Singapore

Recent years have witnessed remarkable achievements in perceptual image restoration (IR), creating an urgent demand for accurate image quality assessment (IQA), which is essential for both performance comparison and algorithm optimization. Unfortunately, the existing IQA metrics exhibit inherent weakness for IR task, particularly when distinguishing fine-grained quality differences among restored images. To address this dilemma, we contribute the first-of-its-kind fine-grained image quality assessment dataset for image restoration, termed $\textbf{FGRestore}$, comprising 18,408 restored images across six common IR tasks. Beyond conventional scalar quality scores, FGRestore was also annotated with 30,886 fine-grained pairwise preferences. Based on FGRestore, a comprehensive benchmark was conducted on the existing IQA metrics, which reveal significant inconsistencies between score-based IQA evaluations and the fine-grained restoration quality. Motivated by these findings, we further propose $\textbf{FGResQ}$, a new IQA model specifically designed for image restoration, which features both coarse-grained score regression and fine-grained quality ranking. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that FGResQ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art IQA metrics. Data and code will be publicly available.

AAAI 2026

Fine-grained Image Quality Assessment for Perceptual Image Restoration

hai: user experience and usability

cv: low level & physics-based vision

hai: learning human values and preferences

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.

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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

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have emerged as powerful tools for automating complex tasks by leveraging the reasoning and decision-making abilities of LLMs. However, a major bottleneck in current agent frameworks lies in the high inference cost of tool selection, especially in approaches like ReAct that repeatedly invoke the LLM to determine which tool to use at each step. In this work, we propose AutoTool, a novel graph-based framework that bypasses repeated LLM inference by exploiting a key empirical observation: tool usage inertia—the tendency of tool invocations to follow predictable sequential patterns. AutoTool constructs a directed graph from historical agent trajectories, where nodes represent tools and edges capture transition probabilities, effectively modeling the inertia in tool selection. It further integrates parameter-level information to refine tool input generation. By traversing this structured representation, AutoTool efficiently selects tools and their parameters with minimal reliance on LLM inference. Extensive experiments across diverse agent tasks demonstrate that AutoTool reduces inference cost by up to 30\% while maintaining competitive task completion rates, offering a practical and scalable alternative to inference-heavy frameworks. Our work highlights the promise of integrating statistical structure into LLM agent design for greater efficiency without sacrificing performance.

AutoTool: Efficient Tool Selection for Large Language Model Agents

It is a critical challenge to efficiently unlock the powerful reasoning potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks or new distributions. Existing test-time adaptation methods often require tuning model parameters, which is not only computationally expensive but also risks degrading the model's pre-existing abilities.To address this, we introduce a lightweight component, Test-Time Steering Vectors (TTSV), which is prepended to the input while keeping the LLM's parameters entirely frozen. By optimizing the TTSV on test data to minimize the model's output entropy, we steer the model towards an internal state of higher confidence, activating its inherent abilities most relevant to the current task. TTSV is both lightweight and highly efficient to optimize, making it a true plug-and-play enhancement. Extensive experiments validate our approach's effectiveness on both base models and reasoning-enhanced models. For instance, on the MATH500 task, TTSV achieves a 45.88% relative performance gain on the Qwen2.5-Math-7B model and a 16.22% relative gain on the Qwen3-4B model. Furthermore, our approach exhibits robust generalization, with its steering vectors proving highly transferable across diverse tasks. Code is provided in Supplementary Material.

Model Whisper: Steering Vectors Unlock Large Language Models’ Potential in Test-Time

We present MoP-UAV, a new benchmark for UAV-based cross-view object geo-localization guided by multi-modal prompts. MoP-UAV supports fine-grained object-level cross-view localization under diverse prompt modalities, including natural language, bounding boxes, and click points. It offers potential for incorporating large foundation models like large language models (LLMs) and promotes the building of more flexible and intelligent UAV agents. Based on the benchmark, we propose MoPT, a multi-modal-prompt-guided tansformer that embeds prompts as token sequences and extract object location from UAV and satellite features via cross-attention. To enhance semantic consistency and performance, we further adopt a cross-view contrastive loss and propose a RefCOCOg-based pre-training strategy. Extensive experiments show that MoPT achieves robust localization under arbitrary prompt combinations. Notably, multi-modal-prompt training significantly boosts unimodal-prompt inference performance, highlighting the generalization benefits of multi-modal learning. MoPT trained with multi-modal prompts outperforms prior unimodal prompt works under the same setting.

Learning Better UAV-Based Cross-View Object Geo-Localization from Multi-Modal Prompts: MoP-UAV Benchmark and MoPT Framework

The practical deployment of infrared imaging is hindered by its inherent output of low-resolution (LR) images. While the super-resolution (SR) technique is a promising remedy, we discover two major challenges concerning infrared image SR: preserving accurate thermal distributions, which are fundamental to infrared imaging, and addressing the ambiguity of high-frequency elements compared to visible images. To tackle these issues, we propose **ThesIS**, a tailored framework that utilizes **The**rmal-Physic**s** guidance and dynamic high-frequency amplification for **I**nfrared image **S**uper-resolution to produce high-resolution (HR) images with accurate physical properties and delicate visual details. Specifically, Thermal Regularization is introduced to reconstruct the accurate thermal radiation distribution via the introduced Infrared Radiation Intensity Alignment Loss, mitigating the adverse effects of complex degradations while conducting initial upscaling. Additionally, we design a guidance mechanism to counter the randomness of the diffusion model, further refining the preservation of physical information. The proposed Dynamic High-Frequency Amplification effectively strengthens the ambiguous high-frequency information present in infrared images, leading to improved texture details and superior visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ThesIS successfully recovers accurate thermal information while delivering visually satisfying results with state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we introduce the **InfraredSR** dataset, which comprises 39,833 images at a resolution of 512 $\times$ 512, hoping to advance research in this field.

Thermal-Physics Guided Infrared Image Super-Resolution with Dynamic High-Frequency Amplification

Camera-based multi-view 3D detection is crucial for autonomous driving. PETR and its variants (PETRs) excel in benchmarks but face deployment challenges due to high computational cost and memory footprint. Quantization is an effective technique for compressing deep neural networks by reducing the bit width of weights and activations. However, directly applying existing quantization methods to PETRs leads to severe accuracy degradation. This issue primarily arises from two key challenges: (1) significant magnitude disparity between multi-modal features—specifically, image features and camera-ray positional embeddings (PE), and (2) the inefficiency and approximation error of quantizing non-linear operators, which commonly rely on hardware-unfriendly computations. In this paper, we propose \textbf{FQ-PETR}, a fully quantized framework for PETRs, featuring three key innovations: (1) Quantization-Friendly LiDAR-ray Position Embedding (QFPE): Replacing multi-point sampling with LiDAR-prior-guided single-point sampling and anchor-based embedding eliminates problematic non-linearities (e.g., inverse-sigmoid) and aligns PE scale with image features, preserving accuracy. (2) Dual-Lookup Table (DULUT): This algorithm approximates complex non-linear functions using two cascaded linear LUTs, achieving high fidelity with minimal entries and no specialized hardware. (3) Quantization After Numerical Stabilization (QANS): Performing quantization after softmax numerical stabilization mitigates attention distortion from large inputs. On PETRs (e.g. PETR, StreamPETR, PETRv2, MV2d), FQ-PETR under W8A8 achieves near-floating-point accuracy ($<$ 1\% degradation) while reducing inference latency by up to 75\%, significantly outperforming existing PTQ and QAT baselines.

FQ-PETR: Fully Quantized Position Embedding Transformation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection

Deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on edge devices (e.g., smartphones and robots) is crucial for enabling low-latency and privacy-preserving intelligent applications. Given the resource constraints of these devices, quantization offers a promising solution by improving memory efficiency and reducing bandwidth requirements, thereby facilitating the deployment of VLMs. However, existing research has rarely explored aggressive quantization on VLMs, particularly for the models ranging from 1B to 2B parameters, which are more suitable for resource-constrained edge devices. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{SPEED-Q}$, a novel $\textbf{S}$taged $\textbf{P}$rocessing with $\textbf{E}$nhanc$\textbf{E}$d $\textbf{D}$istillation framework for VLM low-bit weight-only quantization that systematically addresses the following two critical obstacles: (1) significant discrepancies in quantization sensitivity between vision (ViT) and language (LLM) components in VLMs; (2) training instability arising from the reduced numerical precision inherent in low-bit quantization. In SPEED-Q, a staged sensitivity adaptive mechanism is introduced to effectively harmonize performance across different modalities. We further propose a distillation-enhanced quantization strategy to stabilize the training process and reduce data dependence. Together, SPEED-Q enables accurate, stable, and data-efficient quantization of complex VLMs. SPEED-Q is the first framework tailored for quantizing entire small-scale billion-parameter VLMs to low bits. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SPEED-Q achieves up to $\mathbf{6\times}$ $\textbf{higher accuracy}$ than existing quantization methods under 2-bit settings and consistently outperforms prior on-device VLMs under both 2-bit and 4-bit settings. Code and models will be released.

SPEED-Q: Staged Processing with Enhanced Distillation Towards Efficient Low-Bit On-Device VLM Quantization

This paper presents a novel generative framework for learning shared latent representations across multimodal data. Many advanced multimodal methods typically focus on modeling multimodal space in its entirety (i.e., capturing all combinations of modality-specific details across inputs), which can inadvertently obscure the high-level semantic concepts that are consistent across modalities. Notably, Multimodal VAEs with low-dimensional latent variables are designed to capture these semantic representations, enabling various tasks such as joint multimodal synthesis and flexible cross-modal inference. However, these multimodal VAEs often struggle to design expressive joint variational posteriors and suffer from low-quality synthesis. In this work, ShaLa addresses these challenges by integrating a novel architectural inference model and a second-stage expressive diffusion prior, which not only facilitates effective inference of shared latent representation but also significantly improves the quality of downstream multimodal synthesis. We validate ShaLa extensively across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating superior coherence and synthesis quality compared to state-of-the-art multimodal VAEs. Furthermore, ShaLa scales to highly challenging multi-view settings with many more modalities while prior multimodal VAEs have fallen short in capturing the increasing complexity of the shared latent space. To the best of our knowledge, ShaLa is the first framework to address multi-view multimodal generation using a shared latent variable generative model.

ShaLa: Multimodal Shared Latent Generative Modelling

Longitudinal analysis of sequential radiological images is hampered by a fundamental data challenge: how to effectively model a sequence of high-resolution images captured at irregular time intervals. This data structure contains indispensable spatial and temporal cues that current methods fail to fully exploit. Models often compromise by either collapsing spatial information into vectors or applying spatio-temporal models that are computationally inefficient and incompatible with non-uniform time steps. We address this challenge with Time-Aware $\Delta t$-Mamba3D, a novel state-space architecture adapted for longitudinal medical imaging. Our model simultaneously encodes irregular inter-visit intervals and rich spatio-temporal context while remaining computationally efficient. Its core innovation is a continuous-time selective scanning mechanism that explicitly integrates the true time difference between exams into its state transitions. This is complemented by a multi-scale 3D neighborhood fusion module that robustly captures spatio-temporal relationships. In a comprehensive breast cancer risk prediction benchmark using sequential screening mammogram exams, our model shows superior performance, improving the validation c-index by 2–5 percentage points and achieving higher 1–5 year AUC scores compared to established variants of recurrent, transformer, and state-space models. Thanks to its linear complexity, the model can efficiently process long and complex patient screening histories of mammograms, forming a new framework for longitudinal image analysis.

Δt-Mamba3D: A Time‑Aware Spatio‑Temporal State‑Space Model for Breast Cancer Risk Prediction

Point cloud completion is a fundamental task in 3D vision. A persistent challenge in this field is simultaneously preserving fine-grained details present in the input while ensuring the global structural integrity of the completed shape. While recent works leveraging local symmetry transformations via direct regression have significantly improved the preservation of geometric structure details, these methods suffer from two major limitations. 
(1) These regression-based methods are prone to overfitting which tend to memorize instant-specific transformations instead of learning a generalizable geometric prior. (2) Their reliance on point-wise transformation regression lead to high sensitivity to input noise, severely degrading their robustness and generalization.
To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{Simba}, a novel framework that reformulates point-wise transformation regression as a distribution learning problem. Our approach integrates symmetry priors with the powerful generative capabilities of diffusion models, avoiding instance-specific memorization while capturing robust geometric structures. 
Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical Mamba-based architecture to achieve high-fidelity upsampling. Extensive experiments across the PCN, ShapeNet, and KITTI benchmarks validate our method's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Simba: Towards High-Fidelity and Geometrically-Consistent Point Cloud Completion via Transformation Diffusion

Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external supervision. Surprisingly, some studies even suggest that random or incorrect reward signals can enhance performance. However, these breakthroughs are predominantly observed for the mathematically strong Qwen2.5 series on benchmarks such as MATH-500, AMC, and AIME, and seldom transfer to models like Llama, which warrants a more in-depth investigation. In this work, our empirical analysis reveals that pre-training on massive web-scale corpora leaves Qwen2.5 susceptible to data contamination in widely used benchmarks. Consequently, conclusions derived from contaminated benchmarks on Qwen2.5 series may be unreliable. To obtain trustworthy evaluation results, we introduce a generator that creates fully clean arithmetic problems of arbitrary length and difficulty, dubbed RandomCalculation. Using this leakage-free dataset, we show that only accurate reward signals yield steady improvements that surpass the base model’s performance boundary in mathematical reasoning, whereas random or incorrect rewards do not. Moreover, we conduct more fine-grained analyses to elucidate the factors underlying the different performance observed on the MATH-500 and RandomCalculation benchmarks. Consequently, we recommend that future studies evaluate models on uncontaminated benchmarks and, when feasible, test various model series to ensure trustworthy conclusions about RL and related methods.

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