Singapore

The rise of Vision Transformers (ViTs) as cornerstone models in safety-critical applications like autonomous driving and medical diagnosis has shifted the focus from pure accuracy to verifiable trustworthiness. However, the very mechanisms used to explain these models, their internal attention maps, are themselves vulnerable. This creates a critical &quot;trust gap,&quot; as the model&#39;s apparent reasoning can be maliciously manipulated. To systematically investigate this vulnerability, we introduce A-SAGE (Attention-based Steering Adversarial Generation by Corrupting Explanations), a dual-objective attack framework that forces a model to misclassify an input while simultaneously corrupting its internal attention patterns to generate a misleading explanation. A-SAGE achieves this by optimizing a unified loss that combines a standard classification objective with two explanation-specific terms: an attention entropy loss to diffuse the model&#39;s focus and an \textit{attention map distortion loss} to steer the corrupted explanation towards a desired target. Our primary finding is A-SAGE&#39;s exceptional black-box transferability. Using a CaiT-S as a white-box surrogate, adversarial examples generated with imperceptible perturbations ($L_{\infty}\leq16/255$) achieve attack success rates of 79.4\% on ViT-B, 49.7\% on ResNet-50, and over 81.5\% on other transformers (DeiT-B,TNT-S). Crucially, these successful attacks do not merely destroy the explanation; they generate a coherent but false attention map that deceptively &quot;justifies&quot; the wrong prediction. These results reveal a systemic vulnerability in the core reasoning of modern foundation models, establishing A-SAGE as a critical benchmark for auditing the robustness of AI explainability.

AAAI 2026

Manipulating the Mind’s Eye: A-SAGE, the Attention-Based Attack on ViT Explainability

and transparency

cv: interpretability

hai: explainable ai (xai) for human understanding

explainability

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

The rise of Vision Transformers (ViTs) as cornerstone models in safety-critical applications like autonomous driving and medical diagnosis has shifted the focus from pure accuracy to verifiable trustworthiness. However, the very mechanisms used to explain these models, their internal attention maps, are themselves vulnerable. This creates a critical "trust gap," as the model's apparent reasoning can be maliciously manipulated. To systematically investigate this vulnerability, we introduce A-SAGE (Attention-based Steering Adversarial Generation by Corrupting Explanations), a dual-objective attack framework that forces a model to misclassify an input while simultaneously corrupting its internal attention patterns to generate a misleading explanation. A-SAGE achieves this by optimizing a unified loss that combines a standard classification objective with two explanation-specific terms: an attention entropy loss to diffuse the model's focus and an \textit{attention map distortion loss} to steer the corrupted explanation towards a desired target. Our primary finding is A-SAGE's exceptional black-box transferability. Using a CaiT-S as a white-box surrogate, adversarial examples generated with imperceptible perturbations ($L_{\infty}\leq16/255$) achieve attack success rates of 79.4\% on ViT-B, 49.7\% on ResNet-50, and over 81.5\% on other transformers (DeiT-B,TNT-S). Crucially, these successful attacks do not merely destroy the explanation; they generate a coherent but false attention map that deceptively "justifies" the wrong prediction. These results reveal a systemic vulnerability in the core reasoning of modern foundation models, establishing A-SAGE as a critical benchmark for auditing the robustness of AI explainability.

poster

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.

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**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

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.

Federated recommendations (FRs), facilitating multiple local clients to collectively learn a global model without disclosing user private data, have emerged as a prevalent on-device service. In conventional FRs, a dominant paradigm is to utilize discrete identities to represent clients and items, which are then mapped to domain-specific embeddings to participate in model training. Despite considerable performance, we reveal three inherent limitations that can not be ignored in federated settings, i.e., non-transferability across domains, ineffectiveness in cold-start settings, and potential privacy violations during federated training. To this end, we propose a transferable federated recommendation model, TransFR, which delicately incorporates the general capabilities empowered by pre-trained models and the personalized abilities by fine-tuning local private data. Specifically, it first learns domain-agnostic representations of items by exploiting pre-trained models with public textual corpora. To tailor for FR tasks, we further introduce efficient federated adapter-tuning and test-time adaptation mechanisms, which facilitate personalized local adapters for each client by fitting their private data distributions. We theoretically prove the advantages of incorporating adapter tuning in FRs regarding both effectiveness and privacy. Through extensive experiments, we show that our TransFR model surpasses several state-of-the-art FRs on transferability. Our source code is available at attached Supplementary Material.

TransFR: Transferable Federated Recommendation with Adapter Tuning on Pre-trained Language Models

Leveraging intrinsic data priors is critical for effective data recovery. However, existing approaches often struggle to simultaneously achieve theoretical guarantees, strong performance, and computational efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a novel \emph{Representative Coefficient Correlated Total Variation} (RCCTV) regularizer that captures the recently observed low-rank and local smoothness properties of the representative coefficient tensor derived from a low-rank decomposition. RCCTV offers three key advantages: (1) it operates on a compact representative coefficient image significantly smaller than the original data, enabling highly efficient optimization; (2) it jointly enforces low-rankness and spatial smoothness through a single regularizer, eliminating the need for trade-off parameters; and (3) when integrated into a robust PCA framework (RCCTV-RPCA), it admits provable exact recovery under mild conditions. To solve the resulting model, we develop an efficient ADMM-based algorithm accelerated via fast Fourier transform. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that RCCTV-RPCA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with significantly reduced runtime.

Fast Guaranteed Robust Local-Smooth Principal Component Separation

Text-driven human motion generation has recently attracted considerable attention, allowing models to generate human motions based on textual descriptions. However, current methods neglect the influence of human attributes—such as age, gender, weight, and height—which are key factors shaping human motion patterns. This work represents a pilot exploration for bridging this gap. We conceptualize each motion as comprising both attribute information and action semantics, where textual descriptions align exclusively with action semantics. To achieve this, a new framework inspired by Structural Causal Models is proposed to decouple action semantics from human attributes, enabling text-to-semantics prediction and attribute-controlled generation. The resulting model is capable of generating attribute-aware motion aligned with the user's text and attribute inputs. For evaluation, we introduce a comprehensive dataset containing attribute annotations for text-motion pairs, setting the first benchmark for attribute-aware motion generation. Extensive experiments validate our model's effectiveness.

Generating Attribute-Aware Human Motions from Textual Prompt

Text-to-MIDI generation offers editable and hierarchical control over symbolic music generation. Previous approaches either convert text into a limited set of musical attributes and generate music based on these attributes, which limits semantic controllability, or use end-to-end models that map text directly to music without deeply aligning the features of both modalities, often resulting in a lack of structural coherence and mismatches in key, meter, and tempo. We propose MIDILM, which addresses these limitations by employing text conditioning with a dual-path decoder that processes textual and musical information through separate feedforward paths following a shared masked self-attention mechanism. On the MidiCaps benchmark, MIDILM outperformed the strongest baseline, with relative improvements ranging from 6.07\% on CLAP to 144.77\% on TB across semantic alignment and structural metrics. These gains confirm its ability to enhance both semantic controllability and structural coherence. Collectively, we expect that MIDILM will serve as a useful reference framework for future investigations into controllable and structurally faithful cross-modal music generation.

MIDILM: A Dual-Path Model for Controllable Text-to-MIDI Generation

Textile pattern generation (TPG) aims to synthesize fine-grained textile pattern images based on given clothing images. Although previous studies have not explicitly investigated TPG, existing image-to-image models appear to be natural candidates for this task. However, when applied directly, these methods often produce unfaithful results, failing to preserve fine-grained details due to feature confusion between complex textile patterns and the inherent non-rigid texture distortions in clothing images. In this paper, we propose the first method, SLDDM-TPG, for faithful and high-fidelity TPG. Our method consists of two stages: (1) a latent disentangled network (LDN) that resolves feature confusion in clothing representations and constructs a multi-dimensional, independent clothing feature space; and (2) a semi-supervised latent diffusion model (S-LDM), which receives guidance signals from LDN and generates faithful results through semi-supervised diffusion training, combined with our designed fine-grained alignment strategy. Extensive evaluations show that SLDDM-TPG reduces FID by $4.1$ and improves SSIM by up to $0.116$ on our CTP-HD dataset, and also demonstrate good generalization on the VITON-HD dataset. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SLDDM.

Semi-supervised Latent Disentangled Diffusion Model for Textile Pattern Generation

Video prediction is plagued by a fundamental trilemma: achieving high-resolution and perceptual quality typically comes at the cost of real-time speed, hindering its use in latency-critical applications. This challenge is most acute for autonomous UAVs in dense urban environments, where foreseeing events from high-resolution imagery is non-negotiable for safety. Existing methods, reliant on iterative generation (diffusion, autoregressive models) or quadratic-complexity attention, fail to meet these stringent demands on edge hardware. To break this long-standing trade-off, we introduce RAPTOR, a video prediction architecture that achieves real-time, high-resolution performance. RAPTOR’s single-pass design avoids the error accumulation and latency of iterative approaches. Its core innovation is Efficient Video Attention (EVA), a novel translator module that factorizes spatiotemporal modeling. Instead of processing flattened spacetime tokens with O((ST)^2) or O(ST) complexity, EVA alternates operations along the spatial (S) and temporal (T) axes. This factorization reduces the time complexity to O(S + T) and memory complexity to O(max(S, T)), enabling global context modeling at 512^2 resolution and beyond, operating directly on dense feature maps with a \textbf{patch-free} design. Complementing this architecture is a 3-stage training curriculum that progressively refines predictions from coarse structure to sharp, temporally coherent details. Experiments show RAPTOR is the first predictor to exceed 30 FPS on a Jetson AGX Orin for 512^2 video, setting a new state-of-the-art on UAVid, KTH, and a custom high-resolution dataset in PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. Critically, RAPTOR boosts the mission success rate in a real-world UAV navigation task by 18\%, paving the way for safer and more anticipatory embodied agents.

RAPTOR: Real-Time High-Resolution UAV Video Prediction with Efficient Video Attention

Orthognathic surgery is a crucial intervention for correcting dentofacial skeletal deformities to enhance occlusal functionality and facial aesthetics. Accurate postoperative facial appearance prediction remains challenging due to the complex nonlinear interactions between skeletal movements and facial soft tissue. Existing biomechanical, parametric models and deep-learning approaches either lack computational efficiency or fail to fully capture these intricate interactions. 
To address these limitations, we propose Neural Implicit Craniofacial Model (NICE) which employs implicit neural representations for accurate anatomical reconstruction and surgical outcome prediction. NICE comprises a shape module, which employs region-specific implicit Signed Distance Function (SDF) decoders to reconstruct the facial surface, maxilla, and mandible, and a surgery module, which employs region-specific deformation decoders. These deformation decoders are driven by a shared surgical latent code to effectively model the complex, nonlinear biomechanical response of the facial surface to skeletal movements, incorporating anatomical prior knowledge. The deformation decoders output point-wise displacement fields, enabling precise modeling of surgical outcomes.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that NICE outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, notably improving prediction accuracy in critical facial regions such as lips and chin, while robustly preserving anatomical integrity. This work provides a clinically viable tool for enhanced surgical planning and patient consultation in orthognathic procedures.

NICE: Neural Implicit Craniofacial Model for Orthognathic Surgery Prediction

Graph generation plays a pivotal role across numerous domains, including molecular design and knowledge graph construction. Although existing methods achieve considerable success in generating realistic graphs, their interpretability remains limited, often obscuring the rationale behind structural decisions. To address this challenge, we propose the Neural Graph Topic Model (NGTM), a novel generative framework inspired by topic modeling in natural language processing. NGTM represents graphs as mixtures of latent topics, each defining a distribution over semantically meaningful substructures, which facilitates explicit interpretability at both local and global scales. The generation process transparently integrates these topic distributions with a global structural variable, enabling clear semantic tracing of each generated graph. Experiments demonstrate that NGTM achieves competitive generation quality while uniquely enabling fine-grained control and interpretability, allowing users to tune structural features or induce biological properties through topic-level adjustments.

NGTM: Substructure-based Neural Graph Topic Model for Interpretable Graph Generation

Spatial understanding is a critical capability for LVLMs (Large Vision-Language Models) to advance embodied AI applications. Existing works primarily focus on enhancing spatial understanding within a single frame, i.e., injecting 3D spatial concepts into LVLMs under single coordinate system. However, such improvements struggle in real-world tasks that require consistent cross-view spatial reasoning. In this paper, we propose \textbf{CVVG-Reasoner}(\textbf{C}ross-\textbf{V}iew \textbf{V}isual \textbf{G}eometries) that lifts single-frame spatial comprehension to unified cross-view spatial understanding by mimicking \textit{\textbf{human-like cross-view reasoning mechanisms}}. First, we introduce \textbf{MV3DSR}(\textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{V}iew \textbf{3D} \textbf{S}patial \textbf{R}easoning), a scalable pipeline for cross-view spatial reasoning data generation, and construct MV3DSR-Dataset, a large-scale dataset with diverse 3D cross-view reasoning tasks. Based on MV3DSR, we propose MV3DSR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating cross-view spatial reasoning capabilities. Second, we design a three-stage training strategy: the first two stages progressively equip the model with (1) fundamental spatial knowledge and (2) human-like cross-view reasoning patterns, while the final stage employs reinforcement learning to further boost its performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our \textbf{CVVG-Reasoner} significantly outperforms existing 3D LLMs(Large Language Models) and advanced LVLMs in cross-view tasks while maintaining robust performance on out-of-domain data. Ablation studies further reveal that injecting human-like reasoning patterns yields a remarkable 44\% performance gain, validating the effectiveness of our design.

Aligning Cross-View Visual Geometries in LVLMs Through Human-Like Reasoning Learning

Visual effects (VFX) are essential visual enhancements fundamental to modern cinematic production. Although video generation models offer cost-efficient solutions for VFX production, current methods are constrained by per-effect LoRA training, which limits generation to single effects. This fundamental limitation impedes applications that require spatially controllable composite effects, i.e., the concurrent generation of multiple effects at designated locations. However, integrating diverse effects into a unified framework faces major challenges: interference from effect variations and spatial uncontrollability during multi-VFX joint training. To tackle these challenges, we propose *Omni-Effects*, a first unified framework capable of generating prompt-guided effects and spatially controllable composite effects. The core of our framework comprises two key innovations: (1) **LoRA-based Mixture of Experts (LoRA-MoE)**, which employs a group of expert LoRAs, integrating diverse effects within a unified model while effectively mitigating cross-task interference. (2) **Spatial-Aware Prompt (SAP)** incorporates spatial mask information into the text token, enabling precise spatial control. Furthermore, we introduce an Independent-Information Flow (IIF) module integrated within the SAP, isolating the control signals corresponding to individual effects to prevent any unwanted blending. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive VFX dataset *Omni-VFX* via a novel data collection pipeline combining image editing and First-Last Frame-to-Video (FLF2V) synthesis, and introduce a dedicated VFX evaluation framework for validating model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that *Omni-Effects* achieves precise spatial control and diverse effect generation, enabling users to specify both the category and location of desired effects. Our code will be released.

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