GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Stationary and Clustering Transformer Hashing for Cross-modal Retrieval
Authors: Zhan Yang; Yiran Liu; Youyuan Huang; Yinan Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Unsupervised cross-modal hashing has gained significant attention for efficient retrieval between heterogeneous modalities through encoding data into the unified binary representations, offering low storage cost and fast response. However, the constraints of existing methods persist in bridging the cross-modal semantic gap and capturing fine-grained global semantic structures without explicit labels. In this paper, we propose an innovative unsupervised Stationary distribution and soft Clustering Transformer Hashing approach for cross-modal retrieval, denoted as SCTH. Initially, a Transformer-based modality fusion encoder is employed to extract abundant cross-modal semantic representations, further integrated with contrastive hashing to minimize the semantic gap. To enhance the inter-modal alignment, a pseudo-classifier clustering module with entropy-regularized contrastive loss is presented, ensuring balanced and diverse cluster assignments in unsupervised settings. Additionally, a Markovian stationary distribution strategy stabilizes the feature representations through mitigating the interference of noise and outliers. Comprehensive experiments on MIRFlickr, NUS-WIDE, and IAPR-TC12 datasets validate that SCTH outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods in cross-modal retrieval tasks, demonstrating superior generalization performance.
Forgetting Knowledge Localization and Isolation for Continual Forgetting of Pre-trained Vision Models
Authors: Zhiwen Yang; Jiehua Zhang; Chenggang Yan; Yuhan Gao; Zongpeng Li; Xichun Sheng; Liang Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Continual forgetting task aims to continuously remove multiple target knowledge subsets from pre-trained models while maintaining the integrity of remaining knowledge. Existing methods suffer from both incomplete forgetting of target knowledge and unintended forgetting of indistinguishable remaining knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose the forgetting knowledge localization and isolation for continual forgetting in pre-trained vision models which precisely forgets target knowledge while reducing over-forgetting of remaining knowledge. To achieve precise forgetting, we first propose the forgetting knowledge layer localization to explore layers in the model which are more related to forgetting knowledge. Then, we design the forgetting knowledge parameter isolation to isolate the parameters sensitive to forgetting knowledge in these selected layers, mitigating over-forgetting of remaining knowledge. Finally, we fine-tune these isolated parameters and freeze the remaining parameters to achieve efficient forgetting while maintaining high performance on retained datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods across multiple continual forgetting tasks.
Equivariant Atomic and Lattice Modeling Using Geometric Deep Learning for Crystal Structure Optimization
Authors: Ziduo Yang; Yi-Ming Zhao; Xian Wang; Wei Zhuo; Xiaoqing Liu; Lei Shen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Structure optimization, which yields the relaxed structure (minimum‑energy state), is essential for reliable materials property calculations, yet traditional ab initio approaches such as density‑functional theory (DFT) are computationally intensive. Machine learning (ML) has emerged to alleviate this bottleneck but suffers from two major limitations: (i) existing models operate mainly on atoms, leaving lattice vectors implicit despite their critical role in structural optimization; and (ii) they often rely on multi-stage, non-end-to-end workflows that are prone to error accumulation. Here, we present E³Relax, an end-to-end equivariant graph neural network that maps an unrelaxed crystal directly to its relaxed structure. E³Relax promotes both atoms and lattice vectors to graph nodes endowed with dual scalar–vector features, enabling unified and symmetry‑preserving modeling of atomic displacements and lattice deformations. A layer‑wise supervision strategy forces every network depth to make a physically meaningful refinement, mimicking the incremental convergence of DFT while preserving a fully end‑to‑end pipeline. We evaluate E³Relax on four benchmark datasets and demonstrate that it achieves remarkable accuracy and efficiency. Through DFT validations, we show that the structures predicted by E³Relax are energetically favorable, making them suitable as high-quality initial configurations to accelerate DFT calculations.
Yours or Mine? Overwriting Attacks Against Neural Audio Watermarking
Authors: Lingfeng Yao; Chenpei Huang; Shengyao Wang; Junpei Xue; Hanqing Guo; Jiang Liu; Phone Lin; Tomoaki Ohtsuki; Miao Pan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: As generative audio models are rapidly evolving, AI-generated audios increasingly raise concerns about copyright infringement and misinformation spread. Audio watermarking, as a proactive defense, can embed secret messages into audio for copyright protection and source verification. However, current neural audio watermarking methods focus primarily on the imperceptibility and robustness of watermarking, while ignoring its vulnerability to security attacks. In this paper, we develop a simple yet powerful attack: the overwriting attack that overwrites the legitimate audio watermark with a forged one and makes the original legitimate watermark undetectable. Based on the audio watermarking information that the adversary has, we propose three categories of overwriting attacks, i.e., white-box, gray-box, and black-box attacks. We also thoroughly evaluate the proposed attacks on state-of-the-art neural audio watermarking methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed overwriting attacks can effectively compromise existing watermarking schemes across various settings and achieve a nearly 100% attack success rate. The practicality and effectiveness of the proposed overwriting attacks expose security flaws in existing neural audio watermarking systems, underscoring the need to enhance security in future audio watermarking designs.
Leveraging Failed Samples: A Few-Shot and Training-Free Framework for Generalized Deepfake Detection
Authors: Shibo Yao; Renshuai Tao; Xiaolong Zheng; Chao Liang; Chunjie Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent deepfake detection studies often treat unseen sample detection as a ``zero-shot" task, training on images generated by known models but generalizing to unknown ones. A key real-world challenge arises when a model performs poorly on unknown samples, yet these samples remain available for analysis. This highlights that it should be approached as a ``few-shot" task, where effectively utilizing a small number of samples can lead to significant improvement. Unlike typical few-shot tasks focused on semantic understanding, deepfake detection prioritizes image realism, which closely mirrors real-world distributions. In this work, we propose the Few-shot Training-free Network (FTNet) for real-world few-shot deepfake detection. Simple yet effective, FTNet differs from traditional methods that rely on large-scale known data for training. Instead, FTNet uses only one fake sample from an evaluation set, mimicking the scenario where new samples emerge in the real world and can be gathered for use, without any training or parameter updates. During evaluation, each test sample is compared to the known fake and real samples, and it is classified based on the category of the nearest sample. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of AI-generated images from 29 different generative models and achieve a new SoTA performance, with an average improvement of 8.7% compared to existing methods. This work introduces a fresh perspective on real-world deepfake detection: when the model struggles to generalize on a few-shot sample, leveraging the failed samples leads to better performance.
Learning Adaptive and Expandable Mixture Model for Continual Learning
Authors: Fei Ye; YongCheng Zhong; Qihe Liu; Adrian G. Bors; JingLing Sun; Jinyu Guo; ShiJie Zhou
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Continuous learning constitutes a fundamental capability of artificial intelligence systems, enabling them to incrementally assimilate novel information without succumbing to catastrophic forgetting. Recent research has leveraged Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) to enhance continual learning efficacy. Nevertheless, prevailing methodologies typically depend on a singular pre-trained backbone and freeze all pre-trained parameters to mitigate network forgetting, thereby constraining adaptability to emerging tasks. In this study, we introduce an innovative PTM-based framework featuring a Dual-Representation Backbone Architecture (DRBA), which integrates both invariant and evolved representation networks to concurrently capture static and dynamic features. Building upon DRBA, we propose an Adaptive and Expandable Mixture Model (AEMM) that incrementally incorporates new expert modules with minimal parameter overhead to accommodate the learning of each novel task. To further augment adaptability, we develop a Dynamic Adaptive Representation Fusion Mechanism (DARFM) that processes outputs from both representation networks and autonomously generates data-driven adaptive weights, optimizing the contribution of each representation. This mechanism yields an adaptive, semantically enriched composite representation, thereby maximizing positive knowledge transfer. Additionally, we propose a Dynamic Knowledge Calibration Mechanism (DKCM), comprising prediction and representation calibration processes, to ensure consistency in both predictions and feature representations. This approach achieves a balance between stability and plasticity, even when learning complex datasets. Empirical evaluations substantiate that the proposed approach attains state-of-the-art performance.
Rethink Representation Learning for Questionnaire Data
Authors: Guanhua Ye; Jifeng He; Yan Li; Junping Du; Zhe Xue; Yingxia Shao; Meiyu Liang; Yawen Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Questionnaire data serve as a valuable resource across numerous scientific domains, offering insights into human behavior, health, and social trends. Traditional downsampling-based representation learning methods—such as standardization and one-hot encoding—reformat these data into tabular structures that inherently discard semantic richness and obscure inter-sample and inter-feature relationships. Consequently, advanced deep learning models often underperform compared to simpler approaches like gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), due to their limited capacity to extract meaningful representations from semantically sparse inputs. To address this limitation, we introduce SemantiQ, a novel upsampling-based representation learning framework that embeds questionnaire responses into a unified semantic space. Leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in conjunction with large language models (LLMs), SemantiQ transforms question text, option text, and external knowledge into semantically enriched natural language statements. These statements are then encoded into semantic embeddings, which are further refined through a three-stage training mechanism and test-time training (TTT), enabling the model to capture complex sample- and feature-wise dependencies. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that SemantiQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
MedSpaformer: A Transferable Transformer with Multi-Granularity Token Sparsification for Medical Time Series Classification
Authors: Jiexia Ye; Weiqi Zhang; Ziyue Li; Jia Li; Fugee Tsung
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Accurate medical time series (MedTS) classification is essential for effective clinical diagnosis, yet remains challenging due to complex multi-channel temporal dependencies, information redundancy, and label scarcity.
While transformer-based models have shown promise in time series analysis, most are designed for forecasting tasks and fail to fully exploit the unique characteristics of MedTS.
In this paper, we introduce MedSpaformer, a transformer-based framework tailored for MedTS classification. It incorporates a sparse token-based dual-attention mechanism that enables global context modeling and token sparsification, allowing dynamic feature refinement by focusing on informative tokens while reducing redundancy.
This mechanism is integrated into a multi-granularity cross-channel encoding scheme to capture intra- and inter-granularity temporal dependencies and inter-channel correlations, enabling progressive refinement of task-relevant patterns in medical signals.
The sparsification design allows our model to flexibly accommodate inputs with variable lengths and channel dimensions. We also introduce an adaptive label encoder to extract label semantics and address cross-dataset label space misalignment. Together, these components enhance the model’s transferability across heterogeneous medical datasets, which helps alleviate the challenge of label scarcity.
Our model outperforms 13 baselines across 7 medical datasets under supervised learning. It also excels in few-shot learning and demonstrates zero-shot capability in both in-domain and cross-domain diagnostics.
These results highlight MedSpaformer's robustness and its potential as a unified solution for MedTS classification across diverse settings.
PARS: Partial-Label-Learning-inspired Recommender Systems
Authors: Shanshan Ye; Kezhi Lu; Guangquan Zhang; Jie Lu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recommender systems are widely required and deployed to address real-world problems. In this paper, we study a new yet challenging real-world setting for recommender systems, where only user browsing histories are available without any explicit feedback. No item acquisition information, e.g., purchasing or rating, is given. By assuming that user browsing sequences are likely to contain the items to acquire, we draw an analogy to the setting of partial label learning in weakly supervised learning. This enables us to train reliable recommender systems only using browsing histories. We term the proposed method as Partial Acquisition Recommender System (PARS). Empirical results on real-world benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Surprisingly, we also show that the proposed method even surpasses some baselines using item acquisition information.
SAGE: Spuriousness-Aware Guided Prompt Exploration for Mitigating Multimodal Bias
Authors: Wenqian Ye; Di Wang; Guangtao Zheng; Bohan Liu; Aidong Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large vision-language models such as CLIP have shown strong zero-shot classification performance by aligning images and text in a shared embedding space. However, CLIP models often develop multimodal spurious biases, the undesirable tendency to rely on spurious features. For example, CLIP may infer object types in images based on frequently co-occurring backgrounds rather than the object's core features. This bias significantly impairs the robustness of pre-trained CLIP models on out-of-distribution data, where such cross-modal associations no longer hold. Existing methods for mitigating multimodal spurious bias typically require fine-tuning on downstream data or prior knowledge of the bias, which undermines the out-of-the-box usability of CLIP. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze the impact of multimodal spurious bias in zero-shot classification. Based on this insight, we propose Spuriousness-Aware Guided Exploration (SAGE), a simple and effective method that mitigates spurious bias via guided prompt selection. SAGE requires no training, fine-tuning, or external annotations. It explores on a space of prompt templates and selects the prompts that induces the largest semantic separation between classes, thereby improving worst-group robustness.
Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets and five popular backbone models demonstrate that SAGE consistently improves zero-shot performance and generalization, outperforming previous zero-shot approaches without any external knowledge or model updates.
An Invariant Latent Space Perspective on Language Model Inversion
Authors: Wentao Ye; Jiaqi Hu; Haobo Wang; Xinpeng Ti; Zhiqing Xiao; Hao Chen; Liyao Li; Lei Feng; Sai Wu; Junbo Zhao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Language model inversion (LMI), i.e., recovering hidden prompts from outputs, emerges as a concrete threat to user privacy and system security. We recast LMI as reusing the LLM's own latent space and propose the Invariant Latent Space Hypothesis (ILSH): (1) diverse outputs from the same source prompt should preserve consistent semantics (source invariance), and (2) input<->output cyclic mappings should be self-consistent within a shared latent space (cyclic invariance).
Accordingly, we present Inv2A, which treats the LLM as an invariant decoder and learns only a lightweight inverse encoder that maps outputs to a denoised pseudo-representation. When multiple outputs are available, they are sparsely concatenated at the representation layer to increase information density. Training proceeds in two stages: contrastive alignment (source invariance) and supervised reinforcement (cyclic invariance). An optional training-free neighborhood search can refine local performance. Across 9 datasets covering user and system prompt scenarios, Inv2A outperforms  baselines by an average of 4.77% BLEU score while reducing dependence on large inverse corpora. Our analysis further shows that prevalent defenses provide limited protection, underscoring the need for stronger strategies.
Incomplete Multi-View Unsupervised Federated Feature Selection via Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization and Tensor-Aligned Learning
Authors: Zhiwei Ye; Songsong Zhang; Wen Zhou; Libing Wu; Jun Shen; Ting Cai; Mingwei Wang; Jixin Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: With the widespread adoption of multi-view data in numerous fields, multi-view unsupervised feature selection (MUFS) has made notable strides in both feature pruning and missing-view completion. Nonetheless, existing MUFS methods typically rely on centralized servers, which cannot meet real-world demands for privacy preservation and distributed learning, and they often suffer from suboptimal solution and weak convergence guarantees. To address these challenges, IMUFFS, an incomplete multi-view unsupervised federated feature selection via cooperative particle swarm optimization (CPSO) and tensor-aligned learning (TAL) is proposed. Specifically, each client executes CPSO-TAL at two stages: (i) an external optimization phase that involves a CPSO, inspired by the co-evolutionary mechanism of hybrid breeding optimization algorithm, performing a global search in the feature space, and (ii) an internal optimization phase that leverages TAL with imputation and CP decomposition, where CP decomposition reduces dimensionality by decomposing the original tensor into a sum of core components, to learn low-dimensional embeddings, while simultaneously updating anchor graphs and view preference weights, thereby harmonizing imputation and representation learning. On the server side, a federated aggregation strategy using adaptive normalized mutual information (NMI) weighting combines the locally optimized feature selection (FS) weights and NMI scores from clients, ensuring privacy while improving the quality of FS and convergence. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that IMUFFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding more effective and robust FS and enhancing better missing-view completion.
Multi-Task Test-time Adaptation via Gradient Consensus and Plasticity Constraint
Authors: Zhong Ye; Yu Hu; Zhenguo Yang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-task test-time adaptation (MT-TTA) aims to adapt pre-trained models to dynamic environments during multi-task inference by leveraging unlabeled test data. This task is particularly challenging as different tasks respond divergently to distribution shifts, and mixed input streams containing both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples make the models after test-time adaptation prone to catastrophic forgetting of ID knowledge. Although the existing methods like M-TENT extend the classic test entropy minimization (TENT) by minimizing multi-task entropies and employing task-average gradient to adapt a model, it suffers from two key limitations: 1) the average gradient strategy proposed by M-TENT may exacerbate multi-task test-time optimization conflicts, harming individual tasks when gradients are directionally non-consensual; 2) aggressive updates on mixed ID/OOD data cause severe forgetting of ID knowledge. In this paper, we theoretically establish a formal connection between multi-task loss differences and test-time performance under the first-order Taylor analysis, demonstrating that consensual multi-task entropy reductions are likely to increase the performance, while non-consensual ones might decrease the performance. To this end, we propose Consensus-driven Constrained Multi-Task Test-Time Adaptation (CoCo-MT-TTA), consisting of 1) multi-task gradient consensus adaptation, which aligns cross-task gradient directions to seek a consensus gradient; 2) multi-task plasticity-constraint adaptation, which constrains parameter updates using second-moment statistics to preserve ID knowledge. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including CelebA and PlantData, demonstrate that our method achieves an absolute improvement of up to 16.02% in mean ID/OOD F1-score (Mean I&O) under domain shifts over non-adapted models, outperforming the recent baselines.
Quantum Lipschitz Bandits
Authors: Bongsoo Yi; Yue Kang; Yao Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The Lipschitz bandit is a key variant of stochastic bandit problems where the expected reward function satisfies a Lipschitz condition with respect to an arm metric space. With its wide-ranging practical applications, various Lipschitz bandit algorithms have been developed, achieving the optimal regret performance in the classical setting. Motivated by recent advancements in quantum computing and the demonstrated success of quantum Monte Carlo in simpler bandit settings, we introduce the first quantum Lipschitz bandit algorithms to address the challenges of continuous action spaces and non-linear reward functions. Specifically, we first leverage the elimination-based framework to propose an efficient quantum Lipschitz bandit algorithm named Q-LAE. Next, we present novel modifications to the classical Zooming algorithm, which results in a simple quantum Lipschitz bandit method, Q-Zooming. Both algorithms exploit the computational power of quantum methods to obtain a provably improved regret bound over classical Lipschitz bandit algorithms. Comprehensive experiments further validate our improved theoretical findings, demonstrating superior empirical performance compared to existing Lipschitz bandit methods.