GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Rethinking Multi-Instance Learning Through Graph-Driven Fusion: A Dual-Path Approach to Adaptive Representation
Authors: Yu-Xuan Zhang; Zhengchun Zhou; Weisha Liu; Mingxing Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-instance learning (MIL) has become a powerful paradigm for weakly supervised learning tasks, where each sample is a bag of unlabeled instances with only the bag-level label. While graph-based MIL methods enhance bag topological structure modeling, they often suffer from high computation costs and limited representation due to rigid graph construction and insufficient integration of intra-bag semantics. To address these challenges, we propose GDF-MIL, a novel graph-driven MIL framework, which introduces a dual-path feature fusion mechanism to adaptively balance topological structure modeling and semantic feature preservation. First, the adaptive bag mapping module (ABMM) performs soft clustering to extract compact and informative representations. Subsequently, a dynamic graph structure learning (DGSL) component efficiently learns sparse topological structures via weighted connectivity, aggregating them into a comprehensive graph-level representation. Finally, to balance fast graph construction and bag-level knowledge, dual-path feature fusion (DPFF) employs a dual-path gating mechanism to integrate both types of features, which are then passed to the classifier for bag label prediction. Extensive experiments on twenty-four datasets across four domains show that GDF-MIL significantly outperforms eighteen state-of-the-art methods on the majority of datasets.
Mamba-Driven Multi-View Discriminative Clustering via Global-Local Cross-View Sequence Modeling
Authors: Yuanyang Zhang; Xinhang Wan; Chao Zhang; Jie Xu; Cunjian Chen; Tien-Tsin Wong; Li Yao; Yijie Lin
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-view clustering (MVC) has recently garnered increasing attention for its ability to partition unlabeled samples into distinct clusters by leveraging complementary and consistent information from different views. Existing MVC methods primarily combine deep neural networks with contrastive learning for cross-view representation learning, yet often overlook the inherent global-local structural relationships among samples. While GNN-based methods capture local structures, they struggle to model global dependencies, leading to inferior inter-cluster separability. In contrast, Transformer-based methods excel at global aggregation but suffer from quadratic complexity, and their attention smoothing effect weakens fine-grained local structures, resulting in suboptimal intra-cluster compactness. To address these limitations, we propose a novel end-to-end MVC framework called Mamba-Driven Multi-View Discriminative Clustering via Global-Local Cross-View Sequence Modeling (MGLC). By flexibly constructing multi-view sequences, MGLC fully exploits the efficient sequence modeling capabilities of Mamba to jointly model cross-view dependencies and global-local structural relationships among samples. Furthermore, MGLC introduces a Cross-Mamba Fusion module to dynamically integrate cross-view and global-local structural representations. Additionally, MGLC incorporates a Dual Calibration Contrastive Learning module, guided by high-confidence pseudo-labels, that adaptively refines both feature and semantic representations while mitigating false negatives among semantically similar samples. Extensive comparative experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of MGLC.
FedBRICK: Structural Bias Aware Heterogeneous Foundation Model Federated Tuning
Authors: Yuhang Zhang; Xianda Wang; Wei Sun; Jiaxuan Chen; Fangxin Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Model-heterogeneous federated tuning (MHFT) enables the privacy-preserving fine-tuning of foundation models in heterogeneous systems by allowing clients and the server to adopt different model architectures. Depth partial training—where each client updates only a subset of the model's layers—alleviates system heterogeneity but exacerbates client drift, which stems from clients optimizing different objectives and therefore degrades overall performance. Beyond the well-known statistical bias—where non-IID data leads to client drift—we identify a structural bias arising from clients deploying only partial layers of the global model, which serves as an important cause of drift. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that the possible range of structural bias expands linearly with the number of missing layers. To counter this effect, we introduce FedBRICK (Federated Bias Recovery via Inserted Calibrative Kernels), which inserts tiny BRICKs into each client’s subnetwork. We employ a dual-end layer-wise distillation scheme to train these blocks using both client-side local data and a small public proxy set on the server. This design effectively mitigates the structural bias caused by layer dropping, reduces client drift, and remains practical for storage-constrained devices. Extensive experiments on federated learning benchmarks confirm that FedBRICK delivers up to a 5% average accuracy gain while requiring no more than 1.44% extra storage per client.
MP-ISMoE: Mixed-Precision Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Transfer Learning
Authors: Yutong Zhang; Zimeng Wu; Shengcai Liao; Shujiang Wu; Jiaxin Chen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for adapting pre-trained foundation models to downstream tasks, significantly reducing trainable parameters yet suffering from substantial memory overhead caused by gradient backpropagation during fine-tuning. While memory-efficient transfer learning (METL) circumvents this challenge by bypassing backbone gradient computation via lightweight small side networks, its stringent memory constraint severely limits learning capacity of side networks, thereby significantly compromising performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Mixed-Precision Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts framework (MP-ISMoE). Specifically, we first propose an Gaussian Noise Perturbed Iterative Quantization (GNP-IQ) scheme to quantize weights into lower-bits while effectively decreasing quantization errors. By leveraging memory conserved from GNP-IQ, we subsequently employ Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts (ISMoE) to scale up side networks without sacrificing overall memory efficiency. Different from conventional mixture-of-experts, ISMoE learns to select optimal experts by interacting with salient features from frozen backbones, thus suppressing knowledge forgetting and boosting performance. Extensive experiments across diverse vision-language and language-only tasks demonstrate that MP-ISMoE remarkably promotes accuracy compared to state-of-the-art METL approaches, while maintaining comparable parameter and memory efficiency.
Bi-Spectrum Distillation: Addressing Spectral Mismatch in ANN-SNN Knowledge Transfer
Authors: Yuxuan Zhang; Yuhang Sun; Wen Yao; Yue Deng; Hongjue Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Knowledge distillation from Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) is a prominent training paradigm. However, its efficacy is fundamentally limited by a spectral mismatch: SNNs, with their intrinsic low-pass filtering characteristics, struggle to learn high-frequency details from their ANN teachers, creating a bottleneck in knowledge transfer at both the feature and logit levels. To address this, we propose Bi-Spectrum Distillation (BSD), a novel framework that mitigates the mismatch from two complementary perspectives. First, at the feature level, our Spectral Residual Distillation (SRD) enhances the student SNN's features with a parameter-efficient, learnable filter that adaptively compensates for high-frequency information loss, which transforms the student's output to better match the teacher's rich spectral target. Second, at the logits level, our Spectral Semantic Distillation (SSD) enhances fine-grained classification by distilling high-frequency components from teacher-ordered logits. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and CIFAR10-DVS demonstrate that BSD achieves new state-of-the-art performance across both CNN and Transformer-based SNNs, validating its effectiveness and broad applicability.
Pseudo-Spiking Neurons: A Noise-Based Training Framework for Heterogeneous-Latency Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Yuxuan Zhang; Yuhang Sun; Hongjue Li; Yue Deng; Wen Yao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise significant energy efficiency by processing information via sparse, event-driven spikes. However, realizing this potential is hindered by the conventional use of a rigid, uniform timestep, T. This constraint imposes a challenging trade-off between accuracy and latency, while also incurring the prohibitive training costs of Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT). To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Pseudo-Spiking Neuron (PseudoSN), a novel training proxy that conceptualizes latency as an intrinsic, learnable parameter for each neuron. Building on the efficiency of rate-based methods, the PseudoSN models temporal dynamics in a single, BPTT-free pass. It employs a learnable probabilistic noise scheme to emulate the discretization effects of spike generation (e.g., clipping and quantization), making the neuron-specific timestep—and thus latency—directly optimizable via backpropagation. Integrated into a hardware-aware objective, our framework trains heterogeneous-latency SNNs that autonomously learn to optimize the trade-offs among accuracy, latency and energy, establishing a new state-of-the-art on major benchmarks.
SAGE: Structured Attribute-Guided Enhancement for GZSL
Authors: Zao Zhang; Liguo Sun; Pin Lyu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Embedding-based generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) models often first forge robust latent semantic correlations between visual and attribute features so that knowledge can generalize to unseen categories. Despite leveraging attributes as priors and learning a shared embedding space, current methods exhibit two critical flaws. First, attributes with heterogeneous granularity are treated uniformly, leading to semantic ambiguity. Second, the source of class-level misclassification seldom aligns with attribute-level errors, preventing models from targeting the specific attributes responsible. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Structured Attribute-Guided Enhancement (SAGE), a unified framework for GZSL. Consensus-aware bidirectional attention first synchronizes visual–semantic focus regions via a mutual-distillation scheme. Next, we partition all attributes into pairwise-disjoint subsets—Global, Context, and Local—and couple them with visual features extracted at matching spatial scales. Finally, we design a cross-sample, subset-aware distillation mechanism—when a sample is misclassified, SAGE identifies the culpable attribute subset, retrieves high-confidence prototypes from a memory bank, and
applies a Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence constraint to the corresponding feature branch. Comprehensive experiments and ablations on the challenging AwA2, CUB, and SUN benchmarks demonstrate the contribution of each component, with SAGE achieving a new state-of-the-art throughout. These findings underscore SAGE’s robustness and versatility, marking a substantial advance in generalized zero-shot learning and paving the way for broader zero-resource recognition.
PPGPT: Transferring Next-Token Modeling from Language to PPG Signals
Authors: Zexing Zhang; Huimin Lu; Qingxin Zhao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The success of large language models (LLMs) in cognitive tasks prompts the question of whether their next-token prediction (NTP) paradigm can be adapted to model physiological signals from wearable devices. A key target for this adaptation is photoplethysmography (PPG), the most prevalent sensing modality in consumer wearables for non-invasive monitoring of diverse physiological conditions. Unlike in NLP, where NTP aligns with generative objectives, physiological signal analysis involves fundamentally different tasks, such as continuous parameter estimation (regression) and discrete state recognition (classification). This disparity creates a semantic mismatch between the pre-training paradigm and the downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose PPGPT, the first foundation model that reformulates NTP into next-feature token prediction (NFTP), learning hierarchical feature transition probabilities to unify pre-training and downstream objectives. PPGPT features a novel dual-stream encoder that generates feature tokens by jointly modeling temporal dynamics and local-global morphological patterns. The model is developed using a two-stage training framework: it is first pre-trained on a large-scale mixed dataset of 1.6 billion data points and then validated on our newly released BioMTL benchmark, which includes data from 172 subjects over 285 days across seven different tasks. Extensive experiments show that PPGPT significantly outperforms competing methods, achieving a 16.5% improvement in F1-score and a 25.9% reduction in Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Furthermore, the model demonstrates robust few-shot learning capabilities.
Prototype-Driven Active Domain Adaptation with Density Consideration
Authors: Zeyu Zhang; Chun Shen; Qiang Ma; Meng Kang; Shuai Lü
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Active domain adaptation (ADA) aims to select a small set of target samples for annotation and use them for training to maximally boost the adaptation performance. However, most existing ADA methods only rely on the original output of the model, without considering the relationship between the source and target domain features, which may lead to selecting uninformative samples. In this paper, we propose an effective ADA framework: Prototype-Driven Active Domain Adaptation with density consideration (PDADA). It selects the most valuable target samples in the presence of domain shift through two criteria: Density-Conscious Domainness (DCD) and Prototype-Driven Informativeness (PDI). Furthermore, considering the class imbalance and cluster looseness issues in sample selection and domain adaptation, we develop a Class Balanced Expansion (CBE) algorithm and the Adversarial Active Domain Adaptation via Protecting Structured Information (AADA-PSI). Extensive experiments demonstrate that under the cooperation of the above components, PDADA outperforms previous methods on several challenging benchmarks and can be generalized to multi-source active domain adaptation setting.
A More Efficient Reduction from Outlier-Aware to Outlier-Free k-Median
Authors: Zhen Zhang; Han Peng; Limei Liu; Junyu Huang; Xiaolong Li; Qilong Feng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Given a non-negative integer \ell, the k-median with outliers problem extends the standard k-median problem by allowing the removal of up to \ell points and minimizing the clustering cost over the remaining ones. Algorithmic development in this setting remains an active area of research due to its relevance in processing noisy data. In this paper, we present a sampling-based reduction from the k-median with outliers problem to its outlier-free counterpart. The reduction incurs a multiplicative overhead of (kℓ⁻¹ + ε⁻¹)^O(ℓ) in the running time: it yields (kℓ⁻¹ + ε⁻¹)^O(ℓ) outlier-free instances, a solution to one of which can be directly transformed into a solution to the original instance with an arbitrarily small loss in the approximation ratio. This improves upon the previously known reduction with an overhead of ((k + ℓ)ε⁻¹)^O(ℓ). As applications, we obtain faster fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms with tight approximation guarantees for the k-median with outliers problem under various metric spaces. Furthermore, our approach naturally generalizes to constrained variants of the problem where additional constraints are imposed on the cluster sizes, and yields similar improvements in their FPT approximations.
Dynamic Deep Graph Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Masked Graph Reconstruction Loss
Authors: Zhenghao Zhang; Jun Xie; Xingchen Chen; Tao Yu; Hongzhu Yi; Kaixin Xu; Yuanxiang Wang; Tianyu Zong; Xinming Wang; Jiahuan Chen; Guoqing Chao; Feng Chen; Zhepeng Wang; Jungang Xu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The prevalence of real-world multi-view data makes incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) a crucial research. The rapid development of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has established them as one of the mainstream approaches for multi-view clustering. Despite significant progress in GNNs-based IMVC, some challenges remain: (1) Most methods rely on the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm to construct static graphs from raw data, which introduces noise and diminishes the robustness of the graph topology. (2) Existing methods typically utilize the Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss between the reconstructed graph and the sparse adjacency graph directly as the graph reconstruction loss, leading to substantial gradient noise during optimization. To address these issues, we propose a novel Dynamic Deep Graph Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Masked Graph Reconstruction Loss (DGIMVCM). Firstly, we construct a missing-robust global graph from the raw data. A graph convolutional embedding layer is then designed to extract primary features and refined dynamic view-specific graph structures, leveraging the global graph for imputation of missing views. This process is complemented by graph structure contrastive learning, which identifies consistency among view-specific graph structures. Secondly, a graph self-attention encoder is introduced to extract high-level representations based on the imputed primary features and view-specific graphs, and is optimized with a masked graph reconstruction loss to mitigate gradient noise during optimization. Finally, a clustering module is constructed and optimized through a pseudo-label self-supervised training mechanism. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of DGIMVCM.
Scalable Multi-Objective and Meta Reinforcement Learning via Gradient Estimation
Authors: Zhenshuo Zhang; Minxuan Duan; Youran Ye; Hongyang R. Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given n objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into k groups, which is much smaller than n, where each group comprises related objectives that can be trained together. This problem arises in applications such as robotics, control, and preference optimization in language models, where learning a single policy for all n objectives is suboptimal as n grows. We introduce a two-stage procedure — meta-training followed by fine-tuning — to address this problem. We first learn a meta-policy for all objectives using multitask learning. Then, we adapt the meta-policy to multiple randomly sampled subsets of objectives. The adaptation step leverages a first-order approximation property of well-trained policy networks, which is empirically verified to be accurate within a 2% error margin across various RL environments. The resulting algorithm, PolicyGradEx, efficiently estimates an aggregate task-affinity score matrix given a policy evaluation algorithm. Based on the estimated affinity score matrix, we cluster the n objectives into k groups by maximizing the intra-cluster affinity scores. Experiments on three robotic control and the Meta-World benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16% on average, while delivering up to 26 times faster speedup relative to performing full training to obtain the clusters. Ablation studies validate each component of our approach. For instance, compared with random grouping and gradient-similarity-based grouping, our loss-based clustering yields an improvement of 19%. Finally, we analyze the generalization error of policy networks by measuring the Hessian trace of the loss surface, which gives non-vacuous measures relative to the observed generalization errors.
Decoupling Template Bias in CLIP: Harnessing Empty Prompts for Enhanced Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Zhenyu Zhang; Guangyao Chen; Yixiong Zou; Zhimeng Huang; Yuhua Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model excels in few-shot learning by aligning visual and textual representations. Our study shows that template-sample similarity (TSS), defined as the resemblance between a text template and an image sample, introduces bias. This bias leads the model to rely on template proximity rather than true sample-to-category alignment, reducing both accuracy and robustness in classification.
We present a framework that uses empty prompts, textual inputs that convey the idea of “emptiness” without category information. These prompts capture unbiased template features and offset TSS bias. The framework employs two stages. During pre-training, empty prompts reveal and reduce template-induced bias within the CLIP encoder. During few-shot fine-tuning, a bias calibration loss enforces correct alignment between images and their categories, ensuring the model focuses on relevant visual cues.
Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our template correction method significantly reduces performance fluctuations caused by TSS, yielding higher classification accuracy and stronger robustness.
Length-Adaptive Interest Network for Balancing Long and Short Sequence Modeling in CTR Prediction
Authors: Zhicheng Zhang; Zhaocheng Du; Jieming Zhu; Jiwei Tang; Fengyuan Lu; Wang Jiaheng; Song-Li Wu; Qianhui Zhu; Jingyu Li; Hai-Tao Zheng; Zhenhua Dong
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: User behavior sequences in modern recommendation systems exhibit significant length heterogeneity, ranging from sparse short-term interactions to rich long-term histories. While longer sequences provide more context, we observe that increasing the maximum input sequence length in existing CTR models paradoxically degrades performance for short-sequence users due to attention polarization and length imbalance in training data. To address this, we propose LAIN (Length-Adaptive Interest Network), a plug-and-play framework that explicitly incorporates sequence length as a conditioning signal to balance long- and short-sequence modeling. LAIN consists of three lightweight components: a Spectral Length Encoder that maps length into continuous representations, Length-Conditioned Prompting that injects global contextual cues into both long- and short-term behavior branches, and Length-Modulated Attention that adaptively adjusts attention sharpness based on sequence length. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks across five strong CTR backbones show that LAIN consistently improves overall performance, achieving up to 1.15% AUC gain and 2.25% log loss reduction. Notably, our method significantly improves accuracy for short-sequence users without sacrificing long-sequence effectiveness. Our work offers a general, efficient, and deployable solution to mitigate length-induced bias in sequential recommendation.