GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
AMS-KV: Adaptive KV Caching in Multi-Scale Visual Autoregressive Transformers
Authors: Boxun Xu; Yu Wang; Zihu Wang; Peng Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Visual autoregressive modeling (VAR) via next-scale prediction has emerged as a scalable image generation paradigm. While Key and Value (KV) caching in large language models (LLMs) has been extensively studied, next-scale prediction presents unique challenges, and KV caching design for next-scale based VAR transformers remains largely unexplored. A major bottleneck is the excessive KV memory growth with the increasing number of scales—severely limiting scalability. Our systematic investigation reveals that: (1) Attending to tokens from local scales significantly contributes to generation quality (2) Allocating a small amount of memory for the coarsest scales, termed as condensed scales, stabilizes multi-scale image generation (3) Strong KV similarity across finer scales is predominantly observed in cache-efficient layers, whereas cache-demanding layers exhibit weaker inter-scale similarity. Based on the observations, we introduce AMS-KV, a scale-adaptive KV caching policy for next-scale prediction in VAR models. AMS-KV prioritizes storing KVs from condensed and local scales, preserving the most relevant tokens to maintain generation quality. It further optimizes KV cache utilization and computational efficiency identifying cache-demanding layers through inter-scale similarity analysis. Compared to the vanilla next-scale prediction-based VAR models, AMS-KV reduces KV cache usage by up to 84.83% and self-attention latency by 60.48%. Moreover, when the baseline VAR-d30 model encounters out-of-memory failures at a batch size of 128, AMS-KV enables stable scaling to a batch size of 256 with improved throughput.
CaT-Diff: Cascaded Text-enhanced Diffusion Model for Time-Series Imputation
Authors: Changjian Xu; Yong Wang; Ruizheng Huang; Zhicheng Zhang; Wen Yin; Kexin Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Most state-of-the-art time series imputation methods can leverage textual information to improve imputation quality, but they often struggle because they fail to effectively filter noisy information from large language model (LLM) derived textual information. Some existing solutions only filter over the entire token set, which can introduce erroneous conditional constraints, extreme token frequency effects and increased computational complexity. To address this, we propose CaT-Diff, a novel cascaded text-enhanced diffusion model for probabilistic imputation of multivariate time series under Missing Not At Random (MNAR) scenarios. To suppress irrelevant semantics and focus on context most predictive of missing values, CaT-Diff introduces an innovative Hierarchical Semantic Filter (HSF) that collaborates with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Network. The MoE projects heterogeneous text embeddings into the time series latent space, and the HSF cascade-filters text embeddings from the segment level to the token level, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of direct token-level filtering and reducing overhead. We also incorporate a lightweight Missing Mechanism Estimator, jointly optimized with the denoising network to explicitly capture MNAR missingness patterns. Extensive tests on nine domains show that CaT-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our work presents a new approach for selectively fusing LLM-derived textual information.
UNSEEN: Enhancing Dataset Pruning from a Generalization Perspective
Authors: Furui Xu; Shaobo Wang; Jiajun Zhang; Chenghao Sun; Haixiang Tang; Linfeng Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The growing scale of datasets in deep learning has introduced significant computational challenges. Dataset pruning addresses this challenge by constructing a compact but informative coreset from the full dataset with comparable performance. Previous approaches typically establish scoring metrics based on specific criteria to identify representative samples. However, these methods predominantly rely on sample scores obtained from the model's performance during the training (i.e., fitting) phase. As scoring models achieve near-optimal performance on training data, such fitting-centric approaches induce a dense distribution of sample scores within a narrow numerical range. This concentration reduces the distinction between samples and hinders effective selection. To address this challenge, we conduct dataset pruning from the perspective of generalization, i.e., scoring samples based on models not exposed to them during training. We propose a plug-and-play framework, UNSEEN, which can be integrated into existing dataset pruning methods. Additionally, conventional score-based methods are single-step and rely on models trained solely on the complete dataset, providing limited perspective on the importance of samples. To address this limitation, we scale UNSEEN to multi-step scenarios and propose an incremental selection technique through scoring models trained on varying coresets, and optimize the quality of the coreset dynamically. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K. Notably, on ImageNet-1K,  UNSEEN achieves lossless performance while reducing training data by 30%.
Probability Distribution Alignment and Low-Rank Weight Decomposition for Source-Free Domain Adaptive Brain Decoding
Authors: Ganxi Xu; Jinyi Long; Jia Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Brain decoding currently faces significant challenges in individual differences, modality alignment, and high-dimensional embeddings. To address individual differences, researchers often use source subject data, which leads to issues such as privacy leakage and heavy data storage burdens. In modality alignment, current works focus on aligning the softmax probability distribution but neglect the alignment of marginal probability distributions, resulting in modality misalignment. Additionally, images and text are aligned separately with fMRI without considering the complex interplay between images and text, leading to poor image reconstruction. Finally, the enormous dimensionality of CLIP embeddings causes significant computational costs. Although the dimensionality of CLIP embeddings can be reduced by ignoring the number of patches obtained from images and the number of tokens acquired from text, this comes at the cost of a significant drop in model performance, creating a dilemma. To overcome these limitations, we propose a source-free domain adaptation-based brain decoding framework. Firstly, we apply source-free domain adaptation, which only acquires the source model without accessing source data during target model adaptation, to brain decoding to address cross-subject variations, privacy concerns, and the heavy burden of data storage. Secondly, we employ maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) to align the marginal probability distributions between embeddings of different modalities. Moreover, to accommodate the complex interplay between image and text, we concatenate the embeddings of image and text and then use singular value decomposition (SVD) to obtain a new embedding. What’s more, to achieve better image generation quality, we employ the Wasserstein distance (WD) to align the probability distributions of new embeddings. Finally, in the target model adaptation phase of source-free domain adaptation, we employ low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to reduce the high
expense of tuning the target model. Sufficient experiments demonstrate our work outperforms state-of-the-art methods for brain decoding tasks.
Shaping Parameter Contribution Patterns for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Haonan Xu; Yang Yang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a well-known challenge due to deep models often producing overconfident. In this paper, we reveal a key insight that trained classifiers tend to rely on sparse parameter contribution patterns, meaning that only a few dominant parameters drive predictions. This brittleness can be exploited by OOD inputs that anomalously trigger these parameters, resulting in overconfident predictions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method called Shaping Parameter Contribution Patterns (SPCP), which enhances OOD detection robustness by encouraging the classifier to learn boundary-oriented dense contribution patterns. Specifically, SPCP operates during training by rectifying excessively high parameter contributions based on a dynamically estimated threshold. This mechanism promotes the classifier to rely on a broader set of parameters for decision-making, thereby reducing the risk of overconfident predictions caused by anomalously triggered parameters, while preserving in-distribution (ID) performance. Extensive experiments under various OOD detection setups verify the effectiveness of SPCP.
Optimizing LoRA Allocation of MoE with the Alignment of Topic Correlation
Authors: Hengyuan Xu; Wenjun Ke; Yao He; Jiajun Liu; Dong Nie; Peng Wang; Ziyu Shang; Zijie Xu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Mixture of experts (MoE) dynamically routes inputs to specialized expert networks to scale model capacity with low inference overhead. However, the excessive parameter growth in MoE models poses challenges in low-resource settings. To address these issues, MoE with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a lightweight adaptation paradigm that distributes knowledge among experts via multiple LoRA blocks. Existing MoE-PEFT methods can be broadly categorized into External and Internal PEFT methods. External PEFT methods incorporate lightweight models into existing MoE architectures without modifying their routing, which limits the model’s parameter efficiency. To overcome these issues, Internal PEFT methods integrate MoE architectures into PEFT, enabling minimal parameter overhead. However, they still face two major challenges: (1) lack of expert functional differentiation, resulting in overlapping specialization across modules, and (2) absence of a structured attribution mechanism to guide expert selection based on semantic relevance. To alleviate these challenges, we propose TopicLoRA, a novel three-stage framework that leverages topic knowledge as semantic anchors to guide expert allocation. Specifically, (1) to address expert redundancy, we construct a topic-level prior graph using Graph Neural Network-enhanced representation learning over Big-Bench categories, enforcing structural separation among expert embeddings, and (2) to introduce semantic attribution, we design a dual-loss training mechanism that softly aligns input-query relevance with topic-guided routing distributions via KL divergence. Extensive experiments on representative datasets (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K, Flanv2) demonstrate that TopicLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT baselines by 2.40% on average in accuracy. Notably, the maximum improvement is 4.21%. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate that our framework's robustness to intricate topics and input sequence variations, which stems from the dual-loss training mechanism.
HLML-SNN：Fast Continual Learning in Spiking Neural Networks Achieved via Hebbian Learning-Driven Meta-Learning
Authors: Jiangshuai Xu; Peiyun Xue; Jiacheng Song; Xuhui Huang; Qingshan Hou
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting remains a fundamental barrier to artificial continual learning (CL) - a capability innate to humans. Existing CL methods often incur prohibitive computational costs in resource-constrained scenarios. Spiking neural networks (SNNs), with their biological plausibility and energy efficiency, offer distinct advantages for CL. Inspired by cortico-hippocampal memory mechanisms, we propose a spiking neural network framework integrating Hebbian plasticity with meta-learning, named HLML-SNN. This architecture emulates a dual-phase CL process: (1) In the short-term phase, sample-level Hebbian learning rapidly adapts to new inputs through local synaptic updates; (2) In the long-term phase, task-level meta-learning optimizes cross-task parameters using consolidated synaptic weights, mimicking cortical memory integration to refine shared representations and initialize subsequent Hebbian learning. HLML-SNN incrementally transforms short-term adaptations into stable long-term knowledge, where the synergy of rapid synaptic updates and meta-driven global optimization enables efficient continual learning while balancing stability and plasticity. Empirical results establish HLML-SNN's state-of-the-art performance across split-MNIST/CIFAR10/CIFAR100/TinyImageNet while markedly reducing training time compared to existing methods, demonstrating substantial practical potential for rapid deployment scenarios. The code and appendix are available on https://github.com/JiangshuaiXu/HLML SNN.
Multi-modal Dynamic Proxy Learning for Personalized Multiple Clustering
Authors: Jinfeng Xu; Zheyu Chen; Shuo Yang; Jinze Li; Ziyue Peng; Zewei Liu; Hewei Wang; Jiayi Zhang; Edith C. H. Ngai
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multiple clustering aims to discover diverse latent structures from different perspectives, yet existing methods generate exhaustive clusterings without discerning user interest, necessitating laborious manual screening. Current multi-modal solutions suffer from static semantic rigidity: predefined candidate words fail to adapt to dataset-specific concepts, and fixed fusion strategies ignore evolving feature interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Multi-DProxy, a novel multi-modal dynamic proxy learning framework that leverages cross-modal alignment through learnable textual proxies. Multi-DProxy introduces 1) gated cross-modal fusion that synthesizes discriminative joint representations by adaptively modeling feature interactions. 2) dual-constraint proxy optimization where user interest constraints enforce semantic consistency with domain concepts while concept constraints employ hard example mining to enhance cluster discrimination. 3) dynamic candidate management that refines textual proxies through iterative clustering feedback. Therefore, Multi-DProxy not only effectively captures a user's interest through proxies but also enables the identification of relevant clusterings with greater precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements over existing methods across a broad set of multi-clustering benchmarks.
FuseMine: Robust Multi-Modal Compound-Protein Interaction Prediction via Differential Attention Feature Mining
Authors: Junlin Xu; Zhuang Zhang; Zhenghang Gong; Jincan Li; Pan Zeng; Zilong Zhang; Xiong Li; Shuting Jin; Haowen Chen; Yajie Meng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Accurate prediction of compound protein interactions (CPIs) is crucial for drug discovery. 
However, existing deep learning-based methods suffer from hidden biases and poor cross-domain generalization, leading to spurious correlations and inadequate representation of unseen compound-protein pairs. 
To address these limitations, we propose FuseMine, a multimodal deep learning framework that jointly leverages molecular structures and biological sequences for reliable CPI prediction.
Specifically, FuseMine adopts a dual-representation strategy for each molecule. It employs a convolutional encoder to capture structural features, combined with pretrained large language models for extracting semantic information from sequences. We propose a novel Multi-modal Feature Orchestration Aggregation (MFOA) module that enables deep and synergistic fusion between the structural features and the sequential semantics of molecules, effectively capturing the complementary patterns across modalities. Additionally, we design a Reduction Differential Feature Mining (RDFM) module to further enhance the representation of discriminative features, thereby improving the model’s generalization capability. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both intra-domain and cross-domain scenarios. These results highlight the synergistic value of combining structural and sequential data for CPIs.
QuEPT: Quantized Elastic Precision Transformers with One-Shot Calibration for Multi-Bit Switching
Authors: Ke Xu; Yixin Wang; Zhongcheng Li; Hao Cui; Jinshui Hu; Xingyi Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Elastic precision quantization enables multi-bit deployment via a single optimization pass, fitting diverse quantization scenarios. Yet, the high storage and optimization costs associated with the Transformer architecture, research on elastic quantization remains limited, particularly for large language models. This paper proposes QuEPT, an efficient post-training scheme that reconstructs block-wise multi-bit errors with one-shot calibration on a small data slice. It can dynamically adapt to various predefined bit-widths by cascading different low-rank adapters, and supports real-time switching between uniform quantization and mixed precision quantization without repeated optimization. To enhance accuracy and robustness, we introduce Multi-Bit Token Merging (MB-ToMe) to dynamically fuse token features across different bit-widths, improving robustness during bit-width switching. Additionally, we propose Multi-Bit Cascaded Low-Rank adapters (MB-CLoRA) to strengthen correlations between bit-width groups, further improve the overall performance of QuEPT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QuEPT achieves comparable or better performance to existing state-of-the-art post-training quantization methods.
A Unified Self-Regulating Training Framework for Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Meng Xu; Xinhong Chen; Zhongying Chen; Guanyi Zhao; Yang Jin; Jianping Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning (FDRL) aims to enable distributed collaborative training of multiple DRL models while preserving privacy. Existing FDRL methods function in static client environments, but real-world scenarios often involve dynamic state transitions, such as noise, which render static model topologies inadequate and result in biased policy loss. This degrades client performance and leads to suboptimal global policies. To address this challenge, we develop a generic solution, referred to as the self-regulating training framework, which can be seamlessly integrated into existing FDRL approaches to address dynamic state transitions. Specifically, we propose a Sparse Training (ST) method that dynamically sparsifies and adjusts the topology of each model during training to maximize model performance and reduce model complexity. Additionally, we introduce an auxiliary model to adaptively regulate the policy loss of client models, mitigating loss bias and facilitating updates that yield improved returns. Experimental results demonstrate that our method enhances six state-of-the-art (SOTA) FDRL approaches across nine tasks in terms of return.
AVM: Towards Structure-Preserving Neural Response Modeling in the Visual Cortex Across Stimuli and Individuals
Authors: Qi Xu; Shuai Gong; Xuming Ran; Haihua Luo; Yangfan Hu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: While deep learning models have shown strong performance in simulating neural responses, they often fail to clearly separate stable visual encoding from condition-specific adaptation, which limits their ability to generalize across stimuli and individuals. We introduce the Adaptive Visual Model (AVM), a structure-preserving framework that enables condition-aware adaptation through modular subnetworks, without modifying the core representation. AVM keeps a Vision Transformer-based encoder frozen to capture consistent visual features, while independently trained modulation paths account for neural response variations driven by stimulus content and subject identity. We evaluate AVM in three experimental settings, including stimulus-level variation, cross-subject generalization, and cross-dataset adaptation, all of which involve structured changes in inputs and individuals. Across two large-scale mouse V1 datasets, AVM outperforms the state-of-the-art V1T model by approximately 2% in predictive correlation, demonstrating robust generalization, interpretable condition-wise modulation, and high architectural efficiency. Specifically, AVM achieves a 9.1% improvement in explained variance (FEVE) under the cross-dataset adaptation setting. These results suggest that AVM provides a unified framework for adaptive neural modeling across biological and experimental conditions, offering a scalable solution under structural constraints. Its design may inform future approaches to cortical modeling in both neuroscience and biologically inspired AI systems.
Vision-Language Models Guided Graph Concept Reasoning for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Diagnosis
Authors: Qihao Xu; Xiaoling Luo; Yuxin Lin; Chengliang Liu; Yongting Hu; Jinkai Li; Xinheng Lyu; Yong Xu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly advanced diabetic retinopathy (DR) diagnosis, yet their black-box nature limits clinical acceptance due to a lack of interpretability. Concept bottleneck model (CBM) offers a promising solution by enabling concept-level reasoning and test-time intervention, with recent DR studies modeling lesions as concepts and grades as outcomes. However, current methods often ignore relationships between lesion concepts across different DR grades and struggle when fine-grained lesion concepts are unavailable, limiting their interpretability and real-world applicability. To bridge these gaps, we propose VLM-GCR, a vision-language model guided graph concept reasoning framework for interpretable DR diagnosis. VLM-GCR emulates the diagnostic process of ophthalmologists by constructing a grading-aware lesion concept graph that explicitly models the interactions among lesions and their relationships to disease grades. In concept-free clinical scenarios, our method introduces a vision-language guided dynamic concept pseudo-labeling mechanism to mitigate the challenges of existing concept-based models in fine-grained lesion recognition. Additionally, we introduce a multi-level intervention method that supports error correction, enabling transparent and robust human-AI collaboration. Experiments on two public DR benchmarks show that VLM-GCR achieves strong performance in both lesion and grading tasks, while delivering clear and clinically meaningful reasoning steps.