaptively selects the most suitable tool at each supernet layer, offering probability-annotated trajectories for post-hoc audits and directly enhancing medical AI safety. PASS also continuously compresses salient findings into an evolving personalized memory, while dynamically deciding whether to deepen its reasoning path or invoke an early exit for efficiency. To optimize a Pareto frontier balancing performance and cost, we design a novel three-stage training procedure, including expert knowledge warm-up, contrastive path-ranking, and cost-aware reinforcement learning. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce `CAB-E`, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-step, safety-critical, free-form reasoning. Experiments across various benchmarks validate that PASS significantly outperforms strong baselines in multiple metrics (e.g., accuracy, AUC, LLM-J.) while balancing computational costs, pushing a new paradigm shift towards interpretable, adaptive, and multimodal medical agentic systems.

PASS: Probabilistic Agentic Supernet Sampling for Interpretable and Adaptive Chest X-Ray Reasoning

We study the infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous space Lipschitz MDPs in which an agent can play policies from a given set $\Phi$. The proposed algorithms efficiently explore the policy space by ''zooming'' into the ''promising regions'' of $\Phi$, thereby achieving adaptivity gains in the performance. We upper bound their regret as $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\big(T^{1 - d_{\text{eff.}}^{-1}}\big)$, where $d_{\text{eff.}} = d^\Phi_z+2$ for model-free algorithm $\textit{PZRL-MF}$ and $d_{\text{eff.}} = 2d_\mathcal{S} + d^\Phi_z + 3$ for model-based algorithm $\textit{PZRL-MB}$. Here, $d_\mathcal{S}$ is the dimension of the state space, and $d^\Phi_z$ is the zooming dimension given a set of policies $\Phi$. $d^\Phi_z$ depends on the underlying MDP as well as on $\Phi$. Hence, the proposed algorithms exhibit low regret in case the problem instance is benign and/or the agent competes against a low-complexity $\Phi$ (that has a small $d^\Phi_z$). When specialized to the case of finite-dimensional policy space, we obtain that $d_{\text{eff.}}$ scales as the dimension of this space under mild technical conditions; and also obtain $d_{\text{eff.}} = 0$, or equivalently $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret for $\textit{PZRL-MF}$, under a curvature condition on the average reward function that is commonly used in the multi-armed bandit (MAB) literature.

Policy Zooming: Adaptive Discretization-based Infinite-Horizon Average-Reward Reinforcement Learning

With the increasing adoption of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to align large language models (LLMs), the risk of backdoor installation during the alignment process has grown, potentially leading to unintended and harmful behaviors. Existing backdoor attacks mostly focus on simpler tasks, such as sequence classification, making them either difficult to install in LLM alignment or installable but easily detectable and removable. In this work, we introduce AdvBDGen, a generative fine-tuning framework that automatically creates prompt-specific paraphrases as triggers, enabling stealthier and more resilient backdoor attacks in LLM alignment. AdvBDGen is designed to exploit the disparities in learning speeds between strong and weak discriminators to craft backdoors that are both installable and stealthy. Using as little as 3% of the fine-tuning data, AdvBDGen can install highly effective backdoor triggers that, once installed, not only jailbreak LLMs during inference but also exhibit greater stability against input perturbations and improved robustness to trigger removal methods. Our findings highlight the growing vulnerability of LLM alignment pipelines to advanced backdoor attacks, underscoring the pressing need for more robust defense mechanisms.

AdvBDGen: A Robust Framework for Generating Adaptive and Stealthy Backdoors in LLM Alignment

Underground pipeline leaks and infiltrations pose significant threats to water security and environmental safety. Traditional manual inspection methods provide limited coverage and delayed response, often missing critical anomalies. This paper proposes AquaSentinel, a novel physics-informed AI system for real-time anomaly detection in urban underground water pipeline networks. We introduce four key innovations: (1) strategic sparse sensor deployment at high-centrality nodes combined with physics-based state augmentation to achieve network-wide observability from minimal infrastructure; (2) the RTCA (Real-Time Cumulative Anomaly) detection algorithm, which employs dual-threshold monitoring with adaptive statistics to distinguish transient fluctuations from genuine anomalies; (3) a Mixture of Experts (MoE) ensemble of spatiotemporal graph neural networks that provides robust predictions by dynamically weighting model contributions; (4) causal flow-based leak localization that traces anomalies upstream to identify source nodes and affected pipe segments. Our system strategically deploys sensors at critical network junctions and leverages physics-based modeling to propagate measurements to unmonitored nodes, creating virtual sensors that enhance data availability across the entire network. Experimental evaluation using 110 leak scenarios demonstrates that AquaSentinel achieves 100% detection accuracy. This work advances pipeline monitoring by demonstrating that physics-informed sparse sensing can match the performance of dense deployments at a fraction of the cost, providing a practical solution for aging urban infrastructure.

AquaSentinel: Next-Generation AI System Integrating Sensor Networks for Urban Underground Water Pipeline Anomaly Detection via Collaborative MoE-LLM Agent Architecture

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Graph-based Label-Efficient Learning: When Graph-Structured Data Meets Limited Labels

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