GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Shrinking the Teacher: An Adaptive Teaching Paradigm for Asymmetric EEG-Vision Alignment
Authors: Lukun Wu; Jie Li; Ziqi Ren; Kaifan Zhang; Xinbo Gao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Decoding visual features from EEG signals is a central challenge in neuroscience, with cross-modal alignment as the dominant approach. We argue that the relationship between visual and brain modalities is fundamentally asymmetric, characterized by two critical gaps: a Fidelity Gap (stemming from EEG's inherent noise and signal degradation, vs. vision's high-fidelity features) and a Semantic Gap (arising from EEG's shallow conceptual representation, vs. vision's rich semantic depth). Previous methods often overlook this asymmetry, forcing alignment between the two modalities as if they were equal partners and thereby leading to poor generalization. To address this, we propose the adaptive teaching paradigm. This paradigm empowers the ``teacher" modality (vision) to dynamically shrink and adjust its knowledge structure under task guidance, tailoring its semantically dense features to match the ``student" modality (EEG)'s capacity. We implement this paradigm with the ShrinkAdapter, a simple yet effective module featuring a residual-free design and a bottleneck structure. Through extensive experiments, we validate the underlying rationale and effectiveness of our paradigm. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of 60.2% on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 9.8%. Our work introduces a new perspective for asymmetric alignment: the teacher must shrink and adapt to bridge the vision-brain gap.
Multigranular Evaluation for Brain Visual Decoding
Authors: Weihao Xia; Cengiz Oztireli
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing evaluation protocols for brain visual decoding predominantly rely on coarse metrics that obscure inter-model differences, lack neuroscientific foundation, and fail to capture fine-grained visual distinctions. To address these limitations, we introduce BASIC, a unified, multigranular evaluation framework that jointly quantifies structural fidelity, inferential alignment, and contextual coherence between decoded and ground-truth images. For the structural level, we introduce a hierarchical suite of segmentation-based metrics, including foreground, semantic, instance, and component masks, anchored in granularity-aware correspondence across mask structures. For the semantic level, we extract structured scene representations encompassing objects, attributes, and relationships using multimodal large language models, enabling detailed, scalable, and context-rich comparisons with ground-truth stimuli. We benchmark a diverse set of visual decoding methods across multiple stimulus-neuroimaging datasets within this unified evaluation framework. Together, these criteria provide a more discriminative, interpretable, and comprehensive foundation for evaluating brain visual decoding methods.
Automated Human Strategic Behavior Modeling via Large Language Models
Authors: Xiaohan Xie; Haoran Yu; Biying Shou; Jianwei Huang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: What if machines could discover human behavioral patterns better than experts? Traditional behavioral modeling in economics depends on costly manual refinement by domain experts, severely limiting scalability and discovery potential. We introduce AutoBM, an automated behavioral modeling framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) to systematically generate, evaluate, and refine interpretable behavioral models directly from human behavior data. AutoBM represents candidate models as structured natural language specifications, explicitly defining symbolic terms along with their tunable parameters, interpretations, and design rationales. AutoBM leverages LLMs to automatically translate each language specification into executable code, optimize tunable parameters, and evaluate model performance. Utilizing LLM-guided search strategies, AutoBM iteratively recombines and improves models at the term level, closely mirroring human expert practices. Experiments conducted across three distinct strategic environments (the ultimatum game, repeated rock-paper-scissors, and continuous double auctions) demonstrate that AutoBM-generated models consistently outperform leading manually crafted models, achieving significant improvements in prediction accuracy while maintaining clear interpretability. Our results demonstrate that automated frameworks can not only match but systematically exceed human expertise in behavioral modeling, fundamentally changing how we understand strategic human behavior.
Point Cloud Quality Assessment via Multi-View Structure-Aware Feature Fusion
Authors: Jian Xiong; Lingxia Jiang; Xianzhong Long; Miaohui Wang; Hao Gao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) is essential for reliable 3D visual applications. While point-based methods face challenges in characterizing distortions due to point cloud disorder, projection-based approaches offer better efficiency but suffer from geometric distortion insensitivity and texture representation blind spots. This study proposes SAF-Net, a multi-view structure-aware feature fusion network for PCQA. We first identify two key limitations in projection-based methods: insufficient geometric distortion perception and representation blind spots (RBS) in texture images. To address these issues, SAF-Net innovatively integrates object mask maps and local binary pattern (LBP) maps. The mask maps enhance geometric distortion perception by extracting edge sharpness and curvature variations, while LBP maps capture essential structural information to overcome RBS and align with human visual system (HVS) sensitivity. SAF-Net employs a hybrid CNN-ViT architecture to balance local feature extraction and global context modeling, along with a progressive fusion strategy to optimize cross-modal feature interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SAF-Net on multiple benchmarks, establishing new state-of-the-art results in PCQA.
CyC3D: Fine-grained Controllable 3D Generation via Cycle Consistency Regularization
Authors: Hongbin Xu; Chaohui Yu; Feng Xiao; Jiazheng Xing; Hai Ci; Weitao Chen; Fan Wang; Ming Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite the remarkable progress of 3D generation, achieving controllability, i.e., ensuring consistency between generated 3D content and input conditions like edge and depth, remains a significant challenge. Existing methods often struggle to maintain accurate alignment, leading to noticeable discrepancies. To address this issue, we propose CyC3D, a new framework that enhances controllable 3D generation by explicitly encouraging cyclic consistency between the second-order 3D content, generated based on extracted signals from the first-order generation, and its original input controls. Specifically, we employ an efficient feed-forward backbone that can generate a 3D object from an input condition and a text prompt. Given an initial viewpoint and a control signal, a novel view is rendered from the generated 3D content, from which the extracted condition is used to regenerate the 3D content. This re-generated output is then rendered back to the initial viewpoint, followed by another round of control signal extraction, forming a cyclic process with two consistency constraints. View consistency ensures coherence between the two generated 3D objects, measured by semantic similarity to accommodate generative diversity. Condition consistency aligns the final extracted signal with the original input control, preserving structural or geometric details throughout the process. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that CyC3D significantly improves controllability, especially for fine-grained details, outperforming existing methods across various conditions (e.g., +14.17% PSNR for edge, +6.26% PSNR for sketch).
AR-Nav Benchmark: Augmented Reality Navigation with Vision and Language
Authors: Liqi Yan; Yihao Wu; Chenyi Xu; Chao Yang; Jianhui Zhang; Pan Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Augmented Reality (AR) navigation has emerged as a transformative tool for spatial intelligence, enabling users to interactively explore complex environments through wearable and mobile AR devices. However, current AR navigation systems struggle with low indoor localization accuracy, weak semantic understanding, and limited long-term memory, which severely limits their adaptability in dynamic, multi-floor, and large-scale real-world settings. To address these challenges, we present AR-Nav benchmark, a novel dataset with corresponding suite that leverages vision and language for AR navigation. First, to construct this benchmark, we proposed an Augmented Reality Visual-Language Memory Model (AR‑VLM²), which generates structured, semantically rich, and temporally indexed representations for long-term AR navigation. Second, we design a lightweight navigation intent recommending module with hierarchical topological reasoning and language-grounded path planning, called ARN‑Pilot, enabling low-latency and personalized route selection. Third, we introduce a closed-loop AR interaction module that supports real-time multi-modal feedback, dynamic memory updates, and human-in-the-loop query refinement. Extensive experiments in indoor multi-floor and outdoor parking scenarios show that AR-Nav suite significantly outperforms state-of-the-art AR navigation methods.
On Coresets for End-to-end Learning from Crowds
Authors: Hang Yang; Zhiwu Li; Witold Pedrycz
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Crowdsourcing is a common approach for training data-hungry models by collecting high-quality labeled data with human labor. With crowdsourcing data, the end-to-end learning paradigm is rising, where the classifier is concatenated with annotator-specific confusion layers and the two parts are co-trained in a parameter-coupled manner. However, learning with the size of a very large set of annotations is a challenge when computation or energy is limited. In this paper, we analyze and refine the coresets for end-to-end learning from crowds under the sensitivity sampling framework. This coreset is a small possible subset of annotations, so one can efficiently optimize the Coupled Cross-Entropy Minimization problem with guaranteed approximation. We first prove the lower bound, which shows no coresets smaller than complete data with confusion layers. Then, with workers' transition matrices, we show that with the regularization term, this lower bound can be prevented. Our main result is that under mild assumptions, a smaller coreset exists for the regularized Coupled Cross-Entropy Minimization problem. An upper bound of sensitivity is proposed for designing a sampling algorithm called CrowdCore. The experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our analysis.
Plug-and-Play Clarifier: A Zero-Shot Multimodal Framework for Egocentric Intent Disambiguation
Authors: Sicheng Yang; Yukai Huang; Weitong Cai; Shitong Sun; You He; Jiankang Deng; Hang Zhang; Jifei Song; Zhensong Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The performance of egocentric AI agents is fundamentally limited by multimodal intent ambiguity. This challenge arises from a combination of underspecified language, imperfect visual data, and deictic gestures, which frequently leads to task failure. Existing monolithic Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle to resolve these multimodal ambiguous inputs, often failing silently or hallucinating responses. To address these ambiguities, we introduce the Plug-and-Play Clarifier, a zero-shot and modular framework that decomposes the problem into discrete, solvable sub-tasks. Specifically, our framework consists of three synergistic modules: (1) a text clarifier that uses dialogue-driven reasoning to interactively disambiguate linguistic intent, (2) a vision clarifier that delivers real-time guidance feedback, instructing users to adjust their positioning for improved capture quality, and (3) a cross-modal clarifier with grounding mechanism that robustly interprets 3D pointing gestures and identifies the specific objects users are pointing to. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework improves the intent clarification performance of small language models (4-8B) by approximately 30%, making them competitive with significantly larger counterparts. We also observe consistent gains when applying our framework to these larger models. Furthermore, our vision clarifier increases corrective guidance accuracy by over 20%, and our cross-modal clarifier improves semantic answer accuracy for referential grounding by 5%. Overall, our method provides a plug-and-play framework that effectively resolves multimodal ambiguity and significantly enhances user experience in egocentric interaction.
SUGAR: Learning Skeleton Representation with Visual-Motion Knowledge for Action Recognition
Authors: Qilang Ye; Yu Zhou; Lian He; Jie Zhang; Xuanming Guo; Jiayu Zhang; Mingkui Tan; Weicheng Xie; Yue Sun; Tao Tan; Xiaochen Yuan; Ghada Khoriba; Zitong Yu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) hold rich implicit knowledge and powerful transferability. In this paper, we explore the combination of LLMs with the human skeleton to perform action classification and description. However, when treating LLM as a recognizer, two questions arise: 1) How can LLMs understand the skeleton? 2) How can LLMs distinguish among actions? To address these problems, we introduce a novel paradigm named learning Skeleton representation with visual-motion knowledge for Action Recognition (SUGAR). In our pipeline, we first utilize off-the-shelf large-scale video models as a knowledge base to generate visual, motion information related to actions. Then, we propose to supervise skeleton learning through this prior knowledge to yield discrete representations. Finally, we use the LLM with untouched pre-training weights to understand these representations and generate the desired action targets and descriptions. Notably, we present a Temporal Query Projection (TQP) module to continuously model the skeleton signals with long sequences. Experiments on several skeleton-based action classification benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our SUGAR. Moreover, experiments on zero-shot scenarios show that SUGAR is more versatile than linear-based methods.
Reconstruction Attack-Resistant Inference Paradigm for LLM Cloud Services
Authors: Zipeng Ye; Wenjian Luo; Qi Zhou; Yubo Tang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have seen remarkable growth in recent years. To leverage convenient LLM cloud services, users are inevitably to upload their prompts. Additionally, for tasks such as translation, reading comprehension, and summarization, associated files or context are inherently needed, whether or not they contain user privacy information. Despite the rapid progress in LLM capabilities, research on preserving user privacy during inference has been relatively scarce. To this end, this paper conducts some exploratory research in this domain. Firstly, we show that (1) the embedding space of tokens is highly sparse, and (2) LLMs primarily function in the orthogonal subspace of embedding space, these two factors making privacy extremely vulnerable. Then, we analyze the structural characteristics of LLMs and design a distributed privacy-preserving inference paradigm which can effectively resist privacy attacks. Finally, we perform a thorough evaluation of the defended models on mainstream tasks and find that low-bit quantization techniques can be effectively combined with our inference paradigm, achieving a balance between privacy, utility, and runtime memory efficiency.
TiCAL:Typicality-Based Consistency-Aware Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Authors: Wen Yin; Siyu Zhan; Cencen Liu; Xin Hu; Guiduo Duan; Xiurui Xie; Yuan-Fang Li; Tao He
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) aims to accurately identify human emotional states by integrating heterogeneous modalities such as visual, auditory, and textual data. Existing approaches predominantly rely on unified emotion labels to supervise model training, often overlooking a critical challenge: inter-modal emotion conflicts, wherein different modalities within the same sample may express divergent emotional tendencies. In this work, we address this overlooked issue by proposing a novel framework, Typicality-based Consistent-aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition (TiCAL), inspired by the stage-wise nature of human emotion perception. TiCAL dynamically assesses the consistency of each training sample by leveraging pseudo unimodal emotion labels alongside a typicality estimation. To further enhance emotion representation, we embed features in a hyperbolic space, enabling the capture of fine-grained distinctions among emotional categories. By incorporating consistency estimates into the learning process, our method improves model performance, particularly on samples exhibiting high modality inconsistency. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, e.g, MOSEI and MER2023, validate the effectiveness of TiCAL in mitigating inter-modal emotional conflicts and enhancing overall recognition accuracy, e.g., with about 2.6% improvements over the state-of-the-art DMD.
2D-CrossScan Mamba: Enhancing State Space Models with Spatially Consistent Multi-Path 2D Information Propagation
Authors: Longlong Yu; Wenxi Li; Yaoqi Sun; Hang Xu; Chenggang Yan; Yuchen Guo
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite recent progress in adapting State Space Models such as Mamba to vision tasks, their intrinsic 1D scanning mechanism imposes limitations when applied to inherently 2D-structured data like images. Existing adaptations, including VMamba and 2DMamba, either suffer from inconsistency between scanning order and spatial locality or restrict inter-patch communication to singular paths, hindering effective information propagation. In this paper, we propose 2D-CrossScan, a novel 2D-compatible scan framework that enables spatially consistent, multi-path hidden state propagation by integrating modified state equations over two-dimensional neighborhoods. Furthermore, we mitigate redundant information accumulation due to overlapping paths via cross-directional subtraction. To fully align with the 2D spatial structure, we introduce a multi-directional scanning strategy that starts simultaneously from all four corners of the image, enabling diverse propagation paths and better feature integration.  Our approach maintains efficiency, requiring only minimal architectural changes to existing Mamba variants. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements in multiple visual tasks, including object detection and semantic segmentation on PANDA and COCO datasets. Compared to baseline SSM-based methods, 2D-CrossScan consistently yields better spatial representations, as confirmed by extensive effective receptive field visualizations and attention analyses. These results highlight the importance of geometry-aware state propagation and validate 2D-CrossScan as a simple yet powerful extension to SSMs for vision.
MF-Speech: Achieving Fine-Grained and Compositional Control in Speech Generation via Factor Disentanglement
Authors: Xinyue Yu; Youqing Fang; Pingyu Wu; Guoyang Ye; Wenbo Zhou; Weiming Zhang; Song Xiao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Generating expressive and controllable human speech is one of the core goals of generative artificial intelligence, but its progress has long been constrained by two fundamental challenges: the deep entanglement of speech factors and the coarse granularity of existing control mechanisms. To overcome these challenges, we have proposed a novel framework called MF-Speech, which consists of two core components: MF-SpeechEncoder and MF-SpeechGenerator. MF-SpeechEncoder acts as a factor purifier, adopting a multi-objective optimization strategy to decompose the original speech signal into highly pure and independent representations of content, timbre, and emotion. Subsequently, MF-SpeechGenerator functions as a conductor, achieving precise, composable and fine-grained control over these factors through dynamic fusion and Hierarchical Style Adaptive Normalization (HSAN). Experiments demonstrate that in the highly challenging multi-factor compositional speech generation task, MF-Speech significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving a lower word error rate (WER=4.67%), superior style control (SECS=0.5685, Corr=0.68), and the highest subjective evaluation scores (nMOS=3.96, sMOS_t=3.86, sMOS_e=3.78). Furthermore, the learned discrete factors exhibit strong transferability, demonstrating their significant potential as a general-purpose speech representation.
ELSPR: Evaluator LLM Training Data Self-Purification on Non-Transitive Preferences via Tournament Graph Reconstruction
Authors: Yan Yu; Yilun Liu; Minggui He; Shimin Tao; Weibin Meng; Xinhua Yang; Li Zhang; Hongxia Ma; Dengye Li; Daimeng Wei; Boxing Chen; Fuliang Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Pairwise evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has become the dominant paradigm for benchmarking open-ended tasks, yet non-transitive preferences—where evaluators prefer A over B, B over C, but C over A—fundamentally undermine ranking reliability. We show that this critical issue stems largely from low-quality data that contains inherently ambiguous preference pairs. To address this challenge, we propose ELSPR, a principled graph-theoretic framework that models pairwise preferences as tournament graphs and systematically identifies problematic training data. ELSPR quantifies non-transitivity through strongly connected components (SCCs) analysis and measures overall preference clarity using a novel normalized directed graph structural entropy metric. Our filtering methodology selectively removes preference data that induce non-transitivity while preserving transitive preferences. Extensive experiments on the AlpacaEval benchmark demonstrate that models fine-tuned on ELSPR-filtered data achieve substantial improvements: a 13.8% reduction in non-transitivity, a 0.088 decrease in structural entropy, and significantly enhanced discriminative power in real-world evaluation systems. Human validation confirms that discarded data exhibit dramatically lower inter-annotator agreement (34.4% vs. 52.6%) and model-human consistency (51.2% vs. 80.6%) compared to cleaned data. These findings establish ELSPR as an effective data self-purification approach for developing more robust, consistent, and human-aligned LLM evaluation systems.