Singapore

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.

AAAI 2026

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

efficient mllm

kv cache

attention

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 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.

When Safe Unimodal Inputs Collide: Optimizing Reasoning Chains for Cross-Modal Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models

Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for adapting pre-trained foundation models to downstream tasks, significantly reducing trainable parameters yet suffering from substantial memory overhead caused by gradient backpropagation during fine-tuning. While memory-efficient transfer learning (METL) circumvents this challenge by bypassing backbone gradient computation via lightweight small side networks, its stringent memory constraint severely limits learning capacity of side networks, thereby significantly compromising performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Mixed-Precision Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts framework (MP-ISMoE). Specifically, we first propose an Gaussian Noise Perturbed Iterative Quantization (GNP-IQ) scheme to quantize weights into lower-bits while effectively decreasing quantization errors. By leveraging memory conserved from GNP-IQ, we subsequently employ Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts (ISMoE) to scale up side networks without sacrificing overall memory efficiency. Different from conventional mixture-of-experts, ISMoE learns to select optimal experts by interacting with salient features from frozen backbones, thus suppressing knowledge forgetting and boosting performance. Extensive experiments across diverse vision-language and language-only tasks demonstrate that MP-ISMoE remarkably promotes accuracy compared to state-of-the-art METL approaches, while maintaining comparable parameter and memory efficiency. The source code will be publicly available upon acceptance.

MP-ISMoE: Mixed-Precision Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Transfer Learning

Clean images are crucial for visual tasks such as small object detection, especially at high resolutions. However, real-world images are often degraded by adverse weather, and weather restoration methods may sacrifice high-frequency details critical for analyzing small objects. A natural solution is to apply super-resolution (SR) after weather removal to recover both clarity and fine structures. However, simply cascading restoration and SR struggle to bridge their inherent conflict: removal aims to remove high-frequency weather-induced noise, while SR aims to hallucinate high-frequency textures from existing details, leading to inconsistent restoration contents. In this paper, we take deraining as a case study and propose DHGM, a Diffusion-based High-frequency Guided Model for generating clean and high-resolution images. DHGM integrates pre-trained diffusion priors with high-pass filters to simultaneously remove rain artifacts and enhance structural details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DHGM achieves superior performance over existing methods, with lower costs.

Seeing Through the Rain: Resolving High-Frequency Conflicts in Deraining and Super-Resolution via Diffusion Guidance

Nucleus detection and classification (NDC) in histopathology analysis is a fundamental task that underpins a wide range of high-level pathology applications. However, existing methods heavily rely on labor-intensive nucleus-level annotations and struggle to fully exploit large-scale unlabeled data for learning discriminative nucleus representations. In this work, we propose MUSE (MUlti-scale denSE self-distillation), a novel self-supervised learning method tailored for NDC. At its core is NuLo (Nucleus-based Local self-distillation), a coordinate-guided mechanism that enables flexible local self-distillation based on predicted nucleus positions. By removing the need for strict spatial alignment between augmented views, NuLo allows critical cross-scale alignment, thus unlocking the capacity of models for fine-grained nucleus-level representation. To support MUSE, we design a simple yet effective encoder-decoder architecture and a large field-of-view semi-supervised fine-tuning strategy that together maximize the value of unlabeled pathology images. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate that MUSE effectively addresses the core challenges of histopathological NDC. The resulting models not only surpass state-of-the-art supervised baselines but also outperform generic pathology foundation models.

MUSE: Multi-Scale Dense Self-Distillation for Nucleus Detection and Classification

The slow sampling speed of diffusion models hinders their application in 3D LiDAR scene completion. To address this, we propose Distillation-DPO, a novel framework that accelerates sampling through score distillation while simultaneously enhancing generation quality via preference alignment. Distillation-DPO follows a three-step procedure. First, the student model generates paired completion scenes with different initial noises. Second, using LiDAR scene evaluation metrics as preference, we construct winning and losing sample pairs. Third, as our core innovation, Distillation-DPO optimizes the student model by exploiting the difference in score functions between the teacher and student models on the paired completion scenes. This operation performs variational score distillation of the student model but simultaneously encourages the distilled student to prefer the winning samples over the losing ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Distillation-DPO achieves higher-quality scene completion than state-of-the-art diffusion models, while accelerating sampling by over 5-fold. To our knowledge, our work is the first to integrate the preference learning principle of DPO into the distillation of diffusion models, offering a new paradigm of preference-aligned distillation.

Diffusion Distillation with Direct Preference Optimization for Efficient 3D LiDAR Scene Completion

Multivariate time series forecasting is crucial across a wide range of domains. While presenting notable progress for the Transformer architecture, iTransformer still lags behind the latest MLP-based models. We attribute this performance gap to unstable inter-channel relationships. To bridge this gap, we propose EMAformer, a simple yet effective model that enhances the Transformer with an auxiliary embedding suite, akin to armor that reinforces its ability. By introducing three key inductive biases, i.e., \textit{global stability}, \textit{phase sensitivity}, and \textit{cross-axis specificity}, EMAformer unlocks the further potential of the Transformer architecture, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 12 real-world benchmarks and reducing forecasting errors by an average of 2.73\% in MSE and 5.15\% in MAE. This significantly advances the practical applicability of Transformer-based approaches for multivariate time series forecasting. The code is available on \url{https://github.com/PlanckChang/EMAformer}.

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StyleSentinel: Reliable Artistic Copyright Verification via Stylistic Fingerprints

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