GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
ReaSon: Reinforced Causal Search with Information Bottleneck for Video Understanding
Authors: Yuan Zhou; Litao Hua; Shilong Jin; Wentao Huang; Haoran Duan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Keyframe selection has become essential for video understanding with vision-language models (VLMs) due to limited input tokens and the temporal sparsity of relevant information across video frames. Video understanding often relies on effective keyframes that are not only informative but also causally decisive. To this end, we propose Reinforced Causal Search with Information Bottleneck (ReaSon), a framework that formulates keyframe selection as an optimization problem with the help of a novel Causal Information Bottleneck (CIB), which explicitly defines keyframes as those satisfying both predictive sufficiency and causal necessity. Specifically, ReaSon employs a learnable policy network to select keyframes from a visually relevant pool of candidate frames to capture predictive sufficiency, and then assesses causal necessity via counterfactual interventions. Finally, a composite reward aligned with the CIB principle is designed to guide the selection policy through reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments on NExT-QA, EgoSchema, and Video-MME demonstrate that ReaSon consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods under limited-frame settings, validating its effectiveness and generalization ability.
LookFlow: Training-Free and Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis via Dynamic Lookahead Guidance Flow
Authors: Yuan Zhou; Yan Zhang; Jianlong Chang; Xin Gu; Ying Wang; Kun Ding; Guangwen Yang; Shiming Xiang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Rectification flow Transformers (RFTs) have shown promising performance in diffusion-based image synthesis but are typically confined to lower-resolution scenarios, limiting their ability to generate high-resolution images. 
Existing resolution extrapolation approaches often suffer from excessive computational overhead, resulting in prolonged inference times. 
We propose LookFlow, a training-free high-resolution synthesis framework that accelerates inference while preserving visual quality.
Building on pretrained text-to-image RFTs, LookFlow employs a dynamic lookahead guidance flow  mechanism to refine high-resolution velocity predictions by leveraging multi-timestep lookahead information extracted from a low-resolution flow. 
Additionally, reusing temporally similar features across consecutive timesteps drastically reduces computation and significantly decreases inference time overhead.
Extensive experiments on COCO demonstrate that LookFlow robustly scales resolutions from 4× to 25×, achieving up to a maximum speedup of 2.01× while maintaining competitive visual fidelity.
Beyond Counting: Evaluating Abstract and Emotional Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yuan Zhou; Yan Zhang; Jianlong Chang; Xin Gu; Ying Wang; Kun Ding; Guangwen Yang; Shiming Xiang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite the rapid progress of Vision Language Models (VLMs), existing benchmarks still concentrate on coarse-grained object recognition or simple relational reasoning, leaving the fine-grained and higher-order reasoning abilities of these systems largely unexamined. 
To bridge this critical evaluation gap, we introduce EmojiGrid, a novel diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to probe these fine-grained and higher-order skills. 
Leveraging the universal and semantically rich nature of emojis, we synthesize a grid‑based visual dataset paired with 29,000+ QA pairs.
Each pair is explicitly anchored in a three-level cognitive taxonomy comprising (i) Perception and Information Extraction, (ii) Relational and Structural Reasoning, and (iii) Abstraction and Advanced Cognition.
These dimensions further decompose into nine categories covering a broad range of cognitive skills, including counting, spatial relations, compositional logic, semantic sentiment, and related higher-order reasoning tasks.
Our extensive evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs reveals a significant performance gap between foundational perceptual tasks and higher-level cognitive abilities, particularly in abstraction and advanced emotional reasoning.
Notably, all models struggle with compositional logic, spatial consistency, and especially emotional and semantic understanding. 
EmojiGrid provides a quantifiable, fine-grained benchmark to diagnose VLM limitations and guides future progress toward models that can truly perceive, reason about, and interpret complex, symbol-rich visual scenes.
DragNeXt: Rethinking Drag-Based Image Editing
Authors: Yuan Zhou; Junbao Zhou; Qingshan Xu; Kesen Zhao; Yuxuan Wang; Hao Fei; Richang Hong; Hanwang Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Drag-Based Image Editing (DBIE), which allows users to manipulate images by directly dragging objects within them, has recently attracted much attention from the community. However, it faces two key challenges: (i) point-based drag is often highly ambiguous and difficult to align with user intentions; (ii) current DBIE methods primarily rely on alternating between motion supervision and point tracking, which is not only cumbersome but also fails to produce high-quality results. These limitations motivate us to explore DBIE from a new perspective---unifying it as  a Latent Region Optimization (LRO) problem that aims to use region-level geometric transformations to optimize latent code to realize drag manipulation. Thus, by specifying the areas and types of geometric transformations, we can effectively address the ambiguity issue. We also propose a simple yet effective editing framework, dubbed DragNeXt. It solves LRO through Progressive Backward Self-Intervention (PBSI), simplifying the overall procedure of the alternating workflow while further enhancing quality by fully leveraging region-level structure information and progressive guidance from intermediate drag states. We validate DragNeXt on our NextBench, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly outperform existing approaches.
Less Is More: Vision Representation Compression for Efficient Video Generation with Large Language Models
Authors: Yucheng Zhou; Jihai Zhang; Guanjie Chen; Jianbing Shen; Yu Cheng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Video generation using Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown promising potential, effectively leveraging the extensive LLM infrastructure to provide a unified framework for multimodal understanding and content generation. However, these methods face critical challenges, i.e., token redundancy and inefficiencies arising from long sequences, which constrain their performance and efficiency compared to diffusion-based approaches. In this study, we investigate the impact of token redundancy in LLM-based video generation by information-theoretic analysis and propose Vision Representation Compression (VRC), a novel framework designed to achieve more in both performance and efficiency with less video token representations. VRC introduces learnable representation compressor and decompressor to compress video token representations, enabling autoregressive next-sequence prediction in a compact latent space. Our approach reduces redundancy, shortens token sequences, and improves model's ability to capture underlying video structures. Our experiments demonstrate that VRC reduces token sequence lengths by a factor of 4, achieving more than 9~14x acceleration in inference while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art video generation models. VRC not only accelerates the inference but also significantly reduces memory requirements during both model training and inference.
Debiased Dual-Invariant Defense for Adversarially Robust Person Re-Identification
Authors: Yuhang Zhou; Yanxiang Zhao; Zhongyun Hua; Zhipu Liu; Zhaoquan Gu; Qing Liao; Leo Yu Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Person re-identification (ReID) is a fundamental task in many real-world applications such as pedestrian trajectory tracking. However, advanced deep learning-based ReID models are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks, where imperceptible perturbations to pedestrian images can cause entirely incorrect predictions, posing significant security threats. Although numerous  adversarial defense strategies have been proposed for classification tasks, their extension to metric learning tasks such as person ReID remains relatively unexplored. Moreover, the several existing defenses for person ReID fail to address the inherent unique challenges of adversarially robust ReID. In this paper, we systematically identify the challenges of adversarial defense in person ReID into two key issues: model bias and composite generalization requirements. To address them, we propose a debiased dual-invariant defense framework composed of two main phases. In the data balancing phase, we mitigate model bias using a diffusion-model-based data resampling strategy that promotes fairness and diversity in training data. In the bi-adversarial self-meta defense phase, we introduce a novel metric adversarial training approach incorporating farthest negative extension softening to overcome the robustness degradation caused by the absence of classifier. Additionally, we introduce an adversarially-enhanced self-meta mechanism to achieve dual-generalization for both unseen identities and unseen attack types. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art defenses.
Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Human Motion Grounding with Test-Time Training
Authors: Yunjiao Zhou; Xinyan Chen; Junlang Qian; Lihua Xie; Jianfei Yang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Understanding complex human activities demands the ability to decompose motion into fine-grained, semantic-aligned sub-actions. This motion grounding process is crucial for behavior analysis, embodied AI and virtual reality.
Yet, most existing methods rely on dense supervision with predefined action classes, which are infeasible in open-vocabulary, real-world settings. In this paper, we propose ZOMG, a zero-shot, open-vocabulary framework that segments motion sequences into semantically meaningful sub-actions without requiring any annotations or fine-tuning. Technically, ZOMG integrates (1) language semantic partition, which leverages large language models to decompose instructions into ordered sub-action units, and (2) soft masking optimization, which learns instance-specific temporal masks to focus on frames critical to sub-actions, while maintaining intra-segment continuity and enforcing inter-segment separation, all without altering the pretrained encoder.
Experiments on three motion-language datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art effectiveness and efficiency of motion grounding performance, outperforming prior methods by 8.7% mAP on HumanML3D benchmark. Meanwhile, significant improvements also exist in downstream retrieval, establishing a new paradigm for annotation-free motion understanding.
Few-step Flow for 3D Generation via Marginal-Data Transport Distillation
Authors: Zanwei Zhou; Taoran Yi; Jiemin Fang; Chen Yang; Lingxi Xie; Xinggang Wang; Wei Shen; Qi Tian
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Flow-based 3D generation models typically require dozens of sampling steps during inference. Though few-step distillation methods, particularly Consistency Models (CMs), have achieved substantial advancements in accelerating 2D diffusion models, they remain under-explored for more complex 3D generation tasks. In this study, we propose a novel framework, MDT-dist, for few-step 3D flow distillation. Our approach is built upon a primary objective: distilling the pretrained model to learn the Marginal-Data Transport. Directly learning this objective needs to integrate the velocity fields, while this integral is intractable to be implemented. Therefore, we propose two optimizable objectives, Velocity Matching (VM) and Velocity Distillation (VD), to equivalently convert the optimization target from the transport level to the velocity and the distribution level respectively. Velocity Matching (VM) learns to stably match the velocity fields between the student and the teacher, but inevitably provides biased gradient estimates. Velocity Distillation (VD) further enhances the optimization process by leveraging the learned velocity fields to perform probability density distillation. When evaluated on the pioneer 3D generation framework TRELLIS, our method reduces sampling steps of each flow transformer from 25 to 1–2, achieving 0.68s (1 step x2) and 0.94s (2 steps x2) latency with 9.0x and 6.5x speedup on A800, while preserving high visual and geometric fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing CM distillation methods, and enables TRELLIS to achieve superior performance in few-step 3D generation.
Δt-Mamba3D: A Time‑Aware Spatio‑Temporal State‑Space Model for Breast Cancer Risk Prediction
Authors: Zhengbo Zhou; Dooman Arefan; Margarita Louise Zuley; Shandong Wu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Longitudinal analysis of sequential radiological images is hampered by a fundamental data challenge: how to effectively model a sequence of high-resolution images captured at irregular time intervals. This data structure contains indispensable spatial and temporal cues that current methods fail to fully exploit. Models often compromise by either collapsing spatial information into vectors or applying spatio-temporal models that are computationally inefficient and incompatible with non-uniform time steps. We address this challenge with Time-Aware $\Delta t$-Mamba3D, a novel state-space architecture adapted for longitudinal medical imaging. Our model simultaneously encodes irregular inter-visit intervals and rich spatio-temporal context while remaining computationally efficient. Its core innovation is a continuous-time selective scanning mechanism that explicitly integrates the true time difference between exams into its state transitions. This is complemented by a multi-scale 3D neighborhood fusion module that robustly captures spatio-temporal relationships. In a comprehensive breast cancer risk prediction benchmark using sequential screening mammogram exams, our model shows superior performance, improving the validation C-index by 2–5 percentage points and achieving higher 1–5 year AUC scores compared to established variants of recurrent, transformer, and state-space models. Thanks to its linear complexity, the model can efficiently process long and complex patient screening histories of mammograms, forming a new framework for longitudinal image analysis.
Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network for Point Cloud Completion
Authors: Zhensheng Zhou; Jianqing Liang; Jiye Liang; Zijin Du; Chenghao Fang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The primary goal of 3D point cloud completion is to reconstruct complete and high-resolution point clouds from incomplete and low-resolution inputs. While some recent approaches have achieved satisfactory completion performance by incorporating additional images, there remains room for improvement in fully exploiting and utilizing the rich geometric relation information contained in parts. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network (SGPRNet) for Point Cloud Completion. Its core innovation lies in establishing part semantic relations to guide the reconstruction of structurally consistent local geometries. Specifically, we utilize Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) to automatically generate the specific text of 3D shape, which provides detailed geometric part relations descriptions. Building upon this, we design an Orthogonal Semantic Part Transfer (OSPT) module that learns transferable semantic relations between geometric parts. Subsequently, we develop a Semantic Geometric Relation-aware Transformer (SGRFormer) to progressively refine these semantic features, enhancing point cloud representation and guiding the generation of fine local structures. In addition, we establish a point-text pairs corpus, OmniObject3D-212/34 and Text-ViPC datasets based on existing OmniObject3D and ShapeNet-ViPC datasets, incorporating the specific text. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art completion methods.
DICE: Distilling Classifier-Free Guidance into Text Embeddings
Authors: Zhenyu Zhou; Defang Chen; Can Wang; Chun Chen; Siwei Lyu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models are capable of generating high-quality images, but suboptimal pre-trained text representations often result in these images failing to align closely with the given text prompts. Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a popular and effective technique for improving text-image alignment in the generative process. However, CFG introduces significant computational overhead. In this paper, we present DIstilling CFG by sharpening text Embeddings (DICE) that replaces CFG in the sampling process with half the computational complexity while maintaining similar generation quality. DICE distills a CFG-based text-to-image diffusion model into a CFG-free version by refining text embeddings to replicate CFG-based directions. In this way, we avoid the computational drawbacks of CFG, enabling high-quality, well-aligned image generation at a fast sampling speed. Furthermore, examining the enhancement pattern, we identify the underlying mechanism of DICE that sharpens specific components of text embeddings to preserve semantic information while enhancing fine-grained details. Extensive experiments on multiple Stable Diffusion v1.5 variants, SDXL, and PixArt-\alpha demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Content Diversity-guided Ambiguity Mitigation for Open-Set Noisy Label Learning
Authors: Zhihao Zhou; Rui Li; Xueying Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Open-set noisy label learning faces a critical challenge in maintaining robust DNN performance when training data contain both in-distribution noisy (IDN) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. These noisy samples induce overconfident but erroneous predictions due to their ambiguous positions relative to category boundaries. Current methods address this by filtering noisy samples based on visual features alone, they fail to resolve the semantic ambiguity near decision boundaries, where limited visual cues lead to unreliable sample purification. To this end, we propose Content Diversity-guided Ambiguity Mitigation (CDgAM), a novel framework that leverages diverse contents to mitigate visual ambiguity in open-set noisy label learning. CDgAM leverages textual descriptions of intra-class commonality and inter-class disparity to dynamically refine semantic boundaries, reducing bias in prototype learning. To further suppress early-stage uncertainty in visual representations, we design a region-sensitive distillation regularization that transfers boundary-aware knowledge from a multimodal large language model to the target DNN. Extensive experiments conducted on various datasets with different noise levels demonstrate the effectiveness of our CDgAM, outperforming state-of-the-art methods for open-set noisy label learning.
HiTVideo: Hierarchical Tokenizers for Enhancing Text-to-Video Generation with Autoregressive Large Language Models
Authors: Ziqin Zhou; Yifan Yang; Yuqing Yang; Tianyu He; Houwen Peng; Kai Qiu; Qi Dai; Lili Qiu; Chong Luo; Lingqiao Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-video generation poses significant challenges due to the inherent complexity of video data, which spans both temporal and spatial dimensions. It introduces additional redundancy, abrupt variations, and a domain gap between language and vision tokens while generation. Addressing these challenges requires an effective video tokenizer that can efficiently encode video data while preserving essential semantic and spatiotemporal information, serving as a critical bridge between text and vision. Inspired by the observation in VQ-VAE-2, we propose HiTVideo, a novel approach for text-to-video generation with hierarchical tokenizers. It utilizes a 3D causal VAE with a multi-layer discrete token framework, encoding video content into hierarchically structured codebooks. Higher layers capture semantic information with higher compression, while lower layers focus on fine-grained spatiotemporal details, striking a balance between compression efficiency and reconstruction quality. Our approach efficiently encodes longer video sequences (e.g., 8 seconds, 64 frames), reducing bits per pixel (bpp) by approximately 70% compared to previous tokenizers, while maintaining competitive reconstruction quality. We explore the trade-offs between compression and reconstruction, while emphasizing the advantages of high-compressed semantic tokens in text-to-video tasks. HiTVideo aims to address the potential limitations of existing video tokenizers in text-to-video generation tasks, striving for higher compression ratios, improved token quality, and simplify LLMs modeling under language guidance, offering a scalable and promising framework for advancing text to video generation.
Hierarchical Schedule Optimization for Fast and Robust Diffusion Model Sampling
Authors: Aihua Zhu; Rui Su; Qinglin Zhao; Li Feng; Meng Shen; Shibo He
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Diffusion probabilistic models have set a new standard for generative fidelity but are hindered by a slow iterative sampling process. A powerful training-free strategy to accelerate this process is Schedule Optimization, which aims to find an optimal distribution of timesteps for a fixed and small Number of Function Evaluations (NFE) to maximize sample quality. To this end, a successful schedule optimization method must adhere to four core principles: effectiveness, adaptivity, practical robustness, and computational efficiency. However, existing paradigms struggle to satisfy these principles simultaneously, motivating the need for a more advanced solution. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Hierarchical-Schedule-Optimizer (HSO), a novel and efficient bi-level optimization framework. HSO reframes the search for a globally optimal schedule into a more tractable problem by iteratively alternating between two synergistic levels: an upper-level global search for an optimal initialization strategy and a lower-level local optimization for schedule refinement. This process is guided by two key innovations: the Midpoint Error Proxy (MEP), a solver-agnostic and numerically stable objective for effective local optimization, and the Spacing-Penalized Fitness (SPF) function, which ensures practical robustness by penalizing pathologically close timesteps. Extensive experiments show that HSO sets a new state-of-the-art for training-free sampling in the extremely low-NFE regime. For instance, with an NFE of just 5, HSO achieves a remarkable FID of 11.94 on LAION-Aesthetics with Stable Diffusion v2.1. Crucially, this level of performance is attained not through costly retraining, but with a one-time optimization cost of less than 8 seconds, presenting a highly practical and efficient paradigm for diffusion model acceleration.