Singapore

Recent advances in image editing tools, particularly those used in content-aware retouching and object-level manipulation, have raised significant concerns regarding the authenticity of digital images. While many Image Manipulation Detection and Localization (IMDL) methods have been proposed, they often struggle with subtle forgeries, intricate boundary artifacts, and manipulations generated by unseen editing techniques. In this work, we propose a novel edge-aware framework that leverages the strong natural image priors of pre-trained inpainting models to harmonize manipulated regions. By guiding the inpainting process with generated edge-aware masks, our method reconstructs tampered areas using surrounding context, yielding perceptually coherent results. The pixel-wise residual between the original and reconstructed images reveals manipulation-sensitive inconsistencies—particularly around editing boundaries—thereby enabling accurate and generalizable detection and localization. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in challenging scenarios involving realistic and finely retouched image forgeries.

AAAI 2026

EARG-Net: Edge-Aware Reconstruction-Guided Network for Image Manipulation Detection and Localization

image manipulation detection and localization

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

With the rapid advancement of generative models, high-fidelity AI-generated images have become increasingly indistinguishable from real images, posing significant challenges to traditional detection methods that rely on explicit artifacts or uniform feature learning. We hypothesize that detection ambiguity originates from pattern coexistence: synthetic images simultaneously embed (a) authentic patterns inherited from real-image distributions and (b) synthetic patterns induced by generative architectures, whereas real images maintain consistent patterns. We validate this hypothesis through SHAP-based quantitative analysis, demonstrating that synthetic images inherently exhibit a dual distribution—simultaneously containing authentic patterns and synthetic traces—while real images show a unimodal distribution. Building on this insight, this paper proposes a Dual-Branch Asymmetric Discrepancy Learning (DADL) framework. The DADL leverages multi-scale feature extraction and Asymmetric Feature Discrepancy Loss to capture and amplify such pattern differences across multiple scales. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks (AIGCDetectBenchmark, GenImage, and Chameleon) show that DADL achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particular strengths in detecting high-fidelity synthetic images from diffusion models (e.g., Midjourney, SDv1.4, SDv1.5) and enhancing generalization across diverse generative paradigms. This study not only offers an effective approach for AIGI detection but also sheds light on the intrinsic properties of synthetic images, providing a new perspective for advancing AIGI forensics. The code will be released soon.

Dual-Branch Asymmetric Discrepancy Learning Based on Fake Image Pattern-Coexistence for AI-Generated Image Detection

Human sensing with radio signals has emerged as a non-intrusive and occlusion-robust alternative to vision-based approaches, and WiFi signals further support device-free sensing. However, current approaches deeply rely on neural networks, whose black-box nature hinders model transparency and explainability, limiting the use of WiFi-based human sensing in critical fields. For model explainability, recent works have studied saliency methods which attribute model outputs to important features, but they mostly bias in favor of common modalities (e.g., images, time series). This paper proposes a Matryoshka-like saliency method, MatryMask, an initial exploration of feature attribution for human sensing with radio signals. Compared to existing methods that require empirical knowledge about the sparsity of important features, MatryMask regularizes multiple masks to highlight salient areas at different scales, adapting to the uncertain and varying sparsity of important features in radio signals. To effectively perturb radio signals, we devise a novel frequency-removal perturbation beyond existing spatial/time-domain perturbations. Experimentally, MatryMask outperforms state-of-the-art saliency methods and significantly improves the attribution performance by up to 38.1$\sim$70.6\% for three tasks.

Feature Attribution for Human Sensing with Radio Signals

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as education, healthcare, and law, accurately evaluating their nuanced reasoning process becomes essential to ensure their safety, reliability, and trustworthiness. However, most existing benchmarks evaluate LLMs at a coarse granularity. They emphasize end results and neglect complex reasoning steps, which leads to masking latent deficits, producing misleading high scores, and ultimately limiting accurate assessment of model suitability in complex real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce \textit{CogProbe}, a diagnostic benchmark that decomposes complex reasoning processes into orthogonal cognitive operations, featuring multilingual datasets \textit{CogEval} and cognitively informed metrics for fine-grained evaluation of LLM cognitive capabilities. Drawing from cognitive psychology, we design a comprehensive taxonomy of model capabilities, comprising 5 macro-cognitive capabilities and 17 corresponding micro-cognitive operations, which facilitates precise identification of latent weaknesses and provides detailed assessments of model capabilities, supporting informed deployment of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively assess implicit cognitive capabilities. They further reveal that, despite achieving high scores on traditional benchmarks, current LLMs exhibit significant cognitive deficits, particularly in metacognitive capability. Merely training models on coarse-grained datasets does not effectively enhance their underlying cognitive capabilities.

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Unveiling Latent Cognitive Capabilities of LLM

As digital twins become central to the transformation of modern cities, accurate and structured 3D building models emerge as a key enabler of high-fidelity, updatable urban representations. These models underpin diverse applications including energy modeling, urban planning, autonomous navigation, and real-time reasoning. 
Despite recent advances in 3D urban modeling, most learning-based models are trained on building datasets with limited architectural diversity, which significantly undermines their generalizability across heterogeneous urban environments. 
To address this limitation, we present BuildingWorld, a comprehensive and structured 3D building dataset designed to bridge the gap in stylistic diversity. 
It encompasses buildings from geographically and architecturally diverse regions—including North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania—offering a globally representative dataset for urban-scale foundation modeling and analysis. 
Specifically, BuildingWorld provides about Five million LOD2 building models collected from diverse sources, accompanied by both real and simulated airborne LiDAR point clouds. This enables comprehensive research on 3D reconstruction, building detection and segmentation, as well as roof structure segmentation. 
Cyber City, a virtual city model, is introduced to enable the generation of unlimited training data with customized and structurally diverse point cloud distributions.
Furthermore, we provide standardized evaluation metrics tailored for building reconstruction, aiming to facilitate the training, evaluation, and comparison of large-scale vision models and foundation models in structured 3D urban environments

BuildingWorld: A Structured 3D Building Dataset for Urban Foundation Models

Radiology Report Generation (RRG) aims to automatically generate diagnostic reports from radiology images. To achieve this, existing methods have leveraged the powerful cross-modal generation capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), primarily focusing on optimizing cross-modal alignment between radiographs and reports through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, by only performing instance-level alignment with the image-text pairs, the standard SFT paradigm fails to establish anatomically-grounded alignment, where the templated nature of reports often leads to sub-optimal generation quality. To address this, we propose S2D-Align, a novel SFT paradigm that establishes anatomically-grounded alignment by leveraging auxiliary signals of varying granularities. S2D-Align implements a shallow-to-deep strategy, progressively enriching the alignment process: it begins with the coarse radiograph-report pairing, then introduces reference reports for instance-level guidance, and ultimately utilizes key phrases to ground the generation in specific anatomical details. To bridge the different alignment stages, we introduce a memory-based adapter that empowers feature sharing, thereby integrating coarse and fine-grained guidance. For evaluation, we conduct experiments on the public MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray benchmarks, where S2D-Align achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our multi-stage, auxiliary-guided approach, highlighting a promising direction for enhancing grounding capabilities in complex, multi-modal generation tasks.

S2D-Align: Shallow-to-Deep Auxiliary Learning for Anatomically-Grounded Radiology Report Generation

There is a growing body of work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn representations of circuits, focusing primarily on their static characteristics. However, these models fail to capture circuit runtime behavior, which is crucial for tasks like circuit verification and optimization. To address this limitation, we introduce DR-GNN (DynamicRTL-GNN), a novel approach that learns RTL circuit representations by incorporating both static structures and multi-cycle execution behaviors. DR-GNN leverages an operator-level Control Data Flow Graph (CDFG) to represent Register Transfer Level (RTL) circuits, enabling the model to capture dynamic dependencies and runtime execution. To train and evaluate DR-GNN, we build the first comprehensive dynamic circuit dataset, comprising over 6,300 Verilog designs and 63,000 simulation traces. Our results demonstrate that DR-GNN outperforms existing models in branch hit prediction and toggle rate prediction. Furthermore, its learned representations transfer effectively to related dynamic circuit tasks, achieving strong performance in power estimation and assertion prediction.

DynamicRTL: RTL Representation Learning for Dynamic Circuit Behavior

Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) is a fundamental approach for robustly estimating parametric models from noisy data. Existing learning-based RANSAC methods utilize deep learning to enhance the robustness of RANSAC against outliers. However, these approaches are trained and tested on the data generated by the same algorithms, leading to limited generalization to out-of-distribution data during inference. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based paradigm that progressively injects noise into ground-truth data, simulating the noisy conditions for training learning-based RANSAC. To enhance data diversity, we incorporate Monte Carlo sampling into the diffusion paradigm, approximating diverse data distributions by introducing different types of randomness at multiple stages. We evaluate our approach in the context of feature matching through comprehensive experiments on the ScanNet and MegaDepth datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our Monte Carlo diffusion mechanism significantly improves the generalization ability of learning-based RANSAC. We also develop extensive ablation studies that highlight the effectiveness of key components in our framework.

Monte Carlo Diffusion for Generalizable Learning-Based RANSAC

In the field of human-object interaction (HOI), detection and generation are two dual tasks that have traditionally been addressed separately, hindering the development of comprehensive interaction understanding. To address this, we propose UniHOI, which jointly models HOI detection and generation via a unified token space, thereby effectively promoting knowledge sharing and enhancing generalization. Specifically, we introduce a symmetric interaction-aware attention module and a unified semi-supervised learning paradigm, enabling effective bidirectional mapping between images and interaction semantics even under limited annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniHOI achieves state-of-the-art performance in both HOI detection and generation. Specifically, UniHOI improves accuracy by 4.9% on long-tailed HOI detection and boosts interaction metrics by 42.0% on open-vocabulary generation tasks.

UniHOI: Unified Human-Object Interaction Understanding via Unified Token Space

The demonstrated success of sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, exemplified by models such as DeepSeek and Grok, has motivated researchers to investigate their adaptation to diverse domains. In real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR), existing approaches mainly rely on fine-tuning pre-trained diffusion models through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images. However, these dense Real-ISR models are limited in their ability to adaptively capture the heterogeneous characteristics of complex real-world degraded samples or enable knowledge sharing between inputs under equivalent computational budgets. To address this, we investigate the integration of sparse MoE into Real-ISR and propose a Mixture-of-Ranks (MoR) architecture for single-step image super-resolution. We introduce a fine-grained expert partitioning strategy that treats each rank in LoRA as an independent expert. This design enables flexible knowledge recombination while isolating fixed-position ranks as shared experts to preserve common-sense features and minimize routing redundancy. Furthermore, we develop a degradation estimation module leveraging CLIP embeddings and predefined positive-negative text pairs to compute relative degradation scores, dynamically guiding expert activation. To better accommodate varying sample complexities, we incorporate zero-expert slots and propose a degradation-aware load-balancing loss, which dynamically adjusts the number of active experts based on degradation severity, ensuring optimal computational resource allocation. Comprehensive experiments validate our framework's effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance.

Mixture of Ranks with Degradation-Aware Routing for One-Step Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Multimodal Action Quality Assessment (AQA) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm. By leveraging complementary information across shared contextual cues, it enhances the discriminative evaluation of subtle intra-class variations in highly similar action sequences. However, partial modalities are frequently unavailable at the inference stage in reality. The absence of any modality often renders existing multimodal models inoperable. Furthermore, it triggers catastrophic performance degradation due to interruptions in cross-modal interactions. To address this issue, we propose a novel Missing Completion Framework with Mixture of Experts (MCMoE) that unifies unimodal and joint representation learning in single-stage training. Specifically, we propose an adaptive gated modality generator that dynamically fuses available information to reconstruct missing modalities. We then design modality experts to learn unimodal knowledge and dynamically mix the knowledge of all experts to extract cross-modal joint representations. With a mixture of experts, missing modalities are further refined and complemented. Finally, in the training phase, we mine the complete multimodal features and unimodal expert knowledge to guide modality generation and generation-based joint representation extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MCMoE achieves state-of-the-art results in both complete and incomplete multimodal learning on three public AQA benchmarks. Our code will be available.

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