Singapore

Vision modeling has advanced rapidly with Transformers, whose attention mechanisms capture visual dependencies but lack a principled account of how semantic information propagates spatially. To address this, many physics-inspired models adopt heat conduction dynamics, where the temporal decay rate is proportional to the product of time and spatial frequency, inherently coupling them and causing high-frequency components to decay much faster than low-frequency ones. However, this preferential decay of high-frequency signals suppresses textures, edges, and other fine details that are crucial for preserving semantic richness in vision models. In this paper, we introduce WaveFormer, a novel physics‑inspired vision backbone that leverages frequency–time decoupled wave propagation. By decoupling frequency from temporal evolution through an underdamped wave equation, high‑frequency components oscillate rather than being rapidly damped, preserving fine‑grained details while maintaining low‑frequency stability. For efficient and interpretable modeling, we derive a closed-form solution of the underdamped wave equation that decouples frequency from temporal evolution. Leveraging this principle, we implement the Frequency–Time Decoupled Wave Propagation Operator (WPO), a lightweight module that models global interactions in $\mathcal{O}(N \log N)$ time—far lower than the $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ cost of attention. We propose a family of WaveFormer models as drop-in replacements for standard ViTs and CNNs, achieving competitive accuracy across image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, while delivering up to $1.6\times$ higher throughput and 30\% fewer FLOPs than attention-based alternatives. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that wave propagation introduces a complementary modeling bias to heat-based approaches, effectively capturing both global coherence and high-frequency details essential for rich visual semantics.

AAAI 2026

WaveFormer: Frequency-Time Decoupled Vision Modeling with Wave Equation

ml: deep neural architectures and foundation models

ml: deep learning theory

cv: representation learning for vision

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

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. 

technical paper

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.

Fake orders pose increasing threats to sequential recommender systems by misleading recommendation results through artificially manipulated interactions, including click farming, context-irrelevant substitutions, and sequential perturbations. 
Unlike injecting carefully designed fake users to influence recommendation performance, fake orders embedded within genuine user sequences aim to disrupt user preferences and mislead recommendation results, thereby manipulating exposure rates of specific items to gain competitive advantages. To protect users' authentic interest preferences and eliminate misleading information, this paper aims to perform precise and efficient rectification on compromised sequential recommender systems while avoiding the enormous computational and time costs of retraining existing models. Specifically, we identify that fake orders are not absolutely harmful—in certain cases, partial fake orders can even have a data augmentation effect. Based on this insight, we propose $\textit{Dual-view Identification}$ and $\textit{Targeted Rectification (DITaR)}$, which primarily identifies harmful samples to achieve unbiased rectification of the system. The core idea of this method is to obtain differentiated representations from collaborative and semantic views for precise detection, and then filters detected suspicious fake orders to select truly harmful ones for targeted rectification with gradient ascent. 
This ensures that useful information in fake orders is not removed while preventing bias residue. Moreover, it maintains the original data volume and sequence structure, thus protecting system performance and trustworthiness to achieve optimal unbiased rectification.
Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that DITaR achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of recommendation quality, computational efficiency, and system robustness.

Unbiased Rectification for Sequential Recommender Systems Under Fake Orders

Cross-modal hashing (CMH) is an effective tool for large-scale retrieval due to its low storage cost and high efficiency. However, real-world multi-modal datasets often contain noisy annotations, which can significantly impair model performance. Many existing methods address this issue by using the small-loss criterion to select a likely clean subset of data to guide model training. Nonetheless, this clean subset is typically dominated by easy samples, and treating all samples within it equally can undermine the model’s generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning-based framework, named Meta-Guided Sample Reweighting for Cross-Modal Hashing Retrieval (MGSH), which integrates meta-learning into robust cross-modal hashing. To address the above issues, we design a Meta-Similarity Weighting Network (MSWN) that dynamically assigns importance weights to samples during training. By employing a bi-level optimization strategy, the meta-importance weights are used to scale the loss of training samples during the main network update, encouraging the model to focus on more challenging examples. Additionally, to further distinguish between noisy and clean samples, we incorporate adaptive-margin and meta-guided center aggregation into a robust hashing loss, both guided by the learned meta-importance weights. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that MGSH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness.

Meta-Guided Sample Reweighting for Robust Cross-Modal Hashing Retrieval with Noisy Labels

The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle facilitates effective representation learning by preserving label-relevant information while compressing irrelevant information. However, its strong reliance on accurate labels makes it inherently vulnerable to label noise, prevalent in real-world scenarios, resulting in significant performance degradation and overfitting. To address this issue, we propose **LaT-IB**, a novel **La**bel-Noise Resistan**T** **I**nformation **B**ottleneck method which introduces a *"Minimal-Sufficient-Clean"* (MSC) criterion. Instantiated as a mutual information regularizer to retain task-relevant information while discarding noise, MSC addresses standard IB’s vulnerability to noisy label supervision. To achieve this, LaT-IB employs a noise-aware latent disentanglement that decomposes the latent representation into components aligned with to the clean label space and the noise space. Theoretically, we first derive mutual information bounds for each component of our objective including prediction, compression, and disentanglement, and moreover prove that optimizing it encourages representations invariant to input noise and separates clean and noisy label information.
Furthermore, we design a three-phase training framework: Warmup, Knowledge Injection and Robust Training, to progressively guide the model toward noise-resistant representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaT-IB achieves superior robustness and efficiency under label noise, significantly enhancing robustness and applicability in real-world scenarios with label noise.

Is the Information Bottleneck Robust Enough? Towards Label-Noise Resistant Information Bottleneck Learning

The rapid advancement of image-generation technologies has made it possible for anyone to create photorealistic images using generative models, raising significant security concerns. To mitigate malicious use, tracing the origin of such images is essential. Reconstruction-based attribution methods offer a promising solution, but they often suffer from reduced accuracy and high computational costs when applied to state‑of‑the‑art (SOTA) models. To address these challenges, we propose AEDR (AutoEncoder Double-Reconstruction), a novel training‑free attribution method designed for generative models with continuous autoencoders. Unlike existing reconstruction‑based approaches that rely on the value of a single reconstruction loss, AEDR performs two consecutive reconstructions using the model’s autoencoder, and adopts the ratio of these two reconstruction losses as the attribution signal. This signal is further calibrated using the image homogeneity metric to improve accuracy, which inherently cancels out absolute biases caused by image complexity, with autoencoder‑based reconstruction ensuring superior computational efficiency. Experiments on eight top latent diffusion models show that AEDR achieves 25.5% higher attribution accuracy than existing reconstruction‑based methods, with requiring only 1% of the computational time. Our code will be available at https://github.com/wangchao0708/AEDR.

AEDR: Training-Free AI-Generated Image Attribution via Autoencoder Double-Reconstruction

High-Dynamic-Range Wide-Color-Gamut (HDR-WCG) technology is becoming increasingly widespread, driving a growing need for converting Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) content to HDR. Existing methods primarily rely on fixed tone mapping operators, which struggle to handle the diverse appearances and degradations commonly present in real-world SDR content. To address this limitation, we propose a generalized SDR-to-HDR framework that enhances robustness by learning attribute-disentangled representations. Central to our approach is Realistic Attribute-Disentangled Representation Learning (RealRep), which explicitly disentangles luminance and chrominance components to capture intrinsic content variations across different SDR distributions. Furthermore, we design a Luma-/Chroma-aware negative exemplar generation strategy that constructs degradation-sensitive contrastive pairs, effectively modeling tone discrepancies across SDR styles. Building on these attribute-level priors, we introduce the Degradation-Domain Aware Controlled Mapping Network (DDACMNet), a lightweight, two-stage framework that performs adaptive hierarchical mapping guided by a control-aware normalization mechanism. DDACMNet dynamically modulates the mapping process via degradation-conditioned features, enabling robust adaptation across diverse degradation domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealRep consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both generalization and perceptually faithful HDR color gamut reconstruction.

RealRep: Generalized SDR-to-HDR Conversion via Attribute-Disentangled Representation Learning

Diffusion models have recently advanced video editing, yet
controllable editing remains challenging due to the need for
precise manipulation of diverse object properties. Current
methods require different control signal for diverse editing
tasks, which complicates model design and demands significant training resources. To address this, we propose O-DisCoEdit, a unified framework that incorporates a novel object
distortion control (O-DisCo). This signal, based on random
and adaptive noise, flexibly encapsulates a wide range of editing cues within a single representation. Paired with a “copy-form” preservation module for preserving non-edited regions,
O-DisCo-Edit enables efficient, high-fidelity editing through
an effective training paradigm. Extensive experiments and
comprehensive human evaluations consistently demonstrate
that O-DisCo-Edit surpasses both specialized and multitask
state-of-the-art methods across various video editing tasks.

O-DisCo-Edit: Object Distortion Control for Unified Realistic Video Editing

Universal multimodal embedding models are essential in various tasks. Existing approaches typically use in-batch mining to identify hard negatives by measuring the similarity of query-candidate pairs. However, these methods often struggle to capture subtle semantic differences among candidates and lack diversity in negative samples. Moreover, the embeddings exhibit limited discriminative ability in distinguishing false and hard negatives. In this paper, we leverage the advanced understanding capabilities of MLLMs to enhance representation learning, and present a novel Universal Multimodal Embedding(UniME-V2) model. Our approach first constructs a potential hard negative set through global retrieval. We then introduce the MLLM-as-a-Judge mechanism, which utilizes MLLMs to assess the semantic alignment of query-candidate pairs and generate soft semantic matching scores. These scores serve as a foundation for hard negative mining, mitigating the impact of false negatives and enabling the identification of diverse, high-quality hard negatives. Furthermore, the semantic matching scores are used as soft labels to mitigate the rigid one-to-one mapping constraint. By aligning the similarity matrix with the soft semantic matching score matrix, the model learns semantic distinctions among candidates, significantly enhancing its discriminative capacity. To further improve performance, we propose UniME-V2, a reranking model trained on our mined hard negatives through a joint pairwise and listwise optimization approach. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the MMEB benchmark and multiple retrieval tasks, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks. The code, model and data are publicly available in https://garygutc.github.io/UniME-v2.

UniME-V2: MLLM-as-a-Judge for Universal Multimodal Embedding Learning

Accurate modeling of temporal point processes is critical for reliable event forecasting and informed decision-making. While historical event sequences provide a foundation for intensity estimation, existing approaches often neglect external covariates whose lagged effects impact future intensities across multiple temporal granularities. To address this gap, we propose Multi-Granularity Integration of External Covariates for Temporal Point Processes (METP), a framework for incorporating lagged external influences into intensity modeling. METP extracts periodic structures and decomposes external covariate series into multiple temporal granularities. At each granularity, a lag-aware calibration module is introduced to align covariates with event dynamics. Finally, a hierarchical mixture-of-experts strategy is employed to integrate the multi-granular external covariates with historical event embeddings, enabling a representation of the conditional intensity function with enhanced information. Extensive experiments on public and proprietary datasets demonstrate that METP consistently outperforms existing methods in predictive accuracy.

METP: Multi-Granularity Integration of External Covariates for Temporal Point Processes

Diffusion auction design is a new trend in mechanism design which extended the original incentive compatibility property to include buyers' private connection report. Reporting connections is equivalent to inviting their neighbors to join the auction in practice. The social welfare of a diffusion auction is collectively accumulated by all participants: reporting high valuations or inviting high-valuation neighbors. Because of this, we can measure each participant's contribution by the marginal social welfare increase due to her participation.

Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a new property called Shapley fairness to capture their social welfare contribution and to use it as a benchmark to guide our auction design for a fairer utility allocation. Not surprisingly, none of the existing diffusion auctions has ever approximated the fairness, because Shapley fairness depends on each buyer's own valuation and this dependence can easily violate incentive compatibility. Thus, we combat this challenge by proposing a new diffusion auction called Permutation Diffusion Auction (PDA) for selling $k$ homogeneous items, which is the first diffusion auction satisfying $\frac{1}{k+1}$-Shapley fairness, incentive compatibility and individual rationality. Furthermore, PDA can be extended to the general combinatorial auction setting where the literature did not discover meaningful diffusion auctions yet.

Fair Diffusion Auctions

Machine learning has tremendously benefited from graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate training and inference by several orders of magnitude. However, this success has not been replicated in general and exact combinatorial optimization. Our key contribution is to propose the first general-purpose discrete constraint programming solver fully implemented on GPU. It is based on integer interval bound propagation and backtracking search. The two main ingredients are (1) ternary constraint network optimized for GPU architectures, and (2) an on-demand subproblems generation strategy. Our constraint solving algorithm is significantly simpler than those found in optimized CPU constraint solvers, yet is competitive with sequential solvers in the MiniZinc 2024 challenge.

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