Singapore

The learning dynamics of modern neural networks remain an open problem in deep learning. The *Neural Tangent Kernel* (NTK) offers an elegant description of training dynamics in the infinite‑width limit, yet its classical formulation assumes a static data set. Modern model training practice departs from this strong assumption through the use of on‑the‑fly data augmentations (e.g. additive noise). In this work, we conduct an NTK-driven analysis of how data transformations affect a neural net&#39;s evolution in the function space. Our theoretical contributions characterize how repeated Gaussian perturbations from NTK-derived covariances can steer neural-net optimizations toward user‑specified behavior. These theoretical insights are empirically validated by controlled experiments. Taken together, our results lay the foundation for a promising future research direction that transforms the NTK from a descriptive to a *prescriptive* tool, enabling control of neural net training trajectories and behavior of inference generalization with grounded interventions.

AAAI 2026

Neural Tangent Kernels Under Stochastic Data Augmentation

machine learning

data augmentation

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

The learning dynamics of modern neural networks remain an open problem in deep learning. The *Neural Tangent Kernel* (NTK) offers an elegant description of training dynamics in the infinite‑width limit, yet its classical formulation assumes a static data set. Modern model training practice departs from this strong assumption through the use of on‑the‑fly data augmentations (e.g. additive noise). In this work, we conduct an NTK-driven analysis of how data transformations affect a neural net's evolution in the function space. Our theoretical contributions characterize how repeated Gaussian perturbations from NTK-derived covariances can steer neural-net optimizations toward user‑specified behavior. These theoretical insights are empirically validated by controlled experiments. Taken together, our results lay the foundation for a promising future research direction that transforms the NTK from a descriptive to a *prescriptive* tool, enabling control of neural net training trajectories and behavior of inference generalization with grounded interventions.

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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.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in size, storing and transmitting them on edge devices becomes increasingly challenging. Traditional methods like quantization and pruning struggle to achieve extreme compression of LLMs without sacrificing accuracy. In this paper, we introduce PocketLLM, a novel approach to compress LLMs in a latent space via meta-networks. A simple encoder network is proposed to project the weights of LLMs into discrete latent vectors, which are then represented using a compact codebook. A lightweight decoder network is employed to map the codebook's representative vectors back to the original weight space. This method allows for significant compression of the large weights in LLMs, consisting solely of a small decoder, a concise codebook, and an index. Extensive experiments show that PocketLLM achieves superior performance even at significantly high compression ratios, e.g., compressing Llama 2-7B by 10x with a negligible drop in accuracy.

PocketLLM: Ultimate Compression of Large Language Models via Meta Networks

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns over training data privacy. Membership Inference Attacks (MIA), aiming to identify whether specific data was used for training, pose significant privacy risks. However, existing MIA methods struggle to address the scale and complexity of modern LLMs. This paper introduces OR-MIA, a novel MIA framework inspired by model optimization and input robustness. First, training data points are expected to exhibit smaller gradient norms due to optimization dynamics. Second, member samples show greater stability, with gradient norms being less sensitive to controlled input perturbations. OR-MIA leverages these principles by perturbing inputs, computing gradient norms, and using them as features for a robust classifier to distinguish members from non-members. Evaluations on LLMs (70M to 6B parameters) and various datasets demonstrate that OR-MIA outperforms existing methods, achieving over 90% accuracy. Our findings highlight a critical vulnerability in LLMs and underscore the need for improved privacy-preserving training paradigms.

Optimization and Robustness-Informed Membership Inference Attacks for LLMs

Knowledge editing aims to update specific knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining the entire model. However, existing methods generally struggle to manage the ripple effects of knowledge updates, particularly in multi-hop reasoning tasks, where conflicts between old and new information often lead to shifts in reasoning chains and degraded consistency. To address this issue, a ripple-aware knowledge editing framework, namely \emph{EchoEdit}, is proposed. \emph{EchoEdit} introduces the RippleGraph to explicitly model potentially affected knowledge regions and employs a RippleRule generator to dynamically produce diffusion rules, precisely constraining knowledge propagation. Furthermore, we distill a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) planner from an external teacher model, which decouples complex reasoning chain planning into RippleGraph-guided reasoning, thereby alleviating the reasoning burden on low-resource LLMs in multi-hop tasks. Experimental results on the MQuAKE and RIPPLEEDITS multi-hop reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that \emph{EchoEdit} significantly outperforms existing mainstream methods, effectively enhancing post-edit reasoning consistency and generalization capabilities.

EchoEdit: Consistent Multi-Hop Question Answering via Ripple Control in Knowledge Editing

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at extracting salient visual features for given query images, thus exhibiting promising visual recognition performance. However, VLMs would encounter significant degradation in fine-grained scenarios due to their deficiency in distinguishing nuanced differences among candidate categories. As a remedy, we draw inspiration from the ``System 1 \& System 2" cognitive theory of humans, paving the way to achieve fine-grained recognition for VLMs. To be specific, we observe that VLMs naturally align with System 1, quickly identifying candidate categories but leaving easily-confused ones unresolved. Based on the observation, we propose System-2 enhanCed visuAl recogNition (SCAN), a novel plug-and-play approach that makes VLMs aware of the nuanced differences. In brief, SCAN first specifies and abstracts the discriminative attributes for the confused candidate categories and query images by resorting to off-the-shelf large foundation models, respectively. After that, SCAN adaptively integrates the salient visual features from System 1 with the nuanced differences derived from System 2, resolving confusion in candidates with estimated uncertainty. Extensive experiments on eight widely used fine-grained recognition benchmarks against 10 state-of-the-art baselines verify the effectiveness and superiority of SCAN. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Endowing Vision-Language Models with System 2 Thinking for Fine-grained Visual Recognition

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a growing interest in training large-scale models. As the model size continues to scale, concerns are growing about the depletion of high-quality, well-curated training data. This has led practitioners to explore training approaches like Federated Learning (FL), which can leverage the abundant data on edge devices while maintaining privacy. However, the decentralization of training datasets in FL introduces challenges to scaling large models, a topic that remains under-explored. This paper fills this gap and provides qualitative insights on generalizing the previous model scaling experience to federated learning scenarios. Specifically, we derive a PAC-Bayes (Probably Approximately Correct Bayesian) upper bound for the generalization error of models trained with stochastic algorithms in federated settings and quantify the impact of distributed training data on the optimal model size by finding the analytic solution of model size that minimizes this bound. Our theoretical results demonstrate that the optimal model size has a negative power law relationship with the number of clients if the total training compute is unchanged. Besides, we also find that switching to FL with the same training compute will inevitably reduce the upper bound of generalization performance that the model can achieve through training, and that estimating the optimal model size in federated scenarios should depend on the average training compute across clients. Furthermore, we also empirically validate the correctness of our results with extensive training runs on different models, network settings, and datasets.

Scaling Law Analysis in Federated Learning: How to Select the Optimal Model Size?

Human-interaction-involved applications underscore the need for Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis (MSA). Although many approaches have been proposed to address the subtle emotions in different modalities, the power of explanations and temporal alignments is still underexplored. Thus, this paper proposes the Text-routed sparse mixture-of-Experts model with eXplanation and Temporal alignment for MSA (TEXT). TEXT first augments explanations for MSA via Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLM), and then novelly aligns the representations of audio and video through a temporality-oriented neural network block. TEXT aligns different modalities with explanations and facilitates a new text-routed sparse mixture-of-experts with gate fusion. Our temporal alignment block merges the benefits of Mamba and temporal cross-attention. As a result, TEXT achieves the best performance across four datasets among all tested models, including three recently proposed approaches and three MLLMs. I.e., TEXT wins on at least four metrics out of all six metrics. E.g., TEXT decreases the mean absolute error to 0.353 on the CH-SIMS dataset, which signifies a 13.5\% decrement compared with recently proposed approaches.

A Text-Routed Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Model with Explanation and Temporal Alignment for Multi-Modal Sentiment Analysis

Gait recognition is emerging as a promising technology and
an innovative field within computer vision, with a wide range
of applications in remote human identification. However, existing methods typically rely on complex architectures to directly extract features from images and apply pooling operations to obtain sequence-level representations. Such designs
often lead to overfitting on static noise (e.g., clothing), while
failing to effectively capture dynamic motion regions, such as
the arms and legs. This bottleneck is particularly challenging
in the presence of intra-class variation, where gait features of
the same individual under different environmental conditions
are significantly distant in the feature space.
To address the above challenges, we present a Languageguided and Motion-aware gait recognition framework, named
LMGait. To the best of our knowledge, LMGait is the first
method to introduce natural language descriptions as explicit
semantic priors into the gait recognition task. In particular, we
utilize designed gait-related language cues to capture key motion features in gait sequences. To improve cross-modal alignment, we propose the Motion Awareness Module (MAM),
which refines the language features by adaptively adjusting
various levels of semantic information to ensure better alignment with the visual representations. Furthermore, we introduce the Motion Temporal Capture Module (MTCM) to enhance the discriminative capability of gait features and improve the model’s motion tracking ability. We conducted extensive experiments across multiple datasets, and the results
demonstrate the significant advantages of our proposed network. Specifically, our model achieved accuracies of 88.5%,
97.1%, and 97.5% on the CCPG, SUSTech1K, and CASIAB*
datasets, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Language-Guided and Motion-Aware Gait Representation for Generalizable Recognition

Recent studies reveal that adversaries can manipulate the internal knowledge of large language models (LLMs) on selected topics through model editing, causing attacker-specified harmful or biased outputs when queried about the edited content. Once such tampered LLMs are distributed, they can mislead users on the targeted topics, thereby potentially propagating misinformation or reinforcing stereotypes. However, existing knowledge manipulation attacks rely on the ability to redistribute compromised models, which is infeasible in constrained settings like Federated Instruction Tuning (FedIT), where a central server controls LLM's training and distribution.
In this work, we introduce ShadeEdit, the first attack framework that leverages strengthened model editing to enable knowledge manipulation in FedIT scenarios.
ShadeEdit introduces two key components to address two challenges posed by the training process of FedIT: (1) a \textit{paraphrase-based editing dataset selection strategy} to mitigate the dilution from benign updates on malicious ones by constructing a high-quality editing dataset, and (2) an \textit{adaptive manipulation mechanism} to evade aggregation-based defenses via an adaptive clipping strategy. ShadeEdit achieves an average 99.5\% attack success rate over eight robust aggregation algorithms while preserving instruction-following accuracy, demonstrating its strong attack effectiveness and model-utility preservation. Our code is available at the following anonymous link: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ShadeEdit-41EA/.

ShadeEdit: A Utility-Preserving and Defense-Evasive Knowledge Manipulation Attack in Federated LLMs

Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, cell language models (CLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning cell representations from high-dimensional single-cell data—particularly transcriptomic profiles from scRNA-seq. These foundation models have shown remarkable potential across a variety of downstream applications. However, there remains a lack of foundation models for scATAC-seq data, which measures chromatin accessibility at single-cell level and is critical for decoding epigenetic regulation. Developing such models is considerably more challenging due to the unique characteristics of scATAC-seq data, including the vast number of chromatin regions, lack of standardized annotations, extreme sparsity, and near-binary distributions. To address these challenges, we systematically explore various strategies and propose CLM-access, a specialized foundation model for scATAC-seq data. CLM-access incorporates three main innovations: (1) an unified data processing pipeline that maps 2.8 million cells onto an unified reference of over 1 million chromatin regions; (2) a specialized patching and embedding strategy to effectively manage high-dimensional inputs; and (3) a tailored masking and loss function design that preserves fine-grained regional information while enhancing training efficiency and representation quality. With comprehensive benchmarks, we show that CLM-access significantly outperforms existing methods in key downstream tasks, including batch effect correction, cell type annotation, RNA expression prediction, and multi-modal integration. This work establishes a scalable and interpretable foundation model for single-cell epigenomic analysis and expands the application of CLMs in single-cell research. Code is available at https://github.com/HIM-AIM/CLM-access

CLM-Access: A Specialized Foundation Model for High-Dimensional Single-Cell ATAC-Seq Analysis

Mainstream 3D human pose estimation methods directly predict 3D coordinates of joints from 2D keypoints, suffering from severe depth ambiguity. Pose textual descriptions contain abundant semantic information, which facilitates the model to learn the spatial relationship among different body parts, partially alleviating this issue. Leveraging this insight, we propose a 3D human pose estimation method assisted by textual descriptions. Specifically, we utilize an automatic captioning pipeline to generate textual descriptions of 3D poses based on spatial relations among joints. These descriptions include details regarding angles, distances, relative positions, pitch\&roll and ground-contacts. Subsequently, text features are extracted from these descriptions using a language model, while a 3D human pose estimation model extracts pose features. Aligning the pose features with the text features allows for a more targeted optimization of the estimation model. Therefore, we systematically introduce three alignment approaches to effectively align features extracted by two models operating in entirely different domains. Our method incorporates prior knowledge derived from the textual descriptions into the estimation model and can be seamlessly applied to various existing framework. Experimental results on the Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art methods.

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