Singapore

Point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) has advanced significantly with synthetic datasets offering diverse distortion coverage for model training. However, when applied to new application scenarios, models often suffer from performance drops due to mismatched distortion characteristics between source and target domains. Most current methods use all available synthetic distortions, which may introduce irrelevant features and hinder generalization. To address this, we propose DST-PCQA, a distortion-selective training framework for PCQA. Unlike previous approaches that treat all distortions equally, DST-PCQA identifies and selects distortion types most relevant to a target domain by analyzing inter-domain distortion similarity. This selective strategy reduces negative transfer and enables efficient domain-specific training. To fully leverage the selected distortions for both classification and quality prediction, we adopt a dual-branch architecture that fuses 2D visual cues and 3D geometric structure via cross-modal attention. This design supports multi-level feature alignment across modalities and enables fine-grained distortion understanding. Extensive evaluations across three target domains have verified the effectiveness of DST-PCQA over full-set training baselines. Moreover, its distortion-selective strategy is orthogonal to existing model-based PCQA methods, enabling improved cross-domain performance and reduced training costs across a wide range of architectures.

AAAI 2026

Not All Distortions Are Created Equal: Distortion-Selective Domain Adaptation for Point Cloud Quality Assessment

quality assessment

point cloud

domain adaptation

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.

poster

Cooperative perception (CP) enhances situational awareness of connected and autonomous vehicles by exchanging and combining messages from multiple agents. While prior work has explored adversarial integrity attacks that degrade detection accuracy, little is known about CP's robustness against attacks on timeliness (or availability), a safety-critical requirement for autonomous driving. In this paper, we present CP-FREEZER, the first latency attack that maximizes the computation delay of CP algorithms by injecting adversarial perturbation via V2V messages. Our attack resolves several unique challenges, including the non-differentiability of point cloud preprocessing, asynchronous knowledge of the victim’s input due to transmission delays, and uses a novel loss function that effectively maximizes the execution time of the CP pipeline. Extensive experiments show that CP-FREEZER increases end-to-end CP latency by over $90\times$, pushing per-frame processing time beyond 3 seconds with a 100\% success rate on our real-world vehicle testbed. Our findings reveal a critical threat to the availability of CP systems, highlighting the urgent need for robust defenses.

CP-FREEZER: Latency Attacks Against Vehicular Cooperative Perception

Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) super-resolution methods typically perform high-resolution (HR) rendering of fixed scale factors, making them impractical for resource-limited scenarios. Directly rendering arbitrary-scale HR views with vanilla 3DGS introduces aliasing artifacts due to the lack of scale-aware rendering ability, while adding a post-processing upsampler for 3DGS complicates the framework and reduces rendering efficiency. To tackle these issues, we build an integrated framework that incorporates scale-aware rendering, generative prior-guided optimization, and progressive super-resolving to enable 3D Gaussian super-resolution of arbitrary scale factors with a single 3D model. Notably, our approach supports both integer and non-integer scale rendering to provide more flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in producing high-quality arbitrary-scale HR views (6.59 dB PSNR gain over 3DGS) with a single model. It preserves structural consistency with LR views and across different scales, while maintaining real-time rendering speed (85 FPS at 1080p).

Arbitrary-Scale 3D Gaussian Super-Resolution

Existing unsupervised image alignment methods exhibit limited accuracy and high computational complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a dense cross-scale image alignment model. It takes into account the correlations between cross-scale features to decrease the alignment difficulty. Our model supports flexible trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency by adjusting the number of scales utilized. Additionally, we introduce a fully spatial correlation module to further improve accuracy while maintaining low computational costs. We incorporate the just noticeable difference to encourage our model to focus on image regions more sensitive to distortions, eliminating noticeable alignment errors. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches.

Dense Cross-Scale Image Alignment with Fully Spatial Correlation and Just Noticeable Difference Guidance

In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised shape matching framework based on probabilistic deformation consistency in the spectral domain, termed as PDCMatch. Axiomatic optimization methods suffer from expensive geodesic distance calculations and vulnerability to local optima, and learning-based methods typically lack geometric consistency in pointwise correspondences. To overcome both limitations, we develop a non-Euclidean probabilistic deformation model that jointly estimates the underlying deformation and the correspondence probability via a linear Expectation-Maximization procedure. Building on this formulation, we further design a task-specific deformation loss that explicitly encourages geometric smoothness and structural consistency in an unsupervised manner. This tailored loss function plays a central role in improving the matching performance across challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks involving near-isometric shapes, anisotropic meshing, cross-dataset generalization, topological noise, and non-isometric shapes demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting both its effectiveness and generalizability.

Probabilistic Deformation Consistency for Unsupervised Shape Matching

Tool-use capabilities fundamentally transform large language models (LLMs) from passive language generators into active agents with real-world utility, drawing intense research focus. Yet, their emergent nature renders traditional scaling laws ineffective for early-stage prediction, obstructing principled model design and efficient training. In this work, we propose a proxy-task perspective that predicts tool-use capabilities by measuring early model performance on selected non-emergent proxy tasks. Our method quantifies two properties of each proxy task: alignment, which reflects how well it captures tool-use trajectories, and stability, which indicates how consistently it behaves across training conditions. These properties are used to weight predictive signals. Theoretically, we formalize how these weighted signals approximate emergent tool use through bounded extrapolation under relaxed assumptions. Empirically, we validate our approach across training checkpoints, model scales, and data setups. Results show that a carefully weighted ensemble of proxy tasks can accurately rank downstream tool-use ability long before it arises. Our findings provide new theoretical foundations and practical tools for efficient training and capability planning, and advance the understanding of how complex abilities arise in LLMs.

Predicting Emergent Tool Use in LLMs Before It Emerges: A Proxy Perspective

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves the response quality of large language models (LLMs) by retrieving knowledge from external databases. Typical RAG approaches split the text database into chunks, organizing them in a flat structure for efficient searches. To better capture the inherent dependencies and structured relationships across the text database, researchers propose to organize textual information into an indexing graph, known as graph-based RAG. However, we argue that the limitation of current graph-based RAG methods lies in the redundancy of the retrieved information, rather than its insufficiency. Moreover, previous methods use a flat structure to organize retrieved information within the prompts, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose PathRAG, which retrieves key relational paths from the indexing graph, and converts these paths into textual form for prompting LLMs. Specifically, PathRAG effectively reduces redundant information with flow-based pruning, while guiding LLMs to generate more logical and coherent responses with path-based prompting. Experimental results show that PathRAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across six datasets and five evaluation dimensions.

PathRAG: Pruning Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation with Relational Paths

Remote sensing imagery poses a distinct challenge for semantic segmentation due to its inherent fractal complexity and the diversity of geometric structures present in real-world geospatial scenes. Conventional Euclidean-based models typically assume spatial uniformity; however, such assumptions often break down when confronted with objects exhibiting markedly different structural characteristics—such as roads versus vegetation—thereby complicating the feature representation process. Hyperbolic space offers a theoretically grounded alternative for modeling such hierarchical and heterogeneous patterns, yet fully replacing Euclidean geometry incurs significant computational overhead. To address this trade-off, we propose Geometry-Aware Adaptive Routing (GAAR), a novel module that facilitates Hyperbolic-aware routing by dynamically allocating high-level features to either Euclidean or Hyperbolic subspaces through a learnable binary gating mechanism, informed by structural priors learned during training. To further promote routing stability and geometric consistency, we introduce Geometry-Aware Deterministic Regularization (GADR), a regularization strategy that encourages confident, structure-aligned assignments. GAAR is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly into existing segmentation architectures. Experiments on three challenging Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation (RSISS) benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, particularly in geometrically complex regions, offering a scalable and effective solution to the limitations of purely Euclidean modeling. Code and models will be released upon acceptance.

Beyond Euclidean Assumptions: Geometry-Aware Adaptive Routing for Remote Sensing Segmentation

Despite the prevalent assumption of uniform variable importance in long-term time series forecasting models, real-world applications often exhibit causal relationships and varying data acquisition costs. Specifically, cost‐effective exogenous data (e.g., local weather) can unilaterally influence dynamics of endogenous variables, like canopy or lake surface temperature. Exploiting these links enables more efficient forecasts when exogenous inputs are readily available. Transformer-based models capture long-range dependencies but incur high computation and suffer from permutation invariance. Patch-based variants improve efficiency yet can miss local temporal patterns. To efficiently exploit informative signals across both the temporal dimension and exogenous variables, this study proposes XLinear, a lightweight time series forecasting model built upon Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). XLinear uses MLPs and sigmoid activation to extract both temporal patterns and variate-wise dependencies, and employs a global token mapped from an endogenous variable as a pivotal hub for interacting with exogenous variables. Its prediction head then integrates these signals to forecast the endogenous series. It is evaluated on seven widely adopted benchmarks and five datasets with exogenous variables. Compared with state-of-the-art models, XLinear delivers superior accuracy and efficiency for both multivariate forecasts and univariate forecasts influenced by exogenous inputs.

XLinear: A Lightweight and Accurate MLP-Based Model for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Inputs

Audit games are an important variant of the Stackelberg security game, a widely studied game-theoretic model over the past years. It has been acknowledged by many researchers that a pre-audit phase can notably enhance the audit's efficiency by informing and directing the following audit procedures.

In this paper, we model the above process with a two-stage audit game. The game encompasses two stages: an investigation stage where the auditor gathers information about potential policy breaches, and an audit stage where the auditor allocates the audit resources based on the investigation results.

We first show that it is NP-hard to compute the auditor's optimal two-stage audit strategy. To circumvent the complexity issue, we consider a restricted strategy space, and show that the optimal strategy in the restricted space can be determined by solving a polynomial number of convex optimization problems. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effect of introducing the initial investigation stage and our algorithm. Our experiments show that even a small budget for the initial investigations can significantly enhance the defender's utility.

The Power of Initial Investigation in Audit Games

The learning dynamics of modern neural networks remain an open problem in deep learning. The *Neural Tangent Kernel* (NTK) offers an elegant description of training dynamics in the infinite‑width limit, yet its classical formulation assumes a static data set. Modern model training practice departs from this strong assumption through the use of on‑the‑fly data augmentations (e.g. additive noise). In this work, we conduct an NTK-driven analysis of how data transformations affect a neural net's evolution in the function space. Our theoretical contributions characterize how repeated Gaussian perturbations from NTK-derived covariances can steer neural-net optimizations toward user‑specified behavior. These theoretical insights are empirically validated by controlled experiments. Taken together, our results lay the foundation for a promising future research direction that transforms the NTK from a descriptive to a *prescriptive* tool, enabling control of neural net training trajectories and behavior of inference generalization with grounded interventions.

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