GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Computer Vision Modeling of the Development of Geometric and Numerical Concepts in Humans
Authors: Zekun Wang; Sashank Varma
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Mathematical thinking is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Cognitive scientists have investigated the mechanisms that underlie our ability to thinking geometrically and numerically, to take two prominent examples, and developmental scientists have documented the trajectories of these abilities over the lifespan. Prior research has shown that computer vision (CV) models trained on the unrelated task of image classification nevertheless learn latent representations of geometric and numerical concepts similar to those of adults. Building on this demonstrated cognitive alignment, the current study investigates whether CV models also show developmental alignment: whether their performance improvements across training to match the developmental progressions observed in children. In a detailed case study of the ResNet-50 model, we show that this is the case. For the case of geometry and topology, we find developmental alignment for some classes of concepts (Euclidean Geometry, Geometrical Figures, Metric Properties, Topology) but not others (Chiral Figures, Geometric Transformations, Symmetrical Figures). For the case of number, we find developmental alignment in the emergence of a human-like ``mental number line'' representation with experience. These findings show the promise of computer vision models for understanding the development of mathematical understanding in humans. They point the way to future research exploring additional model architectures and building larger benchmarks.
Large Connectome Model: An fMRI Foundation Model of Brain Connectomes Empowered by Brain-Environment Interaction in Multitask Learning Landscape
Authors: Ziquan Wei; Tingting Dan; Guorong Wu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: A reliable foundation model of functional neuroimages is critical to promote clinical applications where the performance of current AI models is significantly impeded by a limited sample size. 
To that end, tremendous efforts have been made to pretraining large models on extensive unlabeled fMRI data using scalable self-supervised learning. 
Since self-supervision is not necessarily aligned with the brain-to-outcome relationship, most foundation models are suboptimal to the downstream task, such as predicting disease outcomes.
By capitalizing on rich environmental variables and demographic data along with an unprecedented amount of functional neuroimages, we form the brain modeling as a multitask learning and present a scalable model architecture for (i) multitask pretraining by tokenizing multiple brain-environment interactions (BEI) and (ii) semi-supervised finetuning by assigning pseudo-labels of default BEI.
We have evaluated our foundation model on a variety of applications, including sex prediction, human behavior recognition, and disease early diagnosis of Autism, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and Schizophrenia, where promising results indicate the great potential to facilitate current neuroimaging applications in clinical routines.
DHCM-CACL: Dynamic Hierarchical Cross-modal Mamba with Confidence-Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Authors: Baiqiang Wu; Yang Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal emotion recognition plays a crucial role in enhancing the intelligence of human-computer interaction and emotional understanding. However, conventional approaches face challenges such as scarcity of annotated data, significant modality heterogeneity, and temporal misalignment. To address these issues, we propose DHCM-CACL, a novel self-supervised emotion recognition framework integrating EEG and facial expressions. During the pre-training phase, we propose a Dynamic Hierarchical Cross-modal Mamba module (DHCM), which models long-term dependencies through dynamic state matrices, incorporates forgetting gates for noise suppression, and constructs a hierarchical cross-modal interaction structure, effectively achieving cross-modal temporal alignment and mitigating modality heterogeneity. Subsequently, we propose a Confidence-Adaptive Contrastive Learning module (CACL) that dynamically adjusts sample weights using gated confidence signals derived from DHCM to compute loss, prioritizing reliable samples while suppressing noisy instances through adaptive weighting, thereby enhancing representation reliability and generalization in data-scarce scenarios. During the fine-tuning phase, we integrate a cross-modal attention gating mechanism to reinforce temporal associations and adopt an evidence-aware joint optimization objective, providing probabilistic credibility outputs for emotion prediction. Experimental results on the DEAP and MAHNOB-HCI datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in emotion classification under both subject-dependent and subject-independent settings.
SPP-SCL: Semi-Push-Pull Supervised Contrastive Learning for Image-Text Sentiment Analysis and Beyond
Authors: Jiesheng Wu; Shengrong Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing Image-Text Sentiment Analysis (ITSA) methods may suffer from inconsistent intra-modal and inter-modal sentiment relationships. Therefore, we develop a method that balances before fusing to solve the issue of vision-language imbalance intra-modal and inter-modal sentiment relationships; that is, a Semi-Push-Pull Supervised Contrastive Learning (SPP-SCL) method is proposed. Specifically, the method is implemented using a novel two-step strategy, namely first using the proposed intra-modal supervised contrastive learning to pull the relationships between the intra-modal and then performing a well-designed conditional execution statement. If the statement result is false, our method will perform the second step, which is inter-modal supervised contrastive learning to push away the relationships between inter-modal. The two-step strategy will balance the intra-modal and inter-modal relationships to achieve the purpose of relationship consistency and finally perform cross-modal feature fusion for sentiment analysis and detection. Experimental studies on three public image-text sentiment and sarcasm detection datasets demonstrate that SPP-SCL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin and is more discriminative in sentiment.
Let the Model Learn to Feel: Mode-Guided Tonality Injection for Symbolic Music Emotion Recognition
Authors: Haiying Xia; Zhongyi Huang; Yumei Tan; Shuxiang Song
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Music emotion recognition is a key task in symbolic music understanding (SMER). Recent approaches have shown promising results by fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained models (e.g., MIDIBERT, a benchmark in symbolic music understanding) to map musical semantics to emotional labels. While these models effectively capture distributional musical semantics, they often overlook tonal structures, particularly musical modes, which play a critical role in emotional perception according to music psychology. In this paper, we investigate the representational capacity of MIDIBERT and identify its limitations in capturing mode-emotion associations. To address this issue, we propose a Mode-Guided Enhancement (MoGE) strategy that incorporates psychological insights on mode into the model. Specifically, we first conduct a mode augmentation analysis, which reveals that MIDIBERT fails to effectively encode emotion-mode correlations. Motivated by this observation, we further identify the MIDIBERT layer that shows the weakest emotion relevance and introduce a Mode-guided Feature-wise linear modulation injection (MoFi) framework to inject explicit mode features, thereby enhancing the model's capability in emotional representation and inference. Extensive experiments on the EMOPIA and VGMIDI datasets demonstrate that our mode injection strategy significantly improves SMER performance, achieving accuracies of 75.2% and 59.1%, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of mode-guided modeling in symbolic music emotion recognition.
PSA-MF: Personality-Sentiment Aligned Multi-Level Fusion for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Heng Xie; Kang Zhu; Zhengqi Wen; Jianhua Tao; Xuefei Liu; Ruibo Fu; Changsheng Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) is a research field that recognizes human sentiments by combining textual, visual, and audio modalities. The main challenge lies in integrating sentiment-related information from different modalities, which typically arises during the unimodal feature extraction phase and the multimodal feature fusion phase. Existing methods extract only shallow information from unimodal features during the extraction phase, neglecting sentimental differences across different personalities. During the fusion phase, they directly merge the feature information from each modality without considering differences at the feature level. This ultimately affects the model's recognition performance. To address this problem, we propose a personality-sentiment aligned multi-level fusion framework. We introduce personality traits during the feature extraction phase and propose a novel personality-sentiment alignment method to obtain personalized sentiment embeddings from the textual modality for the first time. In the fusion phase, we introduce a novel multi-level fusion method. This method gradually integrates sentimental information from textual, visual, and audio modalities through multimodal pre-fusion and a multi-level enhanced fusion strategy. Our method has been evaluated through multiple experiments on two commonly used datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results.
Exploiting Synergistic Cognitive Biases to Bypass Safety in LLMs
Authors: Xikang Yang; Biyu Zhou; Xuehai Tang; Jizhong Han; Songlin Hu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their safety mechanisms remain susceptible to adversarial exploitation of cognitive biases---systematic deviations from rational judgment. Unlike prior studies focusing on isolated biases, this work highlights the overlooked power of multi-bias interactions in undermining LLM safeguards. Specifically, we propose CognitiveAttack, a novel red-teaming framework that adaptively selects optimal ensembles from 154 human social psychology-defined cognitive biases, engineering them into adversarial prompts to effectively compromise LLM safety mechanisms. Experimental results reveal systemic vulnerabilities across 30 mainstream LLMs, particularly open-source variants. CognitiveAttack achieves a substantially higher attack success rate than the SOTA black-box method PAP (60.1% vs. 31.6%), exposing critical limitations in current defenses. Through quantitative analysis of successful jailbreaks, we further identify vulnerability patterns in safety-aligned LLMs under synergistic cognitive biases, validating multi-bias interactions as a potent yet underexplored attack vector. This work introduces a novel interdisciplinary perspective by bridging cognitive science and LLM safety, paving the way for more robust and human-aligned AI systems.
Melodia: Training-Free Music Editing Guided by Attention Probing in Diffusion Models
Authors: Yi Yang; Haowen Li; Tianxiang Li; Boyu Cao; Xiaohan Zhang; Liqun Chen; Qi Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-music generation technology is progressing rapidly, creating new opportunities for musical composition and editing. However, existing music editing methods often fail to preserve the source music's temporal structure, including melody and rhythm, when altering particular attributes like instrument, genre, and mood. To address this challenge, this paper conducts an in-depth probing analysis on attention maps within AudioLDM 2, a diffusion-based model commonly used as the backbone for existing music editing methods. We reveal a key finding: cross-attention maps encompass details regarding distinct musical characteristics, and interventions on these maps frequently result in ineffective modifications. In contrast, self-attention maps are essential for preserving the temporal structure of the source music during its conversion into the target music. Building upon this understanding, we present Melodia, a training-free technique that selectively manipulates self-attention maps in particular layers during the denoising process and leverages an attention repository to store source music information, achieving accurate modification of musical characteristics while preserving the original structure without requiring textual descriptions of the source music. Additionally, we propose two novel metrics to better evaluate music editing methods. Both objective and subjective experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior results in terms of textual adherence and structural integrity across various datasets. This research enhances comprehension of internal mechanisms within music generation models and provides improved control for music creation.
A Multimodal EEG-Eye Movement Model for Automatic Depression Detection
Authors: Hao-Long Yin; Jian-Ming Zhang; Ren-Jie Dai; Wei-Long Zheng; Qinyu Lv; Zhenghui Yi; Bao-Liang Lu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Depression is a prevalent mental health disorder characterized by persistent sadness and a diminished interest in daily activities, early detection of depression facilitates timely intervention, mitigating its adverse effects. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals and eye movements are emerging as promising biomarkers for depression detection due to their non-invasive nature and cost-effectiveness. Nevertheless, existing studies suffer from methodological constraints, including low specificity, insufficient sample sizes, limited generalizability, and difficulties in large-scale replication, which collectively undermine their clinical utility. To address these challenges, we collected a large-scale depression dataset comprising EEG and eye movements from 1,060 individuals diagnosed with depression and 1,308 healthy controls. To efficiently leverage multimodal data for automatic depression detection, we propose the EEG-Eye Movements Model (E2Mo). E2Mo employs modality-specific encoders to extract discriminative multi-view features from each modality and incorporates a mixture-of-modality-experts architecture with multi pretraining tasks to achieve efficient and robust modality alignment and fusion. Our approach achieves a 70.06% balanced accuracy by leveraging multi-modal data, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating EEG signals and eye movements for automatic depression detection.
Generalized Threshold Optimization with Harmony Multi-Threshold Neurons for Accurate ANN-to-SNN Conversion
Authors: Wenhan Zhang; Zihan Huang; Tong Bu; Tiejun Huang; Zhaofei Yu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks(SNNs) are a promising paradigm designed to emulate the brain's energy efficient by incorporating the timing of spikes. Conversion is an efficient way to obtain high-performance SNNs from Artificial Neural Networks(ANNs). Existing conversion methods often face a trade-off between accuracy and time steps, which is largely caused by the incomplete release of residual membrane potentials. To minimize the conversion error, this paper proposed a harmonious mathematical property-based neuron, called Harmony Multi-Threshold Neurons (H-MT Neuron), which utilizes multiple spikes to minimize residual membrane potentials. The proposed neuron is further enhanced with an optional effective communication mechanism to achieve more accurate conversion. In addition, we propose a threshold optimization method applicable to a broader range cases of spiking neurons to to find the optimal neuron thresholds. Experiment results demonstrate that our method achieve superior accuracy on ImageNet benchmark datasets while significantly reducing the required time steps and energy consumption.
Spikingformer: A Key Foundation Model for Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Chenlin Zhou; Liutao Yu; Zhaokun Zhou; Han Zhang; Jiaqi Wang; Huihui Zhou; Zhengyu Ma; Yonghong Tian
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising energy-efficient alternative to artificial neural networks, due to their event-driven spiking computation. 
However, some foundation SNN backbones (including Spikformer and SEW ResNet) suffer from non-spike computations (integer-float multiplications) caused by the structure of their residual connections. These non-spike computations increase SNNs' power consumption and make them unsuitable for deployment on mainstream neuromorphic hardware. 
In this paper, we analyze the spike-driven behavior of the residual connection methods in SNNs. We then present Spikingformer, a novel spiking transformer backbone that merges the MS Residual connection with Self-Attention in a biologically plausible way to address the non-spike computation challenge in Spikformer while maintaining global modeling capabilities.
We evaluate Spikingformer across 13 datasets spanning large static images, neuromorphic data, and natural language tasks, and demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of Spikingformer, setting a vital benchmark for spiking neural networks.
In addition, with the spike-driven features and global modeling capabilities, Spikingformer is expected to become a more efficient general-purpose SNN backbone towards energy-efficient artificial intelligence.
TDSNNs: Competitive Topographic Deep Spiking Neural Networks for Visual Cortex Modeling
Authors: Deming Zhou; Yuetong Fang; Zhaorui Wang; Renjing Xu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The primate visual cortex exhibits topographic organization, where functionally similar neurons are spatially clustered, a structure widely believed to enhance neural processing efficiency. While prior works have demonstrated that conventional deep ANNs can develop topographic representations, these models largely neglect crucial temporal dynamics. This oversight often leads to significant performance degradation in tasks like object recognition and compromises their biological fidelity. To address this, we leverage spiking neural networks (SNNs), which inherently capture spike-based temporal dynamics and offer enhanced biological plausibility. We propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Constraints (STC) loss function for topographic deep spiking neural networks (TDSNNs), successfully replicating the hierarchical spatial functional organization observed in the primate visual cortex from low-level sensory input to high-level abstract representations. Our results show that STC effectively generates representative topographic features across simulated visual cortical areas. While introducing topography typically leads to significant performance degradation in ANNs, our spiking architecture exhibits a remarkably small performance drop (No drop in ImageNet top-1 accuracy, compared to a 3% drop observed in TopoNet, which is the best-performing topographic ANN so far) and outperforms topographic ANNs in brain-likeness. We also reveal that topographic organization facilitates efficient and stable temporal information processing via the spike mechanism in TDSNNs, contributing to model robustness. These findings suggest that TDSNNs offer a compelling balance between computational performance and brain-like features, providing not only a framework for interpreting neural science phenomena but also novel insights for designing more efficient and robust deep learning models.
Investigating Prosocial Behavior Theory in LLM Agents Under Policy-Induced Inequities
Authors: Yujia Zhou; Hexi Wang; Qingyao Ai; Zhen Wu; Yiqun Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate as autonomous agents in social contexts, evaluating their capacity for prosocial behavior is both theoretically and practically critical. However, existing research has primarily relied on static, economically framed paradigms, lacking models that capture the dynamic evolution of prosociality and its sensitivity to structural inequities. To address these gaps, we introduce ProSim, a simulation framework for modeling the prosocial behavior in LLM agents across diverse social conditions. We conduct three progressive studies to assess prosocial alignment. First, we demonstrate that LLM agents can exhibit human-like prosocial behavior across a broad range of real-world scenarios and adapt to normative policy interventions. Second, we find that agents engage in fairness-based third-party punishment and respond systematically to variations in inequity magnitude and enforcement cost. Third, we show that policy-induced inequities suppress prosocial behavior, propagate norm erosion through social networks. These findings advance prosocial behavior theory by elucidating how institutional dynamics shape the emergence, decay, and diffusion of prosocial norms in agent-driven societies.
Voices, Faces, and Feelings: Multi-modal Emotion-Cognition Captioning for Mental Health Understanding
Authors: Zhiyuan Zhou; Yanrong Guo; Shijie Hao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Emotional and cognitive factors are essential for understanding mental health disorders. However, existing methods often treat multi-modal data as classification tasks, limiting interpretability  especially for emotion and cognition. Although large language models (LLMs) offer opportunities for mental health analysis, they mainly rely on textual semantics and overlook fine-grained emotional and cognitive cues in multi-modal inputs. While some studies incorporate emotional features via transfer learning, their connection to mental health conditions remains implicit. To address these issues, we propose ECMC, a novel task that aims at generating natural language descriptions of emotional and cognitive states from multi-modal data, and producing emotion–cognition profiles that improve both the accuracy and interpretability of mental health assessments. We adopt an encoder–decoder architecture, where modality-specific encoders extract features, which are fused by a dual-stream BridgeNet based on Q-former. Contrastive learning enhances the extraction of emotional and cognitive features. A LLaMA decoder then aligns these features with annotated captions to produce detailed descriptions.
Extensive objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that: 1) ECMC outperforms existing multi-modal LLMs and mental health models in generating emotion–cognition captions;  2) the generated emotion–cognition profiles significantly improve assistive diagnosis and interpretability in mental health analysis.