GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
GAHMN: A Generative Approach for High-Dimensional Mediation Analysis
Authors: Jiaming Zhang; Yiqi Lin; Rou Zhang; Xinyuan Song; Hanwen Ning
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: High-dimensional mediation analysis (HMA) seeks to uncover complex causal mechanisms involving numerous mediators and plays a crucial role in scientific and social sciences. In this work, we introduce the Generative Adversarial High-dimensional Mediation Network (GAHMN), a novel, scalable structured generative framework designed for causal analysis in high-dimensional settings. GAHMN formulates mediation analysis as dual conditional generative blocks, explicitly capturing mediators' dual roles as outcomes influenced by treatments and as predictors affecting outcomes. Each block integrates a high-dimensional partially linear structure with multi-channel convolutional layers, promoting effective parameter sharing and enhanced representation learning. To induce sparsity and accurate mediator selection, GAHMN employs customized min-max optimization problems with L1 penalties on generator parameters, alongside specially designed optimization algorithms for efficient computation. Unlike existing benchmark methods relying on restrictive parametric assumptions or random-effect specifications, GAHMN flexibly captures heterogeneity, complex distributions, and inter-mediator correlations. With careful design, the computational complexity of GAHMN scales linearly with the number of mediators p, rather than quadratically as in conventional approaches. Theoretical results rigorously ensures estimation consistency, convergence rate, and accurate sparse recovery. GAHMN also serves as a structured generative causal modeling framework, extending to causal decomposition, structural equation modeling, and counterfactual policy evaluation. Extensive experiments confirm GAHMN's superior performance and robustness in synthetic and real-world scenarios.
PepCCD: A Contrastive Conditioned Diffusion Framework for Target-Specific Peptide Generation
Authors: Jun Zhang; Yangyang Zhou; Tiantian Zhu; Zexuan Zhu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Peptide-based drug design targeting “undruggable” proteins remains one of the most critical challenges in modern drug discovery. Conventional peptide-discovery pipelines rely on low-throughput experimental screening, which is both time-consuming and prohibitively expensive. Moreover, existing computational approaches for designing peptides against target proteins typically depend on the availability of high-quality structural information. Although recent structure-prediction tools such as AlphaFold3 have achieved breakthroughs in protein modeling, their accuracy for functional interfaces remains limited. The acquisition of high-resolution structures is often expensive, time-intensive, and particularly challenging for targets with dynamic conformations, further restricting the efficient development of peptide therapeutics. Additionally, current sequence-based generative methods follow a paradigm that relies on known templates, which limits the exploration of sequence space and results in generated peptides lacking diversity and novelty. To address these limitations, we propose a contrastive conditioned diffusion framework for target-specific peptide generation, referred to as PepCCD. It employs a contrastive learning strategy between proteins and peptides to extract sequence-based conditioning representations of target proteins, which serve as precise conditions to guide a pre-trained diffusion model to generate peptide sequences with the desired target specificity. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark target proteins demonstrate that the peptides designed by PepCCD exhibit strong binding affinity and outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of diversity and generation efficiency.
Vulnerability-Aware Robust Multimodal Adversarial Training
Authors: Junrui Zhang; Xinyu Zhao; Jie Peng; Chenjie Wang; Jianmin Ji; Tianlong Chen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal learning has shown significant superiority on various tasks by integrating multiple modalities.
However, the interdependencies among modalities increase the susceptibility of multimodal models to adversarial attacks.
Existing methods mainly focus on attacks on specific modalities or indiscriminately attack all modalities. 
In this paper, we find that these approaches ignore the differences between modalities in their contribution to final robustness, resulting in suboptimal robustness performance.
To bridge this gap, we introduce Vulnerability-Aware Robust Multimodal Adversarial Training (VARMAT), a probe-in-training adversarial training method that improves multimodal robustness by identifying the vulnerability of each modality.
To be specific, VARMAT first explicitly quantifies the vulnerability of each modality, grounded in a first-order approximation of the attack objective (Probe). Then, we propose a targeted regularization term that penalizes modalities with high vulnerability, guiding robust learning while maintaining task accuracy (Training).
We demonstrate the enhanced robustness of our method across multiple multimodal datasets involving diverse modalities.
Finally, we achieve {12.73%, 22.21%, 11.19%} robustness improvement on three multimodal datasets, revealing a significant blind spot in multimodal adversarial training.
Breaking Down Market Barriers: Distilled Prompt-Tuning Approach for Cross-Market Recommendation
Authors: Leqi Zhang; Wayne Lu; Haiyang Zhang; Elliott Wen; Zhixuan Liang; Jia Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Cross-market recommendation (CMR) faces severe challenges from distribution shifts between data-rich source markets and sparse target markets. Existing methods rely on a pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm for knowledge transfer, yet suffer from two key limitations: i) the objective gap between pre-training and full-parameter fine-tuning causes loss of generalized knowledge from source markets; ii) the high computational costs of extensive fine-tuning hinder scalability. To this end, we propose DCMPT, a novel Distilled Cross-Market Prompt-Tuning approach. DCMPT reframes the problem under a more efficient pre-training and prompt-tuning paradigm. Instead of full fine-tuning, we adapt a pre-trained universal backbone by freezing its weights and injecting a minimal set of learnable prompts to form a "student" model. To effectively optimize these prompts on sparse data, we introduce a novel teacher-student architecture: a specialized "teacher" model, trained exclusively on the target market, provides dense, market-specific supervision. This guidance is delivered via a dual distillation strategy designed to transfer global ranking patterns and adapt to local consumer tastes. Extensive experiments on real-world market datasets demonstrate that DCMPT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior target market performance with substantial parameter-efficiency.
HALoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation with Hierarchical Budget Allocation for Efficient Vision-Language Alignment
Authors: Letian Zhang; GuangHao Meng; XuDong Ren; Jinpeng Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: With the emergence of large multimodal models, dual-encoder alignment via contrastive learning has seen a resurgence. However, the escalating model size demands effective Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). While LoRA is a promising inference-free alternative to adapters, we find that its naive application to multimodal tasks causes a severe rank imbalance, favoring the text modality and FFN layers. To address this, we propose HALoRA (Hierarchical Allocation LoRA), which introduces a component-wise budget allocator to ensure balanced fine-tuning across both modalities and their internal components. This is complemented by a gradient-approximated initialization to accelerate convergence. With only half the parameters of adapters, HALoRA achieves superior or competitive performance in retrieval and zero-shot classification. Our work presents a more principled approach to multimodal LoRA,  uncovering an intriguing asymmetry in vision-language alignment.
EvoFMVC: Trusted Federated Multi-View Clustering with Evolutionary Fusion
Authors: Li Zhang; Pinhan Fu; Li Lv; Qian Guo; Liang Du; Xinyan Liang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: With the growing demand for decentralized collaborative analysis of privacy-sensitive data, federated multi-view clustering (FMVC) has attracted widespread attention due to its ability to balance privacy protection and collaborative modeling. However, current methods still face the following challenges: (1) Clients need to frequently upload high-dimensional data such as model parameters or graph structures, resulting in high communication costs; (2) The structured data uploaded often contains semantic features and has a high risk of being inverted; (3) The server usually merges the data from all clients with the fixed fusion rule, which may result in a suboptimized clustering result when there exist low-quality clients. To address the issues, we propose a new trusted federated multi-view clustering framework (EvoFMVC) that introduces three key innovations: First, lightweight trusted evidence serves as a compact communication medium, significantly reducing overhead compared to conventional model parameters or graph structures. Second, trusted evidences express clustering results in the form of probability distribution, which avoids the risk of structured information being easily inverted. Lastly, we formalize the server-side aggregation process as a neural architecture search (NAS) task where the server flexibly uses different fusion operators to filter and fuse necessary views through evolutionary algorithms, which significantly improves the fusion effect and model performance. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that our method is superior to existing FMVC methods in terms of clustering accuracy and communication efficiency.
TOFA: Training-Free One-Shot Federated Adaptation for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Li Zhang; Zhongxuan Han; XiaoHua Feng; Jiaming Zhang; Yuyuan Li; Linbo Jiang; Jianan Lin; Chaochao Chen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Efficient and lightweight adaptation of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks through collaborative interactions between local clients and a central server is a rapidly emerging research topic in federated learning.
Existing adaptation algorithms are typically trained iteratively, which incur significant communication costs and increase the susceptibility to potential attacks. Motivated by the one-shot federated training techniques that reduce client-server exchanges to a single round, developing a lightweight one-shot federated VLM adaptation method to alleviate these issues is particularly attractive. However, current one-shot approaches face certain challenges in adapting VLMs within federated settings: (1) insufficient exploitation of the rich multimodal information inherent in VLMs; (2) lack of specialized adaptation strategies to systematically handle the severe data heterogeneity; and (3) requiring additional training resource of clients or server. To bridge these gaps, we propose a novel Training-free One-shot Federated Adaptation framework for VLMs, named TOFA. To fully leverage the generalizable multimodal features in pre-trained VLMs, TOFA employs both visual and textual pipelines to extract task-relevant representations. In the visual pipeline, a hierarchical Bayesian model learns personalized, class-specific prototype distributions. For the textual pipeline, TOFA evaluates and globally aligns the generated local text prompts for robustness. An adaptive weight calibration mechanism is also introduced to combine predictions from both modalities, balancing personalization and robustness to handle data heterogeneity. Our method is training-free, not relying on additional training resources on either the client or server side. Extensive experiments across 9 datasets in various federated settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TOFA method.
Parameter-Free Clustering via Self-Supervised Consensus Maximization
Authors: Lijun Zhang; Suyuan Liu; Siwei Wang; Shengju Yu; Xueling Zhu; Miaomiao Li; Xinwang Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Clustering is a fundamental task in unsupervised learning, but most existing methods heavily rely on hyperparameters such as the number of clusters or other sensitive settings, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this long-standing challenge, we propose a novel and fully parameter-free clustering framework via Self-supervised Consensus Maximization, named SCMax. Our framework performs hierarchical agglomerative clustering and cluster evaluation in a single, integrated process. At each step of agglomeration, it creates a new, structure-aware data representation through a self-supervised learning task guided by the current clustering structure. We then introduce a nearest neighbor consensus score, which measures the agreement between the nearest neighbor-based merge decisions suggested by the original representation and the self-supervised one. The moment at which consensus maximization occurs can serve as a criterion for determining the optimal number of clusters. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms existing clustering approaches designed for scenarios with an unknown number of clusters.
QuMAB: Query-based Multi-annotator Behavior Pattern Learning
Authors: Liyun Zhang; Zheng Lian; Hong Liu; Takanori Takebe; Shozo Nishii; Yuta Nakashima
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-annotator learning traditionally aggregates diverse annotations to approximate a single “ground truth”, treating disagreements as noise. However, this paradigm faces fundamental challenges: subjective tasks often lack absolute ground truth, and sparse annotation coverage makes aggregation statistically unreliable. We introduce a paradigm shift from sample-wise aggregation to annotator-wise behavior modeling. By treating annotator disagreements as valuable information rather than noise, modeling annotator-specific behavior patterns can reconstruct unlabeled data to reduce annotation cost, enhance aggregation reliability, and explain annotator decision behavior. To this end, we propose QuMAB (Query-based Multi-Annotator Behavior Pattern Learning), which uses lightweight queries to model individual annotators while capturing inter-annotator correlations as implicit regularization, preventing overfitting to sparse individual data while maintaining individualization and improving generalization, with a visualization of annotator focus regions offering an explainable analysis of behavior understanding. We contribute two large-scale datasets with dense per-annotator labels: STREET (4,300 labels/annotator) and AMER (average 3,118 labels/annotator), the first multimodal multi-annotator dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our QuMAB in modeling individual annotators’ behavior patterns, their utility for consensus prediction, and applicability under sparse annotations.
SimLabel: Similarity-Weighted Semi-supervision for Multi-annotator Learning with Missing Labels
Authors: Liyun Zhang; Zheng Lian; Hong Liu; Takanori Takebe; Yuta Nakashima
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-annotator learning (MAL) aims to model annotator-specific labeling patterns. However, existing methods face a critical challenge: they simply skip updating annotator-specific model parameters when encountering missing labels—a common scenario in real-world crowdsourced datasets where each annotator labels only small subsets of samples. This leads to inefficient data utilization and overfitting risks. To this end, we propose a novel similarity-weighted semi-supervised learning framework (SimLabel) that leverages inter-annotator similarities to generate weighted soft labels for missing annotations, enabling the utilization of unannotated samples rather than skipping them entirely. We further introduce a confidence-based iterative refinement mechanism that combines maximum probability with entropy-based uncertainty to prioritize predicted high-quality pseudo-labels to impute missing labels, jointly enhancing similarity estimation and model performance over time. For evaluation, we contribute a new multimodal multi-annotator dataset, AMER2, with high and more variable missing rates, reflecting real-world annotation sparsity and enabling evaluation across different sparsity levels. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method.
SALR: Sparsity-Aware Low-Rank Representation for Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
Authors: Longteng Zhang; Sen Wu; Shuai Hou; Zhengyu Qing; Zhuo Zheng; Danning Ke; Qihong Lin; Qiang Wang; Shaohuai Shi; Xiaowen Chu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Adapting large pre-trained language models to downstream tasks often entails fine-tuning millions of parameters or deploying costly dense weight updates, which hinders their use in resource-constrained environments. Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) reduces trainable parameters by factorizing weight updates, yet the underlying dense weights still impose high storage and computation costs. Magnitude-based pruning can yield sparse models but typically degrades LoRA’s performance when applied naively. In this paper, we introduce SALR (Sparsity-Aware Low-Rank Representation), a novel fine-tuning paradigm that unifies low-rank adaptation with sparse pruning under a rigorous mean-squared-error framework. We prove that statically pruning only the frozen base weights minimizes the pruning error bound, and we recover the discarded residual information via a truncated-SVD low-rank adapter, which provably reduces per-entry MSE by a factor of (1 - r/min(d, k)). To maximize hardware efficiency, we fuse multiple low-rank adapters into a single concatenated GEMM, and we adopt a bitmap-based encoding with a two-stage pipelined decoding + GEMM design to achieve true model compression and speedup. Empirically, SALR attains 50% sparsity on various LLMs while matching the performance of LoRA on GSM8K and MMLU, reduces model size by 2x, and delivers up to a 1.7x inference speedup.
VEDA: Generation of 3D Molecules via Variance-Exploding Diffusion with Annealing
Authors: Peining Zhang; Jinbo Bi; Minghu Song
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion models show promise for 3D molecular generation, but face a fundamental trade-off between sampling efficiency and conformational accuracy. While flow-based models are fast, they often produce geometrically inaccurate structures, as they have difficulty capturing the multimodal distributions of molecular conformations. In contrast, denoising diffusion models are more accurate but suffer from slow sampling, a limitation attributed to sub-optimal integration between diffusion dynamics and SE(3)‑equivariant architectures. 
To address this, we propose VEDA, a unified SE(3)-equivariant framework that combines variance-exploding diffusion with annealing to efficiently generate conformationally accurate 3D molecular structures. Specifically, our key technical contributions include: (1) a VE schedule that enables noise injection functionally analogous to simulated annealing, improving 3D accuracy and reducing relaxation energy; (2) a novel preconditioning scheme that reconciles the coordinate-predicting nature of SE(3)-equivariant networks with a residual-based diffusion objective, and (3) a new arcsin-based scheduler that concentrates sampling in critical intervals of the logarithmic signal-to-noise ratio. 
On the QM9 and GEOM-DRUGS datasets, VEDA matches the sampling efficiency of flow-based models, achieving state-of-the-art valency stability and validity with only 100 sampling steps. More importantly, VEDA's generated structures are remarkably stable, as measured by their relaxation energy (Delta E_relax) during GFN2-xTB optimization. The median energy change is only 1.72kcal/mol, significantly lower than the 32.3kcal/mol from its architectural baseline, SemlaFlow. Our framework demonstrates that principled integration of VE diffusion with SE(3)-equivariant architectures can achieve both high chemical accuracy and computational efficiency.
FUSE: Fine-Grained and Semantic-Aware Learning for Unified Image Understanding and Generation
Authors: Peng Zhang; Wanggui He; Mushui Liu; Wenyi Xiao; Siyu Zou; Yuan Li; Xingjian Wang; Guanghao Zhang; Yanpeng Liu; Weilong Dai; Jinlong Liu; Shuyi Ying; Ruikai Zhou; Yunlong Yu; Yubo Tao; Hai Lin; Hao Jiang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent unified models have demonstrated that the reasoning capacity of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can be leveraged to facilitate diffusion-based image generation with impressive flexibility and performance. However, approaches that rely heavily on MLLMs for high-level semantic encoding often struggle with fine-grained visual tasks like image editing and virtual try-on. To address this gap, we propose FUSE, a unified framework excelling at both high-level vision–language understanding and fine-grained generation. First, we introduce a Semantic-to-Detail Connector that pre-aligns fine-grained visual features with the MLLM's semantic space. This design counteracts the low-level information loss inherent in MLLM encodings, creating a unified representation that steers the diffusion process with both global semantics and rich local details. Second, to further enhance semantic awareness and detail preservation, we introduce Adaptive-GRPO, a post-training objective that dynamically balances semantic coherence against pixel-level fidelity. The integration of these two innovations allows FUSE to generate images that are both semantically faithful and visually fine-grained. Comprehensive experiments on text-to-image and instruction-guided editing benchmarks show that FUSE significantly outperforms existing unified baselines, achieving 0.89 on Geneval, 0.65 on WISE, and 3.88 on ImageEdit.
Beyond Conservation: Flexible Molecular Assembly with Unbalanced Diffusion Bridge
Authors: Rongchao Zhang; Yiwei Lou; Yu Huang; Yi Xin; Yongzhi Cao; Hanpin Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Molecular assembly (MA) has long been a fundamental task in chemistry and biology, with the potential to create new materials and enable novel functions beyond the molecular scale. However, its vast conformational search space poses substantial challenges, and current generative models remain limited in capturing molecular flexibility and preventing non-physical poses. In this paper, we propose AssemUDB, a diffusion bridge–based framework that learns transport mappings between two distinct flexible domains for molecular assembly generation. We reformulate the marginal matching constraint of diffusion bridges as a coupling distribution governed by unbalanced transport rather than imposing strict conservation. Subsequently, we employ a progressive process from structural relaxation in Euclidean space to assembly on the SE(3) manifold. This relaxation of marginal conservation grants the generative model greater flexibility and leads to more physically plausible atom placements. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of AssemUDB. Notably, we find that the method demonstrates performance comparable to, or even better than, mature tools such as PackMol for packing tasks.