Singapore

Asynchronous distributed learning is crucial for training large-scale deep models, especially when the computing capabilities of the workers in the cluster are heterogeneous. 
To reduce communication frequency, local updates are widely adopted in distributed learning. Meanwhile, momentum SGD (MSGD) serves as a foundational optimizer due to momentum&#39;s key role in accelerating convergence and enhancing generalization. However, how to implement asynchronous distributed MSGD with local updates remains unexplored.
To solve this problem, we propose a novel method, called \underline{or}dered \underline{lo}cal \underline{mo}mentum (OrLoMo), for asynchronous distributed learning. 
In OrLoMo, each worker runs MSGD locally. Then the local momentum from each worker will be aggregated by the server in order based on its global iteration index. To the best of our knowledge, OrLoMo is the first method to implement asynchronous distributed MSGD with local updates. We prove the convergence of OrLoMo for non-convex problems under arbitrary delays. Experiments validate that OrLoMo can outperform its synchronous counterpart and other asynchronous methods.

AAAI 2026

Ordered Local Momentum for Asynchronous Distributed Learning Under Arbitrary Delays

ml: optimization ml: distributed machine learning & federated learning ml: learning theory

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

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.

Asynchronous distributed learning is crucial for training large-scale deep models, especially when the computing capabilities of the workers in the cluster are heterogeneous. 
To reduce communication frequency, local updates are widely adopted in distributed learning. Meanwhile, momentum SGD (MSGD) serves as a foundational optimizer due to momentum's key role in accelerating convergence and enhancing generalization. However, how to implement asynchronous distributed MSGD with local updates remains unexplored.
To solve this problem, we propose a novel method, called \underline{or}dered \underline{lo}cal \underline{mo}mentum (OrLoMo), for asynchronous distributed learning. 
In OrLoMo, each worker runs MSGD locally. Then the local momentum from each worker will be aggregated by the server in order based on its global iteration index. To the best of our knowledge, OrLoMo is the first method to implement asynchronous distributed MSGD with local updates. We prove the convergence of OrLoMo for non-convex problems under arbitrary delays. Experiments validate that OrLoMo can outperform its synchronous counterpart and other asynchronous methods.

poster

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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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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.

Auto-regressive (AR)-based decoders, owing to their flexibility in handling variable-length outputs and their strong capability in modeling character-level dependencies, have emerged as the predominant decoding paradigm in the field of scene text recognition (STR). However, AR-based decoders suffer from attention drift, slow decoding speed, and difficulty capturing global dependencies, restricting their performance in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for AR-based decoding, called One-Token to Sequence (One2Seq), to address the above issues. Unlike existing methods, we encode the semantic features into a single context token and design a One-Token Wise Decoder to perform the decoding, which alleviates the attention drift caused by the accumulation of semantic information. Moreover, we proposed Positioal-aware Hash Embedding to embed the decoded characters, ensuring the order information is obtained in the context token. By continuously updating this token, One2Seq fully leverages the decoded semantic information while avoiding the computational overhead associated with the growing query sequence. Furthermore, to leverage global information for decoding, we propose Dynamic Global Infusion to dynamically integrates global visual features into the context token. Equipped with the enriched context token, the model has an enhanced ability to extract discriminative local features under the guidance of global context, thereby enhancing recognition accuracy. Extensive experiments reveal that, with its ingenious design, One2Seq exhibits marked superiority on both accuracy and decoding speed compared to existing STR models.

One2Seq: One-Token Wise Decoder for Efficient Scene Text Recognition

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in addressing open-world segmentation tasks. However, the substantial computational cost of the LLM components presents a significant challenge, especially in segmentation tasks, where efficiency has long been a central concern. Existing efficient MLLM approaches typically reduce computation cost by pruning visual tokens in the early layers, as they account for the majority of the input sequence. Despite their efficiency, this is incompatible with dense prediction tasks such as segmentation, since removing visual tokens leads to the loss of essential object parts and spatial details. To better understand the roles of visual tokens in segmentation, we analyze the attention weights of both image and mask tokens within LLM. We find that image tokens are important throughout all layers, whereas mask tokens only attend to image tokens at deeper layers. Based on the observation, we build an efficient segmentation framework based on MLLMs by introducing a sophisticated token routing strategy. This strategy dynamically determines when and how different tokens participate in computation: For mask tokens, they are only inserted at deeper layers of the LLM to reduce redundant computation, since they rarely attend to image tokens in early layers; For image tokens, only a small number of them, named proxies, are updated via full feedforward network (FFN) computation, while the update of the remaining tokens is guided by these proxies, i.e., efficiently computed through a lightweight projector applied on the difference of the proxies during their update. Our method achieves a 1.5$\times$ acceleration over the original LLM process by reducing its FLOPs to 56\%, while maintaining the same segmentation performance.

Efficient Segmentation with Multimodal Large Language Model via Token Routing

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) faces significant challenges due to the dual issues of domain shift and limited labeled samples. One major challenge is style bias, caused by limited support samples that fail to represent the target domain’s style diversity. Another is feature confusion, which stems from distribution shifts and limited supervision, manifesting as both object-background ambiguity and object-object confusion. To address these challenges, we propose Style-Augmented Prototype Learning (StyleProto), which constructs style-aware prototypes from support samples with diverse visual styles, and refines them via spatial weighting and discriminative fusion. Specifically, our StyleProto consists of three components: (1) Style Generation Augmentation (SGA); (2) Semantic-Focused Prototype Construction (SPC); (3) Hierarchical Prototype Fusion Aggregator (HPFA). SGA synthesizes style-diverse yet semantically consistent training samples by recombining style statistics from the support set, thus improving robustness to unseen styles. SPC aggregates support features using spatial attention to highlight object semantics and suppress background noise, yielding cleaner and more distinctive class prototypes. HPFA leverages query-guided attention to integrate discriminative support features, enhancing prototype representations with richer class-specific details. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that StyleProto consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is included in the \textit{supplementary material}.

StyleProto: Style-Augmented Prototype Learning for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations traditionally require extensive computational resources, limiting their utility in many scientific and engineering applications at scale. We introduce Physically-Informed Flow Matching Graph Networks (PIFM-GN), a novel generative framework that directly samples fluid states under specified physical conditions without requiring expensive time-stepping simulations. The key innovation of our approach is the incorporation of incompressibility constraints directly into the flow matching transport process by parameterizing velocity fields through vector potentials, with graph-based curl operators ensuring divergence-free predictions without requiring global pressure-Poisson solves. Experiments on diverse fluid dynamics problems -- ranging from two-dimensional surface pressure distributions and complete flow fields, to complex three-dimensional airflow fields -- demonstrate that PIFM-GN generates high-fidelity samples with significantly fewer sampling steps than diffusion-based alternatives. Most notably, our model maintains competitive performance even with a single sampling step, a regime where diffusion models completely fail. Our generated samples accurately reproduce the statistical characteristics of target flows, successfully capturing multi-modal pressure distributions across various flow conditions, while achieving significant computational speedups compared to diffusion-based methods. PIFM-GN thus enables efficient generation of fluid states for downstream analysis and design tasks in scientific and engineering applications. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/pifm-gn-F75F/.

Physically-Informed Flow Matching with Graph Neural Networks for Complex Fluid Dynamics

Since next-scale prediction was introduced as a new paradigm for autoregressive image generation, it has attracted extensive research interest. By progressively increasing resolution in a draft-to-refinement process, next-scale prediction demonstrates great potential in both generation quality and efficiency.However, at high resolutions, this paradigm faces a fundamental challenge: token sequences grow quadratically and accumulate across multiple scales, resulting in a key performance bottleneck. Our systematic study uncovers two critical observations: (1) most image regions have stabilized during early drafting stages, making later refinement across the full-scale image token-inefficient; (2) different scales inherently trade off efficiency and fidelity, suggesting that adaptive token dispatch on different scales can focus resources where they yield the greatest quality gains. Motivated by these insights, we propose a training-free \textbf{M}ixture \textbf{o}f \textbf{S}cale\textbf{s} (\textbf{MoSs}) method for efficient high-resolution autoregressive image generation. MoSs breaks the strict causal dependency across scales in the final refinement steps by parallelizing scales of different resolutions, each responsible for a subset of spatial regions. A lightweight frequency-based token dispatcher, analyzes the drafted image and assigns regions to the appropriate scale. The outputs are then composited over the draft to produce the final high-resolution image. The scale-mixture method exhibits remarkable efficiency with little impact on generation quality on various models. For instance, our implementaion achieves \textbf{2.05-4.96$\times$ speedup} on transformer backbone, up to \textbf{85.62\% KV cache reduction}, incurring only \textbf{0.1-2.4\%} loss on GenEval\citep{ghosh2023geneval} quality, based on state-of-the-art Infinity\citep{han2024infinity} model.

MoSs: Mixture of Scales for Efficient High-Resolution Autoregressive Image Generation

Vision-Language Continual Learning (VLCL) has attracted significant research attention for its robust capabilities, and the adoption of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies is enabling these models to achieve competitive performance with substantially reduced resource consumption. However, dominated First-Order (FO) optimization is prone to trap models in suboptimal local minima, especially in limited exploration subspace within PEFT. To overcome this challenge, this paper pioneers a systematic exploration of adopting Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization for PEFT-based VLCL. We first identify the incompatibility of naive full-ZO adoption in VLCL due to optimization process instability. We then investigate the application of ZO optimization from a modality branch-wise to a fine-grained layer-wise across various training units to identify an optimal strategy. Besides, a key theoretical insight reveals that vision modality exhibit higher variance than language counterparts in VLCL during the ZO optimization process, and we propose a modality-aware stabilized ZO strategy, which adopts gradient sign normalization in ZO and constrains vision modality perturbation to further improve performance. Benefiting from the adoption of ZO optimization, PEFT-based VLCL fulfills better ability to escape local minima during the optimization process, extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results. Code will be available upon publication.

Branch, or Layer? Zeroth-Order Optimization for Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models

Understanding brain function represents a fundamental goal in neuroscience, with critical implications for therapeutic interventions and neural engineering applications. Computational modeling provides a quantitative framework for accelerating this understanding, but faces a fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency and high-fidelity modeling. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel Energy-based Autoregressive Generation (EAG) framework that employs an energy-based transformer learning temporal dynamics in latent space through strictly proper scoring rules, enabling efficient generation with realistic population and single-neuron spiking statistics. Evaluation on synthetic Lorenz datasets and two Neural Latents Benchmark datasets (MC_Maze and Area2_bump) demonstrates that EAG achieves state-of-the-art generation quality with substantial computational efficiency improvements, particularly over diffusion-based methods. Beyond optimal performance, conditional generation applications show two capabilities: generalizing to unseen behavioral contexts and improving motor brain-computer interface decoding accuracy using synthetic neural data. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of energy-based modeling for neural population dynamics with applications in neuroscience research and neural engineering.

Energy-based Autoregressive Generation for Neural Population Dynamics

Video classification requires event-level representations of objects and their interactions. Existing methods typically rely on data-driven approaches, which either learn such features from whole frames or object-centric visual regions. Therefore, the modeling of spatiotemporal interactions among objects is usually overlooked. To address this issue, this paper presents a Decomposition of Synergistic, Unique, and Redundant Causal Representations Learning (SurdCRL) model for video classification, which introduces a newly-proposed SURD causal theory to model the spatiotemporal features of both object dynamics and their in- and cross-frame interactions. Specifically, SurdCRL employs three modules to model the object-centric spatiotemporal dynamics using distinct types of causal components, where the first module Spatial-Temporal Entity Modeling decouples the frame into object and context entities, and employs a temporal message passing block to capture object state changes over time, generating spatiotemporal features as basic causal variables. Second, the Dual-Path Causal Inference module mitigates confounders among causal variables by front-door and back-door interventions, thus enabling the subsequent causal components to reflect their intrinsic effects. Finally, the Causal Composition and Selection module employs the compositional structure-aware attention to project the causal variables and their high-order interactions into the synergistic, unique, and redundant components. Experiments on two benchmarking datasets verify that SurdCRL better captures event-relevant object-centric representation by decomposing spatiotemporal object interactions into three types of causal components.

Introducing Decomposed Causality with Spatiotemporal Object-Centric Representation for Video Classification

The safe deployment of autonomous driving (AD) systems is fundamentally hindered by the long-tail problem, where rare yet critical driving scenarios are severely underrepresented in real-world data. 
Existing solutions including safety-critical scenario generation and closed-loop learning often rely on rule-based heuristics, resampling methods and generative models learned from offline datasets, limiting their ability to produce diverse and novel challenges. While recent works leverage Vision Language Models (VLMs) to produce scene descriptions that guide a separate, downstream model in generating hazardous trajectories for agents, such two-stage framework constrains the generative potential of VLMs, as the diversity of the final trajectories is ultimately limited by the generalization ceiling of the downstream algorithm.
To overcome these limitations, we introduce **VILTA** (**V**LM-**I**n-the-**L**oop **T**rajectory **A**dversary), a novel framework that integrates a VLM into the **_closed-loop training_** of AD agents. Unlike prior works, VILTA actively participates in the training loop by comprehending the dynamic driving environment and strategically generating challenging scenarios through direct, fine-grained editing of surrounding agents' future trajectories. This **_direct-editing_** approach fully leverages the VLM's powerful generalization capabilities to create a diverse curriculum of plausible yet challenging scenarios that extend beyond the scope of traditional methods. We demonstrate that our approach substantially enhances the safety and robustness of the resulting AD policy, particularly in its ability to navigate critical long-tail events.

VILTA: A VLM-in-the-Loop Adversary for Enhancing Driving Policy Robustness

Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant potential in AI mathematical tutoring, yet current evaluations often rely on simplistic metrics or narrow pedagogical scenarios, failing to assess comprehensive, multi-turn teaching effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce KMP-Bench, a comprehensive K-8 Mathematical Pedagogical Benchmark designed to assess LLMs from two complementary perspectives. The first module, KMP-Dialogue, evaluates holistic pedagogical capabilities against six core principles (e.g., Challenge, Explanation, Feedback), leveraging a novel multi-turn dialogue dataset constructed by weaving together diverse pedagogical components. The second module, KMP-Skills, provides a granular assessment of foundational tutoring abilities, including multi-turn problem-solving, error detection and correction, and problem generation. Our evaluations on KMP-Bench reveal a key disparity: while leading LLMs excel at tasks with verifiable solutions, they struggle with the nuanced application of pedagogical principles. Additionally, we present KMP-Pile, a large-scale (150K) dialogue dataset. Models fine-tuned on KMP-Pile show substantial improvement on KMP-Bench, underscoring the value of pedagogically-rich training data for developing more effective AI math tutors.

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