Singapore

Vision Transformers (ViT) and their variants have achieved remarkable success in various complex tasks, but these accomplishments come with high computational costs and significant inference latency. Token pruning, as an effective technique, reduces computational burden by removing redundant or unimportant tokens, thereby lowering model resource consumption and inference time. Although existing retraining-free token pruning algorithms perform well in accelerating inference, their pruning strategies are often limited to locally optimal mask configurations. They fail to fully explore the interdependencies among intra-layer mask variables from a global perspective, which in turn constrains the overall performance improvement of the model. To address these limitations, we propose V-Pruner (A Fast and Globally-informed Token Pruning Framework for Vision Transformer). This framework delivers a fast, efficient, and streamlined end-to-end pruning workflow that operates without user intervention. This algorithm consists of three stages: Token Mask Search, Token Mask Rearrangement, and Token Mask Tuning. In the Token Mask Search stage, we utilize Fisher information to identify key and redundant tokens; In the Token Mask Rearrangement stage, we introduce Reinforcement learning algorithm to deeply explore the global interactions among intra-layer mask variables, thereby overcoming the limitation of traditional methods that focus only on local information and enhancing the overall pruning performance; Finally, in the Token Mask Tuning stage, we precisely adjust the mask variables to restore the accuracy of the pruned model, aiming to compensate for any potential accuracy loss during the pruning process. We evaluated this approach on ViT-L, DeiT-B, DeiT-S, and DeiT-T models, and experimental results show that compared to existing pruning methods, V-Pruner exhibits superior performance in balancing accuracy, speed, and FLOPs, providing a significant competitive advantage.

AAAI 2026

V-Pruner: A Fast and Globally-informed Token Pruning Framework for Vision Transformer

transformer pruning; token pruning; reinforcement learning; vision transformer;

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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EMNLP 2024

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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.

The rapid progress of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has boosted the task of image quality assessment (IQA). However, a key challenge arises from the inherent mismatch between the discrete token outputs of MLLMs and the continuous nature of quality scores required by IQA tasks. This discrepancy significantly hinders the performance of MLLM-based IQA methods. Previous approaches that convert discrete token predictions into continuous scores often suffer from conversion errors. Moreover, the semantic confusion introduced by level tokens (e.g., “good”) further constrains the performance of MLLMs on IQA tasks and degrades their original capabilities to related tasks. To tackle these problems, we provide a theoretical analysis of the errors inherent in previous approaches and, motivated by this analysis, propose a simple yet effective framework, Q-Scorer. This framework incorporates a lightweight regression module and IQA-specific score tokens into the MLLM pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Scorer achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple IQA benchmarks, generalizes well to mixed datasets, and further improves combined with other methods.

Revisiting MLLM Based Image Quality Assessment: Errors and Remedy

Kernel power $k$-means (KPKM) leverages a family of means to mitigate local minima issues in kernel $k$-means. However, KPKM faces two key limitations: (1) the computational burden of the full kernel matrix restricts its use on extensive data, and (2) the lack of authentic centroid-sample assignment learning reduces its noise robustness. To overcome these challenges, we propose RFF-KPKM, introducing the first approximation theory for applying random Fourier features (RFF) to KPKM. RFF-KPKM employs RFF to generate efficient, low-dimensional feature maps, bypassing the need for the whole kernel matrix.
Crucially, we are the first to establish strong theoretical guarantees for this combination: (1) an excess risk bound of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{k^3/n})$, (2) strong consistency with membership values, and (3) a $(1+\varepsilon)$ relative error bound achievable using the RFF of dimension $\mathrm{poly}(\varepsilon^{-1}\log k)$. Furthermore, to improve robustness and the ability to learn multiple kernels, we propose IP-RFF-MKPKM, an improved possibilistic RFF-based multiple kernel power $k$-means. IP-RFF-MKPKM ensures the scalability of MKPKM via RFF and refines cluster assignments by combining the merits of the possibilistic membership and fuzzy membership. Experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate the superior efficiency and clustering accuracy of the proposed methods compared to the state-of-the-art alternatives.

Enhancing Kernel Power $K$-means: Scalable and Robust Clustering with Random Fourier Features and Possibilistic Method

Partial label learning (PLL) aims to learn from the data where each instance is associated with a candidate label set, with only one being valid. Most existing approaches are designed to eliminate noisy labels and use the remaining reliable ones for model training, following a label-centric learning paradigm. In this paper, we propose a new PLL method called Semantic-Aware Feature Enhancement (SAFE), which tackles the problem through a novel feature-centric learning paradigm. SAFE presumes that the candidate labels are correct while the observed features are partial, and thus seeks to recover the underlying missing features. In this manner, a desired predictive model is constructed by integrating the observed and recovered features, which are responsible for predicting the true label and the remaining candidate labels, respectively. To ensure the quality of recovered features, SAFE jointly explores the intrinsic topological structures via dynamic graphs in both feature and label spaces as guidance for semantic-aware feature enhancement. Extensive experimental results on some popular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art PLL approaches.

Semantic-Aware Feature Enhancement for Partial Label Learning

Ensuring the reliability of agent architectures and effectively identifying problematic agents when failures occur are crucial challenges in multi-agent systems (MAS). Advances in large language models (LLMs) have established LLM-based agents as a major branch of MAS, enabling major breakthroughs in complex problem solving and world modeling. However, the reliability implications of this shift remain largely unexplored. i.e., whether substituting traditional agents with LLM-based agents can effectively enhance the reliability of MAS. In this work, we investigate and quantify the reliability of LLM-based agents from the perspective of Byzantine fault tolerance. We observe that LLM-based agents demonstrate stronger skepticism when processing erroneous message flows, a characteristic that enables them to outperform traditional agents across different topological structures. Motivated by the results of the pilot experiment, we design CP-WBFT, a confidence probe-based weighted Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism to enhance the stability of MAS with different topologies. It capitalizes on the intrinsic reflective and discriminative capabilities of LLMs by employing a probe-based, weighted information flow transmission method to improve the reliability of LLM-based agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CP-WBFT achieves superior performance across diverse network topologies under extreme Byzantine conditions (85.7% fault rate). Notably, Hidden-level Confidence Probe consistently outperforms traditional methods, achieving 100% accuracy on complete graphs and maintaining robust reliability across both mathematical reasoning and safety assessment tasks.

Rethinking the Reliability of Multi-agent System: A Perspective from Byzantine Fault Tolerance

We address payoff-based decentralized learning in infinite-horizon zero-sum Markov games. In this setting, each player makes decisions based solely on received rewards, without observing the opponent's strategy or actions, nor sharing information. Prior works established polynomial-time convergence to an approximate Nash equilibrium under strong reachability and mixing time assumptions. We propose a convergent algorithm that significantly relaxes these assumptions, requiring only the existence of a single policy with bounded reachability and mixing time. Our key algorithmic novelty is introducing Tsallis entropy regularization to smooth the best-response policy updates. By suitably tuning this regularization, we ensure sufficient exploration, thus bypassing previous stringent assumptions on the MDP. We prove a polynomial-time convergence to an approximate Nash equilibrium by establishing novel properties of the value and policy updates induced by the Tsallis entropy regularizer.

Learning in Zero-Sum Markov Games: Relaxing Strong Reachability and Mixing Time Assumptions

Few-shot graph learning remains a fundamental yet challenging problem, especially under heterophilic graph settings where connected nodes are likely to belong to different classes. In such scenarios, two key challenges arise: (1) unreliable or noisy graph structures that hinder effective message passing, and (2) semantic inconsistency: in heterophilic graphs, aggregating messages from neighbors of different classes entangles representations and introduces misleading semantics. These issues are further exacerbated by the limited labeled data inherent to few-shot learning, making it difficult to adaptively repair structure or disentangle semantics. To address these challenges, we propose DAPrompt, a Dual Alignment Prompt framework that jointly calibrates graph structure and semantic representations across the learning pipeline. In the pretraining stage, DAPrompt incorporates a graph structure learning module to denoise and repair the underlying topology, enhancing structural reliability. In the prompt tuning stage, we introduce two coordinated modules: a structure-aware prompt learner, which employs prompt tokens to repair unreliable graph structures and capture structure-level alignment, and a semantics-aligned prompt learner, which enhances the graph using target node semantics to mitigate representation noise caused by class-mismatched propagation. Extensive experiments on both node-level and graph-level few-shot benchmarks validate its effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance and highlighting the value of structure-semantic dual alignment in heterophilic few-shot graph learning.

DAPrompt: Dual Alignment Prompt of Structure and Semantics for Few-shot Graph Learning

The advent of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has sparked interest in their application to electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis. 
However, existing ECG-focused MLLMs primarily focus on report generation tasks, often limited to single 12-lead, short-duration (10s) ECG inputs, thereby underutilizing the potential of MLLMs. To this end, we aim to develop a MLLM for ECG analysis that supports a broader range of tasks and more flexible ECG inputs. 
However, existing ECG-QA datasets are often monotonous. To address this gap, we first constructed the anyECG dataset, which encompasses a wide variety of tasks, including report generation, abnormal waveform localization, and open-ended question answering. In addition to standard hospital ECGs, we introduced long-duration reduced-lead ECGs for home environments and multiple ECG comparison scenarios commonly encountered in clinical practice.
Furthermore, we propose the anyECG-chat model, which supports dynamic-length ECG inputs and multiple ECG inputs. We trained the model using a three-stage curriculum training recipe with the anyECG dataset.
A comprehensive evaluation was conducted, demonstrating that anyECG-chat is capable of supporting various practical application scenarios, including not only common report generation tasks but also abnormal waveform localization for long-duration reduced-lead ECGs in home environments and comprehensive comparative analysis of multiple ECGs.

anyECG-chat: A Generalist ECG-MLLM for Flexible ECG Input and Multi-Task Understanding

Recent researchers have proposed using event cameras for person re-identification (ReID) due to their promising performance and better balance in terms of privacy protection, event camera-based person ReID has attracted significant attention. Currently, mainstream event-based person ReID algorithms primarily focus on fusing visible light and event stream, as well as preserving privacy. Although significant progress has been made, these methods are typically trained and evaluated on small-scale or simulated event camera datasets, making it difficult to assess their real identification performance and generalization ability. To address the issue of data scarcity, this paper introduces a large-scale RGB-event based person ReID dataset, called EvReID. The dataset contains 118,988 image pairs and covers 1200 pedestrian identities, with data collected across multiple seasons, scenes, and lighting conditions. We also evaluate 15 state-of-the-art person ReID algorithms, laying a solid foundation for future research in terms of both data and benchmarking. Based on our newly constructed dataset, this paper further proposes a pedestrian attribute-guided contrastive learning framework to enhance feature learning for person re-identification, termed TriPro-ReID. This framework not only effectively explores the visual features from both RGB frames and event streams, but also fully utilizes pedestrian attributes as mid-level semantic features. Extensive experiments on the EvReID dataset and MARS datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed RGB-Event person ReID framework. The benchmark dataset and source code will be released upon acceptance.

When Person Re-Identification Meets Event Camera: A Benchmark Dataset and an Attribute-Guided Re-Identification Framework

Fairness concerns are increasingly critical as machine learning models are deployed in high-stakes applications. While existing fairness-aware methods typically intervene at the model level, they often suffer from high computational costs, limited scalability, and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a Bayesian data selection framework that ensures fairness by aligning group-specific posterior distributions of model parameters and sample weights with a shared central distribution. Our framework supports flexible alignment via various distributional discrepancy measures, including Wasserstein distance, maximum mean discrepancy, and f-divergence, allowing geometry-aware control without imposing explicit fairness constraints. This data-centric approach mitigates group-specific biases in training data and improves fairness in downstream tasks, with theoretical guarantees. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms existing data selection and model-based fairness methods in both fairness and accuracy.

Fair Bayesian Data Selection via Generalized Discrepancy Measures

Most visual models are designed for sRGB images, yet RAW data offers significant advantages for object detection by preserving sensor information before ISP processing. This enables improved detection accuracy and more efficient hardware designs by bypassing the ISP. However, RAW object detection is challenging due to limited training data, unbalanced pixel distributions, and sensor noise. To address this, we propose SimROD, a lightweight and effective approach for RAW object detection. We introduce a Global Gamma Enhancement (GGE) module, which applies a learnable global gamma transformation with only four parameters, improving feature representation while keeping the model efficient. Additionally, we leverage the green channel's richer signal to enhance local details, aligning with the human eye’s sensitivity and Bayer filter design. Extensive experiments on multiple RAW object detection datasets and detectors demonstrate that SimROD outperforms state-of-the-art methods like RAW-Adapter and DIAP while maintaining efficiency. Our work highlights the potential of RAW data for real-world object detection.

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