Singapore

Recent advances in spatial transcriptomics have enabled the integration of gene expression profiles with precise spatial coordinates, which have facilitated the exploration of tumor occurrence and development mechanisms, as well as the development of more effective targeted and immunotherapy approaches for tumor treatment. Deciphering cell type represents a critical challenge in spatial transcriptomics research. Existing methods are limited by the pervasive “dropout” events in spatial transcriptomics, hindering their ability to fully capture the relationship between spatial location and gene expression, thereby compromising the performance of cell type deconvolution. To address these limitations, we propose a spatial-aware masked graph transformer-diffusion model (SAMGTD) for enhanced cell type deconvolution in spatial transcriptomics. For spatial transcriptomics, the masked graph transformer model is designed to adaptively capture complex dependencies between spatial locations and gene expression. It employs a masking strategy that guides the model to focus on important local information during training, while the multi-head attention mechanism captures global context. More importantly, the spatial diffusion model is constructed to achieve the dual enhancement of spatial transcriptomics, including denoising and data imputation. It incorporates the multi-head attention mechanism and residual blocks, effectively addressing the “dropout” issue commonly encountered in spatial transcriptomics. For scRNA-seq, we construct a variational autoencoder to reduce noise interference while preserving key gene expression information. Finally, we construct a spatial-aware contrastive learning model to integrate scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics for cell type deconvolution. Experiments conducted on three datasets demonstrate that SAMGTD outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

AAAI 2026

SAMGTD: Spatial-Aware Masked Graph Transformer-Diffusion Model for Enhanced Cell Type Deconvolution in Spatial Transcriptomics

cell type deconvolution

spatial transcriptomics

graph

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

The goal of inductive program synthesis is for a machine to automatically generate a program from user-supplied examples. A key underlying assumption is that humans can provide sufficient examples to teach a concept to a machine. To evaluate the validity of this assumption, we conduct a study where human participants provide examples for six programming concepts, such as finding the maximum element of a list. We evaluate the generalisation performance of five program synthesis systems trained on input-output examples (i) from non-expert humans, (ii) from a human expert, and (iii) randomly sampled. Our results suggest that non-experts typically do not provide sufficient examples for a program synthesis system to learn an accurate program.

Can Humans Teach Machines to Code?

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to autonomously navigate complex environments via visual images and natural language instructions—remains highly challenging. Recent research on enhancing language-guided navigation reasoning using pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has shown promising prospects. However, the reasoning of such methods is limited to the linguistic modality, lacking visual reasoning capabilities. Moreover, existing reasoning modules are optimized separately from navigation policies, leading to incompatibility and potential conflicts in optimization objectives. To tackle these challenges, we introduce UNeMo, a novel framework designed for the collaborative optimization of visual state reasoning and navigational decision-making. It introduces a Multimodal World Model (MWM) that takes visual features, language instructions, and navigational actions as inputs to jointly predict subsequent visual states, enabling cross-modal reasoning. Via a Hierarchical Prediction-Feedback (HPN) mechanism, MWM collaborates with navigation policies: the first layer generates actions using current vision-and-language features; MWM then infers post-action visual states to guide the second layer’s fine-grained decisions. This forms a dynamic bidirectional promotion mechanism where MWM reasoning optimizes navigation policies, while policy decisions feedback to improve MWM’s reasoning accuracy. Experiments on R2R and REVERIE datasets show UNeMo outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.1\% and 1.2\% in navigation accuracy for unseen scenes, validating its effectiveness.

UNeMo: Collaborative Visual-Language Reasoning and Navigation via a Multimodal World Model

Controllable generative models have been widely used to improve the realism of synthetic visual content. However, such models must handle control conditions and content generation computational requirements, resulting in generally low generation efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a Hybrid-Grained Cache (HGC) approach that reduces computational overhead by adopting cache strategies with different granularities at different computational stages. Specifically, (1) we use a coarse-grained cache (block-level) based on feature reuse to dynamically bypass redundant computations in encoder-decoder blocks between each step of model reasoning. (2) We design a fine-grained cache (prompt-level) that acts within a module, where the fine-grained cache reuses cross-attention maps within consecutive reasoning steps and extends them to the corresponding module computations of adjacent steps. These caches of different granularities can be seamlessly integrated into each computational link of the controllable generation process. We verify the effectiveness of HGC on four benchmark datasets, especially its advantages in balancing generation efficiency and visual quality. For example, on the COCO-Stuff segmentation benchmark, our HGC significantly reduces the computational cost (MACs) by 63% (from 18.22T → 6.70T↓), while keeping the loss of semantic fidelity (quantized performance degradation) within 1.5%.

Accelerating Controllable Generation via Hybrid-grained Cache

We present Splat-SAP, a feed-forward approach to render novel views of human-centered scenes from binocular cameras with large sparsity. Gaussian Splatting has shown its promising potential in rendering tasks, but it typically necessitates per-scene optimization with dense input views. Although some recent approaches achieve feed-forward Gaussian Splatting rendering through geometry priors obtained by multi-view stereo, such approaches still require largely overlapped input views to establish the geometry prior. To bridge this gap, we leverage pixel-wise point map reconstruction to represent geometry which is robust to large sparsity for its independent view modeling. In general, we propose a two-stage learning strategy. In stage 1, we transform the point map into real space via an iterative affinity learning process, which facilitates camera control in the following. In stage 2, we project point maps of two input views onto the target view plane and refine such geometry via stereo matching. Furthermore, we anchor Gaussian primitives on this refined plane in order to render high-quality images. As a metric representation, the scale-aware point map in stage 1 is trained in a self-supervised manner without 3D supervision and stage 2 is supervised with photo-metric loss. To evaluate our proposed method, we collect multi-view human-centered data and demonstrate that our method improves both the stability of point map reconstruction and the visual quality of free-viewpoint rendering.

Splat-SAP: Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting for Human-Centered Scene with Scale-Aware Point Map Reconstruction

Real-world systems often exhibit complex behaviors and are influenced by various external factors, making the integration of exogenous variables essential for accurate and robust time series forecasting. However, modeling time series with exogenous variables remains challenging due to dynamic cross-variable dependencies and the semantic gap between numerical time series data and external contextual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful language understanding and knowledge representation capabilities in real-world systems, offering a promising solution to bridge this gap. Motivated by this, we propose ExoTimer, a framework that deeply integrates LLMs for time series modeling with exogenous variables. We begin by introducing an Exo-Aware Endogenous Encoder to dynamically incorporate important exogenous variable information and generate patch-level representations for endogenous variables. To leverage the rich knowledge in LLMs, a Multi-Attribute Prompt Embedding module is elaborately designed to convert heterogeneous temporal features, contextual information and task specifications into LLM-interpretable textual prompts. Additionally, we propose Bi-Hash Alignment, a lightweight cross-modal alignment mechanism that bridges textual and temporal modalities in a shared hash space. Finally, a Dual-Branch Predictor with a learnable coefficient is employed to obtain the final time series prediction by integrating temporal-text and text-temporal representations. Extensive experiments on twelve real-world datasets demonstrate that ExoTimer achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits generalizability and scalability in both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios.

ExoTimer: Leveraging Large Language Models for Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Variables

Recent research has focused on using convolutional neural networks as a backbone in two-view correspondence learning, demonstrating significant superiority over methods based on multilayer perceptrons. However, CNN backbones that are not tailored to specific tasks may fail to effectively aggregate global context and oversmooth dense motion fields in scenes with large disparity. To address these problems, we propose a novel network named SC-Net, which effectively integrates bilateral context from both spatial and channel perspectives. Specifically, we design an adaptive focused regularization module (AFR) to enhance the model's position-awareness and robustness against spurious motion samples, thereby facilitating the generation of a more accurate motion field. We then propose a bilateral field adjustment module (BFA) to refine the motion field by simultaneously modeling long-range relationships and facilitating interaction across spatial and channel dimensions. Finally, we recover the motion vectors from the refined field using a position-aware recovery module (PAR) that ensures consistency and precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SC-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in relative pose estimation and outlier removal tasks on two representative datasets (i.e., YFCC100M and SUN3D). The source code will be released.

SC-Net: Robust Correspondence Learning via Spatial and Cross-Channel Context

Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains challenging due to the reliance on large-scale preference annotations and the high cost of fine-tuning LLMs. To address this, we propose SparseRM, which leverages Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) to extract preference-relevant information encoded in model representations, enabling the construction of a lightweight and interpretable reward model. SparseRM first employs SAE to decompose LLM representations into interpretable directions that capture preference-relevant features. The representations are then projected onto these directions to compute alignment scores, which quantify the strength of each preference feature in the representations. A simple reward head aggregates these scores to predict preference scores. Experiments on three preference modeling tasks show that SparseRM achieves superior performance over most mainstream RMs while using less than 1% of trainable parameters. Moreover, it integrates seamlessly into downstream alignment pipelines, highlighting its potential for efficient alignment.

SparseRM: A Lightweight Preference Modeling with Sparse Autoencoder

Modern gaze estimation models can accurately predict human gaze from facial images. However, due to privacy concerns and intricate data collection procedures, gaze estimation datasets are typically smaller and less diverse compared to those for other vision tasks, which directly leads to poor generalization in gaze estimation models. Common solutions, such as domain adaptation models, require additional domain-specific data, yet such data is often difficult to obtain due to privacy restrictions. Meanwhile, domain generalization models suffer from limited performance due to insufficient training data. To address these fundamental challenges---privacy and data diversity---we explore privacy-preserving gaze data generation schemes and propose a novel data-driven generalization solution. Specifically, we develop two diffusion-based generative models, DDPM-Gaze and LDM-Gaze, for synthesizing gaze data. We demonstrate that synthetic data can significantly improve generalization performance when simply used with fine-tuning-based methods. Furthermore, we introduce the Domain Stability Adaptation (DSA) framework, a simple yet effective domain generalization approach that enhances model robustness by increasing the domain uncertainty of input samples while reducing prediction uncertainty. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our synthetic data and demonstrate the superiority of our data-driven generalization solution.

Towards Privacy-Protected Generalized Gaze Estimation Using Diffusion Models and Domain Stability Adaptation Framework

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) become popular due to excellent energy efficiency, yet facing challenges for effective model training.
Recent works improve this by introducing knowledge distillation (KD) techniques, with the pre-trained artificial neural networks (ANNs) used as teachers and the target SNNs as students.
This is commonly accomplished through a straightforward element-wise alignment of intermediate features and prediction logits from ANNs and SNNs, often neglecting the intrinsic differences between their architectures. Specifically, ANN's outputs exhibit a continuous distribution, whereas SNN's outputs are characterized by sparsity and discreteness.
To mitigate this issue, we introduce two innovative KD strategies. 
Firstly, we propose the Saliency-scaled 
Activation Map Distillation} (SAMD), which aligns the spike activation map of the student SNN with the class-aware activation map of the teacher ANN. Rather than performing KD directly on the raw %and distinct 
features of ANN and SNN, our SAMD directs the student to learn from saliency activation maps that exhibit greater semantic and distribution consistency.
Additionally, we propose a Noise-smoothed Logits Distillation (NLD), which utilizes Gaussian noise to smooth the sparse logits of student SNN, facilitating the alignment with continuous logits from teacher ANN.
Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, particularly on CIFAR100, where CKDSNN achieves an accuracy of 79.11\% with just one time step, surpassing the previous best method by 2\%.

A Closer Look at Knowledge Distillation in Spiking Neural Network Training

To identify objects beyond predefined categories, open-vocabulary aerial object detection(OVAD) leverages the zero-shot capabilities of visual-language models (VLMs) to generalize from base to novel categories. Existing approaches typically utilize self-learning mechanisms with weak text supervision to generate region-level pseudo-labels to align detectors with VLMs semantic spaces. However, text dependence induces semantic bias, restricting open-vocabulary expansion to text-specified concepts. We propose $\textbf{VK-Det}$, a $\textbf{V}$isual $\textbf{K}$nowledge-guided open-vocabulary object $\textbf{Det}$ection framework $\textit{without}$ extra supervision. First, we discover and leverage vision encoder's inherent informative region perception to attain fine-grained localization and adaptive distillation. Second, we introduce a novel prototype-aware pseudo-labeling strategy. It models inter-class decision boundaries through feature clustering and maps detection regions to latent categories via prototype matching. This enhances attention to novel objects while compensating for missing supervision. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art performance, achieving 30.1 $\mathrm{mAP}^{N}$ on DIOR and 23.3 $\mathrm{mAP}^{N}$ on DOTA, outperforming even extra supervised methods.

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Can Humans Teach Machines to Code?

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