Singapore

Cross-modal alignment is a promising yet challenging task in multimodal learning. Existing methods typically assess it by measuring the cross-modal semantic similarity from both global and local perspectives. However, these methods often neglect their potential interdependence. Specifically, global matching methods suffer from the over-compression of local features, while local matching methods rarely consider the inherent spatial topology of image patches. To address these limitations, we propose MG-Net, a unified framework with two collaborative modules: Multi-View Differential Mixer (MDM) and Graph-Guided Structural Region Selector (GSRS). The MDM is designed to capture discriminative global representations. It generates a series of views by decomposing feature vectors through multi-order differential operations, and adaptively fuses them via a lightweight Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) network. Meanwhile, the GSRS organizes image patches as a spatial graph and employs text-guided contextual reasoning to select spatially coherent and semantically complete structural region. Extensive experiments on the Flickr30K and MS-COCO benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MG-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in most cases.

AAAI 2026

Multi-View Differential Mixing and Graph-Guided Structural Region Selection for Cross-Modal Alignment

multi-instance/multi-view learning

graph-based machine learning

multimodal learning

representation learning

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

We present *bfact*, a Python package for performing accurate low-rank Boolean matrix factorisation (BMF). *bfact* uses a hybrid combinatorial optimisation approach based on \emph{a priori} candidate factors generated from clustering algorithms. It selects the best disjoint factors, before performing either a second combinatorial, or heuristic algorithm to recover the BMF. We show that *bfact* does particularly well at estimating the true rank of matrices in simulated settings. In real benchmarks, using a collation of single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets from the Human Lung Cell Atlas, we show that bfact achieves strong signal recovery, with a much lower rank.

Hybrid Restricted Master Problem for Boolean Matrix Factorisation

Understanding dynamic 4D scenes from an egocentric perspective—modeling changes in 3D spatial structure over time—is crucial for human–machine interaction, autonomous navigation, and embodied intelligence. While existing egocentric datasets contain dynamic scenes, they lack unified 4D annotations and task-driven evaluation protocols for fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning, especially on motion of objects and human, together with their interactions.

To address this gap, we introduce EgoDynamic4D, a novel QA benchmark on highly dynamic scenes, comprising RGB-D video, camera poses, globally unique instance masks, and 4D bounding boxes. We construct 927K QA pairs accompanied by explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT), enabling verifiable, step-by-step spatio-temporal reasoning. We design 12 dynamic QA tasks covering agent motion, human–object interaction, trajectory prediction, relation understanding, and temporal–causal reasoning, with fine-grained, multidimensional metrics.

To tackle these tasks, we propose an end-to-end spatio-temporal reasoning framework that unifies dynamic and static scene information, using instance-aware feature encoding, time and camera encoding, and spatially adaptive down-sampling to compress large 4D scenes into token sequences manageable by LLMs. Experiments on EgoDynamic4D show that our method consistently outperforms baselines, validating the effectiveness of multimodal temporal modeling for egocentric dynamic scene understanding.

Understanding Dynamic Scenes in Ego Centric 4D Point Clouds

Nowadays, recommendation systems have become crucial to online platforms, shaping user exposure by accurate preference modeling. However, such an exposure strategy can also reinforce users’ existing preferences, leading to a notorious phenomenon named filter bubbles. Given its negative effects, such as group polarization, increasing attention has been paid to exploring reasonable measures to filter bubbles. However, most existing evaluation metrics simply measure the diversity of user exposure, failing to distinguish between algorithmic preference modeling and actual information confinement. In view of this, we introduce Bubble Escape Potential (BEP), a behavior-aware measure that quantifies how easily users can escape from filter bubbles. Specifically, BEP leverages a contrastive simulation framework that assigns different behavioral tendencies (e.g., positive vs. negative) to synthetic users and compares the induced exposure patterns. This design enables decoupling the effect of filter bubbles and preference modeling, allowing for more precise diagnosis of bubble severity.
We conduct extensive experiments across multiple recommendation models to examine the relationship between predictive accuracy and bubble escape potential across different groups. To the best of our knowledge, our empirical results are the first to quantitatively validate the dilemma between preferences modeling and filter bubbles. What's more, we observe a counter-intuitive phenomenon that mild random recommendations are ineffective in alleviating filter bubbles, which can offer a principled foundation for further work in this direction.

Quantifying the Potential to Escape Filter Bubbles: A Behavior-Aware Measure via Contrastive Simulation

Textual open intent classification is crucial for real-world dialogue systems, enabling robust detection of unknown user intents without prior knowledge and contributing to the robustness of the system. While adaptive decision boundary methods have shown great potential by eliminating manual threshold tuning, existing approaches assume isotropic distributions of known classes, restricting boundaries to balls and overlooking distributional variance along different directions. To address this limitation, we propose EliDecide, a novel method that learns ellipsoid decision boundaries with varying scales along different feature directions. First, we employ supervised contrastive learning to obtain a discriminative feature space for known samples. Second, we apply learnable matrices to parameterize ellipsoids as the boundaries of each known class, offering greater flexibility than spherical boundaries defined solely by centers and radii. Third, we optimize the boundaries via a novelly designed dual loss function that balances empirical and open-space risks: expanding boundaries to cover known samples while contracting them against synthesized pseudo-open samples. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple text intent benchmarks and further on a question classification dataset. The flexibility of the ellipsoids demonstrates superior open intent detection capability and strong potential for generalization to more text classification tasks in diverse complex open-world scenarios. Code is included in the supplementary material and will be released upon publication.

Ellipsoid-Based Decision Boundaries for Open Intent Classification

Brain network analysis technology reveals the organizational mechanism and information processing mode by constructing the structural connection network between brain regions. It has achieved satisfactory results in brain disease prediction tasks, promoting the progress of neuroscience. In recent years, graph transformer has become the most mainstream method for brain analysis with its powerful feature extraction ability and attention mechanism. However, these methods face two challenges, i.e., lack of interpretability, and neglect of semantic associations among brain regions. To solve these problems, we proposed a large language model (LLM)-driven causal knowledge brain network transformer framework, termed BrainCKT, which is plug-and-play, and can adapt to most of the existing mainstream graph transformer-based methods. Specifically, we constructed a brain region causal graph and used its adjacency matrix to guide the learning process of the self-attention mechanism. In addition, we constructed a brain science knowledge graph and encoded it through a pre-trained model to enhance the original brain region features. Finally, we integrated BrainCKT into four mainstream graph transformer baselines for verification. Experimental results on two brain imaging datasets proved the effectiveness of BrainCKT.

Make Model Transparent: Brain Network Analysis via Causal and Knowledge Graph Learning

Automatic pronunciation assessment plays a crucial role in computer-assisted pronunciation training systems. Due to the ability to perform multiple pronunciation tasks simultaneously, multi-aspect multi-granularity pronunciation assessment methods are gradually receiving more attention and achieving better performance than single-level modeling tasks. However, existing methods only consider unidirectional dependencies between adjacent granularity levels, lacking bidirectional interaction among phoneme, word, and utterance levels and thus insufficiently capturing the acoustic structural correlations. To address this issue, we propose a novel residual hierarchical interactive method, HIA for short, that enables bidirectional modeling across granularities. As the core of HIA, the Interactive Attention Module leverages an attention mechanism to achieve dynamic bidirectional interaction, effectively capturing linguistic features at each granularity while integrating correlations between different granularity levels. We also propose a residual hierarchical structure to alleviate the feature forgetting problem when modeling acoustic hierarchies. In addition, we use 1-D convolutional layers to enhance the extraction of local contextual cues at each granularity. Extensive experiments on the speechocean762 dataset show that our model is comprehensively ahead of the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-granularity Interactive Attention Framework for Residual Hierarchical Pronunciation Assessment

Stable Diffusion (SD) often produces degraded outputs when the training dataset contains adversarial noise. Adversarial purification offers a promising solution by removing adversarial noise from contaminated data. However, existing purification methods are primarily designed for classification tasks and fail to address SD-specific adversarial strategies, such as attacks targeting the VAE encoder, UNet denoiser, or both.
To address the gap in SD security, we propose Universal Diffusion Adversarial Purification (UDAP), a novel framework tailored for defending adversarial attacks targeting SD models. UDAP leverages the distinct reconstruction behaviors of clean and adversarial images during Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) inversion to optimize the purification process. By minimizing the DDIM metric loss, UDAP can effectively remove adversarial noise. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic epoch adjustment strategy that adapts optimization iterations based on reconstruction errors, significantly improving efficiency without sacrificing purification quality.
Experiments demonstrate UDAP’s robustness against diverse adversarial methods, including PID (VAE-targeted), Anti-DreamBooth (UNet-targeted), MIST (hybrid), and robustness-enhanced variants like Anti-Diffusion (Anti-DF) and MetaCloak. UDAP also generalizes well across SD versions and text prompts, showcasing its practical applicability in real-world scenarios.

Universal Adversarial Purification with DDIM Metric Loss for Stable Diffusion

4D flow magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a reliable, non-invasive approach for estimating blood flow velocities, vital for cardiovascular diagnostics. Unlike conventional MRI focused on anatomical structures, 4D flow MRI requires high spatiotemporal resolution for early detection of critical conditions such as stenosis or aneurysms. However, achieving such resolution typically results in prolonged scan times, creating a trade-off between acquisition speed and prediction accuracy. Recent studies have leveraged physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for super-resolution of MRI data, but their practical applicability is limited as the prohibitively slow training process must be performed for each patient. To overcome this limitation, we propose PINGS-X, a novel framework modeling high-resolution flow velocities using axes-aligned spatiotemporal Gaussian representations. Inspired by the effectiveness of 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) in novel view synthesis, PINGS-X extends this concept through several non-trivial novel innovations: (i) normalized Gaussian splatting with a formal convergence guarantee, (ii) axes-aligned Gaussians that simplify training for high-dimensional data while preserving accuracy and the convergence guarantee, and (iii) a Gaussian merging procedure to prevent degenerate solutions and boost computational efficiency.
Experimental results on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and real 4D flow MRI datasets demonstrate that PINGS-X substantially reduces training time while achieving superior super-resolution accuracy. Our code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PINGS-X-01AC.

PINGS-X: Physics-Informed Normalized Gaussian Splatting with Axes Alignment for Efficient Super-Resolution of 4D Flow MRI

Spatial transcriptomics enables gene expression profiling with spatial context, offering unprecedented insights into the tissue microenvironment. However, most computational models treat genes as isolated numerical features, ignoring the rich biological semantics encoded in their symbols. This prevents a truly deep understanding of critical biological characteristics.
To overcome this limitation, we present SemST, a semantic-guided deep learning framework for spatial transcriptomics data clustering. SemST leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable genes to "speak" through their symbolic meanings, transforming gene sets within each tissue spot into biologically informed embeddings. These embeddings are then fused with the spatial neighborhood relationships captured by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), achieving a coherent integration of biological function and spatial structure.
We further introduce the Fine-grained Semantic Modulation (FSM) module to optimally exploit these biological priors. The FSM module learns spot-specific affine transformations that empower the semantic embeddings to perform an element-wise calibration of the spatial features, thus dynamically injecting high-order biological knowledge into the spatial context.
Extensive experiments on public spatial transcriptomics datasets show that SemST achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance. Crucially, the FSM module exhibits plug-and-play versatility, consistently improving the performance when integrated into other baseline methods.

When Genes Speak: A Semantic-Guided Framework for Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Data Clustering

Existing video recommendation systems, relying mainly on ID-based embedding mapping and collaborative filtering, often fail to capture in-depth video content semantics. Moreover, most struggle to address biased user behaviors (e.g., accidental clicks, fast skips), leading to inaccurate interest modeling and frequent negative feedback in top recommendations with unclear causes.
To tackle this issue, we collect real-world user video-watching sequences, annotate the reasons for users' dislikes, and construct a benchmark dataset for personalized explanations. 
We then introduce the Agentic Explainable Negative Feedback (ENF) framework, which integrates three core components: 
(1) the Profile Agent, extracting behavioral cues from users' historical data to derive psychological and personality profiles; 
(2) the Video Agent, performing comprehensive multimodal video analysis; 
and (3) the Reason Agent, synthesizing information from the other two agents to predict user engagement and generate explanations.
Additionally, we propose the S-GRPO algorithm, enabling the model to progressively address complex tasks during reinforcement fine-tuning. 
Experimental results on the collected dataset show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in negative feedback prediction and reason explanation.
Notably, it achieves an 8.6\% improvement over GPT-4o in reason classification.
Deployment on the business platform further validates its benefits: increasing average user watch time by 6.2\%, reducing the fast-skip rate by 9.4\% , and significantly enhancing user satisfaction.

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