Singapore

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.

AAAI 2026

Multi-granularity Interactive Attention Framework for Residual Hierarchical Pronunciation Assessment

pronunciation assessment

speech

attention mechanism

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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.

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.

When Top-ranked Recommendations Fail: Modeling Multi-Granular Negative Feedback for Explainable and Robust Video Recommendation

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are plagued by exorbitant inference costs attributable to the profusion of visual tokens within the vision encoder. The redundant visual tokens engenders a substantial computational load and key-value (KV) cache footprint bottleneck. Existing approaches focus on $\textbf{token-wise}$ optimization, leveraging diverse intricate token pruning techniques to eliminate non-crucial visual tokens. Nevertheless, these methods often unavoidably undermine the integrity of the KV cache, resulting in failures in long-text generation tasks. To this end, we conduct an in-depth investigation towards the attention mechanism of the model from a new perspective, and discern that $\textbf{attention within more than half of all decode layers are semantic similar}$. Upon this finding, we contend that the attention in certain layers can be streamlined by inheriting the attention from their preceding layers. Consequently, we propose $\textbf{Lazy Attention}$, an efficient attention mechanism that enables cross-layer sharing of similar attention patterns.
It ingeniously reduces $\textbf{layer-wise}$ redundant computation in attention. In Lazy Attention, we develop a novel layer-shared cache, $\textbf{Q Cache}$, tailored for MLLMs, which facilitates the reuse of queries across adjacent layers. In particular, Q Cache is lightweight and fully compatible with existing inference frameworks, including Flash Attention and KV cache. Additionally, our method is highly flexible as it is orthogonal to existing token-wise techniques and can be deployed independently or combined with token pruning approaches. Empirical evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method can reduce KV cache usage by over $\textbf{35}$% and achieve $\textbf{1.5$\times$}$ throughput improvement, while sacrificing only approximately 1\% of performance on various MLLMs. Compared with SOTA token-wise methods, our technique achieves superior accuracy preservation.

Q Cache: Visual Attention Is Valuable in Less than Half of Decode Layers for Multimodal Large Language Model

The versatility of diffusion models in generating customized images has led to unauthorized usage of personal artwork, which poses a significant threat to the intellectual property of artists. Existing approaches relying on embedding additional information, such as perturbations, watermarks, and backdoors, suffer from limited defensive capabilities and fail to protect artwork published online. In this paper, we propose StyleSentinel, an approach for copyright protection of artwork by verifying an inherent stylistic fingerprint in the artist's artwork. Specifically, we employ a semantic self-reconstruction process to enhance stylistic expressiveness within the artwork, which establishes a dense and style-consistent manifold foundation for feature learning. Subsequently, we adaptively fuse multi-layer image features to encode abstract artistic style into a compact stylistic fingerprint. Finally, we model the target artist's style as a minimal enclosing hypersphere boundary in the feature space, transforming complex copyright verification into a robust one-class learning task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art, StyleSentinel achieves superior performance on the one-sample verification task. We also demonstrate the effectiveness through online platforms.

StyleSentinel: Reliable Artistic Copyright Verification via Stylistic Fingerprints

Traditional vision-based material perception methods often experience substantial performance degradation under visually impaired conditions, thereby motivating the shift toward non-visual multimodal material perception. Despite this, existing approaches frequently perform naive fusion of multimodal inputs, overlooking key challenges such as modality-specific noise, missing modalities common in real-world scenarios, and the dynamically varying importance of each modality depending on the task. These limitations lead to suboptimal performance across several benchmark tasks. In this paper, we propose a robust multimodal fusion framework, TouchFormer.
Specifically, we employ a Modality-Adaptive Gating (MAG) mechanism and intra- and inter-modality attention mechanisms to adaptively integrate cross-modal features, enhancing model robustness. Additionally, we introduce a Cross-Instance Embedding Regularization(CER) strategy, which significantly improves classification accuracy in fine-grained subcategory material recognition tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing non-visual methods, the proposed TouchFormer framework achieves classification accuracy improvements of 2.48% and 6.83% on SSMC and USMC tasks, respectively. Furthermore, real-world robotic experiments validate TouchFormer's effectiveness in enabling robots to better perceive and interpret their environment, paving the way for its deployment in safety-critical applications such as emergency response and industrial automation. The code and datasets will be open-source, and the videos are available in the supplementary materials.

TouchFormer: A Robust Transformer-based Framework for Multimodal Material Perception

Controlling nonlinear stochastic systems with parametric uncertainty is a fundamental challenge in modern control theory. This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical framework for a natural-gradient method applied to polynomial chaos theory in the context of quadratic regulator problems with both parametric uncertainty and additive stochastic disturbances. We extend existing polynomial chaos approaches from linear systems to general nonlinear dynamics, developing new mathematical tools to handle the complex interactions between nonlinearity, parameter uncertainty, and noise. The framework provides local convergence guarantees for the proposed natural gradient algorithm and offers practical computational strategies, while carefully characterizing the theoretical limitations in the nonlinear setting.

A Natural-Gradient Approach for Nonlinear Stochastic Systems with Parameter Uncertainty

Diffusion models 
have gained widespread adoption due to their ability to generate highly realistic images, 
yet their rapid proliferation also raises security and traceability concerns. 
To address issues of 
ownership verification and accountability, 
current watermarking techniques primarily focus on embedding information into the internal mechanisms of generative pipelines. 
Nevertheless, 
many existing methods inject watermarks directly into latent representations without adequately exploiting inherent redundancies or perceptual properties in latent space, leading to degraded image quality.
In this work, 
we conduct a systematic analysis aimed at quantifying differentiated redundancies present within latent space, and further propose a novel Redundancy-Aware Latent Injection framework RAIN based on the above analysis. 
Specifically, a redundancy‑aware adaptive watermark fusion method is introduced to preserve image quality, which utilizes the differentiated redundancy distribution to guide adaptive watermark allocation in different perception tolerance regions.
Moreover, a distribution alignment initialization strategy is designed to align the watermark’s initial distribution to the latent prior, reducing initialization bias and improving convergence efficiency.
Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that RAIN achieves state-of-the-art performance by delivering superior perceptual quality under high-capacity watermarking scenarios while maintaining robustness against multiple attacks.

RAIN: Redundancy-Aware Latent Injection for Quality-Preserving Image Watermarking

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are susceptible to the implicit reasoning risk, wherein innocuous unimodal inputs synergistically assemble into risky multimodal data that produce harmful outputs. We attribute this vulnerability to the difficulty of MLLMs maintaining safety alignment through long-chain reasoning.To address this issue, we introduce Safe-Semantics-but-Unsafe-Interpretation (SSUI), the first dataset featuring interpretable reasoning paths tailored for such a cross-modal challenge.A novel training framework, Safety-aware Reasoning Path Optimization (SRPO), is also designed based on the SSUI dataset to align the MLLM's internal reasoning process with human safety values. Experimental results show that our SRPO-trained models achieve state-of-the-art results on key safety benchmarks, including the proposed Reasoning Path Benchmark (RSBench), significantly outperforming both open-source and top-tier commercial MLLMs.

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