Singapore

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown that it is promising to utilize Process Reward Models (PRMs) as verifiers to enhance the performance of LLMs. However, current PRMs face three key challenges: (1) limited process supervision and generalization capabilities, (2) dependence on scalar value prediction without leveraging the generative abilities of LLMs, and (3) inability to scale the test-time compute of PRMs. In this work, we introduce GenPRM, a generative process reward model that performs explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with code verification before providing judgment for each reasoning step. To obtain high-quality process supervision labels and rationale data, we propose Relative Progress Estimation (RPE) and a rationale synthesis framework that incorporates code verification. Experimental results on ProcessBench and several mathematical reasoning tasks show that GenPRM significantly outperforms prior PRMs with only \textbf{23K} training data from \textbf{MATH} dataset. Through test-time scaling, a \textbf{1.5B} GenPRM outperforms \textbf{GPT-4o}, and a \textbf{7B} GenPRM surpasses \textbf{Qwen2.5-Math-PRM-72B} on ProcessBench. Additionally, GenPRM demonstrates strong abilities to serve as a critic model for policy model refinement. This work establishes a new paradigm for process supervision that bridges the gap between PRMs and critic models in LLMs.

AAAI 2026

GenPRM: Scaling Test-Time Compute of Process Reward Models via Generative Reasoning

nlp: (large) language models

mas: mechanism design

nlp: generation

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

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with hour-level video understanding, facing significant challenges not only in modeling the substantial information volume of long videos but also in overcoming the memory wall and resource constraints during both training and inference. Although recent training-free approaches have alleviated resource demands by compressing visual features, their reliance on incomplete visual information limits the performance potential. To address these limitations, we propose Adaptive Pivot Visual information Retrieval (APVR), a training-free framework that hierarchically retrieves and retains sufficient and important visual information. It breakthroughs the memory wall limitation via two complementary components: Pivot Frame Retrieval employs query expansion and iterative spatio-semantic confidence scoring to identify relevant video frames, and Pivot Token Retrieval performs query-aware attention-driven token selection within up to 1024 pivot frames. This dual granularity approach enables the processing of hour-long videos while maintaining semantic fidelity. Experimental validations on three different baseline MLLMs demonstrate significant performance improvements up to 9.5\%, 4.6\% and 9.7\% on LongVideoBench, VideoMME and MLVU, respectively. APVR achieves state-of-the-art results for both training-free and training-based approaches. Code is available on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/APVR-F2C2.

APVR: Hour-Level Long Video Understanding with Adaptive Pivot Visual Information Retrieval

Coupon distribution is a critical marketing strategy used by online platforms to boost revenue and enhance user engagement. Regrettably, existing coupon distribution strategies fall far short of effectively leveraging the complex sequential interactions between platforms and users. This critical oversight, despite the abundance of e-commerce log data, has precipitated a performance plateau. In this paper, we focus on the scene that the platforms make sequential coupon distribution decision multiple times for various users, with each user interacting with the platform repeatedly. Based on this marketing scenario, we propose a novel marketing framework, named \textbf{S}equence-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{C}onstrained \textbf{O}ptimization (SACO) framework, to directly devise coupon distribution policy for long-term revenue boosting. SACO framework enables optimized online decision-making in a variety of real-world marketing scenarios. It achieves this by seamlessly integrating three key characteristics, general scenarios, sequential modeling with more comprehensive historical data, and efficient iterative updates within a unified framework. Furthermore, empirical results on real-world industrial dataset, alongside public and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework.

SACO: Sequence-Aware Constrained Optimization Framework for Coupon Distribution in E-commerce

High-quality material synthesis is essential for replicating complex surface properties to create realistic scenes. Despite advances in the generation of material appearance based on analytic models, the synthesis of real-world measured BRDFs remains largely unexplored. To address this challenge, we propose M^3ashy, a novel multi-modal material synthesis framework based on hyperdiffusion. M^3ashy enables high-quality reconstruction of complex real-world materials by leveraging neural fields as a compact continuous representation of BRDFs. Furthermore, our multi-modal conditional hyperdiffusion model allows for flexible material synthesis conditioned on material type, natural language descriptions, or reference images, providing greater user control over material generation. To support future research, we contribute two new material datasets and introduce two BRDF distributional metrics for more rigorous evaluation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of M^3ashy through extensive experiments, including a novel statistics-based constrained synthesis, which enables the generation of materials of desired categories.

M3ashy: Multi-Modal Material Synthesis via Hyperdiffusion

For long-tailed recognition (LTR) tasks, high intra-class compactness and inter-class separability in both head and tail classes, as well as balanced separability among all the classifier vectors, are preferred. The existing LTR methods based on cross-entropy (CE) loss not only struggle to learn features with desirable properties but also couple imbalanced classifier vectors in the denominator of its Softmax, amplifying the imbalance effects in LTR. In this paper, for the LTR, we propose a binary cross-entropy (BCE)-based tripartite synergistic learning, termed BCE3S, which consists of three components: (1) BCE-based joint learning optimizes both the classifier and sample features, which achieves better compactness and separability among features than the CE-based joint learning, by decoupling the metrics between feature and the imbalanced classifier vectors in multiple Sigmoid; (2) BCE-based contrastive learning further improves the intra-class compactness of features; (3) BCE-based uniform learning balances the separability among classifier vectors and interactively enhances the feature properties by combining with the joint learning. The extensive experiments show that the LTR model trained by BCE3S not only achieves higher compactness and separability among sample features, but also balances the classifier's separability, achieving SOTA performance on various long-tailed datasets such as CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist2018.

BCE3S: Binary Cross-Entropy Based Tripartite Synergistic Learning for Long-Tailed Recognition

The proliferation of sophisticated deepfakes poses significant threats to information integrity.​​ While DINOv2 shows promise for detection, existing fine-tuning approaches treat it as generic binary classification, ​​overlooking distinct artifacts inherent to different deepfake methods.​​ To address this, ​​we propose a DeepFake Fine-Grained Adapter (DFF-Adapter) for DINOv2.​​ Our method incorporates ​​lightweight multi-head LoRA modules​​ into ​​every transformer block​​, enabling efficient backbone adaptation. ​​DFF-Adapter simultaneously addresses authenticity detection and fine-grained manipulation type classification,​​ ​​where classifying forgery methods enhances artifact sensitivity.​​ We introduce ​​a shared branch propagating fine-grained manipulation cues to the authenticity head.​​ ​​This enables multi-task cooperative optimization,​​ explicitly enhancing authenticity discrimination with manipulation-specific knowledge. Utilizing ​​only 3.5M trainable parameters​​, our parameter-efficient approach achieves detection accuracy comparable to or even surpassing that of current complex state-of-the-art methods.

Fine-Grained DINO Tuning with Dual Supervision for Face Forgery Detection

We focus on the automatic evaluation of image captions in both reference-based and reference-free settings. Existing metrics based on large language models (LLMs) favor their own generations; therefore, the neutrality is in question. Most LLM-free metrics do not suffer from such an issue, whereas they do not always demonstrate high performance. To address these issues, we propose Pearl, an LLM-free supervised metric for image captioning, which is applicable to both reference-based and reference-free settings. We introduce a novel mechanism that learns the representations of image--caption and caption--caption similarities. 
Furthermore, we construct a human-annotated dataset for image captioning metrics that comprises approximately 333k human judgments collected from 2,360 annotators across over 75k images. 
Pearl outperformed other existing LLM-free metrics on the Composite, Flickr8K-Expert, Flickr8K-CF, Nebula, and FOIL datasets in both reference-based and reference-free settings.

LLM-Free Image Captioning Evaluation in Reference-Flexible Settings

Fair clustering is crucial for mitigating bias in unsupervised learning, yet existing algorithms often suffer from quadratic or super-quadratic computational complexity, rendering them impractical for large-scale datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Anchor-based Fair Clustering Framework (AFCF), a novel, general, and plug-and-play framework that empowers arbitrary fair clustering algorithms with linear-time scalability. Our approach first selects a small but representative set of anchors using a novel fair sampling strategy. Then, any off-the-shelf fair clustering algorithm can be applied to this small anchor set. The core of our framework lies in a novel anchor graph construction module, where we formulate an optimization problem to propagate labels while preserving fairness. This is achieved through a carefully designed group-label joint constraint, which we prove theoretically ensures that the fairness of the final clustering on the entire dataset matches that of the anchor clustering. We solve this optimization efficiently using an ADMM-based algorithm. Extensive experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that AFCF drastically accelerates state-of-the-art methods, which reduces computational time by orders of magnitude while maintaining strong clustering performance and fairness guarantees.

A General Anchor-Based Framework for Scalable Fair Clustering

Despite recent advancements in font generation, practitioners still grapple with a laborious trial-and-error workflow. To streamline this, we propose OneFont, an end-to-end framework that interprets user intents via free-form dialogue, seamlessly integrating both glyph synthesis and refinement modules. We introduce the Font with Thought (FwT) paradigm, reframing font design as a reasoning task where the model plans actions and articulates design rationales. OneFont’s core planner is trained via a two-stage regimen to master this paradigm. First, we instill reasoning abilities via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a new, comprehensive benchmark of 1,500 font families we built. Second, we refine the model's policy with a novel reinforcement learning algorithm, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), guided by a hybrid reward that assesses visual fidelity, rationale coherence, and transformation correctness.
Extensive experiments show OneFont significantly surpasses existing methods in design quality and stroke precision across diverse scripts, validated on our new benchmark. We will release our dataset, code, and models.

OneFont: A Unified Agent for End-to-End Font Creation

Open-domain visual entity recognition aims to identify and link entities depicted in images to a vast and evolving set of real-world concepts, such as those found in Wikidata. Unlike conventional classification tasks with fixed label sets, it operates under open-set conditions, where most target entities are unseen during training and exhibit long-tail distributions. 
This makes the task inherently challenging due to limited supervision, high visual ambiguity, and the need for semantic disambiguation. In this work, we propose a **Know**ledge-guided **Co**ntrastive **L**earning (KnowCoL) framework that combines both images and text descriptions into a shared semantic space grounded by structured information from Wikidata. 
By abstracting visual and textual inputs to a conceptual level, the model leverages entity descriptions, type hierarchies, and relational context to support zero-shot entity recognition.
We evaluate our approach on the OVEN benchmark, a large-scale open-domain visual recognition dataset with Wikidata IDs as the label space. Our experiments show that using visual, textual, and structured knowledge greatly improves accuracy, especially for rare and unseen entities. 
Our smallest model improves the accuracy on unseen entities by 10.5% compared to the state-of-the-art, despite being 35$\times$ smaller.

Seeing and Knowing in the Wild: Open-domain Visual Entity Recognition with Large-scale Knowledge Graphs via Contrastive Learning

Despite the impressive performance of large multimodal models (LMMs) in high-level visual tasks, their capacity for image quality assessment (IQA) remains limited. One main reason is that LMMs are primarily trained for high-level tasks (e.g., image captioning), emphasizing unified image semantics extraction under varied quality. Such semantic-aware yet quality-insensitive perception bias inevitably leads to a heavy reliance on image semantics when those LMMs are forced for quality rating. In this paper, instead of retraining or tuning an LMM costly, we propose a training-free debiasing framework, in which the image quality prediction is rectified by mitigating the bias caused by image semantics. Specifically, we first explore several semantic-preserving distortions that can significantly degrade image quality while maintaining identifiable semantics. By applying these specific distortions to the query/test images, we ensure that the degraded images are recognized as poor quality while their semantics remain. During quality inference, both a query image and its corresponding degraded version are fed to the LMM along with a prompt indicating that the query image quality should be inferred under the condition that the degraded one is deemed poor quality. This prior condition effectively aligns the LMM’s quality perception, as all degraded images are consistently rated as poor quality, regardless of their semantic difference. Finally, the quality scores of the query image inferred under different prior conditions (degraded versions) are aggregated using a conditional probability model. Extensive experiments on various IQA datasets show that our debiasing framework could consistently enhance the LMM performance and the code will be publicly available.

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APVR: Hour-Level Long Video Understanding with Adaptive Pivot Visual Information Retrieval

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