Singapore

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) is a proliferating paradigm for LMM training. 
Analogous to high-level reasoning tasks, RFT is similarly applicable to low-level vision domains, including image quality assessment (IQA). Existing RFT-based IQA methods typically use rule-based output rewards to verify the model&#39;s rollouts but provide no reward supervision for the &quot;think” process, leaving its correctness and efficacy uncontrolled. Furthermore, these methods typically fine-tune directly on downstream IQA tasks without explicitly enhancing the model’s native low-level visual quality perception, which may constrain its performance upper bound. In response to these gaps, we propose the multi‐stage RFT IQA framework (**Refine-IQA**). In **Stage-1**, we build the **Refine-Perception-20K** dataset (with 12 main distortions, 20,907 locally-distorted images, and over 55K RFT samples) and design multi-task reward functions to strengthen the model’s visual quality perception. In **Stage-2**, targeting the quality scoring task, we introduce a \textbf{probability difference reward involved strategy} for &quot;think&quot; process supervision. The resulting **Refine-IQA Series Models** achieve outstanding performance on both perception and scoring tasks—and, notably, our paradigm activates a robust &quot;think” (quality interpretating) capability that also attains exceptional results on the corresponding quality interpreting benchmark.

AAAI 2026

Refine-IQA: Multi-Stage Reinforcement Finetuning for Perceptual Image Quality Assessment

reinforcement fine-tuning for perceptual image quality assessment and reasoning tasks

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.

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) is a proliferating paradigm for LMM training. 
Analogous to high-level reasoning tasks, RFT is similarly applicable to low-level vision domains, including image quality assessment (IQA). Existing RFT-based IQA methods typically use rule-based output rewards to verify the model's rollouts but provide no reward supervision for the "think” process, leaving its correctness and efficacy uncontrolled. Furthermore, these methods typically fine-tune directly on downstream IQA tasks without explicitly enhancing the model’s native low-level visual quality perception, which may constrain its performance upper bound. In response to these gaps, we propose the multi‐stage RFT IQA framework (**Refine-IQA**). In **Stage-1**, we build the **Refine-Perception-20K** dataset (with 12 main distortions, 20,907 locally-distorted images, and over 55K RFT samples) and design multi-task reward functions to strengthen the model’s visual quality perception. In **Stage-2**, targeting the quality scoring task, we introduce a \textbf{probability difference reward involved strategy} for "think" process supervision. The resulting **Refine-IQA Series Models** achieve outstanding performance on both perception and scoring tasks—and, notably, our paradigm activates a robust "think” (quality interpretating) capability that also attains exceptional results on the corresponding quality interpreting benchmark.

poster

In this paper, we present Ev-iCRF, a novel self-supervised pipeline for high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction from a single-exposure low dynamic range (LDR) image, guided by asynchronous event streams generated by a bio-inspired event camera. The highlight of Ev-iCRF lies in its formulation of the inverse camera response function (iCRF) based on Event-LDR Correspondence. By leveraging the HDR properties of event data, the method enables direct iCRF estimation, offering a new perspective for event-guided HDR imaging. The pipeline is trained in a self-supervised manner using formulation-driven iCRF estimation loss and refinement loss, without the need for synchronized HDR supervision. Ev-iCRF adopts a two-stage coarse-to-fine reconstruction pipeline, allowing effective fusion of features from both LDR image and event data. The event information is used to optimize the iCRF, enabling accurate HDR reconstruction from LDR inputs. We evaluate Ev-iCRF on both real-world and synthetic datasets, and results show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in HDR reconstruction accuracy. Moreover, the reconstructed images demonstrate improved texture fidelity and structural detail.

Ev-iCRF: Self-supervised Event-guided iCRF Estimation for HDR Image Reconstruction

Existing cross-modal pedestrian detection (CMPD) employs complementary information from RGB and thermal-infrared (TIR) modalities to detect pedestrians in 24h-surveillance systems. RGB captures rich pedestrian details under daylight, while TIR excels at night. However, TIR focuses primarily on the person's silhouette, neglecting critical texture details essential for detection. 
While the near-infrared (NIR) captures texture under low-light conditions, which effectively alleviates performance issues of RGB and detail loss in TIR, thereby reducing missed detections. To this end, we construct a new Triplet RGB–NIR–TIR (TRNT) dataset, comprising 8,281 pixel-aligned image triplets, establishing a comprehensive foundation for algorithmic research. 
However, due to the variable nature of real-world scenarios, imaging devices may not always capture all three modalities simultaneously. This results in input data with unpredictable combinations of modal types, which challenge existing CMPD methods that fail to extract robust pedestrian information under arbitrary input combinations, leading to significant performance degradation.
To address these challenges, we propose the Adaptive Uncertainty-aware Network (AUNet) for accurately discriminating modal availability and fully utilizing the available information under uncertain inputs. 
Specifically, we introduce Unified Modality Validation Refinement (UMVR), which includes an uncertainty-aware router to validate modal availability and a semantic refinement to ensure the reliability of information within the modality. 
Furthermore, we design a Modality-Aware Interaction (MAI) module to adaptively activate or deactivate its internal interaction mechanisms per UMVR output, enabling effective complementary information fusion from available modalities. 
AUNet enables accurate modality validation and robust inference without fixed modality pairings, facilitating the effective fusion of RGB, NIR, and TIR information across diverse input configurations. The code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Robust Pedestrian Detection with Uncertain Modality

Data scarcity continues to be a major challenge in the field of robotic manipulation. Although diffusion models provide a promising solution for generating robotic manipulation videos, existing methods largely depend on 2D trajectories, which inherently face issues with 3D spatial ambiguity. In this work, we present a novel framework named ManipDreamer3D for generating plausible 3D-aware robotic manipulation videos from the input image and the text instruction. Our method combines 3D trajectory planning with a reconstructed 3D occupancy map created from a third-person perspective, along with a novel trajectory-to-video diffusion model. Specifically, ManipDreamer3D first reconstructs the 3D occupancy representation from the input image and then computes an optimized 3D end-effector trajectory, minimizing path length while avoiding collisions. Next, we employ a latent editing technique to create video sequences from the initial image latent and the optimized 3D trajectory. This process conditions our specially trained trajectory-to-video diffusion model to produce robotic pick-and-place videos. Our method generates robotic videos with autonomously planned plausible 3D trajectories, significantly reducing human intervention requirements. Experimental results demonstrate superior visual quality compared to existing methods.

ManipDreamer3D: Synthesizing Plausible Robotic Manipulation Video with Occupancy-aware 3D Trajectory

Purple flare, a diffuse chromatic aberration artifact commonly found around highlight areas, severely degrades the tone transition and color of the image. Existing traditional methods are based on hand-crafted features, which lack flexibility and rely entirely on fixed priors, while the scarcity of paired training data critically hampers deep learning. To address this issue, we propose a novel network built upon decoupled HSV Look-Up Tables (LUTs). The method aims to simplify color correction by adjusting the Hue (H), Saturation (S), and Value (V) components independently. This approach resolves the inherent color coupling problems in traditional methods. Our model adopts a two-stage architecture: First, a Chroma-Aware Spectral Tokenizer (CAST) converts the input image from RGB space to HSV space and independently encodes the Hue (H) and Value (V) channels into a set of semantic tokens describing the Purple flare status; second, the HSV-LUT module takes these tokens as input and dynamically generates independent correction curves (1D-LUTs) for the three channels H, S, and V. To effectively train and validate our model, we built the first large-scale purple flare dataset with diverse scenes. We also proposed new metrics and a loss function specifically designed for this task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model not only significantly outperforms existing methods in visual effects but also achieves state-of-the-art performance on all quantitative metrics.

CAST-LUT: Tokenizer-Guided HSV Look-Up Tables for Purple Flare Removal

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) have shown tremendous potential for learning 3D point cloud representations without human annotations. However, SSL for 3D point clouds still faces critical challenges due to irregular geometry, shortcut-prone reconstruction, and long-tail semantic distributions. In this work, we propose *DOS* (Distilling Observable Softmaps), a novel SSL framework that self-distills semantic relevance softmaps only at observable (unmasked) points. This strategy prevents information leakage from masked regions and provides richer supervision than discrete token-to-prototype assignments. 
To address the challenge of long-tail semantics in an unsupervised setting, we introduce Zipfian prototypes and incorporate them using a modified Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, *Zipf-Sinkhorn*, which enforces a power-law prior over prototype usage and modulates the sharpness of the target softmap during training. 
DOS outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on semantic segmentation and 3D object detection across multiple benchmarks, including nuScenes, Waymo, SemanticKITTI, ScanNet, and ScanNet200, without relying on extra data or annotations. Our results demonstrate that observable-point softmaps distillation offers a scalable and effective paradigm for learning robust 3D representations. Code and a general-purpose LiDAR backbone pretrained across multiple datasets will be released upon acceptance.

DOS: Distilling Observable Softmaps of Zipfian Prototypes for Self-Supervised Point Representation

The effective segmentation of 3D data is crucial for a wide range of industrial applications, especially for detecting subtle defects in the field of integrated circuits (IC). Ceramic package substrates (CPS), as an important electronic material, are essential in IC packaging owing to their superior physical and chemical properties. However, the complex structure and minor defects of CPS, along with the absence of a publically available dataset, significantly hinder the development of CPS surface defect detection. In this study, we construct a high-quality point cloud dataset for 3D segmentation of surface defects in CPS, i.e., CPS3D-Seg, which has the best point resolution and precision compared to existing 3D industrial datasets. CPS3D-Seg consists of 1300 point cloud samples under 20 product categories, and each sample provides accurate point-level annotations. Meanwhile, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark based on SOTA point cloud segmentation algorithms to validate the effectiveness of CPS3D-Seg. Additionally, we propose a novel 3D segmentation method based on causal inference (CINet), which quantifies potential confounders in point clouds through Structural Refine (SR) and Quality Assessment (QA) Modules. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CINet significantly outperforms existing algorithms in both mIoU and accuracy.

Point Cloud Segmentation of Integrated Circuits Package Substrates Surface Defects Using Causal Inference: Dataset Construction and Methodology

Video large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in video understanding tasks. However, the redundancy of video tokens introduces significant computational overhead during inference, limiting their practical deployment. Many compression algorithms are proposed to prioritize retaining features with the highest attention scores to minimize perturbations in attention computations. However, the correlation between attention scores and their actual contribution to correct answers remains ambiguous. To address the above limitation, we propose a novel contribution-aware token compression algorithm for video understanding (CaCoVID) that explicitly optimizes the token selection policy based on the contribution of tokens to correct predictions. First, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework that optimizes a policy network to select video token combinations with the greatest contribution to correct predictions. This paradigm shifts the focus from passive token preservation to active discovery of optimal compressed token combinations. Secondly, we propose a combinatorial policy optimization algorithm with online combination space sampling, which dramatically reduces the exploration space for video token combinations and accelerates the convergence speed of policy optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse video understanding benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CaCoVID. Codes will be released.

Contribution-aware Token Compression for Efficient Video Understanding via Reinforcement Learning

Bokeh rendering simulates the shallow depth-of-field effect in photography, enhancing visual aesthetics and guiding viewer attention to regions of interest. Although recent approaches perform well, rendering controllable bokeh without additional depth inputs remains a significant challenge. Existing classical and neural controllable methods rely on accurate depth maps, while generative approaches often struggle with limited controllability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose BokehFlow, a depth-free framework for controllable bokeh rendering based on flow matching. BokehFlow directly synthesizes photorealistic bokeh effects from all-in-focus images, eliminating the need for depth inputs. It employs a cross-attention mechanism to enable semantic control over both focus regions and blur intensity via text prompts. To support training and evaluation, we collect and synthesize four datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BokehFlow achieves visually compelling bokeh effects and offers precise control, outperforming existing depth-dependent and generative methods in both rendering quality and efficiency.

BokehFlow: Depth-Free Controllable Bokeh Rendering via Flow Matching

Diffusion models have been widely adopted in image and video generation. However, their complex network architecture leads to high inference overhead for its generation process. Existing diffusion quantization methods primarily focus on the quantization of the model structure while ignoring the impact of time-steps variation during sampling. At the same time, most current approaches fail to account for significant activations that cannot be eliminated, resulting in substantial performance degradation after quantization. To address these issues, we propose Time-Rotation Diffusion Quantization (TR-DQ), a novel quantization method incorporating time-step and rotation-based optimization. TR-DQ first divides the sampling process based on time-steps and applies a rotation matrix to smooth activations and weights dynamically. For different time-steps, a dedicated hyperparameter is introduced for adaptive timing modeling, which enables dynamic quantization across different time steps. Additionally, we also explore the compression potential of Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG-wise) to establish a foundation for subsequent work. TR-DQ achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on image generation and video generation tasks and a 1.38-1.89× speedup and 1.97-2.58× memory reduction in inference compared to existing quantization methods.

TR-DQ: Time-Rotation Diffusion Quantization

Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires models to reason over multimodal information, combining visual and textual data. With the development of continual learning, significant progress has been made in retaining knowledge and adapting to new information in the VQA domain. However, current methods often struggle with balancing knowledge retention, adaptation, and robust feature representation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework with adaptive memory allocation and global noise filtering called MacVQA for visual question answering. MacVQA fuses visual and question information while filtering noise to ensure robust representations, and employs prototype-based memory allocation to optimize feature quality and memory usage. These designs enable MacVQA to balance knowledge acquisition, retention, and compositional generalization in continual VQA learning. Experiments on ten continual VQA tasks show that MacVQA outperforms existing baselines, achieving 43.38% average accuracy and 2.32% average forgetting on standard tasks, and 42.53% average accuracy and 3.60% average forgetting on novel composition tasks.

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