GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
PCSR: Pseudo-label Consistency-Guided Sample Refinement for Noisy Correspondence Learning
Authors: Zhuoyao Liu; Yang Liu; Wentao Feng; Shudong Huang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Cross-modal retrieval aims to align different modalities via semantic similarity. However, existing methods often assume that image-text pairs are perfectly aligned, overlooking Noisy Correspondences in real data. These misaligned pairs misguide similarity learning and degrade retrieval performance. Previous methods often rely on coarse-grained categorizations that simply divide data into clean and noisy samples, overlooking the intrinsic diversity within noisy instances. Moreover, they typically apply uniform training strategies regardless of sample characteristics, resulting in suboptimal sample utilization for model optimization. To address the above challenges, we introduce a novel framework, called Pseudo-label Consistency-Guided Sample Refinement (PCSR), which enhances correspondence reliability by explicitly dividing samples based on pseudo-label consistency. Specifically, we first employ a confidence-based estimation to distinguish clean and noisy pairs, then refine the noisy pairs via pseudo-label consistency to uncover structurally distinct subsets. We further proposed a Pseudo-label Consistency Score (PCS) to quantify prediction stability, enabling the separation of ambiguous and refinable samples within noisy pairs. Accordingly, we adopt Adaptive Pair Optimization (APO), where ambiguous samples are optimized with robust loss functions and refinable ones are enhanced via text replacement during training. Extensive experiments on CC152K, MS-COCO and Flickr30K validate the effectiveness of our method in improving retrieval robustness under noisy supervision.
Scaling Law for Large Wireless Models
Authors: Ziheng Liu; Jiayi Zhang; Haoyu Wang; Bokai Xu; Chen Zhang; Yiyang Zhu; Enyu Shi
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Emerging from recent advances in foundation models, Large Wireless Models (LWMs) represent a new paradigm of general-purpose intelligence for wireless communications that transcends task-specific engineering. The success of foundation models is critically underpinned by scaling laws, which provide a predictable roadmap for how performance scales with resources. However, established scaling laws from language and vision, charting performance as a power-law of model and dataset sizes, are ill-suited for the wireless domain, as their core formulations cannot model the structured nature of the physical channel. To address this, we propose a novel wireless scaling law that extends the classical formulation by modeling two wireless-native factors: channel heterogeneity and discretization granularity. These two factors reshape scaling behavior via nested linear and power-law relationships, recasting the scaling law's parameters (notably the scaling exponent and irreducible loss) from universal constants into dynamic variables dictated by the physical environment. Our physics-aware formulation reveals two key insights: first, that compute-optimal scaling is not dictated by a fixed model-data ratio but is instead a dynamic function of heterogeneity and granularity, and second, that this dependency is particularly sensitive to granularity, allowing significant performance to be unlocked from existing data simply by refining its resolution. Crucially, this establishes a reliable roadmap for designing powerful yet resource-efficient LWMs, translating theoretical insights into actionable engineering principles. Extensive experiments validate our wireless scaling law, showing a 32.31% prediction accuracy improvement over classical laws in diverse wireless scenarios where they fail.
Branch, or Layer? Zeroth-Order Optimization for Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models
Authors: Ziwei Liu; Borui Kang; Wei Li; Hangjie Yuan; Yanbing Yang; Wenbin Li; Yifan Zhu; Tao Feng; Jun Luo
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-Language Continual Learning (VLCL) has attracted significant research attention for its robust capabilities, and the adoption of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies is enabling these models to achieve competitive performance with substantially reduced resource consumption. However, dominated First-Order (FO) optimization is prone to trap models in suboptimal local minima, especially in limited exploration subspace within PEFT. To overcome this challenge, this paper pioneers a systematic exploration of adopting Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization for PEFT-based VLCL. We first identify the incompatibility of naive full-ZO adoption in VLCL due to optimization process instability. We then investigate the application of ZO optimization from a modality branch-wise to a fine-grained layer-wise across various training units to identify an optimal strategy. Besides, a key theoretical insight reveals that vision modality exhibit higher variance than language counterparts in VLCL during the ZO optimization process, and we propose a modality-aware stabilized ZO strategy, which adopts gradient sign normalization in ZO and constrains vision modality perturbation to further improve performance. Benefiting from the adoption of ZO optimization, PEFT-based VLCL fulfills better ability to escape local minima during the optimization process, extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results.
Parameter-Free Fine-tuning via Redundancy Elimination for Vision Foundation Models
Authors: Jiahuan Long; Tingsong Jiang; Wen Yao; Yizhe Xiong; Zhengqin Xu; Shuai Jia; Hanqing Liu; Chao Ma
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in learning universal visual representations. However, adapting these models to downstream tasks conventionally requires parameter updates, with even parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods necessitating the modification of thousands to millions of weights. In this paper, we investigate the redundancies in the segment anything model (SAM) and then propose a novel parameter-free fine-tuning method. Unlike traditional fine-tuning methods that adjust parameters, our method emphasizes selecting, reusing, and enhancing pre-trained features, offering a new perspective on fine-tuning foundation models. Specifically, we introduce a channel selection algorithm based on the model's output difference to identify redundant and effective channels. By selectively replacing the redundant channels with more effective ones, we filter out less useful features and reuse more task-irrelevant features to downstream tasks, thereby enhancing the task-specific feature representation. Experiments on both out-of-domain and in-domain datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method in different vision tasks (e.g., image segmentation, depth estimation and image classification). Notably, our approach can seamlessly integrate with existing fine-tuning strategies (e.g., LoRA, Adapter), further boosting the performance of already fine-tuned models. Moreover, since our channel selection involves only model inference, our method significantly reduces GPU memory overhead.
Topological Federated Clustering via Gravitational Potential Fields Under Local Differential Privacy
Authors: Yunbo Long; Jiaquan Zhang; Xi Chen; Alexandra Brintrup
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Clustering non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data under local differential privacy (LDP) in federated settings presents a critical challenge: preserving privacy while maintaining accuracy without iterative communication. Existing one-shot methods rely on unstable pairwise centroid distances or neighborhood rankings, degrading severely under strong LDP noise and data heterogeneity. We present Gravitational Federated Clustering (GFC), a novel approach to privacy-preserving federated clustering that overcomes the limitations of distance-based methods under varying LDP. Addressing the critical challenge of clustering non-IID data with diverse privacy guarantees, GFC transforms privatized client centroids into a global gravitational potential field where true cluster centers emerge as topologically persistent singularities. Our framework introduces two key innovations: (1) a client-side compactness-aware perturbation mechanism that encodes local cluster geometry as "mass" values, and (2) a server-side topological aggregation phase that extracts stable centroids through persistent homology analysis of the potential field's superlevel sets. Theoretically, we establish a closed-form bound between the privacy budget ε and centroid estimation error, proving the potential field's Lipschitz smoothing properties exponentially suppress noise in high-density regions. Empirically, GFC outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ten benchmarks, especially under strong LDP constraints (ε < 1), while maintaining comparable performance at lower privacy budgets. By reformulating federated clustering as a topological persistence problem in a synthetic physics-inspired space, GFC achieves unprecedented privacy-accuracy trade-offs without iterative communication, providing a new perspective for privacy-preserving distributed learning.
DFDT: Dynamic Fast Decision Tree for IoT Data Stream Mining on Edge Devices
Authors: Afonso Lourenço; João Rodrigo; João Gama; Goreti Marreiros
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The Internet of Things generates massive data streams, with edge computing emerging as a key enabler for online IoT applications and 5G networks. Edge solutions facilitate real-time machine learning inference, but also require continuous adaptation to concept drifts. While extensions of the Very Fast Decision Tree (VFDT) remain state-of-the-art for tabular stream mining, their unregulated growth limit efficiency, particularly in ensemble settings where post-pruning at the individual tree level is seldom applied. This paper presents DFDT, a novel memory-constrained algorithm for online learning. DFDT employs activity-aware pre-pruning, dynamically adjusting splitting criteria based on leaf node activity: low-activity nodes are deactivated to conserve resources, moderately active nodes split under stricter conditions, and highly active nodes leverage a skipping mechanism for accelerated growth. Additionally, adaptive grace periods and tie thresholds allow DFDT to modulate splitting decisions based on observed data variability, enhancing the accuracy–memory–runtime trade-off while minimizing the need for hyperparameter tuning. An ablation study reveals three DFDT variants suited to different resource profiles. Fully compatible with existing ensemble frameworks, DFDT provides a drop-in alternative to standard VFDT-based learners.
Adapt Before Continual Learning
Authors: Aojun Lu; Tao Feng; Hangjie Yuan; Chunhui Ding; Yanan Sun
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Continual Learning (CL) seeks to enable neural networks to incrementally acquire new knowledge (plasticity) while retaining existing knowledge (stability). Although pre-trained models (PTMs) have provided a strong foundation for CL, existing approaches face a fundamental challenge in balancing these two competing objectives. Current methods typically address stability by freezing the PTM backbone, which severely limits the model's plasticity, particularly when incoming data distribution diverges largely from the pre-training data. Alternatively, sequentially fine-tuning the entire PTM can adapt to new knowledge but often leads to catastrophic forgetting, highlighting the critical stability-plasticity trade-off in PTM-based CL. To address this limitation, we propose Adapting PTMs before the core CL process (ACL), a novel framework that introduces a plug-and-play adaptation phase prior to learning each new task. During this phase, ACL refines the PTM backbone by aligning embeddings with their original class prototypes while distancing them from irrelevant classes. This mechanism theoretically and empirically demonstrates desirable balance between stability and plasticity, significantly improving CL performance across benchmarks and integrated methods.
Towards Non-Stationary Time Series Forecasting with Temporal Stabilization and Frequency Differencing
Authors: Junkai Lu; Peng Chen; Chenjuan Guo; Yang Shu; Meng Wang; Bin Yang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Time series forecasting is critical for decision making across dynamic domains such as energy, finance, transportation, and cloud computing. However, real-world time series often exhibit non-stationarity, including temporal distribution shifts and spectral variability, which poses significant challenges for existing long-term time series forecasting methods. In this paper, we propose DTAF, a dual-branch framework that addresses non-stationarity in both the temporal and frequency domains. For the temporal domain, the Temporal Stabilizing Fusion (TFS) module employs a non-stationary mix of experts (MOE) filter to disentangle and suppress temporal non-stationary patterns while preserving long-term dependencies. For the frequency domain, the Frequency Wave Modeling (FWM) module applies frequency differencing to dynamically highlight components with significant spectral shifts. By fusing the complementary outputs of TFS and FWM, DTAF generates robust forecasts that adapt to both temporal and frequency domain non-stationarity. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world benchmarks demonstrate that DTAF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding significant improvements in forecasting accuracy under non-stationary conditions.
Autonomous Concept Drift Threshold Determination
Authors: Pengqian Lu; Jie Lu; Anjin Liu; En Yu; Guangquan Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing drift detection methods focus on designing sensitive test statistics. They treat the detection threshold as a fixed hyperparameter, set once to balance false alarms and late detections, and applied uniformly across all datasets and over time.
However, maintaining model performance is the key objective from the perspective of machine learning, and we observe that model performance is highly sensitive to this threshold.
This observation inspires us to investigate whether a dynamic threshold could be provably better. In this paper, we prove that a threshold that adapts over time can outperform any single fixed threshold. The main idea of the proof is that a dynamic strategy, constructed by combining the best threshold from each individual data segment, is guaranteed to outperform any single threshold that apply to all segments. Based on the theorem, we propose a Dynamic Threshold Determination algorithm. It enhances existing drift detection frameworks with a novel comparison phase to inform how the threshold should be adjusted. Extensive experiments on a wide range of synthetic and real-world datasets, including both image and tabular data, validate that our approach substantially enhances the performance of state-of-the-art drift detectors.
ProGMLP: A Progressive Framework for GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation with Efficient Trade-offs
Authors: Weigang Lu; Ziyu Guan; Wei Zhao; Yaming Yang; Yujie Sun; Zheng Liang; Yibing Zhan; Dapeng Tao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: GNN-to-MLP (G2M) methods have emerged as a promising approach to accelerate Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by distilling their knowledge into simpler Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). These methods bridge the gap between the expressive power of GNNs and the computational efficiency of MLPs, making them well-suited for resource-constrained environments. However, existing G2M methods are limited by their inability to flexibly adjust inference cost and accuracy dynamically, a critical requirement for real-world applications where computational resources and time constraints can vary significantly. To address this, we introduce a Progressive framework designed to offer flexible and on-demand trade-offs between inference cost and accuracy for GNN-to-MLP knowledge distillation (ProGMLP). ProGMLP employs a Progressive Training Structure (PTS), where multiple MLP students are trained in sequence, each building on the previous one. Furthermore, ProGMLP incorporates Progressive Knowledge Distillation (PKD) to iteratively refine the distillation process from GNNs to MLPs, and Progressive Mixup Augmentation (PMA) to enhance generalization by progressively generating harder mixed samples. Our approach is validated through comprehensive experiments on eight real-world graph datasets, demonstrating that ProGMLP maintains high accuracy while dynamically adapting to varying runtime scenarios, making it highly effective for deployment in diverse application settings.
STEP-Nav: Spatial-Temporal Efficient Visual Token Pruning for Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models
Authors: Yantao Lu; Shiqi Sun; Ning Liu; Bo Jiang; Ying Zhang; Jinchao Chen; Chenglie Du
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) plays a critical role in tasks of embodied AI, particularly in unseen environments following natural language instructions. Recent advancements leverage large language models (LLMs) to improve the accuracy and generalizability of VLN systems by encoding image sequences as dense token representations. However, this tokenization approach incurs substantial computational overhead due to two key inefficiencies: 1) ego-centric camera views often include navigation-irrelevant re-
gions (e.g., sky or distant backgrounds), and 2) high-frame-rate image sequences introduce temporal redundancy. To address these challenges, we propose Spatial-Temporal Efficient Visual Token Pruning (STEP-Nav), a unified frame-
work that simultaneously prunes redundant visual tokens and fine-tunes VLN models to preserve navigation performance. In particular, STEP-Nav incorporates a distance- and content-aware token evaluation mechanism to remove irrelevant tokens at the spatial level, along with temporal level similarity-based filtering to reduce redundancy across sequential frames. To ensure pruning does not harm task performance, we introduce a distortion-aware fine-tuning strategy that aligns pruned-token representations with their full-token
counterparts while maintaining navigation accuracy. Experiments on the R2R and RxR benchmarks using Navid-CE and
NavGPT-2 as base models demonstrate that STEP-Nav preserves over 95% of the performance while reducing 66.7% of tokens, outperforming existing token pruning baselines.
Spiking-Aided Neural Architecture for Efficient and Robust WiFi Sensing
Authors: Yisha Lu; Liwen Jing; Jiangmao Zheng; Bowen Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: This paper introduces a spiking-aided wifi sensing network (SWS-Net), a novel hybrid neural architecture that integrates Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for robust WiFi-based indoor sensing. WiFi signals offer a low-cost and device-free solution for recognizing human activities, gestures, identities and etc. However, their susceptibility to multipath fading and environmental noise poses significant challenges. Inspired by the human brain’s capability to process noisy information, SWS-Net leverages the noise-resilient dynamics of spiking neurons alongside the feature extraction ability of ANNs. We present a theoretical analysis comparing the noise-handling capacities of SNNs and ANNs, and show how their combination yields both improved robustness and training efficiency. Experimental results across three WiFi sensing tasks demonstrate that SWS-Net consistently achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence compared to baseline models, validating its effectiveness in challenging indoor environments.
Beyond the Mean: Fisher-Orthogonal Projection for Natural Gradient Descent in Large Batch Training
Authors: Yishun Lu; Wesley Armour
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Modern GPUs are equipped with large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, enabling them to support mini-batch sizes of up to tens of thousands of training samples. However, most existing optimizers struggle to perform effectively at such a large batch size. 
As batch size increases, gradient noise decreases due to averaging over many samples, limiting the ability of first-order methods to escape sharp or suboptimal minima and reach the global minimum.
Meanwhile, second-order methods like the natural gradient with Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (KFAC) often require excessively high damping to remain stable at large batch sizes. This high damping effectively ``washes out" the curvature information that gives these methods their advantage, reducing their performance to that of simple gradient descent.
In this paper, we introduce Fisher-Orthogonal Projection (FOP), a novel technique that restores the effectiveness of the second-order method at very large batch sizes, enabling scalable training with improved generalization and faster convergence.
FOP constructs a variance-aware update direction by leveraging gradients from two sub-batches, enhancing the average gradient with a component of the gradient difference that is orthogonal to the average under the Fisher-metric. 
Through extensive benchmarks, we show that FOP accelerates convergence by ×1.2–1.3 over K-FAC and ×1.5–1.7 over SGD/AdamW at the same moderate batch sizes, while at extreme scales it achieves up to a ×7.5 speedup. 
Unlike other methods, FOP maintains small-batch accuracy when scaling to extremely large batch sizes. Moreover, it reduces Top-1 error by 2.3–3.3% on long-tailed CIFAR benchmarks, demonstrating robust generalization under severe class imbalance. Our lightweight, geometry-aware use of intra-batch variance makes natural-gradient optimization practical on modern data-centre GPUs. FOP is open-source and pip-installable, which can be integrated into existing training code with a single line and no extra configuration.
SkipCat: Rank-Maximized Low-Rank Compression of Large Language Models via Shared Projection and Block Skipping
Authors: Yu-Chen Lu; Sheng-Feng Yu; Hui-Hsien Weng; Pei-Shuo Wang; Yu-Fang Hu; Liang Hung-Chun; Hung-Yueh Chiang; Kai-Chiang Wu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large language models (LLM) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their substantial parameter sizes pose significant challenges for deployment on edge devices with limited computational and memory resources. Low-rank compression is a promising approach to address this issue, as it reduces both computational and memory costs, making LLM more suitable for resource-constrained environments. Nonetheless, naïve low-rank compression methods require a significant reduction in the retained rank to achieve meaningful memory and computation savings. For a low-rank model, the ranks need to be reduced by more than half to yield efficiency gains. Such aggressive truncation, however, typically results in substantial performance degradation. To address this trade-off, we propose SkipCat, a novel low-rank compression framework that enables the use of higher ranks while achieving the same compression rates. First, we introduce an intra-layer shared low-rank projection method, where multiple matrices that share the same input use a common projection. This reduces redundancy and improves compression efficiency. Second, we propose a block skipping technique that omits computations and memory transfers for selected sub-blocks within the low-rank decomposition. These two techniques jointly enable our compressed model to retain more effective ranks under the same compression budget. Experimental results show that, without any additional fine-tuning, our method outperforms previous low-rank compression approaches by 7% accuracy improvement on zero-shot tasks under the same compression rate. These results highlight the effectiveness of our rank-maximized compression strategy in preserving model performance under tight resource constraints.